13 MAY 1922, Page 12

THE ETERNAL NEED.

[To THE EDITOR or TEL " SPECTATOR."]

Sm,—Your praise of Mr. B. Shaw's dialectic strikes some of your readers as extraordinary. There is really nothing in his replies to the three questions. His first answer is merely a juggling with the ambiguous words " body " and " thing " and an unmeaning reference to the first of the Thirty-nine Articles. His second, which deals with the idea of a "first cause," is so stale as to make the experienced reader of philosophy yawn. He omits to consider that there are various meanings of the word " cause." His third has more thought behind it, or seems to have. But how is all life a series of accidents if everything is either physically caused or, if alive,