HOW TO BELIEVE IN NOTHING.

THE papers contained in this book are intended, primarily, for the thoughtless; a category, be it observed, by no means consisting wholly of persons who never think. For it is possible to think thoughtlessly; to think loosely; to think illogically; even to think self-contradictorily. And among those who thus think there are some who are, consciously or unconsciously, in search of a Belief in Something, while others are but too anxious to get rid of Belief in Anything. Both crave for dogma; for Belief and Unbelief, mark you, are psychologically identical-the believer holding a certain proposition to be true, the unbeliever holding it to be false. The opposite of Belief is not Unbelief, but Doubt. The man who believes

and the man who disbelieves are alike certain ; the man who doubts is uncertain-he has not, like the others, as yet made up his mind. The only difference between the advocates of Belief and the advocates of Unbelief is that the former are desirous of believing Something, while the latter are equally desirous of believing Nothing; of being able to prove, that is, that there is Nothing to believe. It is in the interest of would-be converts to the comfortable and soothing creed of Nothingness that I now write, for I have long considered their case a very hard one. Many persons complain of the difficulty of believing in anything, but that is a trifle compared with the difficulty of believing in nothing. There are such hosts of things to be explained away--the world we live in, for example, the phantasms who pass themselves off as our fellow-creatures, the air we breathe, the light we see, even our own subjective individualities. Still, the task, though formidable enough at the first glance, is not, we think, beyond our power, and is, at any rate, well worth an effort. All the miseries of which we