You may make a game of it, or use it for
gambling, or say it suddenly as a catch for your acquaintances when
they come up from the suburbs. It is a very pretty question and
would have been excellently debated by Thomas Aquinas in the
Jacobins of St. Jacques, near the Parloir aux Bourgeois, by the gate
of the University; by Albertus Magnus in the Cordeliers, hard by the
College of Bourgoyne; by Pic de la Mirandole, who lived I care not a
rap where and debated I know not from Adam how or when; by Lord
Bacon, who took more bribes in a day than you and I could compass in
a dozen years; by Spinoza, a good worker of glass lenses, but a
philosopher whom I have never read nor will; by Coleridge when he
was not talking about himself nor taking some filthy drug; by John
Pilkington Smith, of Norwood, Drysalter, who has, I hear, been
lately horribly bitten by the metaphysic; and by a crowd of others.
But that's all by the way. Let them debate that will, for it leads
nowhere unless indeed there be sharp revelation, positive
declaration and very certain affirmation to go upon by way of Basis
or First Principle whence to deduce some sure conclusion and
irrefragable truth; for thus the intellect walks, as it were, along
a high road, whereas by all other ways it is lurching and stumbling
and boggling and tumbling in I know not what mists and brambles of
the great bare, murky twilight and marshy hillside of philosophy,
where I also wandered when I was a fool and unoccupied and lacking
exercise for the mind, but from whence, by the grace of St.
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