Post-Prandial Philosophy

These Essays appeared originally in _The Westminster Gazette_, and have only been so far modified here as is necessary for purposes of volume publication. They aim at being sugg...

Well, yes, dear Sir Smelfungus, if it gives you pleasure to put it so--just that; a smattering, an all-round smattering. But remember that in this matter the man of science is a...

I dropped into the Opera House here at Nice the other night, and found they were playing "Carmen"--which is always interesting. Well, you may perhaps remember that when that cre...

The leader is a very different stamp of person. _He_ stands well abreast of his contemporaries, and just half a pace in front of them; and he has power to persuade even the iner...

Increasingly of late years I have heard these condescending words uttered, in the fatherland of Bacon, of Newton, of Darwin, when some Bates or Spottiswoode has been gathered to...

Is the change all due to the teaching of the teachers and the preaching of the preachers? I think not entirely. For, after all, the teachers and the preachers are but a little a...

Sometimes these great social reconstructions of which I speak are forced upon communities by external factors interfering with their fixed internal order, as happened when the i...

In saying this, I do not for a moment mean to deny the other and equally obvious truth that Conservatism, in the lump, is a euphemism for selfishness. But the two ideas have muc...

And man has done it all. Alone he did it. Often as I take my walks abroad--and when I say abroad I mean in England--I see men at work dotting about exotics of variegated foliage...

And then what do the philosophers do? Why, they prove to you the necessity of a Second Chamber by pointing to the fact that all civilised nations have got one--in imitation of E...