Men Versus the Man; A Correspondence Between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H. L. Mencken, Individualist - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... MENCKEN'S REPLY TO LA MONTE'S SIXTH LETTER My Dear La Monte: In the matter of the Pecuniary Magnate I am well content to leave you in possession of the field. This is not because I think you have disposed of the few modest suggestions I ventured to put forth in my last letter, but because I see no hope of rescuing you from your errors by the ordinary processes of disputation. You Socialists, when you come to discuss the magnates, surplus values, bourgeoisie, and other fantastic fowl in your aviary of horrors, too often borrow a dialectic device from your blood brothers, the Christian Scientists. That is to say, you insist upon using private brands of epistemology and logic, unknown and incomprehensible to mere human beings, in the conduct of your philosophical feuds. Point out to a Christian Scientist that the influence of the mind upon the liver is infinitely less powerful than the influence of the liver upon the mind, and he will bowl you over with the staggering answer that the liver is a mere delusion of the mind. It seems to me entirely impossible for an everyday disputant, handicapped by a reverence for Aristotle, to controvert, or even to denounce such a theory. How are you going to lay hold of it? How are you going to measure or weigh it? It wipes out the whole universe, as you know that universe, and suspends all the laws of evidence, logic, and causation. It leaves you, in a word, gasping in an empty void. s The only thing to do is to steal away in silence. The same fate, I fear, sometimes overtakes the controversialist who engages a Socialist in debate. My own case offers sorry proof of it. In my last letter, for instance, I pointed out that the Pecuniary Magnate's capacity for evil, while boundless in theory, would be...

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