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Rh that I could not really think what I had there said, but he ignores a direct contradiction contained in the paragraph succeeding that from which he quotes. So that the case stands thus: On two adjacent pages I have made two opposite statements, both of which I cannot be supposed to believe. One of them is right; and this the reviewer assumes I do not believe. One of them is glaringly wrong; and this the reviewer assumes I do believe. Why he made this choice no one who reads his criticism will fail to see.

Even had his judgments more authority than is given to them by his mathematical honors, this brief characterization would, I think, suffice. Perhaps already, in rebutting the assumption that I did not answer his allegations because they were unanswerable, I have ascribed to them an unmerited importance. For the rest, suggesting that their value may be measured by the value of that above dealt with as a sample, I leave them to be answered by the works they are directed against.

Here I end. The foregoing pages, while serving, I think, the more important purpose of making clearer the relations of physical axioms to physical knowledge, incidentally justify the assertion that the reviewer's charges of fallacious reasoning and ignorance of the nature of proof recoil on himself. When, in his confident way, he undertakes to teach me the nature of our warrant for scientific beliefs, ignoring absolutely the inquiry contained in "Principles of Psychology," concerning the relative values of direct intuitions and reasoned conclusions, he lays himself open to a sarcasm which is sufficiently obvious. And when a certain ultimate principle of justification for our beliefs, set forth and acted upon in the "System of Synthetic Philosophy" more distinctly than in any other work, is enunciated by him for my instruction, as one which he "thought that every tolerably educated man was aware" of, his course is one for which I find no fit epithet in the vocabulary I permit myself to use. That in some cases he has shown eagerness to found charges on misinterpretations little less than deliberate, has been sufficiently shown; as also that, in other cases, his own failure to discriminate is made the ground for ascribing to me beliefs that are manifestly untenable. Save in the single case of a statement respecting collisions of bodies, made by me without the needful qualification, I am not aware of any errors he detects, except errors of oversight or those arising from imperfect expression and inadequate exposition. When he unhesitatingly puts the worst constructions on these, it cannot be because his own exactness is such that no other constructions occur to him; for he displays an unusual capacity for inadvertencies, and must have had many experiences showing him how much he might be wronged by illiberal interpretations of them. One who in twenty-three professed extracts makes fifteen mistakes—words omitted, or added, or substituted—should not need reminding how largely mere oversight may raise suspicion of something worse. One