‘He was a great man,’ says Isaac Disraeli of St. Thomas Aquinas, ‘busied all his life with making the Charades of Metaphysics.’

The Charades of Metaphysics, or metaphysical charades, as we generally call them, must not be confused with the Physical Charades, invented by Francis Bacon, nor with the Dumb Charades which are our modern contribution to knowledge. They have a distinct character; they are really quite a different game. In these days when so much attention is paid to Morris Dances and medieval folk-lore, it may be a service to rescue from oblivion the varied accounts of this game which are to be found in our literature. I have drawn my quotations, not from the philosophers, but from the great literary writers of the past, because the best judges of any game are the onlookers who take no part in it. And if I seem to have a weakness for Thomases, it is because I feel that on those who received his name in Baptism, the mantle of Thomas Aquinas must surely have fallen.

Physical Charades was essentially an open-air game. Gallileo spent his spare time dropping bodies from the top of the leaning tower at Pisa: Newton played in his orchard near Grantham. Metaphysical Charades, on the contrary, was emphatically an indoor game, and for this I have the authority of no less a supporter than Thomas De Quincey.