“And in the name of common sense,” I said, “what truth and duty are to stand in your way?  Is not your truth, that there is none?”

“Yes,” he replied, smiling; “but is not the truth the truth, as Falstaff said? though to be sure it was when he was manufacturing his eleven men in buckram out of two.  However, as Mr. Newman, when some one foretold that he would be some day a Socinian or an infidel, replied, ’Well, if Socinianism or any thing else be the truth, Socinians or any thing else let us be’; so I must say, if no truth be the truth, no-truth men let us be.”

“Very well,” I replied.  “Then, it seems, truth stands in the way of acting prudently; and, instead of remedying our first paradox, we have started on another, that truth and prudence are here opposed:  for in no other cases (I think) in which you apply your own rule of the probable to the present life will a mind of your comprehensiveness say they are opposed; I am sure you will admit the general maxims, that to lie is inexpedient, and that honesty is the best policy, and so on.”

He granted it.

“But further,” said I, “what sort of truth is this, which involves duty, and yet is opposed to prudence?  It is, that there is no truth, it seems, and this completes the paradox.  This strange truth—­the Alpha Omega of the sceptic, his first and his last—­is to involve duty; he is to be a confessor and martyr for it!  Nothing less than happiness and prudence are to be sacrificed to conscience in the matter.  Truly, if the truth that there is no truth involves any duty, it ought to be the duty of believing that there is no duty to be performed; and you might as well call yourself a no-duty man as a no-truth man.”

He smiled, but replied, that, seriously, it was impossible to adopt any religious opinions, or to change them, at the bidding of the will.

I admitted, of course, that the will had no direct power in the matter; but reminded him that, if he meant it had no influence, or even a little, on the formation or retention of opinions, no one could be a more strenuous assertor of the contrary than he had often been.  I reminded him it was so notorious that man usually managed to believe as he wished, that was no one maxim more frequently on the lips of the greatest philosophers, orators, and poets.  But I added that there is also a legitimate way of influencing will, and that is through the understanding; and was with the hope of inducing him to reconsider the paradoxes of scepticism, and not with any expectation of instant or violent change, that I was anxious to enumerate them on the present occasion.