His favourite haunt was the Athenaeum Club, where
he sat scanning the newspapers, or conversing with the old
friends of former days. He was a member, too, of that
distinguished body, the Metaphysical Society, which met once a
month during the palmy years of the seventies to discuss, in
strict privacy, the fundamental problems of the destiny of man.
After a comfortable dinner at the Grosvenor Hotel, the Society,
which included Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall, Mr. John
Morley and Sir James Stephen, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Tennyson,
and Dean Church, would gather around to hear and discuss a paper
read by one of the members upon such questions as: 'What is
death?' 'Is God unknowable?' or 'The nature of the Moral
Principle'. Sometimes, however, the speculations of the Society
ranged in other directions. 'I think the paper that interested me
most of all that were ever read at our meetings,' says Sir
Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, 'was one on "Wherein consists
the special beauty of imperfection and decay?" in which were
propounded the questions "Are not ruins recognised and felt to be
more beautiful than perfect structures? Why are they so? Ought
they to be so?' ' Unfortunately, however, the answers given to
these questions by the Metaphysical Society have not been
recorded for the instruction of mankind.
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