CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM Essays by a barrister. (Reprinted from t olin 3 1924 029 633 587 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029633587 ESSAYS BY A BABBISTEB. (REPRINTED FROM THE SATURDAY REVIEW.) LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, COKNHILL. M.DCCC.LXII. [The Right of Translation is reserved.'] CONTENTS ESSAY I. Casuistry PAGE 1 II. Me. Hallam 16 ni. CONVENTIONAL MORALITY 31 >~~ IV. PlHLANTHEOPY 41 V. The Wealth op Nature . 4S VI. John Bull 58 vn. Physical Strength 69 • vm. Doing Good 78 IS. Geniality 89 x. Loed Macaulay . 97 XL Limitations of Morality 107 XII. Christian Optimism 114 - XIH. Fanaticism 123 XIV. The End of the World 134 -• XV. Pain . . . 142 XVI. Christianity in India . 150 xvn. Mental Statuee 160 xvin. Minoe Vietues . 168 CONTENTS. ESSAY PAGE XIX. COURAGE .... . 175 XX. The Vanity op Human Wishes. . 183 XXI. Juniores Priokes . 191 XXII. Morality and Sensibility . 199 xxm. Public and Private Morals . 208 XXIV. Secondhand Knowledge . 215 , XXV. Spirit-Rapping . . 224 XXVI. Gamaliels . 234 XXVII. Mr. Carlyle . 242 xxvm. Pascal's Pensees . 254 XXIX. Joseph de Maistre . 267 XXX. Plutarch's Lives . 280 XXXI. Paley's Moral Philosophy . 293 xxxn. The Minister's Wooing . 307 XXXIII. Mr. Mansel's Metaphysics . 320 ESSAYS i. CASUISTRY. There are two classes of persons who may not unfairly be described as the scrupulous and the unscrupulous, if we are careful to forget what Bentham would have called the eulogistic and dyslo- gistic associations which have been gradually affixed to those words. There are men who, though not more pious than their neighbours, are always doubting whether they may do this or that on a Sunday — whether they can justifiably read a newspaper on that day, and if so, what newspaper, and what parts of it — whether they can safely swear, that the Pope hath not, as well as that he ought not, to have, jurisdiction in these islands — and so on of an infinite number of similar things. There are, on the other hand, persons who are substantially quite as good as their scrupulous neighbours, but to whom questions of this kind never present themselves as questions. They will give signatures, make declarations, and occasionally take oaths, with hardly a feeling of I ESSAYS. uneasiness, although the form of the oath may be open to any quantity of misconstruction. Then- remark upon the matter, if their attention were drawn to it, would probably be that it was only a form, and did not signify. It is not a satisfactory explanation of this diversity of practice and character to say that some people are naturally crotchety, while others are naturally unscrupulous. There are two theories of morality on which the proceedings of these two classes may respectively be justified; and though the adoption of the one or the other is no doubt determined far more often by natural temperament than by any process of speculation, it is worth while to point out the logical basis of conduct which is decided on without reference to logic. The tacit assumption which lies at the root of all scrupulous morality is that morals form a rigid system, standing in precisely the same relation to the conscience as that which legal rules occupy in civil life, so that it is possible to say definitely of a given act, not only that it is right or wrong, but in what precise degree it falls below the standard, and so incurs guilt, or rises above it, and so possesses merit. This is the fundamental principle of casuistry ; and it is to the fact that such a conception is possible, and indeed common and influential, that casuists appeal when they are charged with immorality. It is remarkable that the charge should always be brought against them, and that it should always be popular, though many persons who join in it would not be prepared to deny the principles from which the practice objected to is derived. It is closely analogous to the charge of quibbling and CASUISTRY. 3 hairsplitting which is always brought against lawyers, and: it so happens that one of the most influential and successful books ever written furnishes a com- plete illustration of the topics which can be tirged in favour of it. The book in question is Pascal's Provincial Letters. Their success, both in literature and politics, was so great, that the main position which they enforce derives additional interest, and an additional title to examination from the bare fact that they support it. Though the earlier Provincial Letters (for the first eleven form the pith of the book) contain several passages which jar on the feelings of an ordinary English reader, the first impression derived from them is, that of all the refutations ever written, they are the most triumphant and conclusive. The con- dition to which they reduce the Jesuits can be com- pared to nothing but that to which Lord Macaulay reduced Mr. Robert Montgomery. With hardly any perceptible effort, but with incidental smiling ease, they are shown to be the advocates of theft, murder, calumny, gluttony, magic, and fraudulent bankruptcy. Their object, says their assailant, is to govern the world by pandering to its impatience of the severity of Christian morals, and they carry out their design so completely that they subvert in turn every Christian duty — civil, social, and religious. It is easy to imagine the transport with which such denunciations of an unpopular and justly suspected body were received when they were written, and it is impossible not to sympathize with the genius of the author; but on cooler observation, the Provincial Letters appear less conclusive than they seemed at 1—2 4 ESSAYS. first, and it will be found that they raise several questions of vast importance to mankind at large, which are even now imperfectly understood, and which deeply affect the daily conduct of our lives and the whole tone of our thoughts. Between our own conception of morality and that which prevailed amongst both Jesuits and Jansenists two centuries ago, there is one broad and deep difference of principle, on which all subordinate differences depend. According to our modern view, Law and Morals are radically distinct from, and in a certain sense opposed to, each other. A person who never breaks the law at all may be much more wicked than one who breaks it often. A man who goes up to the very verge of breaking it — who stretches out his hand to steal, and draws it back only when the policeman passes — who draws the knife to stab, and is restrained from using it only by the grossest cowardice — is, in the eye of the law, on exactly the same footing as one who never felt a dishonest or murderous emotion. So, again, if a man steals from a dwelling-house to the value of 4Z. 19s., he incurs one penalty; if the property stolen is worth only one shilling more, the penalty is greatly increased, though the wickedness remains the same. In the same way, a crime committed at five minutes past nine on a summer's evening, in broad daylight, is liable to heavier punishment than a similar or more serious offence committed at half-past eight on a winter night. Most people feel that this must be so, though they may not see the cause of it. A feeling equally widespread suggests that in CASUISTRY. 5 morality such strictness is neither possible nor desirable, and that legal definitions are positive hindrances when our object is to discuss the sin as distinguished from the crime. The fact that, for a particular purpose, people choose to apply the same epithet to three persons, of whom the first treache- rously poisons his friend, the second unintentionally kills a constable who lawfully arrests him, and the third jumps into the Thames with her starving child in her arms, is only a source of confusion when we attempt to estimate the guilt of such conduct. Every one must feel that, though all three were equally murderers, their acts were very far indeed from being equally wicked, and even from bearing any kind of relation to each other. The notion of gauging moral guilt has been long, and happily, given up in Protestant countries. We can say that some things are wrong — that some are very wrong indeed, and some abominable ; but we have no sort of measure by which we can compare the enormity of different sins, so as to say, for example, whether adultery is worse than burglary with violence, or how many thefts are collectively as bad as a murder. This contrast between the legal and the moral estimate of a crime is sometimes supposed to arise from the defects of law, and in many cases it does so ; but of these defects, if such they are, the one which has most influence in this respect is insepa- rable from the very notion of law. It is that laws must be definite, and all definitions exclude on the one side and include on the other many cases which are not distinguished by any more tangible difference 6 ESSAYS. than the trees on the British and American side -of the Canadian frontier. Thus, for example, theft is a crime which it is necessary to define, and the law defines it accord- ingly to consist in "taking and carrying away," under certain circumstances, the property of another. Every one has a very vivid notion of what he means by a theft, every one is apt to suppose that his notion is not only vivid but exact, and most people would probably assent without much difficulty to the legal definition of the crime. They would probably admit, for example, that a man who took hold of another person's horse by the bridle, intending to steal him, and then immedi- ately changed his mind, and let go again, had not actually committed theft ; but it would be equally clear to popular apprehension that he had committed it if he not only laid hold of the bridle, but mounted and rode off. When, however, the matter is drawn somewhat closer, it assumes a very different appear- ance ; and to any one but a lawyer the definition appears altogether shadowy and absurd when the question of thief or no thief is made to depend on the question whether a man turned over a bale of goods in a cart or whether he only handled it. The attempt to fix the dividing point at which the locus penitentim ends and the crime begins, is exactly like the attempt to say at what precise second the dawn begins, or a man reaches his full stature. Difficult, however, and apparently ludicrous as the task is, it is one which lawyers cannot he relieved from undertaking ; for the alternative is the introduction into the law of an' element of arbitrary power on CASUISTRY. 7 the part of judges and juries, which would be a far greater evil than the existence of a debateable land in which it is difficult to determine whether actions are criminal or not. In former times, the contrast between the defi- nite character of law and the indefinite character of morality was not understood ; morality was con- sidered to be subject to rules as precise as law itself; indeed the two subjects can hardly be,said to have been separated till very recently. Law was almost uni- versally regarded as something which had an inde- pendent existence, like the physical phenomena of gravitation, sound, and light ; and morality was considered as a science hardly less complete and definite than arithmetic. One great reason for this was supplied by the practice of confession. The confessor had to allot so much penance for such an act. Of course the criminality of the act, and in many cases the question whether it was a mortal or a venial sin, depended upon an infinite number of surrounding circumstances of aggravation or ex- tenuation. Hence a system gradually sprung up which had a surprising affinity to what is known to modern English lawyers as case law. This system was casuistry, which in Roman Catholic countries is part of the indispensable apparatus of the priesthood, and forms a system of criminal law of the most searching kind. The consequence of assuming the spiritual direction of the consciences of large numbers of people, in respect of all their feelings and actions, is that it is necessary to be provided with a scale setting forth not only whether any particular act is right or wrong, but whether it is right or wrong in 8 ESSAYS. a particular degree, and what amount of punishment, in the shape of penance, it has, if wrong, deserved. This, though it is but little understood, is the true point of connection between casuistry and immo- rality. Dens, and the other writers who have ob- tained so unenviable a notoriety amongst Protestants, are in reality the Archbolds or Chittys of their profession; and the immorality which may fairly be imputed to them lies in the general concep- tion of morals on which they proceed, and not in the particular unseemly results at which they may have arrived. The respectable legal authors just named, might appear to talk most horrible iniquity if the peculiar circumstances under which they write were not borne in mind. Thus, Mr. Archbold says, " To kill a child in the mother's womb is no murder; " and again, " It is not murder to kill an alien enemy in time of war ; " " Taking away a man's life by perjury is not, it seems, in law murder." The same author teaches that it is not perjury to swear that A. beat B. with a sword, when, in fact, he beat him with a stick ; nor, under certain circumstances, to take a false oath before Commissioners of Bank- ruptcy. He says that, if a carrier appropriates a parcel entrusted to him, it is not theft, and many other doctrines equally subversive of all social order might be extracted from his works ; but no one con- siders them immoral, because they claim only to be legal. Excuses somewhat similar in principle might be offered for the most apparently revolting doc- trines of the casuists. The real objection to them is that they applied legal rules to a subject matter which had nothing to do with them. CASUISTRY. 9 It follows from this that Pascal's attack upon the Jesuits must either go a great deal further than its author intended it to go, or must he considered to apply at least as strongly to the Jansenists as to their opponents. Pascal was the partisan of a system of morality of the most rigid kind; and it is singular that it should not have been more frequently ob- served, that in the Provincial Letters he continually lays himself open to retorts as to his own views, which it would have been very difficult to parry; and it may be added, that if, upon such a subject, any weight at all is to be attached to facts and history, it is not less difficult to justify his views of morality than to justify those which he attacked. In fact, the Jesuits' views have some advantages over his. "Whatever were their faults, they seem to have felt that a system of morality which absolutely con- demns the whole existing state of society, and which would, if adopted, bind in iron chains all the energies and all the affections of mankind, stands self-refuted. In their anxiety to bring human life within the pale of salvation, the Jesuits may have stretched their system further than they had any right to stretch it; but if it is once granted (and at that time it was universally admitted) that morality is capable of being reduced to a system at all, the wish that there may be some sort of proportion between that system and the actual state of human society is one to which it is impossible to refuse a considerable degree of sympathy. The ordinary illustrations of the Jesuits' morals are matter of notoriety, and are circulated princi- pally by those who look upon Jesuits as capita lupina 10 ESSAYS. whom it is a Christian duty to invest with every horrible attribute that can be imagined. A few may be mentioned in order to show not so much the extravagances into which they ran, as the legal manner in which they speculated, and in which all persons must of necessity speculate who profess to decide upon the right and wrong of extreme cases in morality, and to administer a system of what is virtually criminal law in connection with their speculations. Take, for example, the following: Escobar, as quoted by Pascal, says — " Promises are not obliga- tory unless the promisor intends to bind himself when he makes them. This intention is not common unless they are confirmed by oath or contract ; so that if a person says simply, ' I will do it,' he means, ' I will do it if I do not change my mind ; ' for he does not mean by what he says to deprive himself of his liberty." Nothing, of course, can sound more dishonest than this : and nothing could be more dishonest than to address such an admonition to a person who wished to evade an obligation. In such a case, the proper advice would of course be to fulfil the promise at the expense of any amount of suffer- ing or loss ; but this and similar passages occur not in sermons but in law books, and in judging of their morality the question is, not whether they would make a good impression on an ordinary or on an ill-disposed hearer, but whether there is any con- siderable class of cases to which they apply. Such a class there undoubtedly is. Escobar's doctrine is no more than the legal maxim, Ex nudo facto non oritur actio, applied to morals. If a man says to CASUISTRY. 11 ills servant, " Have my clothes brushed to-morrow at half-past six ; I shall get up at that hour," it would be absurd to say that he was bound in con- science to get up accordingly. If a person says to another, " I will give you 100Z.," he would surely be at liberty to rescind his promise if he saw grounds of expediency for doing so, unless the person to whom it was made had done anything by way of considera- tion for it. If he had said, " I will give you 100/. to furnish such and such rooms, if you will take a lease of them " — and if the lease were taken, or if the pro- misee had ordered goods on the faith of a bare promise, and the promisor knew it — it would be highly dishonourable and wicked to retract, what- ever might be the loss and inconvenience of fulfilling the engagement. It is, no doubt, easy to put cases in which this or any general rule would sanction unhandsome and even fraudulent conduct, but that is the disadvantage of all express general rules ; and the general rule which Pascal's unqualified condemna- tion of Escobar implies, would be perfectly intole- rable. It would run thus — " Promises are obligatory, although it was not the intention of the promisor to oblige himself when he made them ; so that if a man says, f I will do it,' he debars himself from changing his mind, and leaves himself 110 liberty respecting it." If this were the general understand- ing of men, and the true interpretation of human language, all intercourse would become impossible. In a vast proportion of cases, a promise in form is meant, and is understood, as a mere intimation of present intention ; and all systems of law agree m considering that, to be binding, a contract must be 12 ESSAYS. mutual. This obligation is of course enlarged 'in point; of morality by a great number of considera- tions, which cannot be brought within any inflexible rule ; but if we must have an inflexible rule at all, Escobar's (though it may be expressed so loosely and imperfectly as to open a wide door to fraud) is m principle better and truer than Pascal's. Not only did Pascal misrepresent his antagonists by overlooking the essential conditions of the pro- blem which, in common with them, he seems to have considered as soluble— the problem of framing a system of general rules by which the degree of immorality of any given action whatever may be determined — but the extraordinary rigidity and harshness of his own system laid him under some difficulties from which they are exempt. For exam- ple, he is greatly scandalized at the following passage from Escobar : — " Is it permitted to eat and drink as much as we please (tout son saouT), without neces- sity and for mere pleasure ? Certainly, according to Sanchez, if it does not hurt our health, for it is per- mitted to the natural appetite to enjoy the actions which belong to it." If this maxim is wrong, and if any systematic view of the subject can be taken, there would seem to be no possibility of stopping short of the principle that it is wrong to eat or drink as much as we like for mere pleasure and without necessity, and although it would not hurt our health to do so. A man eats half a dozen strawberries (being as much as he wants — tout son saoul) after dinner — is this a siu ? If Escobar is wrong, it would seem that it is. Suppose the half-dozen become a dozen, two dozen, three dozen, or more, is it possible CASUISTRY. 13 to draw any better line with regard to the lawfulness of the indulgence (considerations of selfishness and decency being out of the question), than that which Escobar actually does draw ? A late traveller in Siberia came upon a wilderness full of wild raspberries. If he had had the requisite appetite and digestion, why might he not have eaten a cart-load of them, if he had no other way of passing his time ? If the prin- ciple which Pascal appears to imply were the true one, no one would ever take a meal without sin ; for even the prisoners in a gaol eat some part of their food merely because it pleases their palates. Illus- trations of Pascal's views in this respect might be multiplied to almost any extent. It seems a fair in- ference, from one passage of his book, to suppose that he maintained that it was a duty to give in alms the whole of our superfluous property; and from another, that he considered all desire to rise in the social scale, even (as he expressly says) by legitimate modes, as being sins of ambition. In a third pas- sage, he distinctly maintains that it is wrong to lend money at interest. Usury, he says, consists in re- ceiving back more money than you lent. In short, his views lead logically to consequences as fatal to human society as those which he attacks. The whole point and force of the Provincial Letters lies in the assumption that there is a code of morality which can be put into an express systematic form, according to which all actions must be regulated, and which the maxims of the Jesuits either evaded or overthrew. The conclusion deducible from this, the most eloquent and memorable of all denunciations of casuistry, is, that the system which Pascal invested 14 ESSAYS. with these glorious attributes was arbitrary, and m many respects false; and that, if it had been strictly applied to the purpose to which Jansenists and Jesuits alike contended that systems of morality ought to be applied, it would have speedily reduced the world to a monastery or a wilderness. If it is admitted that it is a formal duty to give to the poor all super- fluities, one of three results is inevitable— either the world must go on and prosper in and by wickedness ; or it must be turned into a huge waste of listless sloth and beggary ; or the word " superfluity " must be defined in such a manner as to avert this conse- quence. It is this evasion with which Pascal so bitterly reproaches the Jesuits. Certainly it would have been better to deny than to evade the obliga- tion, but it was a less evil to evade than it would have been to enforce it. Indeed, the evasion can hardly be called dishonest. The Jesuits said that whatever was necessary for the maintenance of a man's state and position in society, according to his rank, was not part of his superfluities. From this, says Pascal, they drew the consequence that few people had any superfluities ; but the consequence and the principle stand on different grounds. Casuistry will never be fully disposed of, and finally laid on one side, till people have learnt that morality must be to a great extent indefinite, and that moral definitions are, in reality, little more than descrip- tions. This view, however, like the casuistical theory, has its inconveniences. The most important of them is that it constantly tends to make the feelings or conscience of an individual the test of right or wrong for all mankind, and thus the greatest CASUISTRY. 15 laxity or the most rigid asceticism may be held up as the only right and sensible course, according to the temper of the person who makes the assertion. When Theodore Hook signed the Thirty-nine Articles, adding, " Forty, if you like " — when importers per- jured themselves by the hour under the system of custom-house oaths ; and when, on the other hand, Wesley maintained that to save money was robbery of the poor — they all erred in erecting a personal instead of a general standard of right and wrong. Hook probably would not have committed forgery, nor would the importers of French wine have per- jured themselves at the Old Bailey, nor would Wesley have admitted that property was a robbery ; but it was merely a personal sentiment which would have prevented them from doing so ; for, if they had generalized upon their own conduct, it could have been justified only by propositions which would have involved these consequences. How these two opposite theories are to be har- monized, what is the meeting-point of law and morals, how we are to know when it is wise to be scrupulous and when not, are questions of vast interest and im- portance which cannot be discussed here. But it is very desirable, in the midst of the petty squabbles which arise on these topics, to remember the vast questions which underlie them. The reflection that such questions exist might go far to allay tne violence of many of our popular controversialists, if they were capable of entertaining it. November 27, 1858. 16 ESSAYS. II. MR. HALLAM. The death of Mr. Hallam suggests a short retrospect on his career. No man devoted his life to more severe or arduous studies. Hardly any one whose reputation was so high was less widely known to the world at large. Beyond his own family and his personal friends, he was, generally speaking, little more than a name. Indeed, there was not much in his career to attract that general public attention and interest which is one of the greatest calamities that can befal a man of letters. His father was Dean of Wells, and he was born in or about the year 1779. He was educated at Eton and Christchurch, and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple, of which society he was afterwards a bencher. He never obtained any eminence as a barrister, having ex- changed that calling at an early age for the place of a Commissioner of Audit, which he held for many years, and which gave him the opportunity of esta- blishing his great literary reputation. With one touching exception, his life was passed quietly and silently in the composition of his three great works the Middle Ages, the Constitutional History of Eng- land, and the History of Literature. It is remarkable that the domestic calamities of one whose life was so ME. EALLAM. 17 retired, should haye attracted so large a share of public sympathy. The death of two sons, at the time when their loss was on every account most painful, was certainly as grievous a trial as a man could be called upon to bear ; but in Mr. Hallam's case attention was attracted to the loss, not only by the remarkable manner in which our only living poet testified his affection for the elder son, but by the extraordinary promise which each of them had just time to display before his death. Those who are interested by the spectacle of that uncontrollable progress which makes an indelible though indefinable distinction between different generations, can seldom have met with a better instance of it than was afforded by the difference between Mr. Hallam and the sons whom he loved so dearly, and who so cordially returned his affection. The fragments of Arthur Hallam's composition which still remain present the same sort of contrast to his father's style of thought as Mr. Tennyson's poems do to Pope's, or Mr. Kingsley's sermons to Paley's. It is pleasant to know that such differences left untouched the mutual affection and admiration which existed be- tween the father and the sons. Singular as are the circumstances which have associated Mr. Hallam's name in many minds with such recollections as these, their connexion with his memory will, no doubt, be transient. His historical reputation will, in all probability, last as long as the Constitution of which his works explain the origin and record the growth. The position which they occupy in English literature is well worthy of consi- deration; and it may be interesting to attempt to 2 18 ESSAYS. explain the relation in which they stand to some of the other works which have been written upon the same subject. Though Mr. Hallam never practised law as a profession, his habits of mind were deeply influenced by his legal studies. In almost every part of his works, the lawyer's temper and the lawyer's canons of criticism may be traced. Indeed, it may almost be said that the predominant object of his books was to cast the history of England in a legal mould. The possibility that a man of Mr. Hallam's ability should undertake such a task, is in itself characteristic. It could have occurred in no other country. To review with an all but passionless calm- ness all the cardinal points of English History, and to pass judgment upon them in the spirit of Westminster Hall, is a view of political life both characteristic of,' but welcome to, the English mind. Let any one try to imagine the history of France written in such a spirit — let him conceive the difficulty, or rather the absurdity, of attempting to solve the problem of the legality of the quarrels between the Burgundians and Armagnacs, the Wars of the League, the policy of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. towards the parliaments — and, above all, the series of revolutions which have distracted the country since the year 1789. Justice has been administered in France between man and man, and between the State and private criminals intelligibly enough, but the notion of a law which can control the Government is still exclusively English. It is this that gives unity and interest to Mr. Hallam's books — an interest which maintains itself in the face of a style too compact and severe to have attractions for any but serious readers. MR. HALL AM. 19 Mr. Hallain, as his readers are aware, dates the English Constitution from the reign of Edward I., and every one who has made a serious study of the early part of our history must have been struck with the judgment which he displayed in doing so. Though such writers as Mr. Allen have suc- ceeded in tracing the rudiments of a parliamen- tary system back even to the time of William the Conqueror, many years passed before the law was otherwise than a partial and arbitrary system. It is well known that no act of the Conqueror's excited greater indignation and terror than his execution of Waltheof for treason, the gravamen of which lay rather in the rank than in the innocence of the sufferer. In the early part of the twelfth century, perpetual imprisonment was the severest punishment which Henry I. could venture to inflict on a great lord (John de Belesme) who was convicted of no less than forty-two outrageous acts of rebellion and murder : and even this was not brought about without overcoming considerable resistance on the part of the rest of the nobility. The same state of things may be traced to a certain extent through the reigns of Henry II., Richard I., and John ; but Magna Charta (which has been ignorantly and ab- surdly described as a mere result of aristocratic violence) introduced a change which no one can ap- preciate who has not followed Mr. Hallam's advice by comparing Matthew Paris with Ordericus, Malmes- bury, and Newbury. To use his own striking lan- guage — " From this era a new soul was infused into the " people of England. Her liberties, at the best long 2—2 20 ESSAYS. " in abeyance, became a tangible possession, and " indefinite aspirations for the laws of Edward the " Confessor were changed into a steady regard for " the Great Charter. Pass but from the history of " Roger de Hoveden to that of Matthew Paris — " from the second Henry to the third — and judge " whether the victorious struggle had not excited an " energy of public spirit to which the nation was " before a stranger. The strong man, in the sublime " language of Milton, was aroused from sleep, and " shook his invincible locks. Tyranny, indeed, and " injustice, will, by all historians not absolutely ser- " vile, be noted with moral reprobation, but never " shall we find in the English writers of the twelfth " century that assertion of positive and national rights " which distinguishes those of the next age, and par- " ticularly the monk of St. Albans." After the confusion of Henry III.'s reign, we find in the Parliament Rolls of Edward I. conclusive evidence of the full practical establishment and vigorous operation of that great principle which to this hour is the exclusive possession of our country — that no man or body of men, whatever may be their position or authority, and whether they are or are not acting officially, or even by the express command of the king himself, are superior to the law. Edward II. was infinitely more distressed and injured by the illegality and informality of his exe- cution of the Earl of Lancaster, in 1317, than Louis Napoleon was in 1858, when he transported hundreds of men to Lambessa without any pretence of legality ; or than the Vigilance Committee of San Francisco, when, a year or two ago, they hung men (most of ME. HALL AM. 21 whom -well deserved hanging) with no approach to any other warrant than that supplied by their own views of expediency. The establishment of this principle and its gradual development form the subject-matter of constitutional history. Constitu- tional history itself is a narrower subject, for it is composed of the writings of a class of authors neither numerous, nor (with a few exceptions) well known. The following observations throw some light on the place which Mr. Hallam occupies in this class. Our principal writers on Constitutional History may be divided into three classes — the lawyers, the controversialists, and the modern school, of which Mr. Hallam and Sir F. Palgrave are the principal members. The lawyers, for the most part, handled the subject exclusively from a professional point of view. Fortescue, the author of the book De Laudibus Legurn Anglice, is the earliest, and by no means the least valuable of them. Indeed, he writes with a liberality of thought and a freedom from techni- calities which perhaps entitle his book to take rank rather amongst political treatises than amongst mere law-books, and which certainly make it far more agreeable to read than the more copious and detailed treatise of Lord Coke, who may stand next on the list. His Institutes contain a vast quantity of legal and constitutional history ; but the unhistorical temper of the times in which he wrote shows itself constantly in the confusion and bewilderment of his books. The Institutes were published in the early part of the seventeenth century; but the law which they contain is of all ages, from the time of Edward I. downwards; and it never seems to occur to the 22 ESSAYS. writer that it makes the least difference whether an act was passed in the thirteenth or in the sixteenth century. The whole of the real property law, for example, which forms the first Institute (better known by the familiar title of Coke upon Lyttleton) is based all but exclusively upon the feudal system, and there- fore upon a state of society which, in Coke's time, had entirely passed away. But this never appears to cross his mind. It never seems to strike him that the constitution of society changed, and that the character of landed property would naturally change with it. His whole view of history seems to be that some cases were before, and some after, the statutes De Donis and Quia Emptores. The very quaintness of his style shows the undiscriminating temper of his mind in the strangest manner. He maintains, for example, that corruption of blood is warranted by Scripture, because it is said in the 109th Psalm that the children of the wicked are to beg their bread in desolate places. Few things can set the historical and the pre-historical temper in clearer contrast than a comparison between Coke's Second Institute and Barrington's Observations on the Statutes. The subject of the two books is identical, the difference in temper most curious. Lord Hale's History of the Common Law is little more than [a fragment, being only an introduction to a larger work, which was sketched out but never completed. It is written in a far more modern spirit than Coke's books, but it turns almost exclusively upon questions of purely technical law, and has very little to do with the great questions of the Royal prerogative and the powers of Parliament. The same observa- ME. HALLAJI. 23 tion applies in part to liis History of the Pleas of the Crown, which, however, displays extraordinary learning and great capacity. The last of the purely legal writers on this subject to be noticed is Blackstone. His mode of treating the subject of Constitutional Law may be considered to form the complement of the views advocated by Mr. Hallam. He cannot fairly be charged with a want either of learning or of accomplishments ; but he was involved in that necessity which so many persons appear to have felt in the last century, of weaving all his statements into a system, which if it could not be deduced from the widest a priori grounds, could at least be defended on them. He never appears to see the distinction between the reason why an institution was founded, and the reasons which, after it has been founded, may be alleged in support of it. Why, for example, is the King of England one of the three branches of the Legislature? " Because," says Blackstone, " it is highly necessary for preserving the balance of the Constitution." An excellent reason, no doubt, for maintaining the esta- blished state of things, but one which had absolutely nothing whatever to do with its original production. This narrowness, which values a fact only as proof of some preconceived proposition, is the characteristic of all writers who take an exclusively legal view of the national institutions. Blackstone's famous argu- ment upon the Revolution of 1688 is an excellent example of this temper of mind. He views the whole transaction as a precedent, and deduces from it at last the proposition of law, that if the throne is vacant, the Lords and Commons together may fill it. 24 ESSAYS. Such were the peculiarities (more or less dis- tinctly marked) of those who treated our Constitu- tion merely as matter of strict technical law. It is, However, to be observed that the subject was deeply studied throughout the eighteenth century by another set of writers for a very different purpose. These were the controversial partisans who took one or the other side in the great debate between the House of Hanover and the House of Stuart. Several most learned though one-sided books are the monuments of this discussion. They have, as might have been expected, both the merits and the defects of contro- versial writing. They contain an immense quantity of useful materials, and of untrustworthy conclusions. The histories of Rapin on the one side, and those of Carte and Brady on the other, are the most impor- tant of these works. Carte in particular deserves notice, as he was the first person who studied, with a view to historical composition, the original records which contain not only the law reports, but the State papers of early times. Mr. Hallam's works abound with references to his book, and with expressions of admiration for his extraordinary industry and great ability. Barrington's Observations on the Statutes and Reeves' History of English Law occupy a middle position between the technical lawyers and the con- troversialists. They are written much in the spirit of Mr. Hallam's works, though Reeves was the highest of high Tories, and, curiously enough, was on that score the subject of the most absurd of all the absurd prosecutions for libel which disgraced the close of the last century. His book is admirably clear and learned. ME. HALL AM. 25 Such -were some of the principal predecessors of Mr. Hallam in the great task upon which he laboured so long and so successfully. In addition to their works, he had the advantage of the labours of several antiquarians who had brought together a great mass of historical documents — particularly Rymer, whose immense collection is to this day one of the most valuable of historical authorities, and Madox, who passed a great part of his life in the strange occupa- tion of forming a digest of the Exchequer records from John to Edward II. Mr. Hallam's great supe- riority over all his predecessors was due, not so much to his intellectual vigour, or even to the im- partiality for which he has been so justly praised, as to the fact that the point of view from which lie regarded the whole subject of constitutional law was a higher and more reasonable one than they had been able to seize. When he began to write, Bentham had broken up much of that blind reverence with which English lawyers were formerly in the habit of regarding English law ; and the French Revolution had effectually answered the double purpose of put- ting the Stuart controversy and all that belonged to it at an immeasurable distance from all living interest, and of discrediting a priori speculations about the nature of governments de jure, as compared with their development de facto. The interest in history revived at the same time on both sides of the Channel, by a parallel movement, under the in- fluence of precisely similar causes. Mr. Hallam and M. Guizot were each brought to study the history of their respective countries, by the striking illustration which both had witnessed of the impossibility of 26 ESSAYS. constructing a government for a country without reference to its history. The great peculiarity of Mr. Hallam's works is that he realized more com- pletely than any writer who had gone before him, the fact that, in respect to England, history is the substantive, and law, in whatever form— whether as it is embodied in institutions, or as it exists in mere ordinances— is the adjective, and that without a deep acquaintance with both it is impossible to arrive at satisfactory conclusions about either. No one has brought out with such a variety and aptness of illus- tration the great truth that all institutions are in their essence relative — that they can be estimated and understood only by one who has acquainted him- self with the social state of the people amongst whom they exist. Nor has any one more clearly established the correlative truth (a truth more frequentlv neg- lected, at present, than the other), that there is no more powerful agent in determining the moral and social condition of a nation .than the institutions which are thus to be studied. The importance of historical inquiry in politics and law is now so popular and so well established, that we are apt to forget that its adoption is both a recent and a remarkable event. That it is so, in fact, any one may satisfy himself by looking into any of the systematic political treatises which were so much in fashion in the last century. No one in the present day would venture upon the statement which met with so much applause when put forward by Montesquieu, that the fundamental principle of a monarchy was honour ; and that of a republic, virtue. No one now, except a few un- educated sophists, thinks of talking, at least in this ME. HALL AM. 27 country, about the inalienable rights of man, and the civil contract which is the basis of society. Nor would any one now talk such nonsense as Lord Camden in the last century, when he rebuked the miserable antiquarians who dared to inquire into the origin of the Constitution, instead of falling down to worship it. Mr. Hallam was amongst the first, and certainly was one of the most effective, adversaries of these and similar errors. Jeremy Bentham, indeed, attacked the consequences which flowed from them with a degree of acuteness almost unexampled, and with a force which frequently degenerated into brutality; but Bentham was not only unjust to his antagonists in refusing them credit to which they were justly entitled, but was himself a dogmatist of the most unsatisfying kind. He triumphantly over- threw Blackstone, and vexed the souls of Lord Eldon and other orthodox lawyers; but his theory of the constitution, and by consequence of the history of England, is not only false, but has simply no relation to fact whatever. He maintained that the English constitution was a nonentity, because it was not to be found in any precise, definite written shape, and that, as a fact, our government was a modified despotism, of which the king was the senior, and the other branches the junior partners, entirely dependent on him for whatever trifling share of power or influence he might be pleased to allow them. Such a theory is no more than a dyspeptic dream, to which a violent person chose to attach a degree of importance to which it was not entitled. Mr. Hallam's books supply the positive side which was weak in Bentham's political theories. In fixing 28 . ESSAYS. the history of the constitution, he gave the true measure both of its excellences and of its defects ; which he disentangled from a vast and apparently incongruous heap of materials. Accounts of the general state of society in the middle ages — of the common features of the constitutions which grew up with different results in England, France, Spain, and other countries — of the state of arts and sciences, the growth of towns, and the distribution of the different ranks of society — were all united to form the starting point from which a clear and fair com- parative view might be taken of the political con- dition of England. From this starting point he deduced the history of the gradual development and legal recognition of that set of principles which, taken together, make up the English constitution ; and it is impossible to give too much praise to the skill with which the double character of the various events related is kept in view. Mr. Hallam never forgets either that he is relating historical events the character of which depended upon the state of public feeling at the time of their occurrence, or that he is recording legal precedents the importance of which as precedents is even yet by no means extinct. This double aspect invests his books with peculiar importance ; their historical character saves them from the technicality of mere law books, and their legal character connects them with practical life, and delivers them from that strange air of fatalism which gives an unwholesome tinge to many modern histories of great celebrity. It is of course easy to find fault with a oreat writer, and no doubt there are some real defects in MR. HALLAM. 29 Mr. Hallam's works, and some apparent ones, which diminish their credit with the present generation. Judges entitled to speak on such a suhject say that Mr. Hallam was not so well acquainted with the Canon Law as might have been desirable, and that this prevented him from fully appreciating some of the most powerful of the influences which produced a sort of unity amongst the nations of Europe in the middle ages. It is also difficult to avoid the con- clusion that he had less sympathy than an historian ought to have for passion in general, and especially for the religious passions. Thus, in his dissertations on the Civil Wars, he did not adequately distinguish between the principles and the pretexts of the two great parties which divided the nation. He steers a very impartial course between the Roundhead and the Cavalier, but if Cromwell or Charles could read his book, each would probably feel that the strongest part of his case was left untouched, however fairly that which was touched might be dealt with. It may also be objected to Mr. Hallam's whole theory of history, that it proceeded to some extent upon an anachronism — that he antedated the constitution, and ascribed a sympathy for and an appreciation of constitutional arguments to men to whom the whole theory was foreign. Whatever may be the value of these criticisms, the other side of the question is far the most impor- tant. There never was a time when Mr. Hallam's books were more likely to exercise a healthy influ- ence than at present, for there never was a time in which it was more necessary to assert in the strongest way the importance of acts as opposed to 30 ESSAYS. feelings and dispositions, of positive law and definite institutions as opposed to tendencies and formulas which are foolishly described as laws. Whatever Mr. Hallam's defects may have been, he always gives his readers something real, tangible, and solid. He proceeds by fixed rules and principles, and does not call perjury and murder by new names merely because the general character of an historical per- sonage suits the new names better than the old ones. He has a belief in facts, in broad results, in well tried principles ; and in these, as in most other respects, his books are an example eminently worthy of study and imitation by the whole school of romantic and pictorial historians. January 29, 1859. ol III. CONVENTIONAL MORALITY. Conventional Morality is a subject on which every une considers himself at liberty to be indignant and pathetic. A nobleman lately observed in the House of Lords that he thought the moral effect of the Divorce Court was bad. An indignant writer replied that his lordship's regard for morality must be affected, because another nobleman, whose name figured pro- minently on the list of co-respondents, would sustain no social inconvenience from the circumstance. " Will he," asked the virtuous journalist, with the withering sarcasm appropriate to the occasion — "will he receive one invitation the less ? Will he make a less bril- liant or frequent appearance in any part of the society in which he moves? Will he be less courted and flattered by ladies with marriageable daughters, or less well received by any one of the innumerable army of toad-eaters ? If not, surely Lord E 's regard for morality must be," &c. &c. Some more eloquence of the same sort ushered in the common form conclusion that, inasmuch as conventional mo- rality does not inflict a particular set of penalties for a ■particular set of offences, it is no better than hypo- 32 ESSAYS. crisy. The popularity which assertions of this sort have of late years attained, and the influence which they have exercised over some of the most popular of contemporary authors, are significant and impor- tant facts, though they are so transient, and so little susceptible of precise statement, that they are almost certain to escape the notice of those who will here- after study the character and history of the present generation. Whilst the assertions themselves are still before our eyes, it is desirable to examine them, for their incompleteness and inaccuracy are strong proofs of the worthlessness of a large part of that which passes muster as current popular philosophy. The popular argument is that society cares nothing for morality, because it will forgive any amount of moral obliquity to a man who is rich and lives splen- didly. This short statement contains the pith of a mass of irony and invective which popular writers have poured out upon the world for the last thirty years. Mr. Thackeray's life has been passed in ringing the changes on it — sometimes pathetically, sometimes indignantly, sometimes with a forced calmness the effectiveness of which would have been wonderful, if there were any novelty in showing that by ingenious manipulation you can get out of a sovereign gold-leaf enough to paper a room. Short, however, as the statement is, it will be found, on examination, to consist of a false in- sinuation and several false assertions. The false insinuation is that the fault denounced is peculiar to, or at least specially characteristic of, the upper classes of society. This is by no means true. There is plenty of immorality in the lower walks of life, CONVENTIONAL MORALITY. 33 but labourers and mechanics are not in the habit of ostracising their intemperate or unchaste companions. A sailor is not sent to Coventry on board ship for getting drunk in harbour, or for having several wives in various parts of the world ; and in many parts of the country a young woman's character suffers little from her having an illegitimate child. It would be easy to mention attorneys who have been guilty of fraud and perjury, farmers who are notorious for all the fashionable vices, and shopkeepers who keep a minority of the Ten Commandments, who are never- theless received into the society of their equals with no sort of hesitation, and who have as little difficulty, in proportion to their means and manners, in finding willing daughters and obsequious mothers, as any member of the peerage whose name is written in the chronicles of Sir Cresswell Cress-well. It is, in fact, the universal habit of all classes of persons to notice but little the morals of their associates in the common intercourse of life, so long as they are not of such a nature as to make that intercourse unpleasant. It 'is undoubtedly true, that an immoral man who has a o-reat deal to say for himself is more popular in society than a strictly moral man who is excessively dull ; but as this is equally true of all classes, it is unfair to make it a special charge against the higher classes. If the insinuation conveyed by the language under consideration is unfair, its direct assertions are false. They are, that the common practice of all classes shows an indifference to morality, and that its alteration would be desirable in a moral point of view. These assertions are made only because those 34 ESSAYS. who make them have never considered with accuracy what is the relation between society and morality, and by what principles their mutual relations ought to be regulated. Social penalties for immorality form, like all other penalties, a kind of system of criminal law. They ought to be inflicted only on occasions and in degrees in which they have some tendency to prevent particular evils; and the evil which social punishments are intended and calculated to prevent is the disturbance of the comfort of society. They pre--suppose the existence of an average condition, in which people associate together without conscious discomfort' — they punish acts which tend to disturb that state of things — and they leave, and ought to leave, untouched and unpunished all acts which do not disturb it. If this is the true object at which conventional morality aims, it is absurd to blame it for punishing people heavily for acts which are but slightly im- moral, whilst it abstains from all notice of other acts which involve guilt of a heinous kind ; for it is no more the object of conventional morality than it is the object of criminal law to establish a standard of Christian perfection. The law of the land allows one man with perfect impunity to let his father die of starvation in a ditch, whilst it sends another to gaol for stealing a loaf in order to give his starving parent a meal. Nor is there in this any impropriety ; for it is the object of the criminal law to protect property, but it is not its object to make people honour their parents. In the same way, conven- tional morality does not punish incontinence in a man nor cowardice in a woman, though in the converse CONVENTIONAL MORALITY. 35 cases it is exceedingly severe. And the reason of this is that the normal repose — the average comfort — of social intercourse rests on the supposition that men are sufficiently brave to speak the truth, and to exact for themselves a certain degree of respect, and women sufficiently chaste to justify their mixing, without suspicion, in the common intercourse of society. The degree of virtue necessary to the maintenance of the average condition of things will, of course, vary widely in different times and coun- tries, but where it is highest it will be indefinitely lower than the highest ideal of goodness attainable there ; and thus the enforcement of the sanctions on which it depends will always be warranted by the common sense of the great bulk of mankind, whilst it will be a never-failing object of the contempt of those who think themselves philosophers because they have discovered that gilt cornices are not made of solid gold. This proves the injustice of asserting that the persons who compose society are indifferent to im- morality, because they do not punish it with social excommunication. It is precisely parallel to the injustice of saying that lawyers think there is no harm in ingratitude because it is not the subject of leo-al punishment. It is perfectly possible to dislike a man and to disapprove of his conduct without avoiding his society, and in a great number of cases it is absolutely necessary to do so. In almost every form of public or semi-public life, in trades, in pro- fessions, in every kind of official intercourse, this distinction is recognized and practised. Two bar- risters may meet constantly in court and on circuit, 3—2 36 ESSAYS. they may live in habits of almost confidential inter- course and rough familiarity in their professional capacity ; but when their profession is laid aside they may hardly acknowledge each other's existence, and feel the greatest possible amount of mutual con- tempt and dislike. A similar rule applies between fellow-travellers. For the sake of common con- venience, all sorts of people associate with the greatest freedom in an inn or on board of a steam packet, on the sole condition that they are acquainted with the elementary usages of civilized life ; but when the momentary casual tie is broken, they im- mediately become strangers again, and it is only the consciousness that that event will take place so soon that enables them to display so much intimacy for the moment. If an archbishop met with an in- fidel lecturer in a railway carriage, they might talk comfortably enough about the harvest, the weather, and the newspapers, but it would be absurd to infer from this that the contrast in their religious opinions was a matter of indifference to them. It never appears to strike the persons who are most glib with the usual sarcasms against conventionality, that tremendous evils would be involved in an attempt to increase in any considerable degree the severity of conventional morality considered as a penal code. It would involve nothing less than the dissolution of almost every social relation ; for if we did not take the average comfort of society as the standard bv which the enforcement of social penalties is to be regulated, no other standard could be found except that of ideal goodness. It is barely possible to imagine what a society would be like in which any CONVENTIONAL MORALITY. 37 serious attempt was made to enforce such a standard as this. If it were universally understood that dis- approval was to be felt and expressed in substantial forms — not on account of the tendency which the actions disapproved of might have to interfere with the comfort of others, but because they implied that the person performing them fell short of that degree of virtue which his neighbours required of him — the most powerful of all repressive forces would be brought to bear upon human conduct. A system of prohibitions as severe as those of the narrowest religions fanaticism would be brought into constant activity — an activity the more serious because it would be unostentatious, and, to the generality of men, imperceptible. The moral standard which public opinion would thus enforce would, of necessity, be imperfect in two vital respects. In the first place, it would be exclu- sively negative. It would take account only of specific bad actions. It could never weigh the in- fluence of circumstances upon individuals, nor could it notice those elements of human nature which are not embraced under the categories of moral good and evil. It would place under a social ban all men of impulsive and original characters, in whom good and bad impulses take determinate forms, and it would tend to foster that passionless mediocrity which makes large bodies of people into moral Laodiceans, neither hot nor cold, and entitled to little other praise or blame than that of being more or less prudent. In the second place, the standard thus raised would not only be negative, but narrow and trivial. It would represent nothing but the average feelings of 3S JCSSAYS. the majority, and these average feeling, though good in their way, are despicable if they are regarded as a measure of the moral relations in which men might and oust* to stand to each other. We ..lien hear that morality is a simple matter, level to the com- prehension 'of every one; and no doubt there is something that goes by the name of winch this is true, but the distance between this something and the ultimate theory of human conduct is infinite. To take the great question hinted at above, what do the conceptions of ordinary men teach us as to what may be called moral set-offs ? Was Lord Nelson a better or a worse man than a clerk in a London bank who passed his life in a moral torpor, without sufficient energy or temptation to do anything very right or very wrong? No one has ever settled the question satisfactorily, or even done anything con- siderable towards stating its elements ; but if society were to take upon itself the censorship of private character, it would be dealt with in the narrowest and most mischievous way. Social penalties are indispensable for the comparatively humble purpose of maintaining social decency and comfort; but they would be mischievous in the extreme if they were inflicted on the principle that the common opinions of average men ought to mould the characters of man- kind. It is one of the great evils of the day that they have already far too strong an influence in that direction. Society would have to inflict these penalties with- out satisfactory evidence, and without any reasonable form of procedure. The penalty would he social excommunication ; the evidence, popular report. Such CONVENTIONAL MORALITY. 39 a man, it would bo said, has been unchaste, such another ungrateful, a third is u spendthrift, :m sions of hoys and girls- who have: hardly entered upon their teens. In short, the importance of the young isi at a maximum ; and if, in the course of a few more decades, the world, is; not peopled by a generation infinitely superior to those which have preceded it, it will not be- from any want of interest or exertion on the part of the existing adults towards the existing adolescents. 1 92 ESSAYS. The good side of this movement requires no illus- tration. It would be impossible to say anything about the importance of education without falling into the dreariest of all commonplaces ; but, like most other good things, it has its attendant evils — evils which have an injurious effect upon education itself, upon those who receive, and upon those who give it. Perhaps the best illustration of this is to be found in the character and tendency of the novels which are at present so popular about life at school and at col- lege. In the last generation, and in the works of our older writers, scenes of this kind were introduced principally as affording an opportunity for burlesque description. The common form used by Captain Marryat, for example, in describing his hero's school- days, consists principally of accounts of the tricks which he played upon the master and the usher, and of the tyrannical punishments which he incurred in return. A modern novel about school or college life is written in a totally different temper. If the scene is a school, it will be intimated that success and good behaviour at school have the closest possible relation to success and goodness in future life ; whilst deep moral meanings will be attached to all the ups and downs in lessons and in play. If it is a university, the/meidents may be constructed on rather a larger scale, and more play may be given to serious passions and feelings ; but the same sort of importance will be attached to matters intrinsically petty, whilst the whole will be pervaded by the same fundamental assumption, that the period passed at college is neces- sarily of the utmost importance, and that the part which an undergraduate plays there almost deter- JDNIORES PEIORES. 193 mines the part which he will play in after life. The solemnity with which these hooks are written, and the tone by which they are pervaded, prove that their authors fall into the error of greatly over- valuing the relative importance of very early life. For it is true, though it is a truth which many people seem to forget, that maturity is more important than youth — that the importance of youth depends prin- cipally on the fact that it is an introduction to matu- rity — that many of the habits and many of the quali- ties which have most to do with the success and happiness of mature life, though they may exist in youth, lie beyond the reach of educators — and that they are called out by the events of manhood far more than by the education received in youth. In short, a man's character has in it infinitely more than his schools and schoolmasters put there. And the closest observation and most assiduous drill during the first two or three and twenty years of his life constantly fail to bring it out. These are, of course, unwelcome reflections to the whole generation of what, to use their own phraseo- logy, must be called educationists, for they impose limits upon education, the existence of which educa- tionists habitually neglect or deny. They show that it is not the business of education to form the cha- racter, for some of the most important parts of it are formed after the age of education is over. For a similar reason, it is not the business of education to give to those who receive it a chart by which the course to be steered in life is indicated. The solution of that problem depends in a great measure upon experience, which can be obtained only by each man 13 194 ESSAYS. for himself, as he comes within the influence of the great passions and interests of mature life. On the other hand, one of the most essential cha- racteristics of education is that it should be adapted to the immature and incomplete character of those who receive it; so that the college and the school are, after all, little more than continuations of the nursery, differing from real life by the elimination of a certain number of the elements which make up its interest The nursery excludes almost all these elements; the school excludes most of them; and even a university excludes several of the most im- portant. Students have no professions ; they have no families ; they live under a system of artificial rewards, which give a fictitious value to certain specific talents quite independent of their real im- portance in life, whilst they leave unnoticed other qualities of infinitely greater consequence. Hence the world of school and college is, and must be, to a great extent, a make-believe world — constructed, with more or less ingenuity, to imitate the real world, but affording an inadequate, and, in some respects, a fallacious and even misleading test as to the capacity of its inhabitants for usefulness and success outside of it. Educators of every degree are naturally in- clined to forget this, and to endeavour to enhance their own importance by adopting the highest notion of the importance of their task. They assume, for the most part with little foundation, that they know what life is and how to prepare their pupils for it ; whereas their own views are generally narrow and technical, and their opportunities for impressing them on their pupils limited. If they could reconcile them- JUNIQBES PRIOBES. 195 selves to the reflection that they have a limited task to perform — that their most important duties are negative, and that the young birds whom they have hatched properly belong to, and will pass most of their lives in, an element of which they know com- paratively little — the education which they would give would be less pretentious and more useful. It is not, however, in its effects upon education that the exaggerated importance attached to the young and their doings is most injurious. It exer- cises a worse and a more important influence on the minds of those who entertain it. To gain the ear of a certain number of young disciples, and to set up some scheme of education founded on his particular views, is the mode of proceeding adopted by almost every social reformer.* There are many people in the present day, in almost every walk of life, who appear to feel that they have no chance of getting a hearing from grown-up men and women, and who think that possibly boys and girls may furnish the fulcrum which their little schemes require in order to move the world. A large proportion of the clergy take this course. They are indefatigable (and their in- dustry and benevolence are highly honourable to, them) in educating and lecturing young people. But here they stop. To use a well-known platform phrase, middle-aged men are a " neglected class." In boy- hood, every one is taught and lectured to the utmost limit that can be supposed to be good for him. Very young men are often enlisted by some reformer or speculator, who sets them to work upon schemes of his own for improving the condition of mankind; * See Essay on Gamaliels, p. 234. 13—2 196 ESSAYS. but after that period of life, a man is supposed to have got beyond the province of advice. The most anxious philanthropists have nothing whatever to say to him, and even the clergy appear to think that, if he has a soul to be saved, it is no business of theirs to save it. It is not so with the other learned pro- fessions. The doctor's services are distributed im- partially over life. The lawyer has no objection to male and middle-aged clients; nor do politics or commerce turn their backs upon the unromantic age and sex. If grown-up men are so important an element in life as a possibly unreasonable prejudice suggests, will no one undertake the improvement of their con- dition? There are obvious difficulties in the case, but they are difficulties which reformers and philan- thropists should be prepared to meet, if their reforms and their philanthropy are real and sound. A grown-up man, who has mixed in the real business of the world, generally knows a quack when he sees him, sees through mere verbiage, and has made up his mind that there are a good many evils in life which it is hopeless to try to cure. If such a man is asked to take a great deal of trouble, to spend a great deal of time, to introduce considerable changes into his habits of conduct and modes of thought, the request must be based upon grounds which will bear the fullest discussion and the strongest adverse criti- cism. When people address themselves by prefer* ence to feeble, immature, or ignorant hearers, the inference which unavoidably suggests itself is, that they are not prepared for this, and that they are internally conscious, either that their case is iveak, or JUNIOEES PEIORES. 197 that they do not know how to defend it. If a case is really strong, it can be proved to the satisfaction of mature minds. We have seen an abundance of great political changes, but they were effected by men, and not by boys. We have also seen an abundance of puny sects, which were hardly born before they died ; and their common characteristic has been that they began in the influence of a few clever men over a circle of susceptible youths. It is a wise remark, that the fate of mankind depends much more upon the risen than on the rising generation, and if reli- gious and social reformers want to find out what their plans are really worth, they should see how they affect men of their own age and station, instead of trying to prejudice in their favour a set of lads or girls who will outgrow them in the course of a few years. It is hardly possible to estimate the importance of such a course to the reformers themselves. It would not only give them a test of the soundness of their own views, of which they are at present entirely destitute, but it would have an effect on their own minds of which they can hardly estimate the import- ance. Hardly anything is so fatal to continuous mental growth as constant contact with immature minds. It is the intellectual equivalent of keeping low company. A person whose life is passed amongst children or boys can hardly be expected to avoid the blunder of supposing that the superiority of which he is continually made conscious is absolute, and not relative. The feeling that he has to be constantly setting them an example is almost certain to delude him into the belief that he has an example to set ; 198 ESSAYS. whereas, in fact, his knowledge of life is often little wider, whilst his conjectures about it are less lively than those of his pupils. There is no one thing which it is more important for persons connected with education to remember than the truth that education is only a preparation for life, and that the life which lies beyond it is utterly unlike it, is very partially known to any one, and is, in general, particularly little known to themselves. September 29, 1860. 199 XXII. MORALITY AND SENSIBILITY. The question whether the world is more hypocritical than it used to he often forces itself upon the atten- tion of those who observe the feelings of the present day. Philanthropists call upon Parliament for powers to interfere with the amusements of their neighbours, religious newspapers become a byeword for slander and libel, and men who appear in some points of view models of Christian zeal and charity seem to be altogether dead to the obligation of truth. Upon the other hand, a specially humane and Christian schoolmaster, whose life had, by his own account, been passed in devising a system of school-keeping upon physiological principles, not long ago* beat a boy to death, because, having water on the brain, he was perverse and stupid about saying his lessons; and having, for this specimen of practical physio- logical science, been sentenced to four years' penal servitude, he issued from " his narrow cell " a pamphlet which might be considered the ultimate perfection of cant. The pamphlet affords a text for a curious inquiry. * See the case of R. v. Hopley, tried at the Lewes summer assizes in 1860. 200 ESSAYS. The plain common-sense criticism upon it is simply that it is the work of a hypocrite and a liar, and the common-sense criticism is both just and true. But lying and hypocrisy are seldom, if ever, simple phenomena. Probably no man sets himself con- sciously to pretend to be something which he is not. No one says to himself, " I am a cruel brute ; but I observe that people are in various ways well paid for being humane and affectionate, therefore I will pretend to be humane and affectionate." There are so many departments of life for which cruelty and brutality are not disqualifications, and the effort of always pretending to non-existent feelings must be so wearisome, that, if a man really did arrive at so clear an opinion as to his own character, the proba- bility is that he would rather seek means to indulge than to conceal it. We have all, in fact, sufficient self-respect to deceive ourselves more or less before we begin deceiving others, and falsehood and hypo- crisy will generally be found to originate in harbour- ing in the mind incongruous feelings which, when indulged, produce results diametrically opposed to each other. Men, however, are so constituted that almost every one is actuated more or less by emotions which tend to produce contradictory and inconsistent results. A person who takes great interest in the affairs of others will be pleased so long as his neigh- bours act as he could wish, and will be angry when they act otherwise. In the first state of feeling, he may appear a zealous philanthropist ; in the other, an intolerant bigot and persecutor, or, under special circumstances, a butcher and torturer. When the acts done in the second state of feeling are compared MORALITY AND SENSIBILITY. 201 with the language used in the first, people will call the man a hypocrite, and they will be right in doing so ; for, though there may have been a subjective connection between the soft words and the murderous blows, and though each may have been the genuine expression of the man's feeling for the time being, the rest of the world are not bound to speculate on such uncertainties. People are perfectly right in acting upon the principle that, if a man cares to be thought honest, there must not only be a connection between his words and his acts satisfactory to his own mind, but also a consistency between them which can be maintained upon grounds generally admitted by others. Thus it would be perfectly fair to call a man a hypocrite who, in the present day, was full of affectionate phrases about his fellow-creatures, and yet longed to put to a cruel death those who differed from him upon theological points ; but there may have been times when such a man would no more have been a hypocrite than a judge or a surgeon in the present day who inflicts tremendous suffering in a spirit of perfect benevolence. Hardly any one can have failed to observe that this sort of semi-conscious hypocrisy is common in the present age — that bad conduct and high pro- fessions of principle, seen by every one else to be utterly inconsistent, but appearing to those who exemplify them perfectly homogeneous, are to be met with in all directions. How did this state of things come to exist? Some of its causes are to be found in the circumstances of our times, and especially in the minute classification which is all but universal amongst us, and which is nowhere so 202 ESSAYS. powerful as amongst the classes which make the greatest claims to religion and charity. The reli- gious and the philanthropic worlds stand almost entirely apart from the world which makes no special claims to religion or philanthropy. Each considers that it possesses the secret of life, and that ordinary men are in a state of dense ignorance as to their true interests. If any one will read what is written on the subject of education, not only by mere quacks, but by men of really active benevolence, and in many respects of good judgment, he can hardly fail to be struck by the tone of contemptuous Pharisaical cruelty by which a great deal of it is pervaded. It constantly proceeds upon the assumption that children are, as it were, the young of the poor, who are to be rescued from their parents by the clergyman and the schoolmaster for the purpose of being brought up in decent principles, whilst the parents themselves are left to go their way to destruction. There is nothing which a thorough-bred philanthropist finds it so difficult to admit as the possibility that any one can know his own business better than he does, or can care more for its proper transaction. Powerful as is the influence of this cause in pro- ducing hypocrisy, it is associated with another which lies somewhat deeper, and of which the operation may be traced in almost every department of thought and literature. This is the tendency of the present age to give to sensibility, as compared with morality, a degree of importance to which it is by no means entitled. The general nature of the opposition which exists between the two is obvious enough. Morality always tends, and infallibly must tend, to embody MORALITY AND SENSIBILITY. 203 itself in a system of fixed rules, which invariably imply that all persons, irrespectively of differences of position, character, and the like, are inexorably bound by them. In fact, morality is, on a large indefinite scale, exactly what law is upon a comparatively narrow one. Every system of morals claims obe- dience from all, and confers rights upon all. In fact, morality, duty, and positive rights are correlative terms, and cannot exist without each other. Morality, moreover, is rather negative than positive. It always speaks to forbid : " Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not covet," It rests upon and implies some active power, in virtue of which men will be inclined to those actions which, but for its intervention, would be qualified as murder, theft, or covetousness. Sensibility is the opposite of morality, in its most essential particulars. It manifests itself in the form of passion. Love, hatred, active piety, philanthropy, misanthropy, charity, cruelty, and all other feelings, are forms of sensibility. Whatever may be the special form which it assumes, it is distinguished from morality by the fact that it imposes no duties, and confers no rights, and always impels instead of for- bidding. Affection, either for individuals or for classes of men, is perhaps the most universal form of sensibility. That it is an active principle is self- evident. It always impels and never restrains, but is itself restrained by law or by morals. For this reason, it cannot be said to impose duties. Duties are imposed upon it. Love, for example, does not create the duties of marriage. It is an impulse and affection which cannot properly be said to tend to 204 ESSAYS. anything but its own satisfaction. Experience and reflection have induced people, for the sake of the good of mankind, to surround it with the conditions and restrictions attached to marriage, and it is from these conditions and restrictions that the duties of married life arise. In the same way, love confers no rights. A right is the correlative of a duty. It is a power to obtain or to do something, which power is recognized, and, if necessary, protected by some exterior law. Thus it is the exterior law, or morality, which confers rights, and not sensibility. Sensibility and morality are thus complementary to each other, like the river and the dam, or the steam and the locomotive engine. For several reasons, sensibility has, for many years past, got very much the upper hand of morality. Law, whether it takes the shape of legal or of moral rules, is always harsh and austere, and is therefore instinctively disliked by a lively, pathetic generation, intensely alive to its own joys and sorrows. More- over, both law and morals have to be continually re-written to meet the various circumstances of man- kind. As new relations arise and new sentiments prevail, it is necessary to remodel the old rules, just as the dams and embankments of a river must be altered as the water shifts its course. Till this is done, there is, of course, an opposition between law and morals on the one hand, and sensibility on the other. Every law makes hard cases, and the popular feeling is always on the side of sensibility, against both law and morals. For example, the law is that certain acts are murders, and that murderers shall be hung. Some years since, a woman who had MORALITY AND SENSIBILITY. 205 been seduced and brutally insulted afterwards by a soldier, sbot him dead in the most deliberate manner. For this she was sentenced to be hung. The public voice demanded and obtained her pardon. " We were not thinking," people felt, " of such a case as that when we laid down the rule." It is, indeed, no easy and common thing to recognize the claims of law or of morals as such. Here and there a person of peculiar temperament gives them by nature the preference over sensibility, but, as a general rule, it requires practice and study to do so. The mass of mankind always yield unwillingly to general rules when they are opposed to their feelings, and submit to their authority only from a conviction that their feelings are apt to be capricious and unsteady, and that it would be unsafe to trust them too far. It is this last reflection which explains to a great extent the contradiction noticed at the beginning of this essay. If mere feeling can be invested with a certain steady, consistent, business-like aspect, so as to give it something of the air of law and morals, people will trust it in preference to them ; and this is precisely what is done by that state of feeling which calls into existence such bodies as the chari- table and religious societies which exist amongst us, or the Social Science Association. It does not occur to ordinary people that men so staid and grave — men who use such solemn language and assume such a majestic attitude — presidents of sections and sub- committees, and authors of papers full of statistics, and certainly not open to the imputation of levity — should be on the side of feeling against law and 206 ESSAYS. morals. They look far graver and more dull than Westminster Hall or the Court of Chancery itself. It cannot be that they are likely to think lightly of rights and duties. Strange, however, as it may appear, the fact is so. Such associations give to sensibility the advantage of gravity and weight, which it never had before, and justify its dictates in oppo- sition to existing systems of law and morals. These gentlemen in their solemn way love mankind, and are thoroughly determined that men shall be happy in their way and in no other ; nor does anything hamper them more than the common notions of indi- vidual rights. That men have a right, as they put it, to be dirty or ignorant — or, as it might be put, to prevent others from cleaning or teaching them against their will — is, in their eyes, nothing more than a relic of barbarism. They are willing to adopt any means that may be required to prevent such a state of things. They had far rather beat a boy into a jelly than allow him to be ignorant if he was obsti- nately determined on being so. That such a little wretch could have any rights at all appears hardly to enter into their minds. Indeed, they scarcely evef admit the rights of people of whom they dis- approve. The parental rights of a careless parent, the conjugal rights of a bad husband, the proprietary rights of an unphilanthropic landlord, the political rights of an ignorant man — all these offend and disgust them, and, if they had their way, would not be worth a year's purchase. In course of time they would evolve a system of law and morals of their own, and mankind would then have an opportunity of testing the humanity of their tender mercies. MORALITY AND SENSIBILITY. 207 As sensibility is the motive power without which law and morals would be dry and dead, so law and morals are the great regulators of sensibility ; and there never was, in any age of the world, a more urgent necessity than exists at present for the con- stant recognition of justice in human affairs, and for the prosecution of those studies which enable people to recognize its beauty and necessity, and especially its power to regulate the dictates of a sensibility capable, if neglected, of becoming positively fero- cious. October 6, 1860. 208 ESSAYS. XXIII. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALS. Thi^ most careless observer of the events at present passing in Europe can hardly have failed to observe that they give rise to an extraordinary number of moral problems of the most curious kind. The ques- tions raised by the Thirty Years' War suggested to Grotius the composition of the book which has exer- cised over one of the most important departments of human affairs a greater degree of influence than almost any other human composition. If the present generation does not produce another treatise on the laws of nations, at least equal in interest and import- ance, it will be for want of a Grotius to write it, and not for want of circumstances to suggest it. If we make the effort necessary to rise above mere party and national views, and try in good faith to consider the different questions raised by the recent history of France, Germany, and Italy, we shall find that most of the current phrases by the help of which we usually talk and write upon such subjects are so inadequate that we stand in need of an entirely new set of theories upon some of the most important of the relations in which men stand to each other. What are we to say of the coup d'etat of December, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALS. 209 1851? Was it, in perfect strictness of language, lying, conspiracy, and murder, or was it something else for which we have no definite name — and, if so, what ought it to be called ? Was the crime of Orsini a murder in the same sense in which it is murder for a burglar to cut a man's throat for the sake of robbing him ? Were the Austrians wrong when they invaded Piedmont, or the Piedmontese when they provoked them to do so, or the French when they crossed the Alps, or Garibaldi when he invaded Sicily, or Victor Emmanuel when he invaded the Papal States ? — and, if so, who committed what offence, and why ? We usually answer these ques- tions according to our prejudices. We in England do not stand upon trifles when the object in view is the liberation of Italy from such a dynasty as that of the Neapolitan Bourbons. If Garibaldi or Count Cavour takes liberties with what is called interna- tional law, we utter a faint reproof, but substantially applaud and admire. On the other hand, no words are too hard for those who break through the very same rules in the very same way on the other side of the question. We praise the colluvies gentium who follow Garibaldi, but we stigmatize the foreign troops of the Pope by every means in our power. Perhaps this is not to be avoided in our present state of knowledge. Politically speaking this is an age of persecution. We have not yet learned to agree to differ upon international as we have upon theological questions ; and, accordingly, we call actions done on our own side venial outbreaks of a generous enthu- siasm, which, if they were done on the other side, we should stigmatize as atrocious violations of the most 14 210 ESSAYS. sacred principles of international law and eternal justice. To solve the questions thus raised would require the composition of a second treatise De Jure Belli et Pads, founded upon the principles which the current events have brought into notice since the time of Grotius. A few observations may be made in this place as to the sort of considerations with which the author of such a book would have to deal. All our common language about public events is the language of private morality. Several of the weaknesses of the English mind are flattered by the assertion, that to send out into the streets of a peace- ful town a party of men dressed in uniform, with muskets and bayonets in their hands, and with orders to kill and plunder, is just as much murder and rob- bery as to break into a house with half-a-dozen com- panions out of uniform, and do the same things. There is a sham sturdiness, and an analogy to some useful and characteristic peculiarities of English law, about such language, which, to the average English mind, is very attractive. It is, however, altogether fallacious. Murder and robbery are technical words, and presume a settled state of society affording secu- rity to life and property. This is true of almost all the words which are employed to stigmatize par- ticular acts. They all depend upon, and flow from, the private relations of life, and will be found to refer almost entirely to four or five great classes of rights and duties, such as personal rights, the rights of property, rights arising out of the relation of marriage, and the rights and duties which exist between States and their subjects. Almost all the common phrases of morality depend upon, and flow PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALS. 211 from, these rights. The second table of the Ten Commandments gives the best summary of them. Honour thy father and thy mother ; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not bear false witness; thou shalt not covet. Each of these commandments, and the rights and duties which spring from it, assume a settled state of society. Perhaps, the two broadest and most conspicuous are, Thou shalt not kill, and Thou shalt not steal ; in other words, you shall re- spect your neighbour's life and property. Unless he were a member of some society, a man could not possess property ; and if he were a mere solitary unit, unrelated to any other existing being, it cannot be said that it would be murder, in the proper sense of the word, for any other equally isolated being to kill him. We have no name for such an act, for all our language about human affairs proceeds upon an en- tirely different set of conceptions. We mean by murder the wilful, deliberate killing without just cause, and without certain specified excuses, of a man who comes under the protection of our municipal laws ; and in all that is said about the atrocity of murder, there is a tacit reference to this state of things. The general doctrine as to both murder and theft may be said to be that, in the normal state of society, people ought — that is, it is highly expedient for them — to guarantee to each other the enjoyment of life and property against the attacks to which private passions usually expose them. This is the common settled course of human societies, and these are the principles which are applied to human affairs in an enormous majority of the cases which arise. In 14—2 212 ESSAYS. respect, however, to international relations, a dif- ferent set of principles must be taken into account. In international affairs individuals, no doubt, act and suffer. Men risk, and sometimes lose, their lives, their liberties, and the whole or part of their fortune, in wars and civil commotions, but the motives which induce them to inflict or suffer loss are not individual. It is by no means the same thing whether a man is plundered and wounded by burglars or by the sol- diers of an absolute king who is trying to sustain his authority. The sack of Perugia shocked the sensi- bilities of a great part of Europe, but if the Pope had privately poisoned one of his friends or servants from any purely personal motive, even the blindest reli- gious zeal would have denounced him as a criminal unfit to live. A man must be a very bitter Liberal indeed who really maintains that the violation by a Sovereign of his promissory oath of office stands pre- cisely on the same footing as deliberate perjury in an ordinary court of justice. The common sentiment of the world recognizes a deep though ill-defined differ- ence between these two classes of acts, and the senti- ment may be justified on the ground that public and private morality are, and will probably long continue to be, in a totally different condition. Private morality has been reduced to system in every human society; and though there is a consider- able degree of difference between the morality of different ages and nations, there is a sufficient degree of resemblance between them to enable people living in different ages of the world, and in countries very- remote from each other, to pass a decisive, and, on the whole, not an unjust judgment on each other's PUBLIC AND PRIVATE MORALS. 213 conduct. Public morality, on the other hand, has not yet passed beyond the stage of sentiment. "When we hear that diplomatists habitually say one thing and mean another ; that absolute kings massacre their subjects; that mobs plunder, burn, and de- stroy ; that men who have no concern at all in the affairs of particular nations, let themselves out from mere cupidity as mercenary soldiers to enforce the commands of rulers to whom they owe no allegiance, we receive the same sort of shock, and feel the same kind of disapproving sentiment, as is excited by the news of an ordinary falsehood, murder, or robbery in private life. The difference between the two cases is, that with regard to private wrongs we do not stop sit mere sentiment. We say of a lie, for example, that it is a perjury, a malignant slander, a simple untruth, little more than a joke, a mere exaggera- tion, or a conventional phrase, as the case may be ; and for certain purposes — especially for legal pur- poses — we classify particular acts with extraordinary minuteness. For example, a purse containing 10Z. is stolen. If it was dropped on the floor of a railway carriage, the offence is simple larceny. If it was in a man's pocket, it was stealing from the person. If in his house, it was stealing above the value of 51. in a dwelling-house. If the thief opened the house- door to get in, it was house-breaking ; if he did so after nine o'clock at night, and before six in the morning, it was burglary. Private morality, though not so precise as law, has still a considerable degree of precision ; but in public morality there is nothing in the least degree approaching to this. No one for the last two centuries has framed anything like a 214 ESSAYS. theory of the rights and duties of sovereigns and subjects, or of the relations of nations to each other, sufficiently accurate to furnish anything approaching to an accurate classification of the different acts which they may perform towards each other. One or two phrases exist which indicate by their extreme vague- ness the obscurity in which the subject is involved, whilst they point to the possibility of the attainment at some future time of greater clearness. " Revolu- tion " and " coup d'itat " are specimens. Most people would say that each is, under certain circumstances, justifiable; and that, when justifiable, each would justify a certain degree of violence, either to person, to property, or to previous engagements ; but what are these circumstances, and what is the degree o'f violence which might justify and be justified? By answering these questions in a tolerably full and accurate manner, we should be able to turn into a system of morality what at present is a mere senti- ment. In the meantime, we must confine ourselves to expressing our sentiments in the words which appear to embody them most nearly, and we must call people of whose acts we disapprove murderers, liars, and robbers, not because we really and fully mean what we say, but because no other words so nearly express our meaning. December 24. 1860. 215 XXIV. SECONDHAND KNOWLEDGE. Ix has become a sort of fashion amongst an influential class of writers to depreciate the importance of all knowledge except that which is derived from a scru- pulous and laborious study of the original sources of information upon particular subjects. Mr. Froude's well-known essay on the course of instruction given at Oxford;, in which he recommended that students of English history should acquaint themselves mi- nutely with portions of the Statute Book and other original authorities, instead of reading histories like Hume or Lingard, is as good an illustration of this fashion as any other. It is not difficult to under- stand, or, to some extent, to sympathize with, the feelings in which it originated ; and, no doubt, when kept within proper limits, the suggestions which it prompts are wise. It is perfectly true that there is much more to be known upon any subject than any one book contains ; and it is also true that, when a man writes the history of a country, he writes from the point of view and under the influence of the feelings of his own tinfe and country, so that most histories fail to bring before the mind of the reader the real characteristics of the times and persons to 216 ESSAYS. which they refer. All this, abundantly amplified and illustrated, has become commonplace ; and it may be taken as true to this extent — that a profound study of any subject is likely to be more instructive and to be, in many respects, a better discipline for the mind, than a general acquaintance with it derived from summaries. A man could discipline his mind more effectually by studying the whole range of Greek literature than by reading Mr. Grote's History of Greece; and it may be true that the existing plan of studying the classics at the universities is better for the students than any plan for making them read, not the classics themselves, but books about them. These considerations have been so much and so successfully dwelt upon of late years, that they have brought about several results which their authors probably did not foresee, and which are not in them- selves desirable. There can be little doubt that they have contributed their full share to the growth of the pernicious habit which has so deeply infected several departments of literature, of dwelling upon details to an extent utterly disproportioned to their real importance. The notion that every detail which can be discovered respecting a dead man or a past generation must of necessity be instructive and im- portant, is only a somewhat vulgar application of the principle that, in order to obtain any knowledge worth having, it is necessary to go back to original sources of information. From, the fact that such sources usually abound in details, it is not very diffi- cult for an inaccurate mind to infer that details share the dignity of original sources. A more serious and more legitimate consequence of SECONDHAND KNOWLEDGE. 217 the same theory is to be found in the tendency which it sometimes produces, and generally encourages, to feebleness and timidity of thought. The tendency of our generation to exaggerate the importance of young people, and to look upon particular mental processes as good for every one, because they have advantages in respect of education, is discussed elsewhere.* This habit of mind displays itself conspicuously in the slighting way in which it is customary to speak of the information to be obtained from summaries, such as histories or books which give the results of inquiry in any department of knowledge. A person who had not merely read, but had read carefully and with considerable intelligence, such a book as Blackstone's or Stephen's Commentaries, or works of a similar kind relating to medicine or to physical science, would be almost sure to be given to understand by professional lawyers, physicians, or scientific men, that his labour had been thrown away; and that, unless he gave up his whole time to studying the subject, he could never hope to be able to give an opinion upon any question relating to it. In almost every department of thought, the process of the division of labour is being carried on so quickly that it seems by no means unlikely that we may at last arrive at a state of things in which the claim to any other sort of knowledge than a microscopic acquaintance with some particular department of some one branch will be regarded as an absurd pre- sumption. It is difficult to imagine how calamitous this would be. The mere accumulation of know- ledge in this form would have as little tendency to * See Essay XXI., " Juniores Priores," p. 191. 218 ESSAYS. elevate and enrich the minds of its possessors, or to produce any broad and permanent advantages to society at large, as the collection of a vast number of masons and bricklayers would have to raise a palace. The great subjects which always engage the attention and attract the interest of mankind at large, are those which concern them as human beings, and relate to their religious, political, or social con- dition. It is, happily, impossible to treat these subjects in a purely professional manner. It is not possible to frame rules by the observation of which any man may make sure of succeeding in political life. Before a man can be a statesman, in any elevated sense of the word, he must take into consideration a great variety of subjects. He must have a real grasp of the principles of law, of history, and of political economy. He must understand and be able to sym- pathize with the leading feelings of his countrymen, and he must have knowledge of the world and of mankind. It would be physically impossible that any man should acquire all this knowledge at first hand, and yet, if each part of his knowledge is worthless, the whole must be so also. But this is not, in fact, the case, and therefore secondhand knowledge is, in this instance, not merely an instru- ment, but an indispensable instrument, for fitting men for some of the most arduous and important duties which they can have to discharge. Probably this would not be disputed in regard to practical life ; but its application to speculation is not so generally admitted. There are many persons who appear to think that a man is not entitled to be heard upon any speculative subject, unless he has collected, SECONDHAND KNOWLEDGE. 219 by original inquiries, all the materials of his specula- tion. They will say, for example, that no one can be allowed to give an opinion upon a metaphysical theory unless he has qualified himself by reading all the principal metaphysical books which have been written from the days of Plato downwards. If he has not done so, what he may say will be met, not by an answer, but by a reference to some theory of the Infinite which either is or is supposed to be opposed to him. You have no right, it is said, to have an opinion as to the doctrines of Sir W. Hamilton unless you have read all the books on which his opinions were founded or which they were meant to controvert. If, therefore, in pursuing inquiries upon other subjects, you find yourself involved in meta- physical difficulties, you must not presume to attempt to solve them, but must content yourself with col- lecting facts and observing similarities in your own particular department. No language is better calculated to discourage all the higher efforts of the mind than this, and there can be little doubt that it is sometimes designedly employed for this purpose. There are men who try to dissuade others from going to secondhand sources of information, and to confine them to the investiga- tion of original sources, because they hope by that means to prevent them from arriving at conclusions which they dislike or dread. If a man is suspected of wishing to obtain metaphysical opinions in order that he may apply them to theology, and if another fears that the result may be unfavourable to his orthodoxy, there is an obvious reason for insisting upon the importance of his acquainting himself with 220 ESSAYS. all the theories of the Infinite that ever were written, instead of relying upon histories of philosophy, or other portable summaries. It will always be highly probable that long before the last theory of the Infinite is reached the inquirer will either have abandoned the subject in despair, or carried his doubts or his investigations to the next world. In fact, no subject which relates to human affairs and human life can be investigated with any useful result, unless the premisses which support the concha sions ultimately reached are drawn from several diffe- rent sources which no one mind can investigate from the bottom. It is this circumstance that gives their importance to histories and other works of the same kind. It is perfectly true that no summary, however exact and correct it may be, can put the reader on a level with the author ; but it is equally true that no cultivated and intelligent man can read a really good book upon any subject with the general bearings of which he has some acquaintance, without deriving from it a great deal of knowledge and many reflec- tions which he may use with confidence as the basis of further speculation. A man who had read with care Gibbon, Milman, Mosheim, and other works of the same kind, would have a very considerable knowledge of the circumstances under which Chris- tianity has spread itself over great part of the world, and would be entitled to express a strong opinion as to the inferences which might be drawn from its history, although he had not explored all the original authorities upon the subject. Of course, great judg- ment is required in making use of such works. One principal difference in the way in which different SECONDHAND KNOWLEDGE. 221 people read and think is, that one man delivers him- self over bound, as it were, hand and foot to the authorities to which he resorts, whilst another exer- cises a discretion as to what he will and what he will not believe. This is true even in the simplest of all cases, where the object is to determine what degree of credit is to be attached to the direct evidence of eye-witnesses, but the difficulty of the task increases progressively as the judge recedes from the transac- tion itself. If it requires discretion to say what con- sequence is to be drawn from the fact, that B asserts that he saw A, it requires far more to determine what is the value of C's assertion that B said he saw A; and where C is an historian, B a large number of chroniclers, polemical divines, poets, and letter- writers, and A a complicated series of events, the difficulty reaches its highest point. Still, though the difficulty is great, it is one which a judicious man will be able to overcome by the ex- ercise of proper caution, and by carefully restricting the statements which he makes, and limiting the in- ferences which he draws ; and it is encouraging to see how successfully this is accomplished in many of the books which have produced the greatest effect on mankind. Such books have seldom been written by men of profound special learning, but rather by persons who, having filled their minds with know- ledge taken up at second-hand, have known how to make one subject bear upon another, and have so been able to draw novel and important conclusions from premisses furnished by the investigations of others in their special departments. Many instances of this might be taken. For the purpose of illustra- 222 ESSAYS. tion, one or two will be sufficient No one exercised a greater influence over his generation than Bentham. Yet no one was less entitled to the character of a man of great special learning. He was unquestion- ably possessed of wide information, and his infor- mation bore upon a variety of subjects ; but the circumstance which gave him so much power over others was that, by seeing what it was that his information proved, and by reflecting boldly and vigorously on the principles of the subjects with which he concerned himself, he was able to elaborate clear theories, and to connect those theories closely and effectively with practical results. If he had eschewed secondhand knowledge and devoted his life to original investigations, he would have accom- plished much less. Another instance is afforded by a writer of a very different character — Bishop Butler. The Analogy, though it bears the traces of a wonder- ful amount of thought, and of a certain sort of study, is not a learned book in the sense in which Gibbon's or Warburton's works are learned. It conveys the notion that its author had studied, and had weighed, with extraordinary patience, all the theories of his day which appeared to him to require an answer, and it is difficult to say what amount of reading may not have contributed to the fulness of mind which the book displays ; but parts of it are obviously borrowed from the results of the inquiries of others — for ex- ample, the summary of the prophetical and historical evidences of Christianity in the second part. Such instances as these — and many others might be added — prove that it is not the exclusive province of men of great special learning to instruct mankind ; SECONDHAND KNOWLEDGE. 223 and that when they do so, their labours result in something more valuable than the supply of casual reading to persons whose opinions are of little import- ance, or of indexes for future students like themselves. Their books are useful in many ways, but especially as materials for men whose strength lies in thinking rather than in reading, and in combining the conclu- sions of several branches of study rather than in minutely investigating any one. December 1, 1860. 224 ESSAYS. XXV. SPIRIT-RAPPING. The success which spirit-rappers and their advo- cates have met with on both sides of the Atlantic is a remarkable circumstance. It has been often stated that in America, the believers are numbered by millions ; and it is well-known that countrymen of our own, who from their education ought to know better, believe, with the most simple satisfaction, that Mr. Hume has relations with ghosts who employ themselves (invariably in darkened rooms) in making tables climb upon ottomans, in carrying Mr. Hume round the ceiling, in conveying the silliest of all remarks through the clumsiest of all machinery, and in doing a variety of other things equally impressive and sensible. It is almost a matter of regret that explanations of many of these juggling tricks should have been published by men who put sleight of hand to its legitimate purposes, as it is to be feared that the credit of spirit-rapping may thus be destroyed, and that the instructive illustrations of human credulity which result from it may be prematurely brought to a close. It is to be regretted that edu- cated men and women should be relieved by indis- creet jugglers from the responsibility of saying SPIRIT-RAPPING. 225 whether or no they are prepared to believe the stories told about Mr. Hume and his fellows upon the bare personal authority of those who tell them. There has been hardly any case in modern times in which the issue whether or not the evidence which would prove a murder will prove a miracle has been so neatly raised as in the case of spirit-rapping ; and the interposition of persons who, by untimely expla- nations, enable the public to disbelieve the witnesses without discrediting them, is as unsatisfactory to speculative observers as the compromises which occasionally break out in cases involving curious points of law must always be to lawyers. As, how- ever, a point of law may be argued upon a state of facts altogether imaginary, it may be interesting to consider what ought to have been, and what were in point of fact, the conclusions drawn by persons who read in the newspapers and elsewhere, or heard in private society, a variety of stories about rapping spirits, animated tables, and the like, w r onderful enough to justify, upon the supposition of their truth, the use of such words as miraculous and super- natural ; who did not hear or read of any natural mode of explaining such occurrences ; and who had no other reason than the marvellous nature of the stories themselves for supposing that the persons who related them were not speaking the truth. The first step which a reasonable person who heard or read such stories would take, would be to decide whether or not he meant to form an opinion about them. If he did not think it worth his while to do so — which would be the case with almost all men of sense who did not happen to be troubled with 15 226 ESSAYS. a very large amount of superfluous leisure — he would simply amuse himself with the grotesqueness of the stories, and pay no further attention to them. For all ordinary purposes, it is safer, and generally wiser, to act the part of the Scribe and Pharisee towards strange stories. If a man is sometimes led by this habit into despising a new invention or remarkable discovery, he gets no harm and does no harm by it. Baron Alderson thought and said that it was absurd to suppose that locomotive engines could ever suc- ceed; and his remark has been quoted by the idolaters of Mr. George Stephenson as an awful example. Yet he rose to be a judge, and sat on the bench for nearly thirty years. If he had believed in railways from the first, he would probably not have done much more. There can be little doubt that the same habit of mind led him to despise many other schemes which turned out ill, and probably, on the whole, it did as little harm to him as to the railways. If a man desired to go a little deeper into the matter, he would probably consider to what class of subjects the alleged discoveries belonged. A man of reasonably good education, especially if he has ever studied any branch of any scientific subject with any approach to accuracy, ought to have a fair notion of the kind of certainty attainable in different branches of knowledge, and of the general nature of the proofs by which the propositions which belong to them are supported. He would, for example, see at once that no one could pretend to say wit£ confidence whether or not the stars are inhabited ; nor would he pay much attention to any one, however eminent or learned, who pronounced a decisive opinion on the SPIRIT-RAPPIXG. 227 subject ; but he would listen respectfully to any man of established scientific reputation who told him that he had discovered a mode of foretelling the general character of next year's weather. The reason of this distinction is, that it is matter of general notoriety that the nature of life is a great riddle, and that no one knows all the conditions under which it may exist, but something is already known about the currents of the air, and the variations of heat and cold, and many discoveries may be expected to be made about them by the careful observation of well- known phenomena. Applying this principle, it would be reasonable to say, Spirit-rapping belongs to a set of subjects which have always been discredited, and respecting which no discovery has ever been made. It is related to witchcraft, apparitions, and other nests of imposture, and therefore is not to be believed. These, however, are mere general observations. If a man determined to form as sound an opinion on the subject as could be reached, he would have to examine the evidence itself, and to see what really was proved and what was not, and in this process the first and one of the most important steps would be to separate the facts stated from the inferences drawn from them. The only facts of which there is any evidence at all is that certain people saw and heard certain things. That those appearances and sounds were produced by spirits is an inference not capable of direct proof, and hardly capable of indirect proof. Certain raps are heard, which, when compared with alphabets, spell out the assertion that a dead man is saying such and such things. Suppose the experiment were repeated any number ID — 2 228 ESSAYS. of times and under all varieties of circumstances, would this prove that in fact the dead man was making these assertions ? Unless we had some inde- pendent knowledge of dead men and their modes of action, it would not prove, or tend to prove, anything of the sort. As we know nothing whatever about dead men, it would be quite as reasonable to found upon the fact, supposing it to be proved, any other inference whatever ; for example, that the sounds were produced by an archangel, by the devil, by devils and angels jointly, by a wild beast in the planet Saturn, or by any other cause in heaven, earth, or elsewhere. All that can be inferred from any effect is the antecedence of a cause ; our only knowledge of causation is derived from experience : and if rappings and table-twisting form a class of effects altogether peculiar and unrelated to any others, they may, for aught we know to the contrary, be caused by anything, conceivable or inconceivable. We mean by causation nothing more than invariable sequence, and how can we possibly know what is the invariable antecedent of effects which, as far as our powers of tracing go, are by the hypothesis ultimate pheno- mena ? The course of a person who inquired reasonably, and on true principles, into the subject of rapping spirits would thus be barred at a very early period of his inquiry by an insuperable obstacle. He would never be able to get beyond the facts that certain noises were heard, and certain appearances seen, and that certain motions took place in inanimate matter on occasions when nothing which could account for them on common and recognized principles was SPIRIT-RAPPING. 229 present. Unless he had the opportunity of making personal investigations, he would have to be con- tented with the fact that particular people said that this was so ; and it is an extremely curious question whether a wise man would or would not believe them, if, after their stories had been carefully sifted and their means of knowledge had been ascertained to be sufficient, it appeared that they really did say so. It is of course possible to imagine cases in which he would. If the assertion was found to be made by a great many people independently of each other, and under circumstances which made collusion, or even communication, impossible or ex- tremely difficult, the accumulation of evidence might no doubt be sufficient to remove all possibility of doubt ; but if upon inquiry the number of first-hand witnesses was reduced to two or three credible persons, unanimously affirming facts otherwise unex- ampled, a very curious question would arise — the question, namely, as to the absolute value of human testimony. It is impossible to give a complete and definite answer to this question. The effect of the testimony of three sane and credible witnesses, who should unanimously affirm, under the most awful sanctions, and after being subjected to severe tests of accuracy, that they saw the poker and shovel walk arm-in-arm to the middle of a given drawing-room, and there heard them preach a sermon on the ninth commandment, is just as much a question of expe- rience as the question whether a man could be found able to lift a ton and a half. Experience appears to show that such a story would be believed by many persons. When a single 230 ESSAYS. anonymous individual wrote a letter to the Times some years ago to say that he had seen a whole set of murders of the most frightful kind committed in a railway-train in Georgia, people not only believed him, but the Times published a leading article on the atrocity of the event. It so happened that his story was open to contradiction on a number of points, and was, in fact, contradicted and over- thrown ; but it was not disbelieved on the ground that the event was so extraordinary that the evidence of a single witness must be considered insufficient to prove it. If the scene had been laid in a place where contradiction was out of the question — as, for example, on the deck of a wrecked ship — no one would have doubted it, and the tale would have been received as a striking example of the atrocities into which human nature is capable of being betrayed in its extremities. The common case of criminal trials is perhaps a stronger instance of the extraordinary confidence which people place in each other's uncor- roborated assertions. Juries will convict men of crimes of the most fearful kind upon the bare state- ment of a single witness, of whom they know next to nothing, that he saw the crime committed. A tenth part of the evidence offered in support of the miracles said to be worked by Mr. Hume would have been more than sufficient to stamp men with infamy, and to send them to penal servitude for life. Every one who has had much experience of juries knows the fatal weight of a direct and positive oath. No general considerations will prevail against it ; and juries owe their authority, and indeed their very existence, to the fact that they represent common SPIRIT-RAPPING. 231 sense and common experience ; so that the readiness with which they believe sworn testimony, however serious the consequences of giving credit to it may .be, must be considered as a fair specimen of the feelings of mankind at large. These observations apply to the question of the value which ought to be attached to direct evidence in favour of improbable occurrences given by men of sense, desirous of arriving at the truth, and taking pains to do so ; but the eagerness with which people have received the doctrines of spirit-rapping, and the utter neglect which they have shown of the various steps indicated above towards the formation of a sound judgment, throw light on another point of consider- able interest. They show that a large proportion even of educated people are altogether destitute of anything approaching to scientific habits of mind or of thought, and that they have not the least notion of the bearings or value of evidence. They never seem to draw the distinction between a fact and an inference ; nor do they ever recognize the rule that, if more causes than one may account for a particular state of facts, its existence cannot be said to prove, however, any one of them. The popularity of spirit-rapping shows something more than the rarity of strict or accurate habits of thought. It shows how wide is the prevalence of gross, downright credulity. The fact that a large number of people believe the assertions of unknown writers that they have seen tables climb upon otto- mans, and have heard ghosts playing on the piano, is very memorable. It sets the value of popular belief upon any subject which falls a little out of the common 232 ESSAYS. routine in a striking light, and it proves how \erj little the great majority even of intelligent men and •women are in the habit of watching the operations of their own minds, and of regulating the formation of their opinions by anything deserving the name of a principle. Many of the causes of this state of things are constant, and exist in all times and all states of society, but others are peculiar to our own time and country. One of the most curious of them is the spread of mechanical invention. It might have been supposed that a scientific age would be, of all ages, the least superstitious ; and if a scientific age meant an age in which all or many minds were scientifically trained, this might, though it is far from certain that it would, be true. In point of fact, the phrase is generally employed to describe an age in which the results and applications of science attain unusual importance ; and such a state of things is not only not a hindrance to superstition, but has a direct tendency to promote it. People fall down and worship the work of their neighbours' hands — steam engines, electric telegraphs, and printing presses. They are so impressed by the wonders produced by these and other machines, that they get to look upon science as a sort of god — a blind, arbitrary, capri- cious deity, who may perform, at any moment, any strange unreasonable prodigy. They are so over- come by electric telegraphs, that they have no objec- tion to urge against rapping spirits. If an American can speak to you from the other side of the Atlantic, why may not a friend speak to you from the other side of the grave ? The following anecdote typifies the weaknesses of a higher class of society than that SPIRIT-RAPPING. 233 to which its hero belonged: — A Lincolnshire boor •was visited, when in extremis, by the vicar of the parish, who administered to him appropriate spiritual advice with more energy than success. After much ineffectual admonition, the dying man replied to the following effect, in a feeble voice, and a dialect which cannot be reproduced on paper: — " What with faith, and what with the earth a-turning round the sun, and what with the railroads a-fuzzing and a-whuzzing, I'm clean stonied, muddled, and beat." These were his last words. They sum up with great emphasis the intellectual results of scientific discovery on a great part of mankind. December 22, 1860. 234 ESSAYS. XXVI. GAMALIELS. A great proportion of those whose curiosity or whose abilities rise in any appreciable degree above the common level, have, during some part of their youth, gone through the process of sitting at the feet of Gamaliel. That is, they have been brought into contact with some one with whom they may be said to have fallen, morally and intellectually, in love; whose words came home to them with an edge and weight altogether peculiar, and whose speculations appeared to disclose the existence and the solution of problems dimly felt, but never fully understood before. Any one who is familiar with the passing literature of the day, must see how common such influences are. Half the little books which are read by no one but conscientious reviewers and the friends of the authors, are written under the influence of some three or four popular writers, whose special gift it is to be literary Gamaliels. Mr. Carlyle (though he is much more besides this) possesses this gift in an extraordinary degree; and, twenty years ago, Dr. Arnold and Dr. Newman had almost as much of it. What are the qualities which make a man a Gamaliel ? What is the nature of the influence which such per- GAMALIELS. 235 sons exercise? And what are the prospects which their career holds out? No man can exercise the sort of influence under consideration without an uncommon combination of qualities ; and though such persons occasionally ap- pear for a time, at least, to exert an extraordinary influence over the age in which they live, the qualities which enable them to do so are by no means of the highest kind. One qualification which is altogether indispensable in such a man is, that he should be keenly alive to the intellectual, and still more to the moral, difficulties which the circum- stances of the time present to the minds of sensitive and not unthoughtful youths. It is also indispensable that he should be supplied with a fund of enthu- siastic and positive language which either contains or suggests a solution of them. The fulfilment of each of these conditions is inexorably required of every one who wishes to be regarded as an evangelist — a bearer of good news — by the young and enthusiastic. He must be able to draw out into clear and bold relief the difficulties of which they were already obscurely conscious ; to hold up to them something positive to believe; and to throw that something into such a shape as to promise a solution of the difficulties. The personal gifts which such a power implies, and which are almost universally found in those who possess it, are quick sympathy, a tender conscience, courage, generosity, ingenuity, and eloquence. A man who unites in himself these qualities, and exercises them in the direction in ques- tion, is almost sure to be, if he pleases, the founder of a school of able and enthusiastic youths, who will 236 ESSAYS. almost worship him, receive his opinions as a reve- lation, and display, probably, for the rest of their lives, traces of the influence which he has had over them. There are, however, other gifts, with the entire absence of which such powers are quite consistent, The founder of such a school may be one-sided, wrong-headed, narrow-minded, and obscure to any extent. If he succeeds in deceiving himself, and is personally honourable and truthful, he may be as uncandid as he pleases, and may be so incapable of seeing that there is more than one side to a question, that he may, from the best of motives, commit the most outrageous injustice. Depth and capacity of mind, and the habitual dryness and caution which expect, and at last attain, qualified and possibly intri- cate conclusions, are far from being attractive to the young. Wesley and Whitefield had crowds of enthu- siastic disciples, but what youth would ever have thought of worshipping Butler? It is a doubtful question whether it is or is not an advantage to a man to have been brought, in early youth, under the influence of persons of this cha- racter. At first sight, nothing appears more desir- able. The influence which such a man acquires, and the effect which he produces, are almost electrical. Youths who were either indifferent to their teachers or dissatisfied with their lessons, become only too zealous ; problems which before had distressed and , baifled them melt into thin air ; and they are pre- pared to go out at once and evangelize the world — social, political, or religious, as the case may be — upon the principles which they suppose themselves to GAMALIELS. 237 have mastered. If there is much that is silly, there is something that is amiable and even respectable in this kind of enthusiasm. Men whose passions are much stronger than their understandings may retain it for many years, but "with the great mass it is but a transient phase. As the pupils grow older and study their master's creed more carefully, they soon find out that it is one-sided, incomplete, often incon- sistent, and almost always at variance with facts. If they are cool enough to speculate with anything approaching to fairness upon their own mental history, they are nearly sure to find that what really attracted them in it was the crudeness and confi- dence with which it asserted that some set of new- fashioned phrases contained a real solution of diffi- culties which have perplexed men for centuries, and which, if conquerable at all, will yield only to tedious sapping and mining, while they continue to set open assaults at defiance. Such a discovery as this, however gradually it may be made, is a great blow to a man's mental health. Few men have sufficient candour and courage to make a full confes- sion in mature life of the mistakes of their youth, and to undertake the labour of forming for themselves a durable and substantial creed. Indeed, if they have the inclination, they have generally lost the opportu- nity. They have proceeded so far on the voyage that it is not worth while to put back for the sake of testing the compass. Hence they fall into a state of orthodox scepticism. They cling to the principles which delighted their youth, though they know that they are hollow ; and they refuse to give way to the difficulties which they once thought they had solved, 238 ESSAYS, although they know the hollowness of the solution. Natural energy, and the impatience of being left behind by the rest of the world, sometimes induce such men to continue to take a part — often ostenta- tiously prominent and noisy — in controversies con- nected with the subjects which gained their attention in youth ; but the spirit in which they do so is a strange contrast to that which animated them in earlier life. The warmth and the eagerness are still there, but the fuel is all burnt away. They are as violent as ever, but their object is to attain some minute party object, to humiliate some personal an- tagonist, or to forward some crotchet which they value because it is remotely connected with the prin- ciples which they once believed. There are few more melancholy spectacles than that of a man who twenty years ago believed that he and his teachers possessed the secret by which the Church and the world were to be reconciled and reformed, and who is now consuming his energies in disingenuous efforts to injure some one who has travelled by a different road from himself, and who holds opinions which he still dislikes, though he no longer really believes it possible to refute or establish either them or any others. The teacher himself not unfrequently lives to afford a spectacle hardly less melancholy than the scholars. When the generation in which he lives has made that indefinable but inevitable step which distinguishes the present from the past, and has brought into pro- minence a slightly different set of questions, and a slightly different way of treating them from that to which he was accustomed, his disciples become less GAMALIELS. 239 numerous, less enthusiastic, and very much less able. He comes to the end of the tunes which he has to play, and generally goes on playing them over and over again with feebler and feebler variations, attract- ing a scantier audience by each successive perform- ance. This is more especially the case with writers. Leaders of parties, social or religious, are subject to different trials. Sometimes they outrun their dis- ciples, and with a courage which is neither imitated nor admired, leap into some creed where few follow them, and where their own importance is entirely destroyed. This has been the fate of the ardent and generous men who made the journey from Oxford to Rome. Who listens to them now ? Whom do they influence ? The noisy bigots who lie, and curse, and bully in Irish newspapers have a much wider sphere of influence than the man of genius who five-and- twenty years ago was worshipped at Oxford with ardent enthusiasm by hundreds of enthusiastic youths who are now middle-aged clergymen, lawyers, and country gentlemen, as little influenced by the name of Dr. Newman as by that of Dr. Achilli. Some- times, on the other hand, the disciples outrun the master, the ducklings take to the water, and their foster-parent stands behind on the bank, a not unin- teresting but not a dignified spectacle. Such reflections as these point to the conclusion, in favour of which many independent arguments might be urged, that it is unwise for a man who cares for the investigation of truth to address himself to the young, or to address his own contemporaries in a manner which will attract young hearers to the con- troversy. To make any considerable change in the 240 ESSAYS. opinions or in the institutions of the world is one of the most serious enterprizes which a man can take in hand. The legitimate mode of carrying out such enterprizes is quiet, gradual investigation, and the calm expression of mature and qualified opinions. This is the task, not of a few years, but of a life- time ; and all the experience which can be derived from other pursuits may be brought to bear upon it. A man so employed need never fear that he will confuse the minds and vitiate the sentiments of his disciples ; for he will have no disciples but those who are entitled to be considered as fellow-students ; nor need he fear to figure before the world as a burnt- out firework, for the light (if any) which he diffuses will be dry light, uncoloured by personal ingredients. After saying what he has to say, he may be silent without disappointing expectation, and may be alone without being deserted. There are few stronger proofs of the degree in which passion predominates over reason than the un- popularity of such advice as this. It would seem as if the instinct which leads speculative men to seek to propagate their opinions were as powerful in its way as that which leads most men to wish to leave behind them physical descendants ; and each instinct, powerful as it is, is in some respects unaccountable. Many persons who know well the uncertainty of all opinions, the strange way in which even true opinions are entangled with every kind of error, and in which, as experience increases and facts accumulate, what was true for one age seems to become false for another, are nevertheless intensely anxious that as many people as possible should think as they think GAMALIELS. 241 on the subjects in which they are interested. This is in its way as great a mystery as that men who know how questionable a benefit life is, and how it is hemmed in on every side with mysteries insoluble or appalling, should be pleased to think that after they have gone they know not whither, others should bear their name in the same confused scene, and follow their footsteps on the same unknown path. Expe- rience appears to prove that, constituted as we are, all the troubles of this world and all the terrors of the next act in most cases less powerfully than the suggestions of good health and a sanguine temper. February 9, 1861. 16 242 ESSAYS. XXVII. MR. CAELYLE. Few of the cheap reprints of the books of popular authors, which have of late become so common, will attract more attention or enjoy greater popularity than the collected edition of Mr. Garlyle's writings. With those who admire him most, he enjoys a repu- tation which is almost mystical. To numberless young and ardent readers, his writings have come as the announcement of a new gospel, nor can any one read them without a deep interest in the books, and a sincere feeling of respect for the author. Perhaps all books may be ranged under two heads — those which assume, and those which seek to establish, principles : and if the former are both more interest- ing and more practically important than the latter, after a certain early period of life, it cannot be denied that the influence of the latter, acting at the most susceptible and impressible age, is both wider and deeper. The great peculiarity of Mr. Carlyle's books is that it is his ambition in every case to go to the heart of the matter — to set before his reader what is vital and essential, and to leave on one side the mere husks and shells of history, biography, politics, theology, or criticism. The object is a common one MR. CARLYLE. 243 with men of any real artistic power, but no one ever effected it so completely. Mr. Carlyle has^hardly ever f written a page on any subject, however insig- nificant, which does not bear the stamp of his own character in a manner almost unexampled. He has spent his life in a protest against the Dryasdusts of politics and of literature. If people like information worked up into a vivid picture of the fact as Mr. Carlyle saw it, or a vehement set of consequences drawn therefrom, they will nowhere else find any- thing so, vivid. His career and present position embody more fully than those of any other man the especial advantages and disadvantages of the literary temperament — the turn of mind which leads its pos- sessors to sit on a hill retired and make remark upon men and things instead of taking part in the common affairs of life. Mr. Carlyle, no doubt, has a warm interest in the race to which he belongs in all the phases of its existence; but he is emphatically a preacher, and not an actor, to many of his readers, far the most popular preacher known to this genera- tion. His performances may be looked upon from two points of view, one of which regards their artistic and the other their dogmatic value. Regarded as works of art, the best of Mr. Carlyle's writings may be put at the very head of contemporary literature. It is impossible to mention any modern book which can for an instant be compared, in some of the highest literary excellencies, to his History of the French Revolution. It gives a series of pictures and portraits so distinct, and so life-like, that they make it almost impossible to remember the scenes which they describe through any other medium. To 16—2 244 ESSAYS. many of its readers no other Robespierre will ever, as Mr. Carlyle himself would say, be possible, than the Robespierre who seemed to him " the meanest " of all the deputies of the Tiers Etat : — "That anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles. His eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face snuffing dimly the uncertain future times; com- plexion of a multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be the pale sea-green. A strict-minded, strait-laced man .... whose small soul, transparent, wholesome-looking as small ale, could by no chance ferment into virulent alegar, the mother of ever new alegar, till all France were grown acetous-virulent ? " Such sentences give the impression that there is nothing more to be said on the subject. Reams of description would only weaken them ; and it would be impossible for any one who had once sincerely relished and appreciated the picture which they draw to form any other satisfactory notion of the person whom they describe. The same might be said of every chapter, and almost every page, of this extra- ordinary book. With hardly any argument or reflec- tion, it gives, by mere force of style, at once a picture and a theory of the French Revolution. The ages of misgovernment and corruption which laid the train, the heap of gunpowder on which the spark fell, and the final explosion, are described with just enough detail to be characteristic, and just enough generality to mark the vastness of the event. No one but a man of real and great genius could have done this. The tone in which the book is written is perhaps the MR. CARLYLE. 245 most wonderful and characteristic part of it. With- out levity, and without bitterness, the grotesque and somewhat contemptible aspect of the whole business is brought out with wonderful force. No such tragi- comedies are to be found in the language as the accounts of the flight to Varennes, the insurrection of the women, and the innumerable takings of oaths, feasts of Reason, feast of the Supreme Being, and the other fooleries in which the silliest, if not the worst, features of French national character expressed themselves. The book is not less remarkable as a portrait than as a picture gallery. It illustrates perhaps even better than the lectures on Hero- Worship the method by which Mr. Carlyle proceeds in estimating cha- racter. He forms to himself a conception of the man as a living whole. He tries, to use the old scholastic phrase, to see, not his qualities, but his quiddity, and he seldom fails to put before his readers a picture far more vivid than any drawn by novelists or poets. A good illustration of this may be found in a comparison of the Cagliostro of Mr. Carlyle with the Joseph Balsamo of the Mdmoires dhm Medecin. Mr. Carlyle's conception is as much superior in art, in possibility, in life, and spirit, to M. Dumas', as Sir Walter Scott's Puritans are superior to the absurd caricature of Felton, which is introduced into the Vingt Ans Aprfo. The same praise must be bestowed on nearly every portrait which Mr. Carlyle has drawn. The genius with which he has, as it were, evolved Cromwell from his speeches and corre- spondence is admirable, and it is not too much to say that his book on the subject has given the first 246 ESSAYS. example of a species of biography which in intrinsic value is superior to any other yet discovered. The moral tone of Mr. Carlyle's biographies enlists his readers' sympathy as much as their intellectual excel- lences excite their admiration. Nothing in the main can be kinder, gentler, or more honest, than the spirit in which he judges even those whom he least likes. The worst of men are not described without a touch of sympathy. Louis XV. and Philippe Egalite themselves are condemned with an appreciation of their peculiar temptations, and nothing can exceed the fairness with which any redeeming point in con- duct, or even in speech, is recognized and insisted on. No one can have studied Mr. Carlyle's writings without feeling a strong personal liking for him. If he is the most indignant and least cheerful of living writers, he is also one of the wittiest and the most humane. When we turn from the artistic to the dogmatic point of view, our admiration of Mr. Carlyle's genius is greatly modified. That he has done some good, and even considerable good, may be admitted ; but he has done it almost entirely by the vigorous manner in which he has preached doctrines in the truth of which all the world agree with him, whilst such of his views as are peculiar to himself are, for the most part, false and mischievous, not only in respect of their substance, but also in respect of the style in which they are brought forward. A large proportion of his most effective writings con- sists almost entirely of the inculcation of duties and virtues which have always been acknowledged as such ; and with respect to which he can claim no higher ME. CAELYLE. 247 merit than that of recognizing at first hand, and in an original manner, the fact that they are virtues. His vehement praises of truth, of fact, of earnest- ness — his doctrine that work is worship — and his denunciation of cant, of semblances, and of shams, is only an amplification of those clauses in the cate- chism which say that our duty to our neighbour enjoins us, amongst other things, to be true and just in all our dealings, to learn and labour truly to get our own living, and to do our duty in the state of life to which it has pleased God to call us. Mr. Carlyle is certainly entitled to the praise of having preached on a very old subject in such a manner as to arrest the attention of his congregation and to keep them wide awake, but it does not follow that he has, as so many people seem to think, made any wonderful discoveries in morality. This recognition of Mr. Carlyle's genius, and the admission of the fact that he has done good service to society by the vigour with which he has preached all the cardinal virtues, is consistent with the belief that much of what he has written is open to grave objections. Throughout the whole of his writings he is constantly struggling to get below what is merely formal and external, and to reach the sub- stance and, so to speak, the soul of things. To use a phrase of his own, he dwells upon the vir- tualities as opposed to the actualities. He does not care to know what technical description a moralist would give to the acts of Danton or Robespierre, or how he would describe the massacres of September. He inquires into the essence of men and things. Danton was a wild Titan, Robespierre a " sea-green 248 ESSAYS. formula," the September massacres were a bursting up of the infinite of evil that lies in man. So, too, he passes by what he calls the Delolme and Blackstone view of the English constitution. He regards England as a country in which there is a real aris- tocracy of labour, and a sham aristocracy of game preservers, and in which millions of day-labourers are going about crying in a more or less articulate manner to be wisely led, governed, and organized into industrial regiments. Such a habit of mind is not without its use as a protest against dryness and priggishness. It repre- sents, as Byronism did, a phase through which people must perhaps pass at some time or other ; but if per- sisted in, it leads to gross injustice, absurd mistakes, and confused, useless, and broken-backed results. Both the historical and political writings of Mr. Carlyle afford many illustrations of this. The History of the French Revolution, viewed as a work of art, can hardly be over-praised; but when we look upon it as a history, it becomes all but incredible. Mr. Carlyle is quite incapable of the slightest distortion of a matter of fact ; and, indeed, his native and national shrewd- ness and honesty entitle him to the praise of great accuracy and critical discernment, but his imagina- tion is so enormously powerful that no amount of fact can ballast it. Whenever he writes, he creates a whole set of people who are certainly in one sense real enough, but whose identity with the historical personages whom they represent is very doubtful. His r.eaders must feel as if they had known per- sonally the Robespierre, the Danton, the Camille Desmoulins, and all the other personages who figure ME. CAELYLE. 249 in Mr. Carlyle's pages, but they can have no con- fidence at all that their acquaintances are identical with the men who once went by those names. Mr. Carlyle's conception of [the Revolution itself is quite intelligible, and there is, no doubt, a true epic con- sistency and unity about it; but it does not follow that the thing itself was really so because a very able man can so conceive it ; and if, in point of fact, the conception is false, it must be mischievous also. Take, for example, the doctrine that the triumph of the Sansculottes over the Girondins was the triumph of a fact over a formula (a view less intelligible than emphatic), and t that Vergniaud, Brissot, and their party, were mere talkers and respectability-hunters. It may be true ; but unless truth depends on the degree of force of character which belongs to those who search it, it may also be true that the Girondins were comparatively right in their theory, whilst the Terrorists were not only wrong, but stupidly and hopelessly wrong — at issue with fact, nature, and everything else worth caring for. The whole ques- tion resolves itself into an inquiry as to what would have happened under circumstances which, in fact, did not happen ; and this is an utterly insoluble problem. Mr. Carlyle, never contented without arriving at a broad, clear, pictorial result, falsifies history even more decisively by excess of imagination than he could possibly falsify it by inaccuracy as to fact. He has far over-rated the degree of certainty which is attainable in historical inquiry. A certain number of facts may be ascertained, but they are almost always consistent with a great number of various interpretations. No man has a moral right 250 ESSAYS. to reiterate his own interpretation, to enforce it with all the resources of humour and sarcasm, to construe every fact and every action in accordance with it, and thus by mere force of style to compel many persons to take his view of historical events and personages, without giving them the slightest hint that other views are equally consistent with the facts of the case. The defects of this mode of proceeding appear more strongly in Mr. Carlyle's portraits of indivi- duals than in his theories about events. The habit of attempting to estimate men by their essence, and not by their acts, forces those who adopt it to resort ■to the most meagre evidence as to what the essence of the man is. He has to be judged by his features, his complexion, the nicknames which his enemies give him, little characteristic anecdotes, and other such matters, which are, after all, better fitted for novels than for history. Some one says that Robes- pierre's face was verddtre, and this furnishes Mr. Carlyle with so many sentences about the " sea- green formula," that his readers feel, at last, that if Robespierre had been sanguine, and Danton bilious, there would have been no Reign of Terror. This mode of painting characters has a strong tendency to obliterate moral distinctions. It suggests, though it certainly does not logically imply, the inference that a man has no other course than that of filling the niche which his character enables him to occupy in a dramatic manner. You may be a huge Danton, full of wild, stormy passion and savage tenderness ; or you may be a meagre, strict-minded precisian, like Robespierre, with spectacles instead of eyes, and MR. CARLYLE. 251 a cramp instead of a soul; but there is nothing to teach you that in either case you have duties to fulfil, and that if you cut people's heads off without any sort of excuse, it is no justification to say that, being a mere " logic-formula," you were only acting as such, or that you had a great flaming soul fresh from the heart of fact, which impelled you. There is a right and a wrong for " logic-formulas " and great flaming souls as well as for other people. Everybody has some kind of character, and where should we be if every one acted up to it, without an effort at self- control ? It is in respect to politics that Mr. Carlyle's deter- mination to rush at once to the heart of the matter" leads him into the most wonderful errors. Probably no man of genius, being at the same time a good and honourable man, ever wrote two books so unjust and injurious as Past and Present and the Latter-Day Pamphlets. Considering pictorial delineation as the true mode of arriving at political knowledge, Mr. Carlyle conceives a sturdy mill-owner, full of untu- tored strength, and earnestly worshipping Mammon ; an idle, sauntering, sneering landowner, worship- ping nothing ; a Church, a Parliament, law-courts and public offices, all babbling and jangling, instead of working, " doleful creatures having the honour to be ; " and having worked them up into a sort of whole with infinite picturesqueness and humour, he says, " There you have England as it is." As a counterfoil, he disinters a thirteenth-century abbot, and dresses him out with inimitable grace and skill as a representative of the time in which he lived. When he is sufficiently depicted, he says, " There 252 ESSAYS. you have the old heroic ages." The moral, as to the baseness of the one state of things and the healthi- ness of the other, follows as of course. The skill of the representation completely blinds ordinary readers to the fact that its truth and adequacy, not its inge- nuity, are the real points at issue. Apart from their picturesqueness, these books are a strange mixture of poverty and audacity. An Irish widow dies of fever at Glasgow, and infects some sixteen or seventeen others, who die too ; but such a thing could not have happened in the middle ages. " No human creature then went about connected with nobody .... reduced to prove his relationship by dying of typhus fever." It would be interesting to know what " the harpy Jews," whom Abbot Samson "banished bag and baggage out of the banlieue of St. Edmonds- bury," thought about their connections ; nor would it be undesirable to learn how many people proved their relationship by dying of infection in the great plague of 1347, which destroyed nearly 60,000 people in Norwich and London, and when, as Dr. Lingard says, the pestilence, "was chiefly confined to the lower orders, for the more wealthy, by shutting themselves up in their castles, in a great measure escaped the infection." The only way in which it is possible to criticise Mr. Carlyle's political writings favourably is by look- ing on them as addressed to an imaginary audience. They show what would be the state of the country if all the good qualities of its inhabitants had died out, and all its bad ones were raised to the highest power ; but they also show at every point a complete incapacity of estimating justly any subject which comes imme- ME. CARLYLE. 253 diately under the observation of the writer. When a man or thing stands far enough from Mr. Carlyle to enable him to view it and paint it as a whole, he does so with admirable artistic effect, though with questionable correctness. When it is close to him, he is so much irritated by the irregularities and blemishes of its surface, that he never inquires what is below. He is, on the whole, one of the greatest wits and poets, but the most untrustworthy moralist and politician, of our age and nation. June 19, 1858. 254 ESSAYS. XXVIII. PASCAL'S PENSEES. The best edition of Pascal's great work is the one which was published by M. Faugere, from the ori- ginal MS. At the time of its publication it excited great interest, partly on account of its intrinsic merits, partly on account of a variety of heterodox opinions which the publication was supposed to fix upon Pascal, and partly on account of various con- troversies excited by collateral circumstances con- nected with the work itself, which, if it had been completed, was to have been called the Apologie du Christianisme ; the fragmentary character of Pascal's notes makes it so difficult to follow their connection, that it may be well to give a sketch of the general nature of the argument which they embody. The book was meant to consist of two parts — the second forming a treatise' on the Evidences of Chris- tianity, and the first a series of dissertations intended to prove that there is a sufficient a priori probability of its truth to induce a reasonable man to accept it on slight positive evidence. It is difficult to make much of the second part of the book. It is partly historical, but principally critical, while a great deal of it was to have turned on the interpretation of the PASCAL'S PENSEES. 255 Prophecies and of the typical and mystical portions of the books of the Old Testament. It is difficult to extract anything complete and systematic fromthecon- fused notes upon these subjects which alone remain. The argument of the first part, though expressed in a fragmentary manner, can still be pretty clearly traced. Its general purport is as follows : — There is in all human affairs a radical confusion and absurdity, which leads perpetually to two results diametrically opposed to each other. Men, on the one hand, are haunted by conceptions of truth, justice, virtue, nobleness, and happiness — on the other, they live in a state of things which ten,ds to prove these concep- tions to be altogether false. Stoicism, on the one hand, and Pyrrhonism on the other, have a hold on the human mind which it can never shake off. There is a point of view from which Epictetus, and there is a point of view from which Montaigne, is unanswerable. Human nature therefore is corrupt. Christianity recognizes and is founded on that corruption which it professes to be able to repair. The life of its author, and the leading facts of its creed, exalt us to the highest dignity. They also enter into the lowest humiliation of which human nature is capable. There is enough positive evidence in favour of the truth of this system to justify any one in adopting it who feels inclined to do so, and to protect him from ridi- cule if he does. Inasmuch as, in this world, it fre- quently happens that there is nothing to act upon but imperfect evidence, in which case the intellect has to pray in aid the promptings of inclination, these con- siderations complete the case in favour of Chris- tianity, proving, in a few words, that there is ,no 256 ESSAYS. reason why you should not believe it if you like, that you risk less by believing than by disbelieving, and that you must do one or the other. This, trans- lated into the plainest language — though it is infi- nitely less plain spoken and emphatic than Pascal's — is the gist of his argument. It would be impossible in any moderate space to discuss, in their principal bearings, the enormous subjects which such an argu- ment embraces. A few considerations may, however, be offered on the special illustrations which Pascal gives upon one branch of his subject, and on the general method of his argument. Probably under the influence of the example of Descartes, Pascal takes his own feelings as the crite- rion by which he is to judge of the feelings of man- kind at large. He always appears to think that, because a proposition or a view of life appears self- evident to his mind, it must necessarily appear self- evident to every other mind. There are deep traces of this temper in the fragments of chapters which were intended to prove the misery and corruption of man. The grounds upon which he rests this con- clusion are, first, the eagerness which men show for amusement and occupation, which, he says, arises from their inward consciousness of their own misery, and their disinclination to be alone with themselves — • secondly, the degrading necessity under which we lie of subjecting ourselves to influences obviously decep- tive in their very nature, more especially to imagina- tion and to vanity ; and, lastly, the disproportion of man to nature. Surrounded as he is by infinity in point of greatness, and infinity in point of littleness, man can see just enough of the world around him PASCAL'S TENSEES. 257 to know that the powers of the mind, vast as their sphere may be, serve only to show him his ignorance. Such are Pascal's grounds for the conclusion that man is in a position in itself wretched, degraded, and absurd. That much is to be said in favour of such a view is no doubt true, and no doubt it is also true that Pascal had one of those minds which would naturally adopt it ; but it is sufficiently obvious that the true value of his observations can be ascertained only by much wider observation and study than he bestowed on the matter. Take, for example, his doctrine about amusement and occupation. " All the misfortunes of life," he says, " may be traced to men's incapacity to sit still in a room." All human occupations he looks upon as merely diversions in the etymological sense of the word — expedients for preventing the mind from preying on itself ; and thence he infers that to prey upon itself is at once its natural condition and the abiding and conclusive evidence of its corrupt nature. That Pascal's mind may have been in this condition is extremely probable, but that such is the normal condition of human minds in general is a different and a doubtful proposition. Most people would be inclined to say that the mind, like the body, has powers expressly adapted for action, and that if they do not act and are not supplied with suitable objects for acting, the mind is in an unhealthy condition, as much as the body would be if it were confined to one unvarying posture ; so that the inclination of the mind to prey upon itself, when deprived of all external objects of thought, no more proves its corruption than the fact that the body moves during life, and lies still after death, proves that death is its 17 258 ESSAYS. normal state. It is equally strange and true, that in his; remarks on this subject Pascal falls into the same error which misled Rousseau in his speculations upon the origin of society. To suppose that unless human nature were corrupt men would take pleasure in abso- lute inaction is the precise counterpart of the theory, that the savage state must be the state of nature, because it is the simplest state of which we can form a notion. Similar observations apply to Pascal's remaining arguments upon this point. He adopts the sceptical, theory that the imagination is a puissance trompeuse. In M. Faugere's edition of the JPensees there are numerous scattered reflections, some of which had been suppressed in earlier editions, which may well be imagined to have given great scandal to earlier editors. Pascal attributes to deceit — to what we in the slang of the day should call shams — a very large proportion of the power of all established authorities. The judges in their ermine are to him mere " chats fourres" but he strives to make this view of the case harmonize with the deepest convictions of the sacred- ness of authority by a reflection which comes very near to the populus vult decipi. Nature is corrupt- Man must be imposed upon — it is a necessary part o£ his punishment and degradation. As far as it is possible to judge from fragments, he appears to have- taken pleasure in confirming these views of the con- dition and destiny of mankind by a keen exposure of the defects of the arrangements of human society, coupled with a recognition of the fact that they cannot be avoided. It is instructive to find one of the most, eminent apologists of Christianity denouncing the PASCAL'S PENSiEES. 259 inequalities and injustice of institutions essential to the very existence of society, in a manner which, in our own days, denotes the writings of professed revo- lutionists. Thus, for example, he maintains that abstract justice would require an equal division of property ; and he polishes and elaborates, with mani- fest complacency, a sarcasm, the point of which is, that whereas in general it is a great crime to kill a man, it may become an honourable thing to do so if you live on the opposite bank of a river. It never occurs to him that these things are capable of being remedied or even of being mitigated. It would weaken his cause if they were not there, for it is on the madness and folly of the world that he takes his stand. Such a standing ground will always be accessible enough ; but those who adopt it ought to remember that what they look upon as shams and impostures are so far from being rendered necessary to the trans- action of human affairs by the corruption of human nature, that they are either impediments, the removal of which would, even in the present state of things,, be a blessing, or else the results of misunderstandings which in some cases have been, and in other cases are being, explained away. The imagination itself is so far from being essentially a puissance trompeuse, that it is in fact the great active principle of our nature. Without imagination a man could not mend a pen or make a pair of shoes, for he must have a conception of the effect which he means to produce before he can produce it. The external decorations of civil and military authority are in their origin mere matters of association. They are, in the pre- 17—2 260 ESSAYS. sent day, either tributes to what men naturally reverence, or else they are pleasures which the position of persons in power enables them to enjoy ; but wide and woeful experience ought by this time to have convinced the most sceptical that people who calculate upon the weight which such influences will derive from the weakness or corruption of human nature, reckon without their host. The crown and the ermine may ornament a real authority, but they have no power to defend a sham one. It would be impossible to show that in any province of human affairs folly or wickedness is, in a temporal point of view, a source of strength, or of anything more than accidental and exceptional profit, yet the proposition that folly and wickedness are useful in a temporal point of view is absolutely essential to the force of Pascal's argument. The principal contemporary interest of these ob- servations lies in their bearing upon a mode of arguing which, in all probability, will always be popular, and which was never more popular than it is now. It consists in obtaining an orthodox conclusion from sceptical premisses. It is obvious that if it be im- partially applied, scepticism may be made suicidal, for it may be so used as to destroy the difficulties which it has raised. The most famous argument of this class is Bishop Butler's criticism on fatalism. If fatalism, he argues, is applied universally, it becomes unimportant, for it puts injustice upon exactly the same footing as justice. This mode of turning an adversary's batteries on himself has a wonderful attraction for some minds. It forms the substance of several books which have obtained wide PASCAL'S PENSEES. 261 popularity ; for example, of Mr. ManselFs Bampton Lectures and that well-known popular volume The Eclipse of Faith ; nor can it be doubted that, within certain limits, it is legitimate. It is, however, impor- tant that these limits should be constantly borne in mind, for if they are forgotten, the would-be Christian apologist becomes himself a greater sceptic than his antagonists. What such arguments really prove, or rather what they tend to prove, in favour of any positive form of religious belief, is, that its truth or falsehood is a matter to be determined by critical and historical inquiry into its claims to be con- sidered as revealed truth, and not by a priori speculation ; and their value exclusively depends on the weight with which the positive evidence is stated. If the second part of Butler's Analogy, or the second part of Pascal's Apology, were wanting, the first parts of those works would be arguments in favour of Pyrrhonism, if they were in favour of anything. Butler's argument is that there are certain objections to Christianity, and that they all apply equally to theism. Pascal urges the same point in a more general way, and goes so far as to rest the claims of Christianity to be divine upon its recognition, and even upon its reproduction, of the fundamental contradictions which he supposed to pervade all human affairs. If he had stopped here, and had not gone on to give positive evidence in favour of the system as it was his intention to do in the second part of his book, he would have said nothing to the purpose ; for if it be true that human affairs are fundamentally absurd— if the result of our widest inquiries upon the subject is that men are dis- 262 ESSAYS. proportioned, at -war with themselves, half gods and half brutes, how can that fact alone dispose us to believe in a system which leads us to explain the difficulty ? It is indeed a strange way of arguing to say that there must be a solution because there is a difficulty. Prima facie, the existence of the one is evidence against the other. If the world, so far as we can see, is a mad confusion, the fact that a certain form of doctrine reduces that confusion to harmony is no argument in its favour, unless it is backed by independent evidence of its truth ; for it is begging the question, and, in the supposed case, it is self- contradictory to assume that the system of life must be harmonious, and not confused. People constantly argue as if, by showing the difficulties of other systems, they could establish their own. There cannot be a greater nor a more dangerous error. Doubt can produce only doubt; and the reasoners in question throw a torch into the magazine to save the ship from being taken. The practical results of resting upon this negative form of argument are in one class of minds to pro- duce that most dishonest of all habits — the habit of believing till you get a creed. In another it gives rise to practical Pyrrhonism, which is infinitely more common than most people suppose. In one of the most remarkable passages of his book, Pascal intro- duces a debate with a person who doubts the existence of God :— " S'il y a un Dieu, 'il est infiniment incomprehen- sible, puisque n'ayant ni parties ni bornes, il n'a mil rapport k nous; nous sommes done incapables de connaitre ni ce qu'il est ni s'il est II y PASCAL'S PENSEES. 263 a un chaos infini qui nous separe. II se joue un jeu a- l'extremite de cette distance infini oil il arrivera croix ou pile. Que gagerez-vous ? . . . . Le juste est de ne point parier Oui, mais il faut parier : cela n'est pas Tolontaire ; vous etes embarque. Lequel prendrez-vous done ? " He then proceeds to prove that there is less risk in betting on the affirmative than on the negative ; and his interlocutor objects — " J'ai les mains liees et la bouche muette, on me force k parier et je ne suis pas en liberty, on ne me relache pas et je suis fait d'une telle sorte que je ne puis croire. Que voulez-vous done que jefasse? — Apprenez [is the answer] de ceux qui ont &e lies comme vous Suivez la maniere par oii lis ont commence ; Jest en faisant tout comme s'ils croyaient, en prenant de I'eau benite, en faisant dire des messes, fyc." St. Paul thought that belief in God was a condition precedent to worship. Pascal exactly reverses this •opinion. Whatever may be the misery of the con- dition of an atheist, there is far more hope that he may be brought to a better mind if he bears .his opinions about, consciously regarding them as a calamity, than if he disavows them as dreary, though he cannot renounce them as false. In the one case, he is so far at least an honest man ; in the other, whatever pious disguises he may wear, he is a hypo- crite, a liar, and a coward. An atheist, no doubt, would be justified in respecting the belief of others. He might very reasonably say, Why should I try to disturb institutions and illusions which are power- ful, which may be useful, and which are supported 264 ESSAYS. by the strongest of human passions? But every man ought, at any rate, to know his own mind and face his own opinions, for whether he avows them to himself or not, they are his opinions, and what- ever may be the nature of the responsibility which they entail, he is responsible for them. Such states of feeling are not without example in our own time and country ; but a far more common result of the injudicious and sometimes savage and malignant zeal with which Christian advocates preach universal scepticism, in order to shut the mouths of deists, is one of which they little suspect the extent. It is not every one who agrees in Pascal's dogma, that " il faut parier." Sharpen the horns of your dilemma as you will, and the great mass of mankind will still, as a general rule, avoid both, by the simple process of remaining undecided. Almost every one who argues on dilemmas, forgets that there are always three ways of proceeding. If you go on, you must either go to the right or to the left, but you may also stay where you are. The position, no doubt, is logically incomplete, and an argument always assumes that logical completeness is an object to the person to whom it is addressed. It ought, however, to be borne in mind, especially by those who argue on religious topics, that the practical result of their arguments on the mass of their readers is of much more consequence than their logical cogency as against their antagonists. To halt be- tween two opinions is, in ordinary cases, far from unpleasant. The number of people who are sincerely and earnestly desirous of arriving at truth, especially at theological truth, at any expense of suffering PASCAL'S PENSEES. 265 and labour, is small indeed. The number of people who have a curiosity about the matter is enormously large. Try to drive a man of this sort into one view by showing him the difficulties of others, and you only suggest to him that there are difficulties in all. It is impossible to bring home to such a person the conviction that il faut parier. Indeed, it is not true. A vast proportion of the business of life — business which the common senti- ment of the world rightly regards as necessary and honourable — can be carried on without any distinct theological creed ; and such business is so abundant, various, and interesting, that not only is it easy to turn away the mind from theological subjects, but it is extremely hard not to do so. Lazy indifference, slightly relieved by languid curiosity, will prevail amongst the majority of the educated world in refer- ence to theology, just in proportion to the success with which theologians succeed in refuting each other's positive opinions, and in showing that they can return with deadly effect the thrusts which they cannot parry. Another objection which in practice is conclusive against almost all religious dilemmas, is the difficulty, not to say the impossibility, of making them exhaus- tive. " You must," is the argument, " be either an atheist or a Christian." But what is that Christianity which forms the orthodox branch of the alternative ? Does the choice lie between atheism and Popery, atheism and the Church of England, atheism and Calvinism, or atheism and Lutheranism ? Is it quite impossible to escape atheism by resorting to Maho- metanism, to Buddhism, to Brahminism, to idolatry, 266 ESSAYS. to a hypothetical deism adopted as a creed which may possibly be true though it is confessedly doubt- ful ? In fact, does the dilemma come to more than this — You must either be an atheist or something else ? and is such a dilemma worth having ? As a mode of influencing thought or conduct it is not, but its popularity can astonish no one, for it is a way of arguing which affords men who have given in their public adhesion to recognized forms of religion an admirable opportunity of displaying safe audacity, of gratifying their antipathies, and of insinuating to the world at large the conclusion that if they are not as heretical as their neighbours, it is not because they have a greater disposition to belief, but because they have explored scepticism far enough to see that it also is vanity. September 25, 1858. JOSEPH DE MAISTEE. 267 XXIX. JOSEPH DE MAISTRE. There is in all modern speculation, and especially in those parts of it which deal with the principles of politics and natural theology, a sort of eddy or back- water, which runs in the opposite direction to the main stream of thought. There are always a con- siderable number of persons who want to have a phi- losophy and a theology of their own, which, whilst it shall be as profound and as important as that which is usually accepted, shall convict the conclusions com- monly received upon these subjects of shallowness and feebleness. Dr. Newman's career is as strong an illustration of this state of feeling as could be referred to in our own time and country ; but De Maistre's eminence and influence fairly entitle him to be looked upon as the typical representative of that way of thinking or of feeling. His writings illustrate in all respects the weakness and the strength which per- vades all speculations of the class to which they belong. Their strength arises from the fact that they usually succeed in setting in a strong light half- truths which their opponents have neglected; and they are thus invested with an air of originality, of richness, and, above all, of positive, as opposed to 268 ESSAYS. merely negative, instruction, which is very seductive to the young and sensitive. Their weakness lies in the circumstance that the positive parts of their teaching are emphatically half-truths, which crumble under the honest application of the ordinary tests of truth, and are frequently destroyed by the argu- ments to which they appeal. The influence which De Maistre exercised over many of the most dis- tinguished Frenchmen of the existing generation, and especially over persons so different as Comte, M. La- martine, and the Saint Simonians, is exactly like the influence which Dr. Newman has exercised over some of the finest minds of our own generation in England — over Mr. Froude, for example, and by way of re- action, and what may be described by the contra- dictory phrase of a sympathetic antipathy, over Dr. Arnold. Like Dr. Newman, he handled great truths in a blundering and fundamentally illogical manner, for each of them invariably omits to prove the minor of his syllogisms, and the strictness with which minors are proved is the great test by which real and sham logic may be distinguished. By the help of realist metaphysics to furnish him with premisses which he could assert to be innate ideas, and strong feeling to indicate the conclusions which these premisses were to support, De Maistre readily con- structed arguments which proved whatever he wanted to establish. The evidence necessary to apply his theory to facts was supplied by half-truths neglected hy his antagonists. There is hardly a single opinion advocated by De Maistre which would not, upon analysis, appear to have been reached in this manner. The Soiries de St. Petersbourg contains the most JOSEPH DE MAISTRE. 269 complete enunciation of his views upon the great fundamental questions of science, morals, and theo- logy. It is one of the liveliest and most interesting of boohs. The vivacity of the style, and the origi- nality, ingenuity, and fervour of the thought give it a charm very like that which belongs to Pascal's letters. As for the opinions which it maintains, it is by no means easy to give a general notion of them to a person who has not read the book ; but they might perhaps be faintly indicated by saying that if Bishop Butler had had a taste for paradox, had been a violent partisan of the Stuarts, and had written in a style equidistant between Voltaire and Dr. Newman, he would have produced something not unlike the Soirdes. To deprive Bishop Butler of his caution and discretion is no doubt like depriving Hamlet of the Prince of Denmark. The Analogy is throughout an argumentum ad homines, intended to show Deists that the objections which they made to Christianity applied equally to the positive parts of their own system ; and it is to this circumstance that its great weight and reputation are to be ascribed. If the arguments of the Analogy were thrown into a positive form, and were urged, not as answers to silence objectors to Christianity, but as direct proofs of its truth, they would represent very fairly the general character of the Soirdes de St. Petersbourg. Such arguments are so frequently abused in the present day, and their weight and tendency are so constantly misunderstood, that it is well worth while to consider the manner in which they are applied in a book which certainly invests them with all the adventitious force which style can supply. 270 ESSATS. The general subject of the Soirees de St. Peters- bourg is the moral government of the world, and its purpose is to vindicate what the highest of the high Tories of the last century — the pupil of the Jesuits, and the most prominent antagonist of the French Revolution and its principles— regarded as the ortho- dox view of human life and Divine Providence. The book at first falls into the shape of an argument with an objector to the belief that the affairs of life are the subject of a providential government. He is supposed to reiterate the ancient objection that the wicked flourish and the righteous are troubled. To this it is replied, that there is a considerable part of the troubles of life which virtue has a direct tendency to prevent, and vice to aggravate, and that that part of them of which this cannot be affirmed " rains upon men like the balls in a battle," striking the good and the bad indifferently. De Maistre does not, however, content himself with answering objec- tions. He developes at full length a complete scheme of the providential government of the world, and of the principal laws by which it is conducted. The outline of this scheme is somewhat as follows. All suffering is penal, but it is not in all cases propor- tional to actual guilt, because there are several eternal principles which prevent such an arrange- ment. In the first place, all men are in a degraded and fallen state, and as like always produces like, they come into the world with a vitiated constitution. Moreover, men are so connected together, that they can both expiate each other's faults by vicarious suffer- ing, and increase each other's happiness by vicarious merits. It is thus impossible to refer particular JOSEPH BE MAISTRE. 271 suffering to particular guilt, although it is possible to affirm in general that suffering arises from guilt. The general arrangements of society illustrate these principles on a large scale. The principle that men are connected together is illustrated by the power which a king possesses of pledging the nation of which he is the head to a crime which brings upon it all sorts of punishment, though its individual members may have had no share in the guilt. The nature of the punishments which nations incur is illustrated by war, which, says De Maistre, is supernatural and divine in its character ; and this is shown, not only by the strange and unforeseen events by which its course is characterized, but also by the eagerness and vehemence with which men engage in what, might have been expected to be so hateful a task. Such is a sample of the moral side of De Maistre's theory. It rests upon a corresponding view of science and of history. In direct opposition to the theory of the progress of knowledge, which, since his time, has become even more extended than it was in the last century, he maintained that we live in a state of in- tellectual as well as moral degradation. The notion that the state of nature is a state of barbarism appeared to him the " erreur mere " of modern times. This theory was essential to his views, because the positive evidence to which he appealed in support of them was tradition ; and in order to give importance to the traditions to which he appealed, it was necessary for him to maintain that they were vestiges of a time infinitely superior to our own in every kind of in- tellectual activity. From the relics of Egyptian and Etruscan art, from the: Cyclopean remains, and, above 272 ESSAYS. all, from the evidence supplied by etymology of a careful and exquisitely skilful adaptation of sounds to thoughts in some very ancient time, as well as from the common tradition of a golden age at the begin- ning of things, he argued that a time must have existed in which knowledge of all kinds was not only more abundant, but more scientific than it is now. But when did this primitive civilization exist? Geology, according to the views of it which obtained at the beginning of the present century, was sup- posed by De Maistre not only to demonstrate the universality, but to fix the date of the Noachic deluge at the period usually assigned to it, and history seemed to show that since the deluge such a state of things had been unknown. De Maistre was, therefore, reduced to the assertion (which he made with characteristic audacity and eloquence) that before the deluge men were able to take the a priori road to knowledge ; that they contemplated things in their quiddity, and, instead of ascending from effects to causes, were able to descend from causes to effects. These were the giants and mighty men of renown spoken of in Genesis, and their superhuman knowledge brought upon its owners a superhuman punishment. This knowledge survived the flood for a short time, and the fact appeared to De Maistre to be proved, amongst other things, by the rapidity with which Noah and his family recon- stituted human society after that event. This won- derful science was, however, confined to a few persons, and gradually died out amongst the priesthoods of ancient Egypt and some other primaeval nations. The great traditions of expiation, corporate responsi- JOSEPH DE MAISTRE. 273 bility, the efficacy of prayer, and others of the same kind, are the vestiges of these forgotten marvels. Savages, so far from being in a state of nature, are in a state of miserable degradation — " weighed down apparently by some fearful anathema " — which De Maistre conjectures to have been entailed upon them by the wickedness of their primitive rulers, whose supernatural powers enabled them to involve people in a proportional depth of wickedness. Even the most civilized nations are only toiling painfully, and step by step, towards the height on which their ancestors stood without an effort. These doctrines rested on the realist theory of metaphysics. The wisdom of the primitive sages arose from the fact that they were able to descend at will from universals to particulars, because they had a clear mental perception of universal truths. In our days, though ideas are still innate, we no longer apprehend them clearly, but are compelled to work backwards to them by laborious processes of detail. Our true wisdom, therefore, lies in attaching the utmost importance to the traditions which are our guides towards that different and higher order of things of which they are at once the evidence and. the remnant, and in remembering that our modern processes of thought stop far short of the limits to. which human wisdom once attained. Our guide to- wards these limits is the tradition embodied in that common ^wasi-instinctive sentiment which De Maistre describes as " bon sens," in opposition to the conclu- sions of what is commonly called philosophy. This "common sense" (as Reid understood the words) predisposes us to accept as true the traditions from 274 ESSAYS. which it was derived. It assures us, for example, of the efficacy of prayer ; it tells us that national cala- mities are judgments for sins; and, in fact, it sup- ports all through the theory which De Maistre advocates. Thus the belief in primitive science works itself round to a practical appeal to such parts of modern popular sentiment as cannot be referred to any process of reasoning ; and it is hardly an ex- aggeration to say that, in his hatred of modern phi- losophy, De Maistre contrived a scheme for attaching a magical value to superstition. His theory of expiation supplies a good illustration. His conclusion is, that the misfortunes of the King, the priesthood, and the aristocracy in the French Revolution were somehow creditable to them — if not in their individual, at least in their corporate capacity. There can be little doubt as to the source which furnished this part of the argument. The minor is, that their sufferings were in the nature of expiatory sacrifices for the sins of their predecessors, and the major consists of the doctrine of vicarious suffering. This doctrine rests partly on the innate idea that all suffering is penal — partly on the traditionary belief that one person can suffer in the place of another. Thus, in so far as the argument is an argument at all, and not a mere assertion, it rests partly on an innate idea, and partly on a half-truth em- bodied with a most pernicious error. As to the innate idea that all suffering is penal, it is enough to say, that if De Maistre was right in appealing to it, it is hard to see why he went any further. If the proposition is a first truth, antecedent not only to experience but to logic, what is the good JOSEPH DE MAISTRE. 275 that it claims to give a picture of the practical results of extreme Calvinism in active life ; and in this point of view it has a certain interest, though not a healthy one. The chief figure in the book is Dr. Hopkins, the divine, and its most remarkable feature consists in descriptions of the way in which his teaching practi- cally affected various classes of hearers. The cha- racter of his doctrine is stated by Mrs. Stowe, as follows : — " According to any views then entertained of the evidences of a true regeneration, the number of the whole human race who could be supposed as yet to have received this grace was so small that, as to any numerical valuation, it must have been expressed by an infinitesimal. Dr. Hopkins in many places dis- tinctly recognizes the fact that the greater part of the human race up to his time had been eternally lost, and boldly assumes the ground that this amount of sin and suffering, being the best and most necessary means of the greatest final amount of happiness, was not merely permitted, but distinctly chosen, desired, and provided for, as essential in the schemes of Infinite Benevolence. He held that this decree not only permitted each individual act of sin, but also took •measures to make it certain, though, by an exercise of infinite skill, it accomplished this result without violating human free agency Dr. Hopkins boldly asserts that all the use which God will have for them (the damned) is to suffer. This is all the end they can answer ; therefore, all their faculties, and their whole capacities, will be employed and used for this end The body can by Omnipotence THE MINISTER'S WOOING. 3L i be made capable of suffering the greatest imaginable pain without producing dissolution, or abating the least degree of life or sensibility One way in which God will show his power in the punish- ment of the wicked will be in strengthening and up- holding their bodies and souls in torments which would otherwise be intolerable." It was one principal evidence of a regenerate dis- position to be able to acquiesce in this as the best possible arrangement. The men who preached these doctrines were eminent (Mrs. Stowe says) for their holiness and virtue, and were so far from being insen- sible to the horror of what they preached that their lives were bowed down and burdened by the intolerable agony of believing their own theories. Their doctrines, she says, exercised such an influence over the minds of the society in which they lived that they were the common subject of discussion by all classes of men and women on all occasions. The farmers talked them over at their work, their wives at the tea-table, and their servants at the plough-tail. The Minister's Wooing aims at depicting this, and, accordingly, we have portraits of members of all sorts of classes under the pressure of Dr. Hopkins's theory of Disinterested Benevolence. The tender, pious, susceptible girl who has lost her lover ; the imaginative mother who has lost her son ; the shrewd, clever, managing widow who looks after her own and her daughter's salvation with the same keenness as she shows in managing her house ; the meek little farmer who, whilst a pattern of every form of self-denying virtue, passes through the world groaning and trembling because he cannot come up to his minister's standard ; his fat, 312 ESSAYS. sleepy wife, who rather enjoys being harrowed up into a momentary excitement; and his high-spirited daughter, who accepts her position as one of the wicked, and makes the best of it as cheerfully as she can ; are all depicted in turn, with considerable skill, as illustrations of the effects which the very highest form of High Calvinism would produce upon different specimens of the population of New England. Mrs. Stowe occasionally appears to be struck with the reflection that she has chosen a strange subject for a novel, and she apologizes for it by saying that she could not have drawn a picture of New England as it was without giving theology its due prominence. The conclusion appears to be that she should have held her peace altogether. There really are some subjects which are too solemn for novelists, strange as such an opinion may appear. Of the many gross outrages on decency which have been perpetrated by French writers, none was so gross as the adaptation of the history of the Crucifixion to the exigencies of the feuilleton. But though there is, of course, an infinite difference in degree, and probably hardly less difference in execution, the principle of the Minister's Wooing is precisely the same. To some persons, Dr. Hopkins's opinions may probably appear to be eternal truth ; to others, they may appear — as a much less energetic version of them appeared to Wesley — " blasphemy to make the ears of a Christian to tingle," and a justification for a call to the devils to rejoice, and to death and hell to triumph. Mrs. Stowe appears, to judge from her book, to incline to the former view. It is, indeed, true that, with that shuffling timidity which is the characteristic vice of THE MINISTEE'S WOOING. 313 aovelists, she does not commit herself to anything, but talks about it and about it — putting Dr. Hopkins and his views in all sorts of positions, looking at them under every possible aspect, contrasting them with the activity of one person, the apathy of another, and the commonplace vulgarity of a third, with that effective- ness which any one may obtain who does not shrink from peeping and botanizing upon their fathers' graves. Whatever may have been the true value of the works of Jonathan Edwards and Dr. Hopkins, a religious novelist owed them more respect than Mrs. Stowe has shown. The themes on which they wrote were far too awful for a novelist. The only question about them which can interest any rational creature is, whether they are true or false. The only circum- stance respecting them on which a novel can throw any light is their relation to common life. Now, every one admits that the average tone and temper of every-day existence is not our ultimate rule — that if theology is worth anything at all, it must form the rule and guide of our daily lives, instead of being guided by them ; and, therefore, a novel which (as all novels must) takes daily life as its standing ground, and shows how it is related to theology, has no tendency whatever to show the truth or falsehood of the theological doctrines which it describes. In so far as Mrs. Stowe's book can be said to have any moral at all, it is that we ought to keep our minds in a sort of hazy devotional warmth, and hope for the best, and that any consistent or ex- plicit theological belief upon the great topics which form the basis of theology is self-condemned. The semi-conscious approach to a cross between a senti- 314 ESSAYS. merit and an opinion which appears to form the pre- miss of the book, is that no theological opinions are true which are either un-Calvinistical or very un- pleasant ; and that, as most Calvinistical doctrines are extremely unpleasant, and involve the damnation of a great many agreeable people, the mind ought to be kept floating in a sort of tincture of Calvinism which, if it ever were reduced to definite statements of any kind, might perhaps turn out not to be as bad as might be expected. This is as near an approach to a moral as Mrs. Stowe's book will yield. It would be rash to offer it with confidence, or to contend that she is any way committed to the proposition (if it is one). Such as it is, however, it furnishes an admirable illustration of the truth of the assertion that novels on serious subjects are the curse of serious thought. The diffi- culty of serious reflection upon any subject, and especially on theological subjects, is incalculably in- creased by those who overlay the essential parts of the question with a mass of irrelevant matter, which can have no other effect than to prejudice the feel- ings in one direction or another. If there is ground to believe that agreeable people really will be damned, the probability or improbability of that opinion will not be affected in the remotest degree by setting before the world minute pictures of these agreeable people, and by asking pathetically whether it is really meant that such a fate can overtake men and women who laugh and joke, and eat their dinners, and make love, and enjoy themselves like all the rest of the world. Of course, no one doubts that, if it is true, it is a great pity. The only question which reasonable THE MINISTER'S WOOING. 315 people can ask with, any interest is whether it is true. Temporal punishments are often remarked upon in the same style. M. Hugo, for example, in the Der- nier Jour oVun Condamne, counted out the minutes of a man who was to be guillotined, and described in endless detail every separate sensation attending- that condition. The inference suggested (of course, it was not drawn) was that society did not know what it meant by condemning a man to death ; and that, if it did know, capital punishments would be abolished. The true inference was altogether the other way. People knew in general that it was very unpleasant to be guillotined, and they meant it to be so. The particular items which made up the total were quite immaterial, and M. Hugo's book was accordingly as much beside the mark at which he aimed as Mrs. Stowe's book is beside any mark whatever of a doc- trinal kind. It may be urged that the Minister's Wooing is merely a picture of a state of society, and that the authoress was not bound to do more than to paint it truly. But this is false in fact ; for it is full of such vague hints at argument as have just been described. And, besides this, the argument is bad in principle, for the book undoubtedly does produce an impression very unfavourable to Calvinism ; and though that system is one which is open to observation it ought not to be attacked upon irrelevant grounds. Any one who describes things heartily and vividly takes up, for the time, the position described. By giving all the details of the eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, which was going on in New England notwithstanding Dr. Hopkins and his Disin- 316 ESSAYS. terested Benevolence — by throwing what she has to say into the form of a novel, and by winding up the story with a happy marriage — Mrs. Stowe virtually adopts the cheerful view of life, and rejects the awful one ; and the only approach to a justification for this which the book contains is that the awful view is unpleasant. It is impossible not to resent this. What- ever may be asserted to the contrary, the fundamental beliefs upon which all human conduct proceeds do not depend upon inclination, but on conviction ; and there is hardly any more urgent necessity for men or nations than that those fundamental convictions should rest upon grounds which, if they do not exclude doubt, at any rate show what is doubtful and what is not — what is light and what is darkness. Whether there is a God — whether we can argue respecting his character from any data except those which revelation supplies — whether there is any reve- lation at all, and if so, what are its limits, and what its interpretation — are the overwhelming questions on which hangs all human life. To these Dr. Hopkins and Jonathan Edwards gave one set of answers. Others would give very different ones, but it is by those only who can discuss these subjects upon those terms that either Calvinism or any other creed what- ever can be properly criticised. To make any step towards the discovery of the truth upon these matters is the most important, as it is the most awful, enter- prise which any man can propose to himself; and it is impossible not to feel a strong sense of indignation against those who nibble at such questions, gossip about them, and, as far as their influence extends, try to substitute for the adamantine foundations on THE MINISTER'S WOOING. 317 which any genuine faith must rest the mere shifting sand and mud of personal sentiment and inclination. If the real drift of theological novels is extracted and thrown into plain words, its irreverence is horrible. In the present work there is a certain Priscilla, or as she is always called, Miss Prissy, a dressmaker, who is always in a little fuss about dresses and weddings. She is always bustling about with silks and satins — talking, laughing, and gossiping in a harmless lively manner. This woman, amongst others, is brought within the shadow of Dr. Hopkins and his theories ; and the suggestion whenever she comes upon the stage is, " It is impossible that Dr. Hopkins's theories about eternal damnation should be true, for it would be very odd and incongruous if Miss Prissy were to be damned." The suggestion is unfair, and its in- directness makes it worse. No one doubts that an average human mind would see great incongruity and oddity in such an event; but the question is, whether, and to what extent, average human notions of congruity and singularity may be relied upon for the purpose of testing the truth of statements as to the operations of the divine mind. Upon that point Mrs. Stowe would have a right to be heard if she had anything to say ; but till it is decided, it is not only premature, but irreverent and unfeeling, to in- troduce the subordinate question. The gospel of vagueness and sentiment has obtained a miserable currency in these times. We think that the sea will never come, the waves never beat, the floods never rage again, and we accordingly build our houses on the sand. This is a great evil ; for even if it be true that society is so firmly organized 318 ESSAYS. that we have got to the end of those trials which search the heart and reins — if we have secured for ourselves and our heirs for ever that fair chance of being comfortable, provided we are industrious, which may be roughly taken as the meaning of the phrases ''civilization" and "social progress," — it is still not the less important that our mental foundations should be firmly settled. We have still got to live, to marry, to educate children, to discharge some duty in life, and, after all, to die, and go we know not where ; and there is something infinitely contemptible in doing all this in a blind, helpless, drifting way, with nothing to guide us but a strange hash of inclinations and traditions. If any spectacle can be sadder than this, it is that of clever, ingenious people who pass their lives in gossiping about the great principles in which their forefathers really did believe, and by believing in which they purchased for their children the inesti- mable privilege of being able, without conscious in- convenience, to do without any principles at all, and to pass their time in prattling over incongruities between their practice and the small remnant of their theories. The Great Eastern, or some of her suc- cessors, will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to be per- formed with similar facility. Progress and science may, perhaps, enable untold millions to live and die: without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage, and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights, and blazing THE MINISTER'S WOOING. 319 towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands ; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and ice- bergs, its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and eternity, their Maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite views of their relations to them and to each other. October 22, 1859. 320 ESSAYS. XXXIII. MR. MANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. Mb. Mansel lias just republished, in a separate form, an article on metaphysics which he contributed to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and which illustrates the common conviction that it is almost equally unlikely that metaphysical inquiries should ever lose their interest or ever issue in any conclusion. It is not necessary, in order to account for this, to resort to the humiliating theory that metaphysics are merely a game which ingenious people may play at indefinitely. The true inference is that their value must not be measured by their tendency to produce unanimity. They have substantial indirect results, for they furnish convincing proofs of the falsehood of many opinions, though they may not prove the truth of any. Almost all discussions upon politics, morality, theology, and other subjects which interest human beings as such, involve metaphysical considerations ; and if it can be shown that the metaphysical foundation of a propo- sition belonging to any one of these subjects is wrong, the proposition itself falls to the ground, though it does not follow that the proposition is true because its metaphysical foundation is not shown to be unsound. A man's metaphysical opinions thus almost always ME. HANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. 321 are, and are almost universally regarded as beino-, the fortifications of his opinions, or of the opinions of those with whom he sympathizes, upon matters of more immediate interest ; and every new meta- physical system, even if it differs little in essence from its predecessors, may be regarded as a new line of works thrown up to defend a position which always has been, and always will be, attacked and defended with all the resources which the existing state of skill and science can bring to bear upon it. The questions of free will, moral obligation, and the origin of knowledge, are like the barrier fortresses of Belgium and France. They are bones of contention in every generation, and are occupied sometimes by one power and sometimes by another, whilst they have been, or will be, attacked and defended by' battering-rams, by archers, by arquebuses, and by Armstrong guns. The obstinacy and continuity of the warfare rather enhances than diminishes its interest ; for, as the question whether Antwerp is to be French or Belgian for a whole generation is one of vast importance to that generation — though it is highly probable that in thirty or forty years the old quarrel will have come round to the old place — so the deter- mination of the question whether, at a particular time, nominalism or realism is to give the tone to the leading minds of the period, though it constantly recurs, decides as constantly the whole complexion of each successive age. Mr. Mansel's contribution to the great perennial controversy is a remarkable one. It is remarkable for its weight and brevity, and for the precision and viffour of the language in which it is embodied. It S 21 322 ESSAYS. is divided into two parts, of which the first treats of pyschology, and the second of ontology — which include respectively the philosophy of the phenomena of consciousness, and of the realities by which con- sciousness is produced. Consciousness is a state of the conscious person, and though in itself a single act or state, may be mentally resolved into two elements — intuition, or presentative, and thought, or representative consciousness. Presentative conscious- ness is the recognition by the mind of sensation. Representative consciousness, or thought, includes three stages — >the formation of a mental image of the object perceived by presentative consciousness ; the formation of a general notion derived from a number of similar images ; and the appropriation of a sign — generally (though not always, as in the case of the deaf and dumb) a name or word — to the notion. Thus the mind recognizes the impression which a tree makes on the retina of the eye — this is presentative consciousness. It then depicts it. From many such pictures it forms a general notion, and to that notion it at last appropriates a name. These three acts together constitute thought, or representative con- sciousness. By an obvious analogy, consciousness may be viewed in relation to its matter or to its form. The impressions supplied from without constitute its matter. The mind itself supplies the form which, in its widest sense, is that of relation to the mind ; but this universal characteristic of consciousness mani- fests itself under the two special forms of space and time, subject to which we conceive, and cannot but conceive, all existences whatever ; for every object which affects the senses occupies some portion of MR. MANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. 323 space, and every thought which occurs to the mind occupies some portion of time. As space and time are invariable elements of every act of consciousness, which no effort of thought can get rid of or conceive as absent — and as they are, both logically and in some degree chronologically, prior to the objects of sense — they are, in Mr. Mansel's opinion, innate elements of the ideas which experience calls into actual con- sciousness. Passing from these general forms of consciousness to its special forms, he proceeds to describe the action of the different senses, as well as that of the different powers and passions of the mind ; and amongst these he includes several elements the existence of which always has been, and will be, hotly contested. The most important of these are as follows : — He agrees in the opinion that there is in morality an intuitive element as well as one which is contributed by expe- rience, though he observes that the two are so much mixed up together from the very beginning of our conscious life that we cannot say how much of our existing conception of morality at any given time belongs to either ; but he believes that the distinc- tion between good and evil, right and wrong, is an ultimate one, perceived, like the distinction between colours, by an intuition which supplies the foundation of all subsequent reasonings. He believes also in free will, the evidence of which he asserts to exist " in the consciousness of the power of choosing between two alternative determinations." He also believes that people are directly conscious of their personal existence. "Unless our whole conscious- ness is a delusion and a lie, self is something more 21—2 324 ESSAYS. than the aggregate of sensations, thoughts, volitions, &c I am immediately conscious of myself, seeing and hearing, thinking and willing." " This personality .... can be made clearer by no description or comparison, for it is revealed to us in all the clearness of an original intuition." He also believes that thought has its form as well as its substance, and that this form consists of three "laws of thought as thought" — which are identity (A is A), contradiction (A is not- A), and the law of the " excluded middle " (" every possible object is either A or not-A"). These three principles are the foundation of formal logic. Finally, he main- tains that it is a " fact of consciousness which it is the duty of the philosopher to admit, instead of dis- guising it to suit the demand of a system," that " there are certain necessary truths which, once acquired, no matter how, it is impossible by any effort of thought to conceive as reversed or reversible." These are of four kinds — Logical judgments, in which the predi- cate is identical with the whole or part of the attri- butes comprehended in the subject, as that every triangle must have three angles ; mathematical judg- ments, which express a necessary relation between two distinct notions concerning quantity, continuous or discrete, as that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, or that 7+5 = 12 ; moral judgments, which State the immutable obligations of certain laws of conduct, whether actually observed in practice or not, as that ingratitude or treachery must at all times, and in all persons, be worthy of condemna- tion ; and lastly, metaphysical judgments, expressing an apparently necessary relation between the known ME. MANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. 325 and the unknown, between the sensible phenomenon and the supersensible reality — as that every attribute belongs to some substance, and that every change is brought about by some cause. The logical judg- ments are only particular cases of the general laws of thought just mentioned. The mathematical judg- ments, though suggested by the experience of external phenomena, are supplied by the direct intuition of the mind itself that two straight lines cannot enclose a space, or that two and two make four. Moral judgments, in the same way, give experience its form, and do not receive their form from it. Upon observ- ing certain facts, I am conscious of an obligation to act in certain ways in reference to them, nor is it in my power to suppose this obligation to be reversed whilst my own personality is unchanged, for it is a constituent element of my personality. The meta- physical judgments as to cause and substance do not appear to Mr. Mansel to be as certain as the other three. They are only accidentally and not essentially necessary. We cannot think about qualities except as being the qualities of some thing, nor can we think of any occurrence except as preceded by some other without which it would not have occurred. But this inability is capable of being resolved into association. Such are the principal points maintained by Mr. Mansel in relation to the constitution of the mind itself. Of that upon which the mind acts, or onto- logy, he says very little, and most of what he does say consists of an account of the views of others. His own opinions are summed up shortly in the book itself, and must here be referred to in a manner even more summary. The principal subjects upon which 326 » ESSAYS. we think are the external world, ourselves and our own constitution, theology, morality, and all that is included under the word taste, in its most extended sense. Mr. Mansel maintains that, in relation to all these subjects, with the single exception of ourselves, or psychology, we deal with phenomena only, and not with realities — that all we can say aboot the external world is that we think, and are, by the constitution of our minds, compelled to think, certain thoughts, but that we have no means of ascertaining whether in fact there are, or are not, any realities independent of, and corresponding to, these thoughts. He entertains the same opinion with regard to theology, morality, and taste; but with regard to psychology, he says it is otherwise, for our conscious- ness does not prove, but constitutes our existence, and that consciousness asserts the existence of a perma- nent self under and inclusive of successive modifica- tions, of which some are passive, and others active and determined by free will. Such is a sketch of the main positions of Mr. Mansel's book — compressed, no doubt, to an extent which is barely compatible with a fair representation of its purpose and spirit, and which is incompatible with that full recognition and exemplification of the .intellectual merits of the author which it would be unjust to omit from a more extended notice. It is, however, sufficient to render intelligible some obser- ■ vations on the general character of the class of specu- lations to which Mr. Mansel's work belongs. The practical importance of metaphysics depends prin- cipally on the fact that the two great metaphysical schools are the representatives in abstract speculation MR. MANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. 327 of the two great parties which divide between them almost every department of human affairs. To use a rough and scanty, but intelligible metaphor, those who refer our knowledge to sensation and experience are the Whigs, and those who refer it to intuition are the Tories, of speculation. The tacit conviction that this is so in the main, though the observation would require many important modifications before it could be advanced as even approximately true, is that which gives to metaphysical inquiry almost all the interest which it possesses for the world at large. Perhaps the broadest explicit metaphysical question in which this sentiment could find its full expression is, whether there are any opinions whatever in any department of human affairs which are by their own nature exempt from criticism and inquiry, and which, therefore, furnish that for which human nature is constantly craving, in one way or another — an ulti- mate, infallible standard of truth, by comparison with which the truth or falsehood of specific opinions may be decided. It will appear, from the foregoing account of his opinions, that, with many limitations and explanations, Mr. Mansel answers this question in the affirmative, though his admission (it is his own term, and it is a very characteristic one) that all de- partments of thought, including theology, but except- ing psychology, are concerned with phenomena, and not with absolute realities, makes his speculations far more formidable to all received opinions than almost any others which have attained any considerable popularity. This point need not be discussed here, however interesting it may be to those who suppose that in Mr. Mansel they have at length found the 328 , ESSAYS. Athanasius who is to beat down the heresies which flourish so vigorously in various departments of theo- logical and social belief. The validity of his affirma- tive answer to the question just stated is a subject of discussion more suitable to this place. With all the skill of a subtle controversialist, Mr. Mansel contrives to put his propositions in a form which makes it very difficult for any one to be sure whether he agrees with them or not. The distinction between psycho- logy and ontology — between the subject which thinks and the objects of which it thinks — is broad in appear- ance, but subtle in reality, for it is next to impossible to keep up in speculation the distinction between the object which suggests the impression and the impres- sion which is suggested; Indeed, the distinction itself (as Mr. Mansel admits) is hypothetical, and it is in- evitably unnoticed by language. Thus, the earlier part of Mr. Mansel's book is full of propositions which are ontological in their terms, and would be so understood by any ordinary reader, but which he might [probably defend against objectors by saying that he asserted them only psychologically. There is, however, one objection to the whole of his theory upon the subject of consciousness which, if well founded, goes to the root of all attempts to lay down unassailable propositions. This objection seems occasionally to present itself to Mr. Mansel's mind; but he never fully states it, and, of course, does not answer it. It is as follows: — Thought, Mr. Mansel tells us, is composed of four stages or elements. First, there is the mental recognition of that physical emotion which constitutes one branch of sensation ; next, imagination ; then the formation ME. MANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. 329 of a notion from many images; and, lastly, the naming of the notion by means of language. Thought, therefore, implies language as its indis- pensable instrument ; and, so far as we know, where there is no language there is no thought, in our sense of the word. Thus, whatever can claim the name of knowledge must be embodied in words or signs. Assuming [this account of thought and of language to be true, it follows that between the first direction of the mind to any object whatever, and the enunciation of any proposition whatever about that object, there are four different openings at which any amount of error may enter — which error, being antecedent to the very construction of language, cannot be eliminated by its use. First, the mind may not fully take in the information which the senses supply ; and that it does not always do so is plain from the fact that by repeated and careful attention we increase our knowledge of the appear- ance of objects. When a man looks, for example, at a pattern, he sees, first, a surface of confused colours, and afterwards colours disposed on a particular plan. Next, the imagination may form a more or less exact and complete picture of the object perceived. Thirdly, the notion derived from these pictures may express the important common features of each with infinitely various degrees of accuracy and complete- ness. And, lastly, the same is true of the appro- priateness of the sign or word which is affixed to the notion. Thus words, which are the materials of thought, are impregnated with error. Daily expe- rience informs us of the consequences. If any one attempts to determine the meaning of any one of the 330 ESSAYS. familiar words which are constantly passing his lips, he will find that each has its history, and that many form a sort of summary of the thoughts and observa- tions of ages. What, for example, is the meaning of the common words " gentleman " and "comfortable ?" Essays, perhaps Yolumes, might be written on either of them. What is meant by any one of the words which enter into the propositions asserted by Mr. Mansel to be absolutely and eternally true ? Con- sciousness, he says, assures me of my own existence. But no one, as Mr. Mansel would say, is " presenta- tively" or directly conscious of a proposition. No one feels that the words " I exist " are absolutely true. What we all feel is something which we describe by those words, not because we know that they are absolutely true, but because .we have always been accustomed to hear them. ' Our direct con- sciousness neither does nor can decide whether any and what ambiguities and mysteries lurk in the two words " I " and " exist," any more than that part of our consciousness to which we give the name of a perception of water tells us whether water is or is not composed of oxygen and hydrogen. What that is to which the word " I " is affixed, is a boundless question. The word "exist" is a mere metaphor. No one could say that he was conscious of the propo- sition " I stand out ; " and who can say what is the exact distance from its original meaning to which the word has travelled ? If these considerations are well founded, it will follow at once that whatever may be the process by which we arrive at what we call our knowledge — whether it is the result of mere experience, or MR. MANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. 331 whether, as certainly appears far more probable, the mind itself contributes something to what Mr. Mansel calls the form of thought — it will equally follow that such a thing as a self-evident verbal proposition, the absolute truth of which can never be contested, is not to be found ; for the question as to the meaning of the words in which it is couched is always open, and the assertion that the words are either founded on imperfect observation, or imperfectly express the ob- servation on which they are founded, or are incom- plete metaphors, or are defective in some other essential particular, must always be open to proof. This is greatly confirmed by the circumstance that almost every word which describes mental operations is ob- viously metaphorical, and may therefore be assumed to be tentative and incomplete. To " attend," for example, is a metaphor from stretching ; to " apply," a metaphor from folding ; and men who have made a special study of philology would be able to illustrate this observation indefinitely. One thing at least is certain, that if any words are original names of specific things, and exactly fit and express them, many more are not, and we can never know which are which. Who, for example, can say that the words " space " and " time," of which Mr. Mansel speaks so definitely, really describe the things to which they apply as nearly as human language can describe them? Every one knows that nothing is more easy than to extract from the word "space" every sort of contradiction. Surely it is at least as possible that this may be the fault of the inadequacy of the word as that it proceeds, as Mr. Mansel seems to think, from conditions under which, by the 332 ESSAYS. constitution of our nature, we are compelled to think. This objection lies against the whole of Mr. Mansel's theory, and is readily applied to each member of it. It entirely overthrows the authority of consciousness considered, as Mr. Mansel seems to consider it, as an enouncer of infallible dogmas ; for consciousness is (or rather issues in) thought, thought must be embodied in language, and language is tentative, incomplete, and sometimes contradictory. This doctrine does not, however, lead, as it might appear at first sight to lead, to universal scepticism. It only shows what consciousness cannot do, but it by no means follows that men cannot be sure of anything, or even that the constitution of their own minds contributes nothing to that certainty. It would no doubt tend to overthrow that transcendental authority which Mr. Mansel claims for particular propositions ; but it leaves untouched that other certainty of the truth of the very same propositions which is derived principally from experience, partly, in all probability, from experience modified by some attributes of the mind which it is beyond the power of human knowledge, at least in its present condition, to specify with precision. This may be illustrated by a single case. Mr. Mansel asserts that it is a " necessary truth " that two and two make four, that " by no possible effort of thought can we conceive that twice two can make any other number than four . . . nor yet can we conceive it possible that by any future change in the constitution of things, even by an exer- tion of Omnipotence, these facts can hereafter become other than they are, or that they are otherwise in ME. HANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. 333 any remote part of the universe." "We are, he adds, far more certain that this is so than that day and night will continue, because it is a truth " conceived as possessing an eternal and absolute necessity which no exertion of power can change," whereas the other is " only one out of many possible arrangements." The question is, whether our certainty of the truth of the multiplication table arises from experience or from a transcendental conviction of its truth excited by experience, but anterior to, and formative of it. Let Mr. Mansel consider this case. There is a world in which, whenever two pairs of things are either placed in proximity or are contemplated together, a fifth thing is immediately created and brought within the contemplation of the mind engaged in putting two and two together. This is surely neither incon- ceivable, for we can readily conceive the result by thinking of common puzzle tricks, nor can it be said to be beyond the power of Omnipotence, yet in such a world surely two and two would make five. That is, the result to the mind of contemplating two twos would be to count five. This shows that it is not in- conceivable that two and two might make five ; but, on the other hand, it is perfectly easy to see why in this world we are absolutely certain that two and two make four. There is probably not an instant of our lives in which we are not experiencing the fact. We see it whenever we count four books, four tables or chairs, four men in the street, or the four corners of a paving stone, and we feel more sure of it than of the rising of the sun to-morrow, because our experience upon the subject is so much wider and applies to such an infinitely greater number of cases. 334 ESSAYS. Nor is it true that every one who has once been brought to see it is equally sure of it. A boy who has just learned the multiplication table is pretty sure that twice two are four, but is often extremely doubt- ful whether or not seven times nine are sixty-three. If his teacher told him that twice two made five, his certainty would be greatly impaired. It would also be possible to put a case of a world in which two straight lines should be universally supposed to include a space. Imagine a man who had never had any experience of straight lines through the medium of any sense whatever suddenly placed upon a railway stretching out on a perfectly straight line to an indefinite distance in each direc- tion. He would see the rails, which would be the first straight lines he ever saw, apparently meeting, or at least tending to meet, at each horizon ; and he would thus infer, in the absence of all other experience, that they actually did inclose a space, when produced far enough. Experience alone could undeceive him. A world in which every object was round, with the single exception of a straight inaccessible railway, would be a world in which every one would believe that two straight lines enclosed a space. In such a world, therefore, the impossibility of conceiving that two straight lines can enclose a space would not exist ; and Mr. Mansel rests his conclusion, that straight lines could not under any circumstances enclose a space, on the impossibility of conceiving that they should do so. If Mr. Mansel's "necessary truths" are not ade- quate to such tests as these, how can he maintain that it is a necessary truth that " ingratitude " is wrong, MR. HANSEL'S METAPHYSICS. 335 when, with all his great ingenuity, he would find it impossible to say precisely what ingratitude means? The conclusion seems to be, that though it is neither impossible nor improbable that our words and feelings may represent external realities, physical, moral, and spiritual, we are in possession of no verbal proposi- tions whatever respecting any one of them which can claim an exemption from inquiry on its own authority. June 30, 1860. THE END. London : Printed iy Smith, Eldbb & Co., 15J, Old Bailey, E.C. 65, Gornhill, London, September, 18G2. NEW AND STANDARD WORKS PUBLISHED BT SMITH, ELDEE AO CO. Journal of a Political Mission to Afghanistan, Wtih an Account of the Country and People. By H. W. Bellew, Medical Officer to the Mission. With 8 Plates. Demy 8vo. Robert O'Hara Burke and the Australian Exploring Expedition of 1860. By Andrew Jackson. With Map and Portrait. Post 8vo. Our Last Years in India. By Mrs. John B. Speid. Post 8vo. Against Wind and Tide. By Holme Lee. Author of " Sylvan Holt's Daughter," " Kathie Brande," &o. A New and Cheaper Edition. Pcap 8vo. 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