VI. To Lucian of Samosata - Page 2

duty for
government, and Thais and Lais are names of power--here, Lucian, is room and
scope for you. Can I not imagine a new 'Auction of Philosophers,' and what
wealth might be made by him who bought these popular sages and lecturers at
his estimate, and vended them at their own?

HERMES: Whom shall we put first up to auction?

ZEUS: That German in spectacles; he seems a highly respectable man.

HERMES: Ho, pessimist, come down and let the public view you.

ZEUS: Go on, put him up and have done with him.

HERMES: Who bids for the Life Miserable, for extreme, complete, perfect,
unredeemable perdition? What offers for the universal extinction of the
species, and the collapse of the Conscious?

A PURCHASER: He does not look at all a bad lot. May one put him through his
paces?

HERMES: Certainly; try your luck.

PURCHASER: What is your name?

PESSIMIST: Hartmann.

PURCHASER: What can you teach me?

PESSIMIST: That Life is not worth Living.

PURCHASER: Wonderful! Most edifying! How much for this lot?

HERMES: Two hundred pounds.

PURCHASER: I will write you a cheque for the money. Come home, Pessimist, and
begin your lessons without more ado.

HERMES: Attention! Here is a magnificent article--the Positive Life, the
Scientific Life, the Enthusiastic Life. Who bids for a possible place in the
Calendar of the Future?

PURCHASER: What does he call himself? he has a very French air.

HERMES: Put your own questions.

PURCHASER: What's your pedigree, my Philosopher, and previous performances?

POSITIVIST: I am by Rousseau out of Catholicism, with a strain of the
Evolution blood.

PURCHASER: What do you believe in?

POSITIVIST : In Man, with a large M.

PURCHASER: Not in individual Man?

POSITIVIST: Bv no means; not even always in Mr. Gladstone. All men, all
Churches, all parties, all philosophies, and even the other sect of our own
Church, are perpetually in the wrong. Buy me, and listen to me, and you will
ahvays be in the right.

PURCHASER: And, after this life, what have you to offer me?

POSITIVIST:: A distinguished position in the Choir Invisible: but not, of
course, conscious immortality.

PURCHASER: Take him away, and put up another lot.

Then the Hegelian, with his Notion, and the Darwinian, with his notions, and
the Lotzian, with his Broad Church mixture of Religion and Evolution, and the
Spencerian, with that Absolute which is a sort of a something, might all be
offered with their divers wares; and cheaply enough, Lucian, you would value
them in this auction of Sects. 'There is but one way to Corinth,' as of old;
but which that way may be, oh master of Hermotimus, we