"Truth hath not an unchanging name." A modern English writer
says: "I have long been convinced by the experience of my life,
as a pioneer of various heterodoxies, which are rapidly becoming
orthodoxies, that nearly all truth is temperamental to us, or
given in the affections and intuitions; and that discussion and
inquiry do little more than feed temperament." Our poet seems to
mean that the Perceptions, when they perceive truly, convey
objective truth, which is universal; whereas the Reflectives and
the Sentiments, the working of the moral region, or the middle
lobe of the phrenologists, supplies only subjective truth,
personal and individual. Thus to one man the axiom, _Opes
irritamenta malorum_, represents a distinct fact; while another
holds wealth to be an incentive for good. Evidently both are
right, according to their lights.

Haji Abdu cites Plato and Aristotle, as usual with Eastern
songsters, who delight in Mantik (logic). Here he appears to mean
that a false proposition is as real a proposition as one that is
true. "Faith moves mountains" and "Manet immota fides" are
evidently quotations. He derides the teaching of the "First
Council of the Vatican" (cap. v.), "all the faithful are little
children listening to the voice of Saint Peter," who is the
"Prince of the Apostles." He glances at the fancy of certain
modern physicists, "devotion is a definite molecular change in
the convolution of grey pulp." He notices with contumely the
riddle of which Milton speaks so glibly, where the Dialoguists,

--reasoned high
Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute.