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 THE 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OF NECESSITY; 
 
 OB, 
 
 NATURAL LAW 
 
 AS APPLICABLE TO 
 
 MOEAL, MENTAL, AND SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARLES BRAY. 
 
 SECOND EDITION, REVISED. 
 
 " Let the Dead Past, bury its Dead." LONGMHOW. 
 
 ' That no idea or feeling arises, save as a result of some physical force expended in pro- 
 ducing it, is fast becoming a common-place of science." HEBBEBT SPKNCEK. 
 
 1 Everything that exists depends upon the past, prepares the future, and is related to the 
 whole." OBKSTBD. 
 
 1 The ordinary events of History instead of being causes are merely the occasions on which 
 the real causes act." H. T. BCCKLB. 
 
 ' Society prepares crime, and the guilty are only the instruments by which it is executed." 
 QCETBLET. 
 
 ' The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with 
 fools." 
 
 ' When men have once acquiesced in untrue opinions, and registered them as authentic 
 records in their minds, it is no less impossible to speak intelligibly to such men 
 than to write legibly on paper already scribbled over." HOUSES. 
 
 LONDON :
 
 PRINTED AT THE HERALD OFFICE, COVENTRY.
 
 Stack 
 Annex 
 
 5" 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE establishment of the British Association for the Advancement 
 of Social Science in October, 1857, was the practical recognition of the 
 Principle that Mind is equally the subject of fixed law with Matter. 
 The disputes touching Free Will and Necessity have hitherto been 
 regarded as idle metaphysical controversy, having no practical result ; 
 but Free Will implies contingency or chance, and contingency is fatal 
 to Law, and without Law there can be no Science ; for Science is the 
 power to predict the future from the past, by the aid of known, fixed, 
 aud determinate law, excluding all contingency. Philosophical Neces- 
 sity, then, and Law are the same thing ; and instead of the efforts to 
 establish its truth being idle and worthless, its recognition must be the 
 base of all progress, and can alone enable Social Science to take its place 
 by the side of Physical, or indeed to deserve the name of Science at all. 
 The object of this work is to inquire how far our present knowledge will 
 enable us to apply this principle to mind and morals as it has hitherto 
 been applied to Physics, and to determine thereby the important ques- 
 tions of, What is man ? What are his obligations ? and How may they 
 best be performed ? 
 
 The writer is aware how imperfect a work must be where so wide a 
 range of subject is compressed into so small a compass, and how un- 
 attractive a dry detail of principles, without ornament and without 
 illustration, is likely to be with respect to topics which, from their 
 abstruseness, are ordinarily distasteful, even when touched by a 
 master hand aud relieved by all the graces of style. Ambitious as the 
 task would seem, and wide as is the space to be travelled over, it is not 
 so great as it appears if we leave out all the mere assumption and 
 speculation which time has hallowed and prejudice sanctified, and are 
 guided only by the light of present discovery, aud proved and positive 
 
 1C
 
 IV PREFACE. 
 
 science ; and he trusts therefore that the searcher after truth, who, like 
 himself, has felt the want of fixed principles in Ethical Philosophy, will 
 forgive the imperfections of the manner, and find something to interest 
 him in the matter of the following pages. 
 
 Physical science has made rapid strides, and knowledge has secured 
 for us, to a vast extent, a dominion over earth, sea, and air. But the 
 science of man, which alone can make this power available to the 
 increase of happiness, has been in a corresponding degree neglected, 
 and held to be of less importance than that knowledge which tends 
 only to the increase of wealth. The knowledge that men have of 
 their own minds, is ordinarily considered to furnish sufficient insight 
 into human nature, without the aid of mental philosophy ; and in 
 Moral and Social Science, the opinions to which they are born, based on 
 the theology of their country, constitute to most individuals a standard 
 of truth. Hence there is no subject on which such various and con- 
 flicting opinions exist as upon that of the present inquiry ; people feel 
 rather than reason, and these great questions are considered so purely 
 controversial, as to be hitherto inadmissible into British Associations, 
 Mechanics' and Philosophical Institutions, and all other Societies 
 devoted to the moral and intellectual culture of the people. 
 
 Men brought up in the same University, reading the same books, 
 trained by the same studies, come to conclusions on these questions 
 diametrically opposite. As an illustration of this diversity of opinion, 
 Mr. G. W. Hastings, Hon. Secretary to the Social Science Association, is 
 reported to have said at Glasgow, on the 20th of March, 1860 : " In 
 regard to this Association, as it was called, for the Promotion of Social 
 Science, he had heard several objections made to it. He had heard it 
 said that there was no such thing as Social Science that the whole 
 thing was a delusion that the term science was not applicable to the 
 pursuits of the Association. He, however, must differ very strongly 
 from such opinions. They might not be able to put their propositions 
 in the same exact forms as the followers of the physical sciences had 
 been able to do. But it was not very many years since some of the 
 exact sciences themselves were in the very position in which Social 
 Science was now ; and he thought the philosopher who had written so 
 much upon the subject of Social Science had said truly that it was the
 
 PREFACE. V 
 
 greatest of all sciences, for it embraced all problems connected with 
 mankind, morally, intellectually, physically, and existed to solve that 
 great question How could men live in a community to the greatest 
 advantage of each other 1" On the other hand, at the meeting in Lon- 
 don, last year, (1862,) we find the President of the Section on Social 
 Economy, Richard Monckton Milnes, Esq., in his address, repeating 
 the very objection against which the Secretary protests. He says, " I 
 own I almost prefer the name of ' Social Economy' to that of ' Social 
 Science,' because I have always felt that in treating upon social ques- 
 tions it is hardly possible to do so in a really scientific manner." * * 
 "If all mankind resembled one another; if you could predicate dis- 
 tinctly either of a nation or an individual what the mind were to be ; if 
 you could distinctly say that such and such a thing, such and such a 
 series of actions, would produce such and such a series of results then, 
 I think, it would be quite right that we should talk of Social Science. 
 But when we see that, as in the work of education, you may apply the 
 same educational processes to a considerable number of individuals, and 
 yet produce totally different results ; when we see the same elements 
 of civilization given to different nations, and yet those nations pro- 
 ducing totally different results, both in their individual character and 
 the place they occupy in the history of the world, I think we shall see 
 that there enters into this question an element which is almost contra- 
 dictory of strict scientific principle. That element is human liberty, the 
 free-will of mankind. Without that free-will no man can have individual 
 power of action, no man can call himself a man ; and this free-will, 
 when applied to the community of nations, assuming all the forms of 
 public opinion and public estimates of great questions, this itself so 
 modifies the questions of Social Economy that I think you will see what 
 I mean when I say I much prefer that definition to the stricter one of 
 ' Social Science.'" 
 
 Again, in opposition to this, we find the most advanced school of 
 thinkers represented by Mr. H. T. Buckle, who says, " The actions of 
 men being guided by their antecedents, are in reality never inconsistent, 
 but, however capricious they may appear, only form one vast scheme of 
 universal order, of which we in the present state of knowledge can . 
 barely see the outline." He also says, "It will be as rare to find an
 
 VI PREFACE. 
 
 historian who denies the undeviating regularity of the moral world, as 
 it now is to find a philosopher who denies the regularity of the material 
 world." 
 
 A writer in the "Westminster Review," (Oct., 1861,) in an 
 article on Professor Goldwin Smith, on the Study of History, says, "He 
 (Mr. Smith) may think that the scientific view of history accepts the 
 other horn of the dilemma the doctrine of Necessity. It does nothing 
 of the sort. It stands upon its own proof. It leaves the antagonistic 
 dogmas of metaphysics in their internecine struggles. It accepts and 
 adopts the practical conclusions of both parties. * * How these two are 
 reconciled, may still remain an insoluble problem in the eyes of meta- 
 physicians, but it has now ceased to possess any interest or use. The 
 practical issue is, that none believe the will to be the victim of circum- 
 stance, and none believe it to transcend the sphere of knowledge. In 
 the system of a great metaphysician Free- Will and Necessity are two 
 contradictories, either of which is inconceivable. With our faculties, 
 he says, it is equally impossible to conceive choice combined with 
 certainty, as it is to conceive volition without a cause." (p. 307-8.) It 
 has been this unwise and unworthy spirit of compromise, this attempt 
 to hold both doctrines of Free-Will and Necessity, of not clearly 
 seeing that if one is true the other must be false, that has led to all the 
 inconsistencies on this subject, and obscured the knowledge, and pre- 
 vented the advance of a true philosophy of morals. A man is said to 
 be "free" so long as there is no "compulsion from without over- 
 coming resistance from within," so long as there is no physical 
 obstruction or mental derangement interfering with the exercise of his 
 natural powers ; but it is evident that the will is the " victim of cir- 
 cumstance," so far as it is entirely dependent upon these natural 
 powers ; that a man did not endow himself with these powers, and 
 although it is true he can do as he pleases, he can only please to act or 
 will as they direct. 
 
 It is of no use, therefore, trying any longer to temporise with this fact, 
 but our ethical code and our ideas of moral responsibility must be 
 brought into accord with it. There would be little use in Law and 
 Order in Physics, if one-half of nature, and that the most important 
 mind, were still left to chance or free-will, or rather "if choice were
 
 PREFACE. vii 
 
 not combined with certaiuty." What is called knowledge of humau 
 nature, and the skill, sagacity, or wisdooi that manages and commands 
 mankind, is nothing more than a better acquaintance than ordinary of 
 the laws of niind ; and our calculations of futurity thus formed, are 
 made with almost absolute assurance of success. The recognition of 
 Philosophical Necessity, or that Mind is equally the subject of law with 
 Matter, involves the reconstruction of our whole ethical code, which 
 must be rebuilt upon the principle that nothing is to be left to accident 
 in the moral world, any more than in the physical. This element of 
 chance must be excluded, for it has been truly observed that "five hun- 
 dred people may be found to lead a forlorn hope, for five that would 
 consent to take a red-hot poker in their bare hands." The present sys- 
 tem, based upon a fiction, must be replaced by an exposition of natural 
 law, and a clear elucidation of the natural and inevitable consequences 
 of our actions. 
 
 Instead of the recognition of Necessity " ceasing to possess any 
 interest or use," as observed by the writer in the Westminster, we may 
 mention as illustrative of the contrary, that if the doctrine be accepted 
 and logically used, we get rid at once of Revenge, Remorse, and Punish- 
 ment, except such as is for the good of the individual offending : for 
 the first would be absurd, the second useless, as the recognized and 
 experienced consequences of our actions are sufficient for our future 
 guidance, and "forgiveness," or remission of punishment that was for 
 our good would be simply an injury. Revenge, remorse, and retri- 
 butive punishment are the sources of half the crime and misery in the 
 world. 
 
 The problem of man's nature, of the why and the wherefore ; of 
 his relation to this world, and to the past, present, and future of his 
 existence ; of the origin and object of evil, must always have an 
 increasing and absorbing interest, and every one has his own solution of 
 such problems, founded ordinarily upon tradition and feeling, and not at 
 all upon science, or upon what we really can know ; and each trembles 
 with alarm at every assault upon his time-honoured system, fearing 
 that if his venerable solution must be laid aside, the bulwarks of virtue 
 must go with it ; but such persons may share the consolation and satis- 
 faction which it has given the present writer to find that morality and
 
 Vlll PEEFACE. 
 
 virtue are based upon laws as fixed and determinate as the law of gravi- 
 tation which upholds the universe itself, aud that the Universal Father 
 thus reveals Himself, iu a language that cannot be misunderstood or 
 misinterpreted, to every sect and every clime. 
 
 Much in this Edition has been re-written, and much has been 
 added ; and although time has only strengthened the conviction which 
 the writer entertained of the truth of the Ethical principles of the 
 work ; in its Political Economy it is believed that there is nothing now 
 at variance with the doctrines so admirably laid down by J. S. Mill. 
 The aspirations of the Socialists after community of interest and pro- 
 perty are consigned, at least for many generations, to Utopia, although 
 the economic principle in the form of Co-operative Societies, is shown 
 to be making rapid progress. 
 
 It must be added that this work makes no pretensions to literary 
 merit. The writer has been too much in earnest to find out the 
 truth, even to think of the graces of style ; he fears even that in 
 some cases he has not been sufficiently full and explicit to make himself 
 understood. This is a great fault, but he trusts that the seed thus 
 sown will not in consequence be altogether fruitless, and that at no 
 distant day, some mind more competent than his own to do justice to 
 the all-important principles laid down, may be induced to do so by the 
 imperfect effort now made. 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 For " unusual" p. 208, line 24, read " universal." 
 For "intentions" same page, line 31, read "intuitions." 
 
 <fec., <fcc.
 
 CONTENTS, 
 
 Introduction 
 
 PART I. 
 
 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 CHAFFER I. 
 
 Philosophical Necessity 11 
 
 The Application of Philosophic-id Necessity to 
 Responsibility, Praise and Blame, Iteward 
 and Punishment, Virtue and Vice 29 
 
 CH AFTER II. 
 
 On the Origin, Objects, and Advantages of Evil 41 
 
 Pain considered as the necessary and most 
 effectual Guardian of that system of Organi- 
 zation upon which happiness depends ... 46 
 Pain necessary as a Motive and Stimulus to 
 
 Action 56 
 
 Death 62 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Principles of Morality : 
 
 Moral Obligation 86 
 
 Pain and Pleasure 90 
 
 The Practice of Morality 98
 
 CONTENTS. 
 PART II. 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Matter 117 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Mind 129 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Analysis of the Mental Faculties 150 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 On the Origin and Bounds of our Knowledge 201 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Belief 213 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Materialism, Consciousness, Identity, Association 237 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 On the Connection of Mind with Organization 250
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PART III. 
 SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 On the Present Condition of Society 268 
 
 Density of the Population, Numbers, Wealth, 
 Occupation, Health, General Condition 269 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Wages, and the Laws which regulate them ; and the Causes 
 
 of the Poverty of the Working Classes 303 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 On the Measures proposed for the Amelioration of the Con- 
 dition of the People 311 
 
 The Functions of Government ... 316 
 
 Free Trade 317 
 
 Trade Unions 321 
 
 Land Allotments, and the Union of 
 
 Agriculture and Manufactures ... 327 
 
 Colonization and Emigration 341 
 
 Education 342 
 
 Religion 348 
 
 Co-operation 362 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 The Socialist Utopia 374 
 
 Summary and Conclusion 413
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NECESSITY, 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 THE Philosophy of Necessity is the " reason why" of Ne- 
 cessity. Necessity implies Law or a constant and invariable 
 order of events in the physical and also in the moral world. 
 Reason is exercised in the knowledge and calculation of this 
 fixed order, and if in any department of Nature this order did 
 not reign, in that department there could be no exercise of 
 reason. This is the "reason why" of "Necessity." 
 
 "Man, the servant and interpreter of Nature, can only 
 understand and-act in proportion as he observes or contemplates 
 the order of Nature ; more he can neither know nor do." 
 
 It is now extensively admitted that Lord Bacon has defined 
 in the above fundamental principle of the inductive Philosophy, 
 the extent of the knowledge of which man is capable ; what 
 Nature has really enabled him and what she has forbidden him 
 to do. For want of a clear perception of the boundaries of his 
 mind, which Nature herself has fixed, man has in all ages 
 dogmatized upon endless subjects, which from the very consti- 
 tution of his being, are beyond his reach ; and has formed, and 
 is continually forming, theories upon points which lie beyond 
 the range of his powers. Much speculation would be saved, 
 much pernicious error would be prevented, if we would always 
 B
 
 2 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 keep in view that it is the order of Nature alone, whether as 
 relating to matter or to mind, that we are capable of observing 
 and understanding ; that we can know neither the beginning nor 
 the end of things, but can only observe what is. We can know 
 in itself, neither the real nature of matter nor of mind, but 
 only the order in which one event follows another, or in which 
 one sensation follows another. " To aspire to the knowledge of 
 more than phenomena, their resemblances, co-existences, and 
 successions, is to aspire to transcend the inexorable limits 
 of human faculties. To know more, we must be more."* 
 
 Doubtless it is difficult to believe that all Science must be 
 resolved into the knowledge of antecedence and consequence 
 of cause and effect of the powers of nature ; for the power 
 of producing a given effect, and the cause, or the invariable 
 antecedent of such effect, are all synonymous terms ; yet such, 
 if we strictly analyse our knowledge, will be found to be the 
 case, and that nothing is really known to us but this relation of 
 things to each other and to ourselves. Thus one billiard ball 
 
 o 
 
 striking another, communicates motion to it; yet, simple as 
 this may appear, we know not how or why it does so. We say 
 the striking is the cause of the motion ; but we do not know 
 why one body striking another should communicate motion to 
 it, especially as it might be proved that it does not touch it. 
 All we know is that the motion invariably follows what we call 
 the striking. Again, heat converts water into steam ; the ex- 
 pansive force of steam acts upon the piston ; and the piston, by 
 the intervention of many further antecedents, produces many 
 further effects. Here again, all we know is that such causes, 
 cceteris paribus, will invariably produce the same effects ; in 
 other words, we know the relation of heat to water, of water 
 to steam, of steam to the piston, and of the piston to what it 
 has to perform. This kind of knowledge may be called certain 
 or Positive, because it may be proved, that is, made to take 
 
 * Lewea's Biographical History of Philosophy, p. xvi. See Dr. Thomas 
 Brown's " Theory of Cause and Effect," and his 7th Lecture on the "Philosophy 
 of the Human Mind ;" also, " First Principles," by Herbert Spencer, Part I., 
 " The Unknowable."
 
 INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 place again in the given or recognized order. But it will be 
 said that independently of the knowledge of the order of na- 
 ture, and of the relation of things to one another, we possess 
 a knowledge of things as individuals and also of their quali- 
 ties. This, however, is only a knowledge of their relation 
 to us. What we call individual existences and their qualities 
 is the effect such existences have upon the senses, and the 
 senses upon the brain ; it is the first link in the chain of 
 sequences. 
 
 Again, we know that due proportions of oxygen and hydro- 
 gen form water ; that sulphur, nitre, and charcoal, form gun- 
 powder ; and that a spark applied to the latter mixture causes 
 an explosion. But we know not how or why all this should 
 take place ; why a spark should have this relation to gunpowder, 
 i. e. why it should have this power, or be the cause, or invari- 
 able antecedent of its explosion. We know it as we can only 
 know everything else, by experience, from having observed 
 that such is the ORDER OF NATURE. Now as regards our know- 
 ledge of the relation that this explosion bears to ourselves, it is 
 exactly of the same character, merely the knowledge of the 
 sequence of events. The powder acts upon the air and the air 
 upon the tympanum, the tympanum upon the nerves and the 
 nerves upon the brain, and the action of the brain is the only 
 antecedent we can trace before the sensation which apprises us 
 of the explosion. To say that the brain acts upon the mind is 
 introducing a link in the chain for which, in the present state 
 of our knowledge, we have no warrant. Not that I would be 
 understood to affirm that the brain is the cause of the sensation ; 
 but the action of the brain is the invariable antecedent of sen- 
 sation, and we have no knowledge at present of anything 
 between ; to add a link to the chain of causation is as unphilo- 
 sophical as to leave one out. To make discoveries in science, 
 therefore, is merely to show what antecedents precede such and 
 such consequents; what causes invariably produce such and 
 such effects ; and by this knowledge we are enabled to adapt 
 our relation to external things, or their relation to us, so as to
 
 4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 produce the effect we wish. Thus to know, with the vulgar, 
 that the explosion produces the sound, is only available know- 
 ledge to a certain extent ; to learn that the gunpowder acts 
 upon the air is a discovery in science, and the various other 
 links between are essential to certain knowledge ; for by an 
 alteration in the air, the tympanum, the nerves, or the brain, a 
 different effect would be produced, i. e. the relation of the gun- 
 powder to ourselves would be changed ; or if a link were yet 
 undiscovered and left out we might infer that the same cause 
 did not always produce the same effect. Knowledge becomes 
 certain in proportion as we discover the invariable antecedent 
 to the consequent ; it is therefore less certain where Life is con- 
 cerned than it is in Physics, and still less so where sensation is 
 added to Life. In the action of medicine upon the body it is 
 seldom that the same remedy will produce precisely the same 
 effect in cases which appear to us to be similar ; the reason of 
 which is that so little is at present understood of vitality that 
 there may be many circumstances in each case which we are 
 unable to calculate upon, any one of which might be sufficient 
 to produce the different result. Knowledge is so much more 
 uncertain when Sensation is added to Life that invariable antece- 
 dence and consequence is here supposed to cease, the same 
 necessary relation between cause and effect not being held to 
 exist in mind as in matter. But this is an error, arising from 
 the circumstance that the causes that produce mental phenomena 
 are not always so perceptible as those that admit of more direct 
 experiment.* There is exactly the same connexion between 
 
 * If such coexistences and sequences as those of Biology and Sociology 
 are not yet reduced to law, the presumption is not that they are irreducible 
 to law, but that their laws elude our present means of analysis. Having long 
 ago proved uniformity throughout all the lower classes of relations ; and having 
 been step by step proving uniformity throughout classes of relations successively 
 higher and higher; if we have not at present succeeded with the highest classes, 
 it may be fairly concluded that our powers are at fault, rather than that the 
 uniformity does not exist. And unless we make the absurd assumption that 
 the process of generalization, now going on with unexampled rapidity, has 
 reached its limit, and will suddenly cease, we must infer that ultimately man- 
 kind will discover a constant order of manifestation even in the most involved, 
 obscure, and abstract phenomena. "First Principles" by Herbert Spencer, 
 p. 143.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 every action of the mind and its cause as between things ex- 
 ternal to the mind ; and not the slightest change takes place in 
 the mind, nor the most transient idea passes through it, but 
 has its cause ; which cause is always adequate in the same cir- 
 cumstances, to produce the same effect ; and it is only by such 
 admission that we can infer the existence of anything external 
 to ourselves, or even the existence of what we call ourselves. 
 It is of very great importance that we should clearly see that 
 the self of the conscious being is nothing but an object of ob- 
 servation, known only as everything else is known, by the 
 chain of necessary antecedents and consequents. Thus all we 
 can know of the mind of man is its successive changes which 
 are best observed in others in their effects or consequences ; 
 mere reflection on consciousness has produced all the errors of 
 Metaphysics. We see at once what a wide field is cleared 
 when we are obliged to admit that we know nothing of matter 
 in itself, or of mind in itself, for all the speculations based on 
 the essential difference in their nature at once fall to the ground, 
 and materialist and immaterialist can no longer be said to 
 exist. 
 
 The object of all Science, therefore, is to show the relation 
 of things to each other and to ourselves so as to anticipate 
 events. To this it is limited. " All that we know is, nothing 
 can be known," is true in one sense, for we know nothing of 
 the essential nature of anything or of how any one cause pro- 
 duces its effect. One thing invariably precedes another, and 
 we say that it has the power to produce it ; but what this power 
 is, or what makes the connexion, or whether the relation will 
 always exist or has only been established for a time, we do not 
 know, neither is it necessary, as far as we can see, that we 
 should know, for the knowledge of the order of nature is all 
 that is requisite for the proper exercise of reason, and for the 
 perfection of our happiness. Let us not then feel ourselves 
 degraded by the idea that the most diligent research has done 
 no more, and can do no more than trace the relation of things 
 here, and discover but a part of the order of nature ; and
 
 b INTRODUCTION. 
 
 since our inquiries can but end in the discovery of the rela- 
 tions of things as discernible by our present faculties, let us 
 cease from all those fruitless attempts to attain to knowledge 
 upon subjects beyond the comprehension of beings in our scale 
 of intelligence, which have hitherto so retarded the Science of 
 Mind, and prevented the happiness of man from bearing any 
 proportion to the means of happiness afforded him. Locke 
 says, "We shall not have much reason to complain of the 
 narrowness of our minds, if we will but employ them about 
 what may be of use to us, for of that they are very capa- 
 ble ; and it will be an unpardonable as well as childish peevish- 
 ness, if we undervalue the advantages of our knowledge, and 
 neglect to improve it to the ends for which it was given, because 
 there are some things set out of reach of it." Bacon says "the 
 real cause and root of almost all the evils in science is this : 
 that falsely magnifying and extolling the powers of the mind, 
 \ve seek not its true helps." 
 
 My object in the present treatise is to pursue this inductive 
 method of inquiry in investigating the nature of man ; his place 
 in creation ; the character of his mind ; and particularly to 
 trace to its legitimate consequences the doctrine of philosophical 
 necessity, which the connexion between cause and effect im- 
 plies. I would show that the mind of man is not an excep- 
 tion to nature's other works ; that like everything else it has 
 received a determinate character ; that all our knowledge of it 
 is precisely of the same kind as that of material things, and 
 consists in the observation of its order of action, or of the rela- 
 tion of cause and effect. This is a truth which, although 
 acknowledged by many writers, has never yet been made of 
 sufficient importance in the science of Mental and Moral Philo- 
 sophy. It has either been considered as a mere abstraction of 
 no practical use, or else avoided and stifled as leading to fatal- 
 ism, and otherwise dangerous in its tendency. But I hope to 
 be able to show, on the contrary, that upon this truth alone, 
 however it may be said to militate against man's free-will or 
 accountability, in some acceptation of the terms, our Educa-
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 tkmal and Political systems can be properly based, in accord- 
 ance with the nature of the being to be educated and governed. 
 If in setting a steam engine to work the engineer were to leave 
 much to its free will, the work would be but badly performed, 
 go as relates to man, if in our educational systems the causes 
 are inadequate to the intellectual and moral results we desire, 
 Ills free witt will not supply the deficiency. 
 
 That the same certain and calculable laws exist in the de- 
 partments of Life and Mind as in Physics is daily being made 
 evident by Statistics. Uncertainty may exist in individual cases, 
 or in a limited field of observation, but it is proved that in a 
 larger field, in a given number of cases, invariable results may 
 always be looked for. Thus, in a recent Report of the Regis- 
 trar-General on the population of England, he shows the 
 " law" to be that one person out of every 45 living at the com- 
 mencement of any year will die within that year. The depar- 
 ture from this law is very trifling, and the most valuable '- j 
 applications of it are already made by Life Insurance Com- 
 panies and others who base their calculations upon the absolute 
 certainty of its invariability. In the 12th Annual Report of 
 the Registrar- General we are informed " it may be broadly 
 stated that 27 in 1,000 men of the population, of the age of 
 20 and under 60, are suffering from one kind of disease or 
 other ; that several of the diseases are of long duration, that 
 others are recurrent, and that some are hereditary." But 
 Statistics now show that a similar uniformity is found to pre- 
 vail where mind is concerned as in matter. M. Quetelet has 
 furnished tables relative to crime in France, by which he shows 
 that "law" is equally certain and calculable with respect to crime 
 as to deaths. The same effects have followed similar inquiries 
 in this country. M. Quetelet says " the possibility of assign- 
 ing beforehand the number of the accused and condemned 
 which should occur in a country, is calculated to lead to seri- 
 ous reflections, since it involves the fate of several thousands 
 of human beings, who are impelled, as it were, by an irre- 
 sistible necessity, to the bar of the tribunal, and towards the
 
 8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 sentences of condemnation that there await them. These con- 
 clusions flow directly from the principle, already so often 
 stated in this work, that effects are in proportion to their 
 causes, and that the effects remain the same, if the causes 
 which have produced them do not vary." 
 
 Year by year the same number of persons commit suicide, 
 varying a little with varying circumstances. In London about 
 240 persons every year make away with themselves, while in 
 1848, the year of railway panic, 266 committed suicide. The 
 number of marriages are not regulated as is ordinarily supposed 
 by Love, but by the price of corn, that is, by the cheapness of 
 provisions and by the rate of wages. 
 
 To show the influence of numbers in reducing apparently 
 inextricable uncertainty to mathematical certainty, we will take 
 as an illustration the hairs on our head. It might be supposed 
 that the hairs on no two persons heads were exactly the same in 
 number, but if we pi'esume that the greatest number of hairs on 
 any one person's head is 250 thousand, then all persons above 
 that number must agree in the number of their hairs with one of 
 the 250 thousand, and in a million there must necessarily be 
 four alike. Varied as is human character and disposition, as 
 the hairs of our head, yet in the broad features there is con- 
 siderable agreement ; and, supposing the variety to be ex- 
 pressed by 1,000 or 10,000, then there would be ten persons 
 in every 10,000 or 100,000 who would, in similar circum- 
 stances, act exactly alike. 
 
 " Everything throughout creation," says one of the most 
 beautiful and philosophical writers of the present day, " is 
 governed by law : but over most of the tracts that come 
 within the active experience of mankind, the governing hand 
 is so secret and remote that until very large numerical masses 
 are brought under the eye at once, the controlling power is not 
 detected. To an appreciating mind there is something attract- 
 ively beautiful in the delicacy with which laws of unswerving 
 regularity and resistless force are withdrawn from view, masked 
 behind an apparently inexhaustible variety, an independence
 
 INTKODUCTION. 9 
 
 and spontaneity of action, and a playfulness of l accident,' 
 seemingly without control or bounds. It is impossible too 
 much to admire this indulgent feature of creative and adminis- 
 trative power, which permits thus its graciousness to be lost to 
 general sight in the success of the very illusion employed. The 
 whole vocabulary of those who talk of l chance' and ' luck,' 
 attests the matchless lightness and elasticity of gait which dis- 
 guise the majestic onward tread and movement of natural law. 
 Statistics are the touchstone under which the illusion at once 
 vanishes. Like some potent chemical test it ' precipitates' at 
 once, and exposes to view the latent law so skilfully held in 
 solution." It is in this wide space that man finds room for an 
 almost infinitely varied field of action for what he calls his 
 freedom of will, and which is the source of an infinitely varied 
 series of sensations, productive of much more happiness than 
 were his actions apparently more " fixed in fate." But of 
 course unless what is called "free-will" were ultimately go- 
 verned by law as everything else is, man's actions could never 
 be calculated, and a " Social Science," or a science of human 
 nature, would be an impossibility. But " forgetfulness as well 
 as free-will is under constant laws," for a late return, made by 
 the Post-Offices of London and Paris, shows that we can calcu- 
 late, that is, exactly foretell, the number of persons who will 
 forget eveiy year to address their letters. 
 
 " To those who have a steady conception of the regularity 
 of events, says Buckle, and have firmly seized the great truth 
 that the actions of men, being guided by their antecedents, are 
 in reality never inconsistent, but however capricious they may 
 appear, only form one vast scheme of universal order, of 
 which we in the present state of knowledge can barely see the 
 outline, to those who understand this which is at once the 
 key and the basis of history, the facts just adduced, so far 
 from being strange, will be precisely what would have been 
 expected, and ought long since to have been known. Indeed 
 the progress of inquiry is becoming so rapid and so earnest, 
 that I entertain little doubt that before another century has
 
 10 KTBODUCTION. 
 
 elapsed, the chain of evidence will be complete, and it will be 
 as rare to find an historian who denies the undeviating regu- 
 larity of the moral world, as it now is to find a philosopher 
 who denies the regularity of the material world."* 
 
 Bolingbroke observes that "Mankind, bred to think as 
 well as speak by rote, furnish their minds as they furnish their 
 houses or clothe their bodies, with the fancies of other men, 
 and according to the mode of the age and country. They pick 
 up their ideas and notions in common conversation or in 
 the schools. The first are always superficial, and both are 
 commonly false." Holding fast then to the principle of the 
 inductive philosophy, and regardless of mere opinion, however 
 prevalent, I shall proceed to the elucidation of the doctrine of 
 Philosophical Necessity and its Applications, to the conside- 
 ration of the Constitution of Man, and its relation to all that 
 surrounds him. 
 
 History of Civilization in England, p. 31.
 
 PAET L 
 
 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 
 
 THIS subject has generally been considered as one of unusual 
 difficulty, for the proper treatment of which human reason Is 
 scarcely adequate. But this view of it arises, not so much 
 from any real abstruseness in the question itself, as from the 
 apparent opposition which the doctrine offers to established 
 opinions, and even to common sense itself. Many, therefore, 
 and perhaps the greater number of those who have had their 
 attention called to it, and who have not been able to resist the 
 evidence upon which it stands, have found it necessary to admit 
 the opposite doctrine of freedom of will also; the incompati- 
 bility of the two, although allowed to be somewhat a mystery, 
 being a less difficulty with them than the giving up of many 
 pre-established opinions. 
 
 There is, perhaps no proposition that admits of stronger 
 proof, or that can be more logically, if not mathematically, 
 demonstrated; but its supposed tendency has mystified an 
 otherwise plain question. Many have admitted and proved the 
 doctrine of philosophical necessity, to serve a sectarian purpose, 
 who, when that object has been answered, have discarded it as 
 of no farther use ; as a mere abstraction, having no practical 
 bearing upon any one of the important interests of mankind ; 
 and even of mischievous tendency, when permitted to escape 
 from the closets of philosophers and to circulate amongst the 
 vulgar. The author of " The Natural History of Enthusiasm," 
 for instance, in his introductory Essay to Edwards' " Inquiry,"
 
 12 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 
 
 considers the doctrine, the truth of which he appears not to 
 deny, as useless when applied to questions of " common life, 
 affecting the personal, social, and political conduct of mankind, 
 or as applied to Theology and Christian doctrine, or to the 
 physiology of man, or to the higher metaphysics." But no 
 truth is unimportant, still less pernicious, and we think it may 
 be shown that this doctrine, so far from being valueless to man 
 in a practical sense, has a most important bearing upon all his 
 best interests, and is also fundamental to all just views of the 
 Divine Government. 
 
 Jonathan Edwards has hitherto been considered unanswer- 
 able. The following passages from the "Inquiry concerning 
 Freedom of Will," contain the argument in its support, as 
 stated by him : 
 
 " Tlie argument from cause and effect. 
 
 " Nothing comes to pass without a cause. What is self- 
 existent, must be from Eternity, and must be unchangeable; 
 but as to all things that begin to be, they are not self-existent, 
 
 and therefore must have some foundation of their existence 
 
 \ 
 
 without themselves. That whatsoever begins to be, which 
 
 before was not, must have a cause why it then begins to exist, 
 seems to be the first dictate of the natural and common sense 
 which God has implanted in the minds of all mankind, and the 
 main foundation of all our reasonings about things past, present, 
 and to come. If once this grand principle of common sense 
 be given up, that what is not necessary in itself must have a 
 cause and we begin to maintain that things may come into 
 existence, and begin to be, which heretofore have not been of 
 themselves without any cause all our means of ascending in 
 our arguing from the creature to the Creator, and all our evi- 
 dence of the being of God is cut off at one blow. In this case 
 we cannot prove that there is a God, either from the being of 
 the world and the creatures in it, or from the manner of their 
 being, their order, beauty, and use. Should we admit that 
 things may come to pass without a cause, we should be without 
 evidence of the existence of anything whatever but our own
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 
 
 13 
 
 immediate, present, ideas and consciousness. For we have no 
 
 way to prove anything else but by arguing from effects to causes ; 
 
 from the ideas immediately in view, we argue other things not 
 
 immediately in view ; from sensations now excited in us, we 
 
 infer the existence of other things without us as the causes of 
 
 these sensations ; and from the existence of these things we 
 
 argue other things, which they depend on as effects on causes. 
 
 We infer the past existence of ourselves, or anything else, by 
 
 memory : only as we argue that the ideas which are now in 
 
 our mind, are the consequences of past ideas and sensations. 
 
 So if there is no absurdity or difficulty in supposing one thing 
 
 to start out of non-existence into being, of itself, without a 
 
 cause, then there is no absurdity or difficulty in supposing the 
 
 same of millions of millions. For nothing, or no difficulty 
 
 multiplied, still is nothing or no difficulty ; nothing multiplied 
 
 by nothing does not increase the sum. 
 
 " Now, according to the hypothesis of some, of the acts 
 of the will coming to pass without a cause, it is the case in 
 fact, that millions and millions of events are continually coming 
 into existence, contingently without any cause or reason why 
 they do so, all over the world, every day and every hour 
 through all ages. So it is in a constant succession in every 
 moral agent. This contingency, this effectual no cause is always 
 ready at hand to produce this sort of effects, as long as the 
 agent exists, and as often as he has occasion. 
 
 " If it were so, that things only of one kind, viz., acts of 
 the will, seemed to come to pass of themselves, but those of 
 this sort, in general, came into being thus ; and it were an 
 event that was continual and that happened in a course, wher- 
 ever were capable subjects, of such events, this very thing would 
 demonstrate that there were some cause of them, which made 
 such a difference between this event and others, and that they 
 did not really happen contingently. For contingence is blind, 
 and does not pick and choose for a particular sort of events. 
 Nothing has no choice. This no-cause, which causes no exist- 
 ence, cannot cause the existence which comes to pass to be of 
 one particular sort only, distinguished from all others.
 
 14 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 " Some suppose that volition can arise without a cause, 
 through the activity of the nature of the soul ; but I can con- 
 ceive of nothing else that can be meant by the soul's having 
 power to cause and determine its own volitions, as a being to 
 whom God has given a power of action, but this, that God 
 has given power to the soul, sometime, at least, to excite 
 volitions at its pleasure, or according as it chooses. And this 
 certainly supposes in all such cases, a choice preceding all 
 volitions which are thus caused, even the first of them, which 
 runs into an absurdity. 
 
 " A great argument for self-determining power is the 
 supposed experience we universally have of an ability to deter- 
 mine our wills in cases wherein no prevailing motive is pre- 
 sented. The will (as is supposed) has its choice to make 
 between two or more things that are perfectly equal in the view 
 of the mind ; and the will is apparently altogether indiiferent ; 
 and yet we have no difficulty in coming to a choice ; the will 
 can instantly determine itself to one, by a sovereign power 
 which it has over itself, without being moved by any prepon- 
 derating inducement. The very supposition which is here 
 made directly contradicts and overthrows itself. For the thing 
 supposed wherein this grand argument consists is, that among 
 several things, the will actually chooses one before another, at 
 the same time that it is perfectly indifferent, which is the very 
 same thing as to say the mind has a preference at the same 
 time that it has no preference. 
 
 " To suppose the will to act at all in a state of perfect in- 
 difference, either to determine itself, or to do anything else, is 
 to assert that the mind chooses without choosing. To say that 
 when it is indifferent it can do as it pleases, is to say that it can 
 follow its pleasure when it has no pleasure to follow. And, 
 therefore, if there be any difficulty in the instances of two 
 cakes, or two eggs, &c. ; concerning which, some authors sup- 
 pose the mind in fact has a choice, and so in effect supposes 
 that it has a preference, it as much concerns them to solve the 
 difficulty, as it does those whom they oppose.
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 15 
 
 " It will always be among a number of objects in view, 
 that one will prevail in the eye, or in idea, beyond others. 
 When we have our eyes open in the clear sunshine many 
 objects strike the eye at once, and innumerable images may be 
 at once painted in it by the rays of light ; but the attention of 
 the mind is not equal to several of them at once ; or if it be so, 
 it does not continue so for any time. And so it is with respect 
 to the ideas of the mind in general ; several ideas are not in 
 equal strength in the mind's view and notice at once, or, at 
 least, do not remain so for any sensible continuance. The in- 
 voluntary changes in the succession of our ideas, though the 
 cause may not be observed, have as much a cause as the 
 changeable motion of the motes that float in the air, or the 
 continual, infinitely various, successive changes of the uneven- 
 ness on the surface of the water, so, though the falling of the 
 die be accidental to him that casts it, yet none will suppose 
 that there is no cause why it falls as it does. 
 
 " Concerning liberty of will consisting in indifference, the 
 very putting of the question is sufficient to show the absurdity 
 of the affirmative answer ; for how ridiculous would it be for 
 any one to insist that the soul chooses one thing before another, 
 when at the same time it is perfectly indifferent with respect to 
 each ! This is the same thing as to say the soul prefers one 
 tiling to another, at the very same time that it has no prefer- 
 ence. And should it be inquired whether volition is a thing 
 that ever does, or can, come to pass contingently, it must be 
 remembered that it has been already shown, that nothing can 
 ever come to pass without a cause or reason why it exists in 
 this manner rather than another ; and the evidence of this has 
 been particularly applied to the acts of the will. Now, if this 
 be so, it wiU demonstratively follow, that the acts of the will 
 are never contingent, or without necessity in the sense spoken 
 of, inasmuch as those things which have a cause or reason of 
 their existence must be connected with their cause. 
 
 " If liberty consist in that which Arminians suppose, viz., 
 in the soul's determining its own acts, having free opportunity,
 
 16 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 and being without all necessity : this is the same as to say, that 
 liberty consists in the soul's having power and opportunity to 
 have what determinations of the will it pleases or chooses. 
 And if the determination of the will and the last dictates of 
 the understanding be the same thing, as Dr. Clarke affirms, 
 then liberty consists in the mind's having power to have what 
 dictates of the understanding it pleases, having opportunity to 
 choose its own dictates of understanding. But this is absurd ; 
 for it is to make the determination of choice prior to the dictate 
 of the understanding and the ground of it, which cannot consist 
 with the dictate of the understanding's being the determination 
 of choice itself. 
 
 " The argument from Fore-knowledge. 
 
 " Granting, as we certainly must do, that God has a certain 
 and infallible prescience of the acts of the will of moral agents, 
 I come now to show the consequence, to show how it follows 
 from hence that these events are necessary, with a necessity of 
 connexion or consequence. 
 
 " In order to this, I would observe the following things. 
 It is very evident, with regard to a thing whose existence is 
 infallibly and indissolubly connected with something that al- 
 ready hath, or has had existence, the existence of that thing is 
 necessary. Here may be noted ; that in things that are past, 
 their past existence is now necessary; having already made 
 sure of existence, it is too late for any possibility of alteration 
 in that respect, it is now impossible that it Should be otherwise 
 than true that that thing has existed. 
 
 " If there be any such thing as a divine foreknowledge of 
 the volition of free agents, that fore-knowledge, by the suppo- 
 sition, is a thing which already has, and long ago had, exist- 
 ence ; and so, now its existence is necessary, it is now utterly 
 impossible to be otherwise than that this fore-knowledge should 
 bs, or should have been. 
 
 " It is no less evident, that if there be a full, certain, and 
 infallible fore-knowledge of the future existence of the volitions
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 17 
 
 of moral agents, then there is a certain infallible and indissolu- 
 ble connexion between those events and that fore-knowledge ; 
 and that, therefore, by the preceding observations, these events 
 are necessary events, being infallibly and indissolubly con- 
 nected with that which has had existence already, and so is 
 now necessary, and cannot but have been. 
 
 " That no future event can be certainly fore-known, whose 
 existence is contingent, and without all necessity, may be 
 proved thus : it is impossible for anything to be certainly 
 known to any intellect without evidence. To suppose other- 
 wise implies a contradiction ; because, for a thing to be cer- 
 tainly known to any understanding is for it to be evident to 
 that understanding, and for a thing to be evident to any under- 
 standing, is the same tiling as for that understanding to see 
 
 O / <J O 
 
 evidence of it : but no understanding, created or uncreated, 
 can see evidence where there is none. And, therefore, if there 
 be any truth which is absolutely without evidence, that truth is 
 absolutely unknowable, insomuch that it implies a contradiction 
 to suppose that it is known. 
 
 " But if there be any future event whose existence is con- 
 tingent, without all necessity, the future existence of the event 
 is absolutely without evidence. 
 
 " To suppose the future volitions of moral agents not to be 
 necessary events, or which is the same thing, events which it 
 is not impossible but that they may not come to pass, and yet 
 to suppose that God certainly foreknows them, and knows all 
 things, is to suppose God's fore-knowledge to be inconsistent 
 with itself. For, to say that God certainly, and without all 
 conjecture, knows that a thing infallibly will be, which at the 
 same time he knows to be so contingent that it may possibly 
 not be, is to suppose his knowledge inconsistent with itself, or 
 that one thing that he knows is utterly inconsistent with another 
 thing that he knows. It is the same thing as to say, he knows 
 a proposition to be of certain infallible truth, which he knows 
 to be of contingent uncertain truth. If volitions are in them- 
 selves contingent events, without all necessity, then it is no 
 D
 
 18 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 argument of perfection of knowledge in any being to determine 
 peremptorily that they will be ; but on the contrary, an argu- 
 ment of ignorance and mistake ; because, it would argue that 
 he supposes that proposition to be certain, which in its nature, 
 and all things considered, is uncertain and contingent. To say 
 in such a case, that Grod may have ways of knowing contingent 
 events which we cannot conceive of, is ridiculous, as much as 
 to say, that God may know contradictions to be true, for aught 
 we know ; or that he may know a thing to be certain, and at 
 the same time know it not to be certain, though we cannot 
 conceive how ; because he has ways of knowing we cannot 
 comprehend. 
 
 " There is as much of an impossibility but that the things 
 which are infallibly foreknown should be, (or which is the same 
 thing), as great a necessity of their future existence as if the 
 event were already written down, and was known and read, by 
 all mankind through all preceding ages, and there was the most 
 indissoluble and perfect connexion between the writing and the 
 thing written. In such a case it would be as impossible the 
 event should fail of existence, as if it had existed already ; and 
 a decree cannot make an event surer or more necessary than 
 this." 
 
 The argument from cause and effect we consider to be 
 conclusive, although the connexion between antecedent and 
 consequent, or cause and effect, be not considered as a neces- 
 sary connexion, but one established and upheld for a particular 
 purpose. The argument from foreknowledge would appear to 
 be less satisfactory ; for the idea of prescience not being derived 
 from experience, our knowledge upon the subject cannot be of 
 such a character as to admit of our drawing logical inferences 
 from it. 
 
 We shall now proceed to a more practical elucidation of the 
 subject. 
 
 The doctrine of necessity, in plain language, means that a 
 man could in no case have acted differently from the manner 
 in which he did act, supposing the state of his mind, and the
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 19 
 
 circumstances in which he was placed, to be the same ; which 
 is merely saying 1 , that the same causes would always produce 
 the same effects. Men are prone to suppose that they could 
 have done otherwise, because, in reviewing their conduct, its 
 consequences the experience resulting from it are mixed up 
 with the motives that decided them before, so that if they had 
 to decide over again, different circumstances must be taken into 
 the calculation. Suppose a case : A man has to decide upon 
 some speculation in business ; his conduct is voluntary, that is, 
 it is free from external compulsion, he is at liberty to do what 
 he shall will to do ; what is to determine his will ? Surely we 
 need not consult Edwards to tell us that his will will be deter- 
 mined by the " greatest apparent good," not, perhaps, in the 
 opinion of other people, but in his own opinion at the moment. 
 This good is the motive which governs his will. 
 
 To suppose that the man is not governed by motives, or ' \ rf\Y^f 
 even to suppose that he acts contrary to motives, does not make 
 
 \lrV < fin* 
 
 the action less necessary, for there must be a cause why he acts 
 
 in one way rather than another, and the cause must be sufficient TW/K 
 
 to produce the act; for "Nothing comes to pass without a 
 
 cause." 
 
 But upon what will the motives that decide the will de- 
 pend? Upon the mental constitution of the individual, and 
 upon the circumstances in which he is placed. If he has a 
 strong sense of justice, he will consider whether what he is 
 about to do is perfectly honest ; if he is a benevolent man, he 
 will take care to do nothing likely to injure his fellows, and so 
 on with respect to all the natural feelings of which the mind 
 consists ; they will impel to action or restrain, according to 
 their natural or acquired strength, and the direction they may 
 have received from education. The intellectual faculties have 
 reference to the circumstances which influence the determina- 
 tion of his will ; they examine how far the speculation is likely 
 to succeed, and the correctness of the judgment will depend 
 upon the strength of the reasoning powers, the education they 
 have received, and a more or less complete view of all the
 
 20 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 circumstances. If however it is admitted, as it frequently is r 
 that a man must now in any given instance believe what appears 
 to him to be true, and also act upon that belief in determining 
 " the greatest apparent good," yet it is thought that at some 
 previous time he might have gained more knowledge which 
 would now have enabled him to believe differently and to choose 
 more wisely ; but it will be found that if the present belief and 
 motives to action are without his own control, and he must 
 believe and act as he does, then every influence that has pre- 
 viously tended to make his mental constitution what it now is, 
 and everything that produced the circumstances in which he is 
 now placed, has been, in like manner, dependent upon causes 
 over which he had no control. 
 
 In what, then, does the Liberty which man feels that he 
 possesses consist ? Certainly not in the being able to act with- 
 out motive, or contrary to the strongest motive ; but in freedom 
 from external compulsion ; in the wide field of action open to 
 . him, and in the almost infinite number of paths to the objects 
 . of his desires lying open to his choice. The brutes approach 
 \their objects directly, impelled by one or more simple instincts, 
 while Reason offers to man a hundred different ways of ap- 
 proach, a vast variety of different means by which his aim can 
 be accomplislred ; and he can suspend its pursuit until he finds 
 the proper path, for he knows that if he take the wrong direc- 
 tion out of the many that she presents to him, pain and suffer- 
 ing will be the consequence of his error. Reason thus calls 
 into activity a great variety of feelings, and keeps up an endless 
 succession of sensations. If a man would eat, he is not confined 
 to one or two simple articles of diet, but he can vary his food 
 to suit his palate. Would he lay up store for a future day 
 his stock is not of one kind only, like that of the bee, nor is his 
 warehouse, like hers, of one particular construction, however 
 perfect ; but this desire, in combination with others, gives rise 
 to the diversified products of commerce and the arts. Would 
 he train up his offspring he does not act instinctively, but 
 adapts his treatment to the requirements of the mental and 
 

 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 
 
 21 
 
 bodily constitution of his child, excited by all the hopes and 
 fears of parental solicitude, which reason suggests. But be- 
 cause his choice of any one mode of action is still determined 
 by the strongest motive, this kind of liberty does not take man 
 from under the governance of necessity. 
 
 That which has most mystified this subject, and made men 
 think the doctrine of necessity contrary to common sense, or 
 what they imagine to be intuitive evidence, is the supposition 
 that it annihilates the free agency of man : they reason in this 
 way we feel that we have the power to do as we please ; we 
 are not obliged by any physical necessity to do anything ; we 
 have the perfect control of our own actions ; are we not then 
 free agents ? But true necessity is not opposed to that which 
 is voluntary, but to that which is contingent. It is undoubtedly 
 true, therefore, that man can always do as he pleases; but 
 what he pleases to do will ever depend upon his mental 
 constitution (which is only another word for himself) and the 
 circumstances in which he is placed. This is no more than say- 
 ing that man possesses a definite constitution, and that he must 
 act according to it. Locke says in his Essay, " As far as man 
 has t power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, 
 according to the preferences or direction of his own mind) so far is 
 a man free." Here the only liberty acknowledged is that of 
 acting according to the internal mechanism of a man's mind. 
 He says also, " The mind having in most cases, as is evident in 
 experience, a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction 
 of any of its desires, and so of all, one after another, is at 
 liberty to consider the objects of them, examine them on all 
 sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the liberty a 
 man has. He has the power to suspend the execution of this 
 or that desire, as every one daily may experience in himself : 
 this seems to me the source of all liberty. In this seems to 
 consist that which is, as I think, improperly called free-will." 
 But this power of suspension is quite consistent with the doc- 
 trine of necessity ; for, if we delay the performance of any 
 action, it must be because we have a motive for doing so, and 
 
 ' f
 
 22 MOKAL SCIENCE. 
 
 that motive is the necessary cause. Kant says " Every action 
 or phenomenon, so far as it produces an event, is itself an event 
 or occurrence which presupposes another state wherein the cause 
 is to be met with ; and thus everything that happens is only a 
 continuation of the series, and no beginning which occurs of itself 
 is possible : consequently, all the actions of the natural causes 
 in the succession are themselves again effects." In fact, the 
 Universe is one General Effect, both in Mind and Matter, and 
 there is but one Supreme Cause. 
 
 Spinoza says " In no mind is there an absolute or free 
 volition ; but it is determined to choose this or that by a cause, 
 which likewise has been fixed by another, and this again by a 
 \ third, and so on for ever." Tractata Tlieologica-Polit, ch. xii, 
 
 sec. 22. He also says, and which by some is held to contra- 
 dict the above: "moreover, it is to be observed, although the 
 mind is influenced by external circumstances to affirm or deny 
 anything, nevertheless, it is not in itself so swayed as to be 
 forced by external things, but always in its own nature remains 
 free." True Freedom, as we have before said, is where a being is 
 able to act by the law of its own nature ivithout external com 
 pulsion. This is the freedom which we all feel that we possess : 
 this is the freedom for which Kant contends, based upon what 
 he calls practical reason ; this is evidently what Locke means 
 and also Spinoza when he says the mind is not "so swayed as to 
 deforced by external things." This in fact is the only freedom 
 of which we can conceive, but it is not at variance either in 
 God or man with necessity and belongs alike to mind and 
 matter. Man acts spontaneously by the law of his own nature, 
 and so does every atom equally in accordance with its tenden- 
 cies ; but in God we believe such nature to be self-existent, 
 original, eternal ; in man and matter it is derived. Of course 
 we cannot speak dogmatically of the nature of God, for we 
 really know nothing, but in this sense he must be the most free 
 as well as the most "necessary" of all beings. We can con- 
 ceive a hundred courses open to man, ninety-nine of which 
 from his limited intelligence may be wrong, (limitations of real
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 23 
 
 freedom), but we cannot conceive of supreme intelligence 
 
 taking more than one course the right. Thus as we rise 
 
 in the scale of intelligence, is the path of duty narrowed to us, 
 and we lose that spurious freedom for which the advocates of 
 free-will so strenuously contend. 
 
 Motive is to voluntary action in the moral world, what 
 cause is to effect in the physical, and the order of nature is as 
 fixed in the world of mind as of matter ; for if the course of 
 nature were not as fixed in the moral world as in the physical ; 
 if calculable laws did not regulate one as well as the other, 
 man's reasoning power, which depends for its exercise upon the 
 uniformity of events in both, would be of no use. If man could 
 refuse to be governed by motives; if his conduct did not depend 
 upon springs of action which could be calculated and relied 
 upon, the superiority of his organization, which now raises him 
 so eminently above the brute creation, would have availed him 
 nothing. Reason is dependent for its exercise upon experience, 
 and experience is nothing more than the knowledge of the in- 
 variable order of nature, of the relations of cause and effect. 
 Man observing these sequences and expecting them to occur 
 again in like circumstances, shapes his conduct accordingly. 
 In the first ages of the world, when succession was only ob- 
 served in a few simple things, such as the rising of the sun 
 from day to day, it was thought that the same free will now 
 attributed to man, belonged to the physical world also ; that 
 events might come to pass, or they might not, and the term 
 chance denoted this uncertainty. But increased knowledge has 
 tended to abolish this term, by showing the uniform manner in 
 which events follow one another, and that under similar cir- 
 cumstances the same results may be expected to follow. The 
 explosion of gunpowder could not be predicted by the analysis 
 of its parts, and the simplest phenomena were all at first at an 
 equal distance from human sagacity. Having observed then 
 the order of nature, we can anticipate events and regulate our 
 conduct accordingly, suiting our circumstances to this known 
 order of events ; we regulate our conduct by what we expect
 
 24 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 to result from it, by making use of the same causes to produce 
 the same effects. 
 
 Admitting that this is a proper definition of the exercise of 
 reason, it follows that if this uniformity did not exist, the 
 exercise of it would be as likely to be ruinous as serviceable to 
 us ; our knowledge would in no way avail us, for we could not 
 predict that things would occur again as we had before observed 
 them. All the discoveries that man has made in the arts and 
 sciences, everything in fact that has tended to ameliorate and 
 raise his condition, depends on this known order of nature, and 
 rests upon its immutability. 
 
 Because the causes of human actions have been hidden 
 from us like those of physical action in the first ages of the 
 world, such actions have been supposed to be contingent, to 
 depend upon chance and not to follow the same law of in- 
 variable sequence ; but if this were really the case if the 
 doctrine of philosophical necessity were not true, the regularity 
 of events in the physical world would little avail us, neither 
 would they afford sufficient foundation for morality and pru- 
 dence, as the voluntary conduct of our neighbours enters into 
 almost all those calculations upon which our plans, and determi- 
 nations are founded.* 
 
 * J. S. Mill says " The conviction that phenomena have invai iable laws, and 
 follow with regularity certain antecedent phenomena, was only acquired gradu- 
 ally, and extended itself as knowledge advanced, from one order of phenomena 
 to another, beginning with those whose laws were most accessible to observa- 
 tion. This progress has not yet attained its ultimate point; there being still 
 one class of phenomena (human volitions) the subjection of which to invari- 
 able laws is not yet universally recognized. So long as any doubt hung over 
 this fundamental principle, the various methods of induction which took that 
 principle for granted, could only affoid results which were admissable con- 
 ditionally ; as showing what law the phenomena under investigation must 
 follow if it followed any fixed law at all. As, however, when the rules of 
 correct induction had been conformed to, the result obtained never failed to be 
 verified by all subsequent experience ; every such inductive operation had the 
 effect of extending the acknowledged dominion of general laws, and bringing 
 an additional portion of the experience of mankind to strengthen the evidence 
 of the unirersality of the law of causation ; until now at length we are fully 
 warranted in considering that law, as applied to all phenomena within the 
 range of human observation, to stand on an equal footing in respect to evidence 
 with the axioms of geometry itself.
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 25 
 
 " A person well acquainted with the necessary order in 
 which events follow each other, (i.e.) well skilled in the 
 ordinary movements of the machinery of life, may with con- 
 fidence, if not with absolute assurance of success, risk his 
 most important interests upon the issue of well concerted 
 plans. Skill and sagacity in managing the affairs of common 
 life, or wisdom in council or command, is nothing else than 
 the knowledge of the fixed laws of matter and mind, which 
 
 " I apprehend that the considerations which give at the present day, to the 
 proof of the law of uniformity of succession as true of all phenomena without 
 exceplion, this character of completeness and conclusiveness, are the following : 
 First ; that we know it directly to be true of by far the greatest number of phe- 
 nomena ; that there are none of which we know it not to be true, the utmost that 
 can be said being, that some we cannot positively, from direct evidence, nffirna 
 its truth ; while phenomenon after phenomenon, as they become better known to us, 
 are constantly passing from the latter class into the former ; and in all cases 
 where that transition has not taken place, the absence of direct proof is 
 accounted for by the rarity or the obscurity of the phenomena, our deficient 
 means of observing them, or the logical difficulties arising from the complica- 
 tion of the circumstances in which they occur ; insomuch that notwithstanding 
 as rigid a dependence upon given conditions as exist in the case of any other 
 phenomenon, it was not likely that we should be better acquainted with those 
 conditions than we are. Besides this first class of considerations, there is a 
 second, which still further corroborates the conclusion, and from the recogni- 
 tion of which the complete establishment of the universal law may resonably 
 be dated. Although there are phenomena, the production and changes of 
 which elude all our attempts to reduce them universally to any ascertained 
 law; yet in every such case, the phenomenon, or the objects concerned in it, are 
 found in some instances to obey the known laws of nature. The wind, for example, 
 is the type of uncertainty and caprice, yet we find it in some cases obeying 
 with as much constancy as any other phenomena of nature the law of the ten- 
 dency of fluids to distribute themselves so as to equalize the pressure on 
 every side of each of their particles ; as in the case of the trade winds, and the 
 monsoons. Lightning might once have been supposed to obey no laws; but 
 eiuce it has been ascertained to be identical with electricity, we know that 
 the very same phenomenon, in some of its manifestations, is implicitly obedi- 
 ent to the action of fixed causes. I do not believe that there is now one object 
 or event in all our experience of nature, within the bounds of the solar system at 
 least, which has not either been ascertained by direct observation to follow laws, 
 of its own, or been proved to be exactly similar to objects and events, which, 
 in more familar manifestations, or on a more limited scale, follow strict laws : 
 our inability to trace the same laws on the larger scale, and in the more recon- 
 dite instances being accounted for by the number of complications of the modi- 
 fying causes, or by their inaccessibility to observation." System of Logic, 
 c. II, p. 116. 
 E
 
 26 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 together dictate the intricate movements of the great machine 
 of the social system. It must be upon the immovable sub- 
 stratum of cause and effect, of motive and voluntary action, 
 that our calculations of futurity are formed, and it is upon this 
 basis alone, that a wise man rests his hopes and constructs his 
 plans." 
 
 Mill also says, "Correctly conceived, the doctrine called 
 Philosophical Necessity is simply this : that given the motives 
 that are present to an individual mind, and given likewise the 
 character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which 
 he will act may be unerringly inferred : that if we know the 
 person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements that are 
 acting upon him, we could fortel his conduct with as much 
 certainty as we can predict any physical event. This proposi- 
 tion 1 take to be a mere interpretation of universal experience, 
 a statement in words of what every one is internally convinced 
 of." 
 
 The "National Review" for January, 1858, in a notice of 
 " The World of Mind" by Isaac Taylor says " On the suppo- 
 sition that man is not a free agent, the master of his own sen- 
 timents and conduct, but on the contrary subject to the laws of 
 physical causation which rule in the material world, con- 
 
 G. H. Lewes says '' That the positive method (the observation of the order 
 of nature) is the only method adapted to human capacity, the only one on which 
 truth can be found is easily proved : on it alone can prevision of phenomena 
 depend. Prevision is the characteristic and the test of knowledge. If you can 
 predict certain events and they occur as you predicted, then are you assured 
 that your knowledge is correct. If the wind blow according to the will of 
 Boreas, we may, indeed, propitiate his favour, but we cannot calculate upon it. 
 We can have no certain knowledge whether the wind will blow or not. If, 
 on the other hand, it is subject to law, like everything else, once discover this 
 law, and men will predict concerning it as they predict concerning other 
 matters." Biographical History of Philosophy, Vol. 4, p. 256. 
 
 It is true however that if we discovered the law or motives which governed 
 the will of Boreas it might be the same thing. "Even the wind and rain, says Dr. 
 Arnott which ia common speech are the types of uncertainty and change, obey 
 laws as fixed as those of the eun and moon j and already as regards many 
 parts of the earth, men can fortel them without fear of being deceived. He 
 plans his voyages to suit the coming monsoon, and prepares against the floods 
 of the rainy season."
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 27 
 
 science, the moral sense, though an essential part of his 
 nature, has no foundation in it. It bids him do this, and restrain 
 from that ; though he has no power to determine what he shall 
 do, being himself absolutely disposed of by laws as inviolable 
 as those which keep the earth in her orbit, and provide that 
 summer and winter, seed time and harvest, shall not fail. Any 
 theory which fails to recognize man's moral freedom converts 
 his nature into an incoherent delusion, to which we find nothing 
 analogous in the other arrangements of the universe. Admit, 
 however human free agency, and this incongruity vanishes 
 conscience ceases to be 'a redundant endowment.' ' This ob- 
 jection arises from the limited use of language at our command 
 and from our thus applying " necessary" to voluntary action 
 in the same sense as we do to the laws of physical causation. 
 Voluntary action is as much dependent upon the laws of mind 
 as matter upon the laws of physics. As Priestly says " It 
 must be understood that all that is ever meant by necessity in a 
 cause, is that which produces certainty intlie effect" The proper 
 answer then to the above objection of the " National" is, that 
 man is not only governed by the external laws of nature, but 
 by the internal nature or laws of his own mind, of which con- 
 science is one. The pain of burning keeps him out of the fire 
 and protects his body ; the pain of conscience keeps him from 
 doing what he considers wrong and protects his mind or moral 
 being. As Buckle says, " On the one hand we have the human 
 mind obeying the laws of its own existence, and, when uncon- 
 trolled by external agents, developing itself according to the 
 conditions of its organization. On the other hand we have 
 what is called nature, obeying likewise its laws ; but incessantly 
 coming into contact with the minds of men, exciting their pas- 
 sions, stimulating their intellect, and therefore giving to their 
 actions a direction which they would not have taken without 
 such disturbance. Thus we have men modifying nature, and 
 nature modifying man ; while out of this reciprocal modifica- 
 
 o 
 
 tion all events must necessarily spring." 
 
 However it may suit the wants of certain creeds to deny 
 
 Joiw^
 
 28 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 tlie necessity of all our actions, yet those who adopt them, 
 acknowledge it in action, if they deny it in words. Do not 
 such persons expect from certain moral inducements to produce 
 a certain voluntary line of conduct ? All the arguments they 
 use to excite our hopes or fears, proceed upon the supposition 
 that mind is subject to certain laws, and that if their arguments 
 are efficient as a cause, the effects desiderated will invariably 
 follow. " Do you think such motives are sufficient to induce 
 him ?" is a question with them as pertinent as " Do you think 
 this lever has the power to raise that weight ?" But, say the 
 advocates of freedom of will, necessity is not here implied, for 
 though we are obliged to admit a connexion between motives 
 and actions, yet this connection does not appear to us to amount 
 to a certainty. The mind possesses an inherent activity, by 
 which it can at pleasure dissolve this connexion ; consequently 
 when motives are presented to induce a particular line of con- 
 duct, it is not done with certain expectations of success, and 
 we are not always disappointed if we fail. We make a reserva- 
 tion for a certain liberty of will a person is supposed to possess, 
 which may cause him to resist all our inducements. This 
 objection is as forcible when applied to matter as to mind. It 
 arises from our not being sufficienty acquainted with the causes 
 necessary to produce the effect we wish. A philosophical ex- 
 periment may succeed ninety-nine times and fail the hundredth, 
 not from any liberty of will that the materials possess, but 
 from some counteracting cause that has crept in of which we 
 are ignorant, but which farther investigation may discover. So 
 with respect to mind, if our arguments are not successful, it is 
 because they are not forcible enough, or they do not apply to 
 the state of mind of the individual, or there is some prejudice 
 still unmoved ; and not from any power he may possess of re- 
 fusing to be moved, by a motive strong enough for the purpose. 
 In the latter case, as in the first, we must not ascribe our fail- 
 ure to the free will of the individual, but to our own ignorance 
 of how to move him, and if we would succeed, we must look in 
 both cases for the hidden cause of the failure.
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 29 
 
 The character of a man is the result of the organization he 
 received at birth, and all the various circumstances that have 
 acted upon it since, and these, if that were possible, being 
 given, a mental philosopher would predict the line of conduct 
 that will be invariably pursued by each individual, as readily 
 as the chemist can predict the exact result of the mixture of 
 any chemical substances. Man, like everything else around, 
 has received a definite constitution, and he is no more capable 
 of acting contrary to that constitution, and of refusing to be 
 acted upon by the influences that everywhere surround him, 
 than the atoms of matter are capable of resisting the impulses 
 of attraction and repulsion, and the various affinities from 
 which result all the beneficial order and arrangement of the 
 present material system. The same disastrous effects might 
 be expected to result in the one case as the other; for if 
 matter refused to obey the laws that pertain to it, we could 
 not depend up:n the causes that are capable of producing 
 certain results to-day being efficient to the same ends to- 
 morrow; and if there were no certain connexion between 
 motive and action, we should never be able to predict what 
 men would be from what they had been ; thus reason would be 
 of no use, all progression would cease, and man would be as 
 the beasts, moved by immediate impulses, and confined to an 
 equally limited range of ideas and enjoyments. 
 
 SECTION I. 
 
 THE APPLICATION OF PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY TO RESPONSI- 
 BILITY, PRAISE AND BLAME, REWAED AND PUNISHMENT, 
 VIRTUE AND VICE. 
 
 So clear is the evidence in favour of Philosophical Neces- 
 sity that it would never for one moment have been doubted if 
 it had not been for its supposed consequences. It was supposed 
 to lead to fatalism to darkness and death ; to the doctrine of 
 non-responsibility, and consequently to be subversive of the
 
 30 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 very foundations of morality. We should never attempt however 
 to stifle truth from its supposed consequences, but either make it 
 harmonise with other truth or quietly wait till we can. If we 
 had followed this course in this direction we should earlier have 
 discovered that Induction applies to Mind as well as to Matter 
 and that as the great desideratum in Nature is Unity, Law, 
 and Order, we should not have left it out of one-half creation, 
 and that the most important, and having banished Miracle and 
 the supernatural from the physical world, we should not have 
 left it in the world of mind and morals. We should have been 
 able to banish half the misery of life that arises from the 
 supposition that things might have been otherwise that they 
 ought to have been otherwise, and at the same time we should 
 have banished the cause of at least one-half the crime in the 
 world, that arising from the feeling of revenge and the desire 
 of what is called retributive justice, and the origin and use of 
 what is called " evil," would have been made much clearer. 
 We shall now proceed to trace the doctrine to its legitimate 
 consequences. 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY. If a man's actions are determined neces- 
 sarily by the previous state of his mind, and the circumstances 
 or influences to which he is exposed, and if, consequently, no 
 action of his life could possibly have been different from what 
 it actually was, in the circumstances, responsibility, in the sense 
 in which it is generally used, is without meaning. A man is 
 usually considered to be responsible, or accountable, for having 
 acted in a certain manner, because it is supposed that he might 
 have acted differently ; but this not being the case, all respon- 
 sibility for such actions would be unjust ; besides, as such actions 
 are already past and perfectly inevitable, for actions that are 
 already past God himself could not prevent, it is evident that 
 any such responsibility would be as useless and absurd as it 
 would be unjust. Is then man not accountable for his actions ? 
 Most certainly he is, for he can never get away from their conse- 
 quences, and these are made pleasurable or painful as the actions 
 are right or wrong. All true responsibility must have reference
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 31 
 
 to the future, never as is commonly supposed to the past. The 
 Creator has attached responsibility in the shape of inevitable 
 pain, moral or physical, to every breach of his laws; or if not 
 in all cases of positive pain, of diminution or loss of happiness. 
 He has given to man a frame, " fearfully and wonderfully 
 made," and his happiness is dependent upon the proper regula- 
 tion and protection of its complicated mechanism. If he do 
 anything that has a tendency to injure this constitution, either 
 bodily or mental, pain follows and obliges him to desist. Thus 
 if he put his hand into the fire, he is subjecting it to an influence 
 that would soon destroy it, and with it all the powers and pleasures 
 that are dependent upon its use ; the pain that he feels, therefore, 
 or the punishment that is inflicted upon him for doing so, quickly 
 obliges him to take it out Here, then, he is responsible for 
 the ignorance or carelessness that induced him to put his hand 
 where, from the relation that heat bears to the body, it must 
 be injured ; and this whether the action be voluntary or not ; for 
 the object of the pain being to deter the individual and others 
 from the breach of this law, the pain must be attached to the 
 act. So also with reference to the mind ; if a man commit an 
 act of injustice or treachery, he suffers its consequences in the 
 distrust and resentment of his fellow-men, though his evil 
 action be the result of bad education and temptation ; because 
 the certain connexion of such conduct with such consequences, 
 is necessary to make men attach importance to good education 
 and to the avoidance of temptation. If a man says what is 
 false, he suffers from not being believed for the future, and so 
 every fault has its unpleasant consequences. Not an evil 
 thought can pass across the brain, without leaving its trace, in 
 less aptitude for good, and therefore for pleasurable sensation. 
 This view involves a much stricter responsibility than the com- 
 mon one, for we are thus accountable to our Maker for the 
 breaking, of his laws, whether such breach proceed from our 
 ignorance, our convictions, or our feelings; whether our actions 
 be voluntary or involuntary, or proceed from free will or neces- 
 sity ; and we are made to suffer- for that which is already done,
 
 32 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 that the further evil may be prevented which would ensue from 
 the repetition of the offence. Man is, thus, not only responsi- 
 ble for that portion of his happiness which depends upon his 
 own body and mind, but for that which he derives from the 
 great body of Society, of which he is a member; and if he 
 commit any offence against this latter, that is, if he inflict 
 any injui'y upon it, he is accountable in the same sense, and 
 in no other. For such breach of the moral law he suffers, or 
 ought to be made to suffer, just so much as will prevent the 
 same fault in future. If its recurrence could be prevented 
 without any suffering at all, we only do an injustice to the indi- 
 vidual in subjecting him to it, since he could not have acted 
 otherwise. If we are made to suffer, then, it is for our pro- 
 tection, and "punishment" is for our own good; and to ask to be 
 relieved from it, or to have our sins forgiven, would be asking 
 for that which would simply do us an injury. " Forgiveness 
 of sins" then is out of the question. To suppose that God is 
 angry and wishes to take vengeance, is transferring human 
 passion to the Creator, and to ask Him to interpose miraculously 
 to save us from the consequences of our actions, would be asking 
 for the greatest curse he could besto\v upon us, for such conse- 
 quences are all that reason has for its guidance. " Forgiveness 
 of sins," " Atonement," " Vicarious Sacrifice," are all based 
 upon the common but erroneous notions of the nature of "Sin" 
 and the use and necessity of " punishment." Then "let the 
 dead past bury its dead." The past is past and cannot be 
 altered or recalled, and what is more, nothing could have hap- 
 pened differently. The full conviction of this truth would save 
 half the misery there is in the world, which is made up of vain 
 regrets for events which it is supposed might and ought to have 
 been otherwise. Experience, or knowledge of the consequences 
 of the past, ought to guide our conduct for the future, but 
 REMORSE should be banished from the world. Repentance, so 
 far as it consists of a full perception of evil consequences, 
 and sorrow and humiliation for the state of mind which caused 
 them, and which may therefore influence our coming actions, is
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 33 
 
 a rational and wholesome feeling, but when, as is too generally 
 the case, remorse is mixed with it, it is a useless sacrifice of 
 happiness based upon popular error. 
 
 PKAISE AND BLAME. Upon a cursory view of the subject, 
 the difficulty naturally arises, that if actions could not have 
 been otherwise under the circumstances, then merit and demerit 
 are mere names, denoting only the character of certain actions ; 
 and that, in consequence, man is not, properly, the subject of 
 praise and blame. Upon reflexion, however, it will be found 
 to be just the reverse ; for if there were no necessary connexion 
 between motives and actions, if a man might refuse or not to 
 be guided by the former, then, indeed, all praise and blame 
 would be useless ; for we praise a certain line of conduct because 
 it is right and that it may be pursued, or we blame it that it may 
 be forsaken, and our approbation or disapproval act as motives 
 that are calculated to produce one kind of action more than 
 another. 
 
 We naturally approve of, or praise, that which is agreeable 
 to us, from its being right or otherwise, and disapprove of, or 
 blame, that which is disagreeable ; and that this sense of what 
 is pleasant or unpleasant to us, may have proper weight with 
 those upon whom our happiness in a great measure depends, 
 nature has given us a disposition by which such praise or 
 blame become a great source of enjoyment or discomfort, and 
 a strong motive to incite to some actions and to restrain from 
 others. The expression of praise and blame, of approbation or 
 disapprobation is, therefore, necessary and proper, although a 
 man could in no case act otherwise than he did act under the 
 circumstances. What a complete revolution will take place in 
 society when the expression of this praise and blame shall be no 
 longer made instinctively, but be brought into accordance with 
 the doctrine of necessity ! A child knocks its head against the 
 table, and thinking the table had a choice in the matter, turns 
 round and beats it. So man, " a child of larger growth," 
 knocks his head against some rough corner of another's dispo- 
 F
 
 34 MOKAL SCIENCE. 
 
 sition, he meets with some injury or offence, and not knowing, 
 or not thinking, that the offender could not possibly have done 
 otherwise, he acts as instinctively as the child, and expresses 
 his disapprobation in all probability in the same way. What, 
 however, would be the conduct of a person brought up from 
 infancy as a disciple of necessity? He would know, that of 
 whatever action a person might have been guilty against him, 
 in the state of such an individual's views and feelings he could 
 not have acted differently, and that it would be as absurd to 
 give way to the feeling of anger in this case as in that of the 
 child. That to produce a different effect towards himself he 
 must alter the cause, that is, he must change the views and 
 feelings of the offender towards himself. If the offence were a 
 personal insult, and the object to prevent it in future if knocking 
 the person down were the best mode of doing this, why then 
 knock him down ; but this display of the combative propensity 
 would probably produce a similar exhibition on the part of the 
 other, and if they were well matched they would leave off just 
 where they began. But if inquiry were calmly made into the 
 motive of the insult, and the cause removed if possible accord- 
 ing to the dictates of the moral feelings, with kindness and 
 justice in the generality of cases there would be no fear of 
 its repetition. It can only be this mode of looking at injuries, 
 and the temper of mind consequent upon it, that can give that 
 " soft answer that turneth away wrath." By the predominance 
 of feelings, the produce of opposite views to these, many minds 
 dwell in a state of perpetual irritability, occupied in resenting 
 not only real injuries, but imaginary offences ; and it is a ques- 
 tion, whether a larger amount of unhappy feeling in the world 
 is not occasioned by the latter class than the former. 
 
 The evils resulting from the ordinary mode of considering 
 this subject are very numerous. The common notions con- 
 cerning merit and demerit, praise and blame, and responsibility, 
 give rise to the worst abuses of our selfish propensities, to envy, 
 hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness. If we were early 
 taught to feel and know that a man's character is the result of
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 35 
 
 his mental constitution, and the circumstances in which he is 
 placed, all such feelings would be kept in check from the mere 
 absurdity of giving vent to them. True, the exhibition of 
 anger and of those feelings that induce us to take immediate 
 vengeance for an offence, may to a certain extent, have the 
 effect of preventing offences ; and among the inferior animals 
 this is apparently the legitimate and only mode of doing so ; 
 but man possessing additional faculties, his reason enables him 
 to foresee the direct consequences of open violence, and to 
 avoid them, whilst producing secret and much more complicated 
 mischief. How is it possible to " Love our enemies, to bless 
 them that curse us, and to do good to them that hate us," so 
 long as we look upon them as the cause of our suffering in the 
 sense that they had liberty to do otherwise ? But when they 
 are considered as mere instruments, as acted upon by causes 
 over which they had no control, then indeed we may " love our 
 enemies," love them as fellow-creatures, pity them as being in 
 all probability greater sufferers than ourselves, and with calm- 
 ness and reason, guided by benevolence and justice, endeavour 
 to remove the cause of their enmity ; or if that be impossible, 
 to guard ourselves against it with as little suffering as may be 
 to them. 
 
 It may be said perhaps, it is impossible but that by a law of 
 our nature we should hate that which is unpleasant to us. This 
 is true, but let the feeling receive its right direction, let us hate 
 vice, not the vicious. The precautions we take to secure ourselves 
 against that which injures us, are not necessarily connected 
 with our hatred of the injurer. We guard ourselves sedu- 
 lously against the poison of the viper, and the destructive pro- 
 pensities of the tiger, although, knowing as we do that their 
 power and disposition to injure is the inevitable condition of 
 their nature, we cannot be said to hate them. 
 
 A man cannot be a true Christian or a true philosopher, 
 until he is a practical Necessitarian. It is then only that he can 
 exercise a perfect control over his own feelings, and cease to be 
 acted upon, to his own discomfort, by the bad feelings of others.
 
 36 MOKAL SCIENCE. 
 
 It is then that he feels himself master of his own fortune in the 
 strictest sense of the word, for he knows that nothing is uncer- 
 tain, but that he has only to seek and apply the proper cause, 
 and the effect desired will inevitably follow. 
 
 REWARD AND PUNISHMENT. After considering Responsi- 
 bility, and Praise and Blame, little remains to be said under 
 this head. We have shown that the responsibility of man con- 
 sists in his experiencing always the natural and necessary re- 
 sults of his actions, and that praise and blame, and consequently 
 reward and punishment, can be employed by the Necessitarian 
 only as motives to the adoption or abandonment of any given 
 line of conduct.* Desert and merit being entirely out of the 
 question, where a man could not possibly have acted otherwise 
 than he did act, so also are all rewards to which a man may 
 consider himself entitled. The rewards of nature are the plea- 
 sureable sensations, the happiness consequent upon the study 
 and observance of, and obedience to, her laws ; her punishments 
 are the pain that follows the breach of them. It is in this way 
 that Nature is more powerful than mere doctrine all over the 
 world, and it is well for mankind that she is so, for had man 
 been a free agent, such as he is represented, capable of observ- 
 ing and following the pernicious creeds and dogmas that sel- 
 fishness has never failed to instil into his mind, he must Ions 
 
 7 O 
 
 since have ceased to exist on this earth. But in spite of what 
 a man professes to believe, he cannot help invariably seeking, 
 in practice, that which is pleasurable, and avoiding that which is 
 painful ; and this it is that secures to him, on all occasions, the 
 
 * " Please Sir I could not help it," says a school-boy very truly to his 
 master, with reference to some offence he had committed ; " I know you 
 could not my dear boy," says the master, " you left out of consideration the 
 flogging you were to have if you did it ; when I have given it you, you will 
 think of it another time, and it will enable you to help it for the future." 
 Whether we hold the doctrine of free-will or necessity, whether our conduct 
 be voluntary or involuntary, it can never save us from the consequences of 
 our actions, and the great object of all education and government should be 
 to make them clear and inevitable.
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 37 
 
 object of his being, a balance of enjoyment ; and preserves that 
 consistency in his conduct, which would be lost, if his actions 
 were guided solely by his opinions. This balance of enjoyment 
 is the natural reward which a man receives for having sought 
 for happiness where it was to be found ; but given to him with- 
 out any desert on his part. So suffering is the punishment 
 that nature inflicts upon those who have sought for happiness 
 where it was not to be found. But we nowhere find nature 
 inflicting this punishment, excepting for the good of the person 
 offending, or of society at large, which, as man is necessarily a 
 part of society, is the same thing; for where a man has offended 
 against the physical or organic laws of his being, so that the 
 pain or punishment resulting can be of no use in a remedial 
 point of view, the pain does not last long, for death mercifully 
 takes him from this state of existence. 
 
 But, says the advocate of freedom of will, it is not enough 
 that punishment should be merely remedial, that it should 
 merely have for its object the prevention of the repetition of 
 the offence a criminal should be made to suffer in exact pro- 
 portion to the fault he has committed ; and this idea of retri- 
 butive justice, as it is called, but more properly vengeance, lies 
 at the foundation of all criminal codes throughout society, is the 
 main cause of their inefficiency, and of a vast amount of un- 
 necessary suffering. It is assumed that by allotting a certain 
 amount of suffering to a certain amount of " sin" all wrong is 
 made right, and God is necessarily satisfied, but to the consis- 
 tent Necessitarian, any punishment beyond such as is requisite 
 for the purpose of amendment, must appear an injustice of the 
 highest degree towards the individual upon whom it is inflic- 
 ted, because it is evident that under the circumstances in which 
 he was placed, and with his views and feelings, his conduct was 
 inevitable. Our Criminal Codes cannot be radically reformed 
 and made effectual, until this view of the question with respect 
 to accountability and punishment becomes general ; until the 
 very idea of retribution be dismissed from our thoughts, and, 
 consequently, the principle of it from our Institutions. The
 
 38 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 wicked must be regarded as the truly unfortunate of the earth, 
 and punishment the means which true kindness would dictate 
 of correcting vicious habits, and of clearing away the obstacles 
 to that large amount of enjoyment of which their bad disposi- 
 tions deprive them. 
 
 VIRTUE AND VICE. But if philosophical necessity be true, 
 what becomes of all the distinctions between virtue or vice ? If 
 all actions are necessary, are not all equally virtuous or vicious? 
 They would undoubtedly be so if there were no difference 
 between pleasure and pain, happiness and misery ; but so long 
 as there is this difference, the inherent distinction between ac- 
 tions must continue, as they tend either to one state or the other. 
 Thus, if they tend, all things considered, to produce happiness, 
 they are virtuous ; if they tend to misery, they are vicious ; 
 and it would be difficult to prove any other distinction between 
 virtue and vice, if considered with reference either to this 
 world or another. 
 
 Much has been said and written upon this subject, and al- 
 though plain in itself, so much has it been mystified, that it has 
 become the general opinion that there is something in actions 
 themselves, that places them in the one class or the other. " In 
 order," says Edwards, " to a thing's being morally evil, there 
 must be one of these things belonging to it ; either it must be 
 a thing unfit or unsuitable in its own nature; or it must have a 
 bad tendency; or it must proceed from an evil disposition, and 
 be done for an evil end." Now if it were possible to conceive 
 of anything unfit or unsuitable in its own nature, supposing 
 that the doctrine of necessity were unproved, it is impossible to 
 believe it together with the conviction that nothing could possibly 
 have been otherwise than it was, and that everything was ap- 
 pointed by an All- Wise Creator. The same act according to 
 circumstances, is sometimes either virtuous or vicious : thus 
 the act of killing a man, when done in our country's defence, 
 is meritorious, but when committed to suit private revenge or 
 interest, it is murder, and a crime of the deepest dye. We
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY. 39 
 
 might easily multiply instances to show that in the moral 
 world, there is no difference in the character of actions, when 
 considered separately from their effects upon happiness or 
 misery, but that will be unnecessary, as they must present them- 
 selves to every one. "Morality is the science of the means in- 
 vented by man, to live together in the most happy manner pos- 
 sible." It is impossible to conceive that God can have any 
 other view, in laying down laws, than the happiness of his 
 creatures ; to make man a better is to make him a happier 
 being. 
 
 Are all therefore to be put upon the same level in society ? 
 Are the vicious upon an equality with the virtuous ? Yes, 
 when the tiger and the lamb are so. When the lap dog gives 
 place to the wolf, when vipers are hidden in men's bosoms ; in 
 fact, when we prefer the company of that which gives us pain, 
 to that which bestows happiness. Virtuous, holy, pure, and 
 other terms of like import, have no meaning when applied to 
 actions, in any other sense than as they tend to happiness or 
 misery ; and when we speak of any kind of discipline as having 
 a tendency to perfect our character, to make us more pure and 
 holy, we cannot mean anything else but that it tends to increase 
 our capacity of enjoyment, and our power of adding to the 
 happiness of all around. That man is most perfect who is capa- 
 ble of giving and receiving the greatest sum of enjoyment. 
 Neither can we admit that actions are virtuous or vicious, 
 according to the motives that dictate them, for all motives are 
 equal, being all dependant, like the actions to which they give 
 rise, upon the mental or bodily constitution and circumstances. 
 1 'All motives," says Bentham, "are abstractedly good; no 
 man ever has, ever had, can, or could have, a motive contrary 
 to the pursuit of happiness or the avoidance of pain.'' All 
 feelings, both propensities and sentiments, in which motives 
 generally arise, good or bad, whichever they may be called, 
 are mere blind impulses requiring the guidance of the reason, 
 which shows that the intellect must be cultivated, in order that 
 we may do well, as well as mean well. It is not enough to
 
 40 MORAL SCIENCE. 
 
 wish to do right, we must set ourselves diligently to learn what 
 is right. If we do mischief we are responsible for it, whatever 
 our wish or motive might have been. Benevolence and Des- 
 tructiveness are equally hurtful if misdirected or unrestrained. 
 We must be judged then by our actions, not by our motives, 
 for we are as much responsible for the direction of our feelings 
 as for the feelings themselves. 
 
 ' 
 
 Wv*\
 
 CHAPTER IL 
 
 ON THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 
 
 EPICURUS says, " Is God willing to prevent evil, but not 
 able ? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able but not willing ? 
 Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing ? Whence 
 then is evil ?" It is probable that what we call evil is the best, 
 if not the only means of producing and preserving the good. 
 Is our calling it evil then merely a misnomer, or must we not 
 rather admit that we are obliged to limit the power of God, 
 and that He cannot produce the good in its full amount without 
 the evil, and that one is absolutely necessary to the production 
 of the other? 
 
 Turnbull, in his Christian Philosophy, as quoted by Edwards, 
 observes, " If the Author and Governor of all things be infinitely 
 perfect, then whatever is, is right ; of all possible systems, He 
 has chosen the best ; and, consequently, there is no absolute 
 evil in the universe. This being the case, all the seeming 
 imperfections or evil in it are such only in a partial view, and 
 with respect to the whole system they are good." 
 
 " Whence then comes evil ? is the question which hath in 
 all ages been reckoned the Gordian knot in philosophy. And, 
 indeed, if we own the existence of evil in the world in an 
 absolute sense, we diametrically contradict what hath been just 
 now proved of God. For if there be any evil in the system 
 that is not good with respect to the whole, then is the whole 
 not good, but evil, or at the best, very imperfect; and an author 
 must be as his workmanship is ; as is the effect, such is the 
 cause. But the solution of this difficulty is at hand : that there 
 is no evil in the universe. What ! are there no pains, no 
 imperfections ? Is there no misery, no vice in the world ? or, 
 are not these evils ? Evils indeed they are ; that is, those of 
 one sort are hurtful, and those of the other sort are equally 
 G
 
 42 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 hurtful and abominable ; but they are not evil or mischievous 
 with respect to the whole. * * God intends and pur- 
 
 sues the universal good of His creation ; and the evil which 
 happens is not permitted for its own sake, or through any 
 pleasure in evil, but because it is requisite for the greater good 
 pursued." 
 
 Archbishop King says, " Natural evils proceed from the 
 original condition of things, and are not permitted by God, but 
 in order to prevent greater. Neither the goodness of God, 
 nor the perfection that belongs to the nature of things, required 
 that all natural evils should be removed : for some created 
 beings have evils inherent in their very natures, which God 
 must of necessity either tolerate, or not create those things in 
 which they do inhere.'"* 
 
 Leibnitz says " God has permitted evil, because it is enve- 
 loped in the best plan which is found in the region of possi- 
 bles, and that divine wisdom could not fail to have chosen." 
 Dr. Chalmers, commenting on this idea, remarks : " He could 
 not by this hypothesis, expunge the evil that is in our actual 
 universe, but at the expense of a shortcoming from the maxi- 
 mum of good that is rendered by it. We cannot positively 
 affirm this to be true ; but we can at least say, that for aught 
 we know, it may be true." 
 
 The previous inquiry into the nature of virtue and vice is 
 essential to the proper understanding of this question of ack- 
 nowledged difficulty, and the Necessitarian is alone able to put 
 it in its simple, true, and proper light. The supposition that 
 man could have done differently in the state of mind and cir- 
 cumstances in which he was placed, has been the cause that has 
 enabled Theologians to introduce most of the mystery that or- 
 dinarily is made to surround this subject. We hear consequently 
 of supreme justice; of judicial retribution; of the sanctity of 
 moral laws, irrespective of the tendency of such laws to pro- 
 duce good; of the sovereignty of the Almighty; and that the 
 Most High must vindicate his authority, &c., as if God had 
 
 * King on the Origin of Evil, vol. i., p. 220.
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 43 
 
 some other object in his laws, either physical or moral, than the 
 good of his creatures, or as if like some earthly potentate his 
 dignity and self-importance could be outraged ! Now all this 
 is perfectly childish, and when we know that " nothing could 
 have happened but what did happen," or as the Rev. J. Mailler 
 says, " every change, however slight, and every movement, 
 however minute, and every event that comes to pass, are fore- 
 ordained and regulated by the Almighty,"* equally untrue. 
 
 The doctrine of Philosophical Necessity assumes that there is 
 no such thing as sin and evil, only pains and pleasures, the 
 pains being necessary to the production of the pleasures : in 
 fact, virtue is virtue only because it promotes the one and avoids 
 the other : and if the directly opposite course conduced to the 
 highest good, that would be virtue and not what we now 
 assume to be such. The virtues have all been named accord- 
 ingly in accordance with this tendency to produce the general 
 good ; it is impossible therefore, in a general sense to do 
 evil that good may come, because if the general good did 
 come from what we call evil, it would not be evil but good. 
 The supposition that there is something in actions themselves, 
 something unfit or unsuitable in their own nature, that renders 
 them virtuous or vicious, unacceptable to God, has tended to 
 involve the subject in mystery. The distinction between phy- 
 sical and moral evil however, cannot be maintained ; sin, vice, 
 and moral turpitude, are only evils from their tendency to pro- 
 duce physical evil, that is, pain and misery ; consequently, 
 there is no evil but pain ; pain, either mental or bodily, in all 
 its different degrees, from mere uneasiness, to that agony which 
 can be supported only for a few moments : and the question, 
 on being extricated from all those difficulties with which the 
 notion of man's free agency has encumbered it, assumes its 
 simplest form, viz., what is the use of pain ? 
 
 The Deity, of course, cannot but be regarded by the Neces- 
 sitarian as the Author of all things, of the evil as well as the 
 good ; and that evil has its use, and that a benevolent one, cannot 
 
 * Philosophy of the Bible, p. 237.
 
 44 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 be doubted by him whose knowledge of our Creator has been 
 gathered from the numberless instances of benevolent design 
 throughout the universe, which, whilst they manifest the power 
 of God, show us plainly the direction of that power towards the 
 production of the greatest possible enjoyment. If, therefore, 
 it can be demonstrated that pain, which is the only evil, is a 
 necessary agent for the production of this balance of enjoyment; 
 that it is the only effectual guardian of that system of organiza- 
 tion upon which our happiness depends ; that it is essential 
 even to our very existence; will not the question in part be 
 stripped of its mystery, and the ways of God to man be justi- 
 fied even to our finite comprehensions ? 
 
 To creatures possessing our modes of intelligence, there are 
 some propositions which appear by their nature to be absurd 
 and contradictory ; thus, that the half of a thing can be equal 
 to the whole, and that an event which has already taken place 
 can be caused not to have taken place, we instinctively feel to 
 be contradictions, and the reverse of each of these propositions 
 we constitute into an axiom which serves as a basis of reasoning. 
 In the same way we deduce the axiom that God could not 
 create an intelligence equal to himself; for, to suppose that he 
 could do so would involve the absurdity of two infinite exist- 
 ences. All created intelligences must, therefore, be finite; 
 limited in their powers of knowing ; and such limitation implies 
 a certain degree of imperfection which must extend throughout 
 the whole universe of mind. But we cannot conceive of per- 
 fect happiness consisting with any degree of imperfection ; for 
 in the space between finite and infinite knowledge there must 
 be numberless things, the nature and tendency of which the 
 highest order of created beings cannot know, and with reference 
 to which they must be continually liable to do wrong ; that is 
 to act in opposition to the laws which constitute the definite 
 character which everything has received, and in disregard of 
 the relation which has been established between such objects and 
 the subject or intelligence, thus causing a perpetually increasing 
 amount of disarrangement. To check, therefore, that utter
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 45 
 
 subversion of order, and consequently of happiness, which the 
 necessary ignorance of created intelligences would occasion, a 
 something must be appointed which shall constantly act as a 
 warning whenever these laws are transgressed. It is doubtful 
 whether a monitor more effectual or better adapted for the pur- 
 pose than Pain could possibly have been selected. 
 
 It is probable even that no part of the creation is free from 
 evil, in the sense in which we thus use the term, as it is the 
 invariable accompaniment of that error which is consequent upon 
 the necessary limitation of the powers of knowing. George Combe 
 in his " Constitution of Man" has very clearly shown that "All 
 objects that exist, animate and inanimate, have received definite 
 qualities and constitutions, and that good arises from their pro- 
 per, and evil from their improper use." The field of choice is 
 immense, and our powers are limited ; how then are we on all 
 occasions to distinguish the proper from the improper use? 
 Pain and pleasure attend the selection and thus guide and even 
 dictate our choice. This is the most effectual teaching we can 
 have, and very probably the best possible arrangement that can 
 be made. Why then call the pain that seems absolutely neces- 
 sary to warn us when we are doing wrong, that is, making an 
 improper choice, an evil? 
 
 Not only is Pain the best Schoolmaster, but much of 
 what we call evil is nothing but the natural adaptation of 
 beings to the necessary conditions of their existence, on the 
 principle of " Natural Selection" by which the weak and 
 bad are destroyed, to make room for the strong and 
 good, which only ought to be preserved. In fact, what we 
 foolishly call evil, is only the natural and necessary law of pro- 
 gress, from good, ever on to better and better. With respect to 
 the employment of pain for the correction of error in other 
 worlds, it must be mere matter of conjecture, for "what can 
 we reason but from what we know ?" It would appear how- 
 ever to be probable that wherever there are beings susceptible 
 of enjoyment there also is pain.
 
 46 THE OKIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 SECTION L 
 
 PAIN CONSIDERED AS THE NECESSARY AND MOST EFFECTUAL 
 GUARDIAN OF THAT SYSTEM OF ORGANIZATION UPON 
 WHICH HAPPINESS DEPENDS. 
 
 As the capability of enjoyment is ever found to increase 
 with complexity of structure, the power of feeling pain always 
 increases in the sains proportion. For the more complex and 
 delicate the nervous system, and consequently the more varied 
 and intense the powers of thinking and feeling, the more neces- 
 sity has it for a protection from the numerous surrounding in- 
 fluences which would tend to throw it into disorder, or to des- 
 troy it. Pain, in many cases intense pain, could alone compel 
 us to desist from subjecting our body to such influences, and 
 thus destroying the power of enjoyment dependent upon the 
 perfection of our organization. Extraneous substances intro- 
 duced into the body, are, by a long and intricate process, fitted 
 for becoming part of a living structure, and by a still further 
 process are adapted not only for living, but for feeling and 
 thinking; out of the same blood are formed all the different 
 materials of which our frame consists, each new atom being 
 deposited in its proper place, and the old materials, by a 
 variety of processes, carried out of the system, or mixed up 
 with new matter to be revivified. It is necessary that each 
 atom should assume exactly its proper place in the system, and 
 if any derangement or artificial obstruction prevents this, we 
 are immediately warned and made conscious by pain that some- 
 thing is wrong, the pain being generally in proportion to the 
 importance of the derangement* 
 
 * " Unless the whole constitution of the world were altered our very exist- 
 ence depends upon our sensibility to suffering. * * * Without the warning 
 voice of pain, life would be a series of disasters. * * * Without phy- 
 sical pain, infancy would be maimed, or perish, before experience could inform 
 it of its dangers. Lord Kaimes advised parents to cut the fingers of their 
 children 'cunningly' with a knife, that the little innocents might associate 
 suffering with the glittering blade before they could do themselves a worse 
 injury ; but if no smart accompanied the wound, they would cut up their own 
 fingers with the same glee that they cut a stick, and burn them in the candle
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 47 
 
 We thus find man possessed of a complicated apparatus, con- 
 sisting of numerous functions ; first, those necessary for the 
 preservation of life, arid secondly, those essential for the support 
 of the nervous system upon which sensation depends ; and he is 
 surrounded on all sides with objects bearing a fixed relation to 
 himself, the greater part causing pleasurable sensations, but all, 
 when calculated to injure him, causing painful ones. Experi- 
 ence, thus tutored by pleasure and pain, is his only guide as to 
 what is injurious and what salutary ; and real Education con- 
 sists in imparting a knowledge of the nature and tendencies of 
 everything around us. 
 
 with the same delight that they burn a piece of paper in the fire. Without 
 pain we could not proportion our actions to the strength of our frame, or our 
 exertions to its powers of endurance. In the impetuosity of youth we should 
 strike blows that would crush our hands and break our arms ; we should take 
 leaps that would dislocate our limbs ; and no longer taught by fatigue that the 
 muscles needed repose, we should continue our sports and our walking tours 
 till we had worn out the living tissue with the same unconsciousness that we 
 now wear out our coats and our shoes. The very nutriment which is the sup- 
 port of life would frequently prove our death. Mirabeau said of a man who 
 was as idle as he was corpulent, that his only use was to show how far the 
 skin would stretch without bursting. Without pain, this limit would be con- 
 stantly exceeded, and epicures experiencing no uneasy sensations, would con- 
 tinue their festivities until they met with the fate of the frog in the fable, who 
 was ambitious of emulating the size of the ox. Sir Charles Bell mentions the 
 case of a patient who had lost the sense of heat in his right hand, and who, 
 unconscious that the cover of a pan which had fallen into the fire was burning 
 hot, took it out and deliberately returned it to its proper place to the des- 
 truction of the skin of the palm and fingers. This of itself would be an acci- 
 dent of incessant occurrence if the monitor were wanting which makes us drop 
 such materials more hastily than we pick them up. Pain is the grand pre- 
 server of existence, the sleepless sentinel that watches over our safety, and 
 makes us both start away from the injury that is present, and guard against it 
 carefully in the time to come. 
 
 The same Infinite Wisdom which has contrived pain for our protection has 
 also distributed it in the manner which causes it to fulfil its defensive purposes 
 with the least suffering to its subjects. * * * The skin is the advanced 
 guard through which every injury to the other parts must make its way. The 
 skin, therefore, required to be the seat of a peculiar sensibility both for its own 
 security and to impel us to flinch from the violence which would hurt the 
 flesh beneath. Forming our notions of pain from what we feel at the surface, 
 we imbibe the idea that the deeper the wound the more severe would be the 
 sxiffering, but this, says Sir Charles Bell, is delusive, and contrary to the fact. 
 The surgeon, he adds, who makes use of the knife, informs the patient that 
 the worst is over when the skin is passed, and if, in the progress of the opera-
 
 48 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 It is easy to make apparent the objects and advantages of 
 evil, as it is denominated, in the physical world, by showing 
 that the benevolent guardianship of pain alone could maintain 
 our bodily frames in the state requisite for the enjoyment of 
 which they are the source. Thus, if a person fall into the fire, 
 
 tion, it is found necessary to extend the outer incision, the return to the skin 
 proves far more trying than the original cut, from the contrast it presents to 
 the comparative insensibility of the interior. The muscle is protected not by 
 its own tenderness, which is by no means acute, but by the tenderness of its 
 superficial covering, 'which affords,' says Sir Charles, ' a more effectual defence 
 than if our bodies were clothed with the hide of a rhinoceros. To have en- 
 dowed the delicate internal textures with an exquisite susceptibility to the 
 gash from a knife, or a blow from a stick, would have been superfluous torture. 
 The end is effectually attained by spreading over them a thin layer of highly 
 sensitive skin, which is too intolerant of cuts or bruises to allow any harm to 
 approach it, which it is in our power to avert. In addition to the protection 
 which is thus provided against occasional dangers, the skin by its sensibility, 
 is essential to our existence under the hourly conditions of life. It is the skin 
 which acts as a thermometer to tell us whether the temperature is suited to 
 our organization, and warns us alike to shun pernicious extremes of heat and 
 cold. It is the skin again which prompts the instinctive restlessness that pre- 
 serves the entire frame from decay. * * * Even in the unconsciousness of 
 Blumber the contrivance continues to act, and, were it otherwise, sleep, instead 
 of being ' nature's sweet restorer,' would derange the circulation and cripple 
 our frames. * * * The nerve of the coat of the eye is sometimes injured, 
 and is no longer sensitive to the dust which adheres to the ball. Then the lid 
 is not excited to work or the tears to flow. The particles which are carried 
 into the eye cease to pain, and being allowed to remain, they set up inflam- 
 mation, and the inflammation renders opaque the transparent covering through 
 which the light flows. Blindness is the result, and the sight itself is found to 
 be dependent upon the refined sensibility of the outer membrane. * * 
 
 " As pain has been diversely distributed over the body of man in the man- 
 ner which his safety and comfort requires, so it must be meted out to each 
 order of beings in the degree which consorts with their position in the world." 
 Quarterly Review, Jan., 1858, p. 190, et seq. 
 
 That pain only exists among animals tbe highest order of sensitive creatures 
 where it can serve a purpose, is a very comforting idea, and it is becoming 
 general among naturalists. As it exists in different degrees in the human 
 body, according to the purpose it is intended to serve, so it may and doubtless 
 does exist in different degrees in the sensitive creation, but precisely to what 
 extent, so as to be able to say, this creature does not feel pain at all, our present 
 means of knowing do not enable us to specak positively. Look at the expression 
 of agony in the face of a fly in a spider's web and hear its cries, and yet it seems 
 to do as well almost without its legs as with them. We are not yet able to 
 8ay which are nerves of sensation and which of motion in a fly, or even whether 
 in any case nerves of sensation are capable of pleasurable feelings only and 
 not at all uf painful ones.
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 49 
 
 pain compels him to extricate himself in the most speedy man- 
 ner possible ; if a limb be fractured, or any important bodily 
 function deranged, pain obliges him to seek a remedy and to 
 repair the mischief. In all these cases, the benevolent inten- 
 tion to the individual sufferer is evident, and he who would 
 consider bodily pain as an evil and not as a good, is like the 
 unruly child that quarrels with its nurse for not allowing him 
 to play with a razor, or to drink poison. But in the moral and 
 intellectual world, suffering, though no less remedial, is less 
 evidently so to mankind at large ; although it is incalculable 
 the extent to which the comfort and welfare of all may be en- 
 hanced, when it is universally understood that mental as well 
 as bodily suffering is intended to apprise us of the infringe- 
 ment of some important law of nature upon which the pre- 
 servation of happiness depends. A large class of those suffer- 
 ings which are thought to be purely mental, may, upon further 
 investigation into the intimate connection between matter and 
 mind, be found to be solely referrible to peculiar states of the 
 bodily system, and may be capable of much alleviation when 
 the corporeal functions upon which they depend shall be better 
 known, so as to come within the province of medicine. 
 
 With respect to the sufferings to which we are liable in con- 
 sequence of the relation in which we stand to society, the 
 benevolent tendency is less obvious, by reason of our present 
 ignorance as to the nature of that relation, and of our own men- 
 tal constitutions. Our ideas of justice have been formed upon 
 notions of free-will ; we have regarded ourselves strictly as 
 individuals, instead of mere parts of the great body of society, 
 united to it by ties quite as strong as those that unite one part 
 of our body to another, not indeed by contiguity of atoms, but 
 by contiguity of feeling ; and it would be quite as reasonable for 
 one part of the body to object to suffer for the derangement of 
 another part for the lungs to expostulate with the stomach, 
 1 Why must I suffer for your imprudence ?' as for one man to 
 complain to the body of society, of which he forms only a 
 member, ' Why must I individually suffer for your misdeeds ?'
 
 50 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 The same answer might be given in both cases, that, as one 
 part of the body could not exist without the other, an injury to 
 one is felt by all, that all may feel interested in the restoration 
 of the injured member ; that, as one man could not exist ( in a 
 state in which existence would be a blessing) without society, 
 he suffers from the sins of another, that he may have an interest 
 in removing the ignorance or ill-feeling from which he suffered, 
 and in keeping every member of the general body sound. 
 Society is, in fact, so organized, that so long as there is one of 
 its members ill-disposed or ignorant, all are liable to pay the 
 penalty ; and although this distribution of evil may not seem 
 in accordance with the common notion of justice, viz., that 
 each man should suffer only for his own misconduct, yet if it 
 can be shown that each individual gains infinitely more than he 
 loses by such an arrangement, justice cannot be said to be out- 
 raged by a system which produces the greatest possible happi- 
 ness to all; or if it can, injustice becomes the virtue and not 
 justice. 
 
 The following is a pleasing picture of the advantages we 
 derive from living in society : Dr. Arnott says " Every one 
 feels that he is a member of one vast civilized society which 
 covers the face of the earth ; and no part of the earth is in- 
 different to him. In England, for instance, a man of moderate 
 fortune may cast his looks around him and say with truth and 
 exultation, ' 1 am lodged in a house that affords me conveni- 
 ences and comforts which some centuries ago even a King 
 could not command. Ships are crossing the sea in every direc- 
 tion to bring what is useful to me from all parts of the earth. 
 In China, the men are gathering the tea-leaf for me; in 
 America they are planting cotton for me ; in the West India 
 Islands, they are preparing my sugar and my coffee for me ; 
 in Saxony they are shearing the sheep to make me clothing ; 
 at home, powerful steam-engines are spinning and weaving for 
 me, and making cutlery for me, and pumping the mines, that 
 minerals useful to me may be procured. Although my pro- 
 perty is small, I have post-coaches running day and night on
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 51 
 
 all the roads, to carry my correspondence, and I have pro- 
 tecting fleets and armies around my happy country, to secure 
 my enjoyments and repose. Then I have editors and printers, 
 who daily send me an account of what is going on throughout 
 the world, among all those people who serve me. And to crown 
 the whole, I have books ; the miracle of all my possessions, 
 more wonderful than the wishing-cap of the Arabian Tales ; for 
 they transport me instantly, not only to all places, but to all 
 times. By my books I can conjure up before me, to vivid ex- 
 istence, all the great and good men of antiquity ; and for my 
 individual satisfaction I can make them act over again the most 
 renowned of their exploits : the orators declaim to me : the 
 historians recite, the poets sing : and from the equator to the 
 pole, or from the beginning of time until now, by my books I 
 can be where I please.' ' Such has been the effect of the 
 combined powers of man, giving "to each individual of the 
 civilized millions that cover the earth, nearly the same enjoy- 
 ments as if he were the single lord of all."* Compare these 
 advantages with those which an individual might possess by his 
 own unaided powers, and it is evident how much more he gains 
 by the social arrangement than he loses by being a part of the 
 great whole. The object of creation is to produce the largest 
 possible sum of enjoyment to all, considering individuals not as 
 individuals, but only as parts of the sensitive world, and it is 
 to the practical ignorance of this wise arrangement, and to the 
 tendency that all have to individualize their enjoyments, that 
 we must attribute much of the moral evil, or mental pains, now 
 prevalent throughout society ? The advantages that ought to 
 be derived by the race generally from the progress of civiliza- 
 tion, are too much monopolized by the few, whose happiness, 
 meanwhile, would be far better secured if they were made to 
 participate only in the general well-being. The overgrown 
 wealth which tempts the possessor to the destruction of the 
 power of enjoyment which nature gave him, would suffice to 
 call into healthy and vigorous action hundreds now cramped 
 
 * Elements of Physica, Introduction, p. 26.
 
 52 
 
 and stunted under the chilling influence of want. The sum of 
 ease and leisure which eats into the soul of the indolent in the 
 lap of luxury, would refresh the minds, and cheer the spirits of 
 a multitude whose incessant toil furnishes the perverted bles- 
 sing to its victim. The object and advantage of what is called 
 moral evil then is to extend these advantages to the whole of 
 
 mankind. 
 
 What then, will it be said, are crimes against the person 
 and property, robberies and murders, good upon the whole to 
 society? These evils bear the same relation to the body of 
 Society, as physical evils do to our own bodies, and are 
 intended for the same purpose to secure the health and 
 happiness of the system. Some vital organ is diseased, 
 and the consequent pain drives the individual to seek a 
 remedy before the organic functions are destroyed. Robbers 
 and murderers are diseased parts of the body of society, and 
 the evils resulting from the inroads of such parties, serve to 
 induce men to look to the causes of crime, and to apply those 
 measures that are calculated to restrain it ; thus diminishing by 
 the most direct means crime, and the suffering thence resulting. 
 
 It has been objected that virtue does not, in the present 
 state, on all occasions, produce a balance of good to the vir- 
 tuous. As a general rule, it is admitted that it does so, and 
 that when the laws of nature have free operation, there are no 
 exceptions ; but it is urged, that since the laws and social insti- 
 tutions of mankind are at variance with the laws of nature, 
 particular cases do occur in which a man suffers for acting 
 virtuously. 
 
 Virtue, to the Necessitarian, means that line of conduct 
 which, all things considered, shall be productive of the 
 greatest happiness to all. Now suppose that in consequence of 
 some human law made for individual advantage, or the advan- 
 tage of a class, a person in calculating the results of a certain 
 action, perceives that though it may tend to the advantage of 
 the whole, yet that he individually must suffer by it. Still the 
 strength of his moral faculties, his innate love of virtue, and
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 53 
 
 the persuasion in which lie has been brought up, that virtue is 
 the best policy, induce him to choose the virtuous path. 
 What good arises from his suffering in the cause of virtue ? 
 Thus much. The evil he suffers induces him to look to the 
 cause he discovers it in the unjust law, and he joins others 
 who have felt the ill effects of the same law, in obliging 
 legislators to repeal it. It is in this manner that the state of 
 society is continually improved. But this particular individual 
 may not live to enjoy the fruits of his virtue how then is he 
 benefited by it ? He has been benefited all his life, by the state 
 of society in which he has lived having been improved bv 
 similar means : others have suffered, in the past, more for 
 him than he has for the people now in being, and he is a pro- 
 portionate gainer. He reaps in this way, the reward of virtue, 
 though not of his own individual virtue. 
 
 As earthquakes, storms, and hurricanes tend to restore the 
 equilibrium of nature's powers, a few suffering by them, but 
 thousands benefiting, so moral tornadoes help to main- 
 tain communities in a healthy state. 
 
 By the French revolution, the moral atmosphere of France 
 was rendered far more favourable to the growth of virtue, and, 
 consequently, of enjoyment, to the whole of its inhabitants.* 
 
 * " History, looking back over this France through long time, back to 
 Target's time, for instance, when Dumb Drudgery staggered up to its King's 
 Palace, aud in wild expanse of sallow faces, squalor and winged raggedness, 
 presented hieroglyphically its Petition of Grievances, and for answer got 
 hanged on a ' new gallows, forty feet high,' confesses mournfully that there is 
 no period to be met with, in which the Twenty-five Millions of France 
 suffered less generally than in this period which they name Reign of Terror ! 
 But it was not the Dumb Millions that suffered here ; it was the Speaking 
 Thousands, and Hundreds, and Units ; who shrieked and published, and made 
 the world ring with their wail, as they could and should ; that is the grand 
 peculiarity. The frightfullest Births of Time are never the loud-speaking 
 ones, for these soon die ; they are the silent ones, which can live from ceniury 
 to century ! Anarchy, hateful as Death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of 
 man ; and so must itself soon die." 
 
 " Wherefore let all men know what of depth and of height is still revealed 
 in man ; and with fear aud wonder, with just sympathy and just antipathy, 
 with clear eye and open heart, contemplate it and appropriate it ; and draw 
 innumerable inferences from it. This inference, for example, among the first :
 
 54 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 The evils of WAR present great difficulties to those who 
 regard only its immediate effects upon a people or district ; but 
 to such as study the history of civilization, the wars which have 
 accompanied its progress, appear, not as unmixed gratuitous 
 evil, but as the means of working out the good of evil; by 
 forming the character of nations; introducing light where 
 darkness and night before existed; uniting by one bond of 
 brotherhood the people of each nation, formerly consisting of 
 detached individual families or clans ; breaking down old and 
 useless institutions that had answered their ends, and now 
 served merely as clogs to the advancement and happiness of 
 society; by clearing away old and decayed states in which, 
 from defective institutions and the misgovernment of ages, the 
 balance of happiness was reversed and turned against the people. 
 
 That if the gods of this lower world will sit on their glittering thrones, 
 indolent as Epicurus' gods, with the living Chaos of Ignorance, Hunger, 
 weltering uncared for at their feet, and smooth Parasites preaching ' Peace, 
 peace, when there is no peace,' then the dark Chaos, it would seem will rise ; 
 has risen, and heavens ! has it not turned their skins into breeches for 
 itself? That there be no second Sansculottism in our Earth for a thousand 
 years, let us understand well what the first was ; and let Rich and Poor of us 
 go and do otherwise." Carlyle's French Revolution, vol. 3, p. 434. 
 
 '' Mr. Arthur Young has truly described the deplorable indigence of the 
 French peasantry prior to the Revolution, and the present age has sufficiently 
 experienced the evils arising from the miserable condition of the Irish poor. 
 Posterity, however, will not fail to remark, that the sufferinga of the peasantry 
 in France brought about the Revolution, by which the condition of the 
 labouring poor was, in the first instance at least, considerably, and but for 
 the enormous sins they committed during its progress would have been 
 durably improved ; and we are ourselves witnesses to the formidable weight 
 which the Irish people have acquired, since the redundance of their popula- 
 tion has swelled the ranks of the disaffected, and deluged their neighbours 
 with distress.* * * The misery, therefore, which is the immediate con- 
 sequence of the redundant population which flows from political oppression, is 
 in fact the means which nature takes to hasten the downfall of the institutions 
 which have occasioned it ; like the swelling of a limb which has been wounded 
 or imbibed poisonous matter, it is the effort of nature to discharge the 
 noxious substance which occasions the suffering. The benevolent laws of 
 nature are incessantly operating for the good of man, even when their 
 tendency is most mistaken by numerous observers. At the moment when the 
 misery of Ireland was confidently appealed to, as demonstrating the un- 
 avoidable pressure of population upon subsistence, that very misery was the 
 means which she was taking to terminate the distresses of the country, and 
 heal the wounds of the social system." Alison on Population, vol. 1, p. 247.
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 55 
 
 The wars of the Crusades, mad as they would appear, yet were 
 the means of spreading throughout Europe the light that broke 
 the bonds of superstition, and gradually led to the Reformation, 
 which again contributed to that freedom of inquiry from which 
 the present advance in science results. The wars between 
 France and England, notwithstanding their many disastrous 
 consequences, helped to strengthen the character of both peo- 
 ple, and to give that spirit and hardihood by which the great- 
 ness of each has been maintained. The wars of the White and 
 Red Roses, whilst they ravaged our country and weakened the 
 aristocracy, emancipated the people the masses, from civil 
 bondage, and led to the formation of those institutions upon 
 which British freedom has been dependent 
 
 "War," says Mr. Alison, * u is the great instrument by 
 which the agency of some important laws of nature is main- 
 tained. It is the decay of military virtue which exposes civi- 
 lized states to destruction from the efforts of their barbarous 
 neighbours. Their fall does not take place till they have con- 
 ferred all the benefits on mankind of which they were capable, 
 and till their further continuance would be a misfortune to 
 humanity. The destruction of Nineveh by the Medes, of 
 Babylon by the Persians, of Rome by the Goths, and of Con- 
 stantinople by the Turks, served only to extinguish so many 
 branches of the human race, in which age had withered the 
 sinews of virtue, and prosperity exhausted the sources of 
 happiness." 
 
 Upon the same subject Mr. Combe observes, f " There is 
 more of benevolent arrangement in the tendency of savage and 
 barbarous tribes, to wage furious wars with each other than at 
 first sight appears. The Irish peasantry are still barbarous in 
 their minds and habits, and but for the presence of a large 
 army of civilized men, who preserve the peace, they would 
 fight and exterminate each other. It is questionable whether 
 the miseries that would attend such a course of action would 
 exceed those which are actually endured from starvation. The 
 * On Population, vol. I., p. 268. t Lectures on Moral Philosophy, p. 228.
 
 5(3 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 bane of Ireland is, that her population has increased far more 
 rapidly than her capital, morality, and knowledge. Where a 
 nation is left to follow its own course, this does not occur. 
 Dissension keeps down the numbers, until intelligence, capital, 
 and industry take the lead. England prevented the Irish from 
 fighting, but she did little to improve them." 
 
 Destruction and renovation is the great law of nature. 
 This is infinitely better than that nations should drag out "a 
 slow and snake-like life of dull decay" and decrepid old age. 
 A generation of a thousand millions is swept away about every 
 35 years ; and should it be cleared off a few years before its 
 time, what is that to the necessity for a clear and healthy 
 atmosphere for all the generations to come. 
 
 These are some of the effects of Evil considered with 
 reference to society as a whole : with respect to the individuals 
 of which the social body is composed, the subject has been 
 partially considered in treating of Rewards and Punishments. 
 
 SECTION II. 
 
 PAIN NECESSARY AS A MOTIVE AND STIMULUS TO ACTION. 
 
 The greater part of mankind being imbued with a notion 
 that the will is free, are in the habit of regarding more the 
 objects and ends of actions, than the causes which originate 
 them ; intent chiefly upon results, the delicate and wonderful 
 machinery that produces these results is comparatively un- 
 noticed. A large part of that which is called " evil" in the 
 world consists of nothing more than the wants, the desires 
 that furnish the motives to action, and without which we could 
 not maintain our existence for a day. All the faculties of man 
 when active, constitute wants or desires. Thus he wants food 
 he wants some one to love, and who shall love him in return ; 
 he wants the approbation of his fellows, he wants to see every
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 57 
 
 one receive that which is his due ; his happiness consists in the 
 gratification of these and his other wants, and pain results 
 when from any cause they remain ungratified. But these 
 wants are the impelling forces which irresistibly set him in 
 motion, securing an infinite diversity in the direction of his 
 powers, and a never-ceasing succession of sensations. 
 
 Some of our most pressing w-ants have relation to the 
 very preservation of our existence, the appetite for food, for 
 instance : and could we have been made to live without 
 sustenance, freedom from all liability to the pains of hunger 
 would not compensate for the loss of the pleasures of appetite. 
 Nor would the privilege of requiring no bread, be equal to the 
 advantage we derive from the law of nature which compels 
 us to earn it by the sw r eat of the brow. Laing, in his 
 " Journal of a residence in Norway," observes : " The food 
 best for a country is clearly that which it requires the greatest 
 exertion of industry and skill to produce. That which requires 
 but little of such exertion, as potatoes, would undoubtedly, re- 
 duce a nation to a low state of industry and skill. Those are 
 in the wrong path who would reduce the rate of pauperism in 
 England by reducing the standard of subsistence for the poor. 
 If the English labourers, instead of considering wheaten bread 
 and meat necessary for their proper subsistence, were to be 
 contented with potatoes and salt herrings, the increase of 
 pauperism among them would be in proportion to the diminished 
 value of their food and the ease of obtaining it." "Potatoes 
 are the worst food for a nation to subsist on, because in pro- 
 portion to their nutriment as food, they require less labour, less 
 exertion of body and mind to bring them to a state of food 
 than any other article of human culture. The planting and 
 digging up, the boiling or baking, are almost the only opera- 
 tions required with the potato ; and therefore, the nation which 
 is satisfied with a potato diet must be in a state of sloth 
 and inactivity, bodily and mental. The most complicated 
 manufacture, perhaps, which we have among mankind, and 
 which in all its parts requires the most continual exertion of 
 i
 
 58 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 human Industry and skill, is the production of a quartern loaf 
 from a few seeds of wheat put into the ground." 
 
 Thus necessity is the mother of invention. The ordinary 
 and common wants of our nature, of food, clothing, and lodg- 
 ing, always recurring and never satisfied, set us in motion, 
 bring into action all the powers of our mind, and call for that 
 exercise which is as necessary to the mental powers as aliment to 
 the body. Locke says, < ' all our actions owe their rise to a state of 
 uneasiness" which uneasiness is more or less intolerable as the 
 action to which it would urge us is more or less important. The 
 disposition to activity increases with exercise, the more we do the 
 more we seem disposed to do ; and it may with truth be said 
 that never are we so happy as when every moment has its full 
 employment. Take away the common wants of our nature, 
 and you take away that which produces all this activity. So 
 that these constantly recurring wants, so far from being infirm- 
 ities in the body of society, are its very principle of life, the 
 source of all its health and enjoyment. 
 
 It is not uncommon to hear the solid and perfect happiness 
 of the future state described as consisting in total rest, inac- 
 tivity, and freedom from all wants and desires ; but whatever 
 may be the the case in the unknown world, constituted as we 
 are with respect to this, we can conceive of no possible degree of 
 happiness resulting from such a state ; for all our ideas of en- 
 joyment are ideas of wants gratified ; and man is unquestiona- 
 bly infinitely the gainer by being surrounded perpetually by 
 wants, than he is the loser from their occasional non- 
 gratification. 
 
 Evil, then, is the result of the necessary limitation of our 
 faculties, and without pain we should have no means of know- 
 ing or avoiding what would injure us ; and none of our 
 motives would be sufficiently strong to induce us to seek our 
 own welfare. Now if a man is idle, and refuses to perform 
 his allotted part in the labour of the world, nature pinches him 
 in the stomach and obliges him to move on. Hunger is the 
 great conservator of all law and order, it sets every one to
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 59 
 
 work, it keeps every one in his place, and if it is an evil at all, 
 every one must admit it is a very necessary one. 
 
 The ordinary idea of philosophical Christians differs appa- 
 rently but little from this view of the nature of the evil, viz., 
 that it is permitted by an All-wise Providence, and that in His 
 hands, it on all occasions tends to good ; that it is the means 
 of the improvement and purification of our characters, and a 
 preparation for a future state. But there is considerable prac- 
 tical difference between the two views. Pain, says the advo- 
 cate of one, is intended to prepare you for a future state ; bear 
 it therefore with resignation, looking to a hereafter for the 
 reward of your patience. Pain, says the advocate of the 
 other, is the invariable intimation that you have disobeyed 
 some of the Creator's laws upon which happiness is de- 
 pendent here ; look to its cause, therefore, and remove it. 
 
 But if evil results from ignorance, might not Almighty 
 Power and Wisdom have interfered to save us from the effects 
 of our conduct when injurious ? Certainly, but it would be by 
 cutting the spirit of action and of right conduct at the root, 
 and we should have no interest in rectifying error; and as the 
 exercise of reason is based upon the uniformity of nature's 
 laws, any interference with this uniformity by such special pro- 
 vidence, would make reason a useless, if not a fatal gift. It 
 may be asked is not reason itself then an undesirable gift, and 
 would not man have been better left to the mere guidance of 
 Instinct as the brutes are ? 
 
 Isaac Taylor, the Author of the Natural History of En- 
 thusiasm says, " The reader need not be reminded that the 
 application of the word Instinct comprehensively, and without 
 distinction, to all the actions of the brute orders, is a popular 
 impropriety. One might as well call all the actions of man 
 rational, as all of the inferior order instinctive. When an ani- 
 mal acts in a manner, which differs in no essential circumstance 
 to a corresponding action in man, a delusion must be engen- 
 dered by applying to the two actions different terms. We 
 should confine the word Instinct to those instances in which a
 
 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 course rational as to its end, is pursued by a voluntary agent, 
 under circumstances that forbid the supposition that it springs 
 from a perception or calculation of the connexion of means and 
 end. The instance usually adduced, that of the construction of 
 the honey-comb, is one of the most popular that can be named, 
 especially because it involves some of the highest and most 
 abstruse principles of geometry. Philosophical writers must 
 be understood to use the words reason and instinct in a popu- 
 lar sense, when attributing one to man as his prerogative, and 
 the other to the brute as his blind faculty. The terms reason 
 and instinct thus vaguely used mean, more reason and less rea- 
 son. For if the brutes were altogether destitute of reason and 
 liberty, in the same sense -in which the bee is destitute of both 
 in building her cells, rewards and punishments would have no 
 operation or efficiency." 
 
 Instinct appears to be a power impelling voluntary agents 
 to act in a single direction, without any perception of the con- 
 nection of means and ends, and little capable of adapting itself to 
 circumstances; consequently it has a very limited field of 
 action. If, therefore, we were to be governed entirely by in- 
 stinct, in order to our possessing the large field of action that 
 we now enjoy, we should require ten thousand at least. But 
 all the instincts with which we are acquainted we find acting 
 by means of organization ; and a brain containing the organs 
 of ten thousand instincts would, it is to be feared, be inconveni- 
 ently large. Man is a creature possessing a variety of instincts, 
 which give him his purpose and disposition to act; but instead 
 of being directed to their objects in one unvarying manner, 
 they are put under the charge of a generalizing instinct, which 
 we call reason, and which gives to each a liberty of acting in a 
 hundred different ways, calling at the same time our other 
 feelings into sympathetic action. It must be evident that this 
 is a means of increasing our sensations a hundred-fold, and it 
 is the aggregate of pleasurable sensations that constitutes happi- 
 ness, and the evil, or the painful sensations resulting from the 
 wrong direction which our instincts sometimes take, are not in
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 61 
 
 the proportion of one to a hundred of the extra sensations we 
 receive. 
 
 Suppose appetite in man, as in the lower animals, infallibly 
 directed him to eat only at proper times and in proper quantities 
 of some few things that are the most wholesome, the many evils 
 bodily and mental, which arise from gluttony and drunkenness, 
 would be spared, but we should lose the varied pleasures of 
 the taste, with all the sympathetic pleasures which accompany 
 its gratification. 
 
 Take another instance, the love of offspring. Suppose that 
 children could run about as soon as they were born, and were 
 protected by the perfection of their instincts ; much trouble in 
 nursing would be saved, and all the evils of physical mis- 
 management ; but all the pleasures, the hopes and fears, jo}-s 
 and sorrows, of parental solicitude would be lost. Perhaps 
 nothing shows more the folly of those who would take the 
 place of the Almighty and make a better system, than the fact 
 that the pleasures derivable from offspring, more intense per- 
 haps than any other, depend, in a great measure, upon what 
 may be called the evil of the helplessness of the object. 
 
 Happiness is made up of units, of single pleasurable sensa- 
 tions, and the object of nature is to bring us into such cir- 
 cumstances as shall produce a constant succession of such sen- 
 sations ; and even if they are partially painful, they are pre- 
 ferable to the pains of ennui, " which is the absence of sensations 
 sufficiently acute to engage attention." Habitual sensations 
 also are too weak to avert ennui, and none but habitual sensa- 
 tions could be experienced by us if we were guided by 
 infallible instincts without the diversifying power of reason ; 
 for all progression would cease, and comparative stagnation 
 would be the consequence.
 
 (52 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 SECTION III. 
 
 DEATH. 
 
 " How strange is human pride ! 
 I tell tliee that those living things, 
 To whom the fragile blade of grass,. 
 
 That springeth in the morn 
 
 And perisheth ere noon, 
 
 Is an unbounded world ; 
 I tell thee that those viewless beings, 
 Whose mansion is the smallest particle 
 
 Of the impassive atmosphere, 
 
 Thirk, feel, and live, like man ; 
 That their affections and antipathies, 
 
 Like his, produce the laws 
 
 Ruling their moral state ; 
 And the minutest throb, 
 That through their frame diffuses 
 
 The slightest, faintest, motion, 
 
 Is fixed and indispensable 
 As the majestic laws 
 
 That rule yon rolling orbs." 
 
 SHELLEY. 
 
 Such, though a poetical, is yet a logical deduction from the 
 doctrine of " Necessity." Man and the whole world, of which 
 he forms an insignificant item, is one general " effect," not a 
 cause. He prides himself upon his separate independent exist- 
 ence and freedom of will, but he has no such existence, he is 
 part only of a great whole, and he cannot be separated. Mil- 
 lions of causes helped to bring him into existence and made 
 him what he is, and millions of causes playing upon this men- 
 tal mechanism produce all the effects of his varied being. He 
 is dependent upon the human race, and the human race on the 
 great whole of animated existence ; and animate and inanimate 
 are again inseparable. " The simplest germination of a lichen 
 is," says Lewes, " if we apprehend it rightly, directly linked with 
 the grandest astronomical phenomena ; nor could even an infu- 
 sory animalcule be annihilated without altering the equilibrium 
 of the universe. 
 
 ' Nothing in this world is single, 
 
 All things by a law divine 
 
 In one another's being mingle.'
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 63 
 
 Plato had some dim forecast of this when he taught that the 
 world was a great animal ; and others, since Plato, when they 
 considered the universe the manifestation of some transcendent 
 life, with which every separate individual life was related, as 
 parts are to the whole." Emerson says, " everything in nature 
 contains all the powers of nature ; everything is mads of one 
 hidden stuff. The true doctrine of Omnipresence is, that God 
 reappears in all his parts in every moss and cobweb ; thus the 
 universe is alive." The Christian Philosopher ( Rev. J. White 
 Mailler, M.A.,) says, *" When we view the world as one uni- 
 versal effect, we are at once led to the contemplation of a 
 universal Divine Agency. Does not the Infinite act on every 
 atom ? * * * God never delegates his power ; He cannot 
 transfer divinity to a substance: there is no power therefore 
 separated from himself. In Him all things have their being." 
 As Pope says : 
 
 "All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 Whose body nature is and God the soul." 
 
 In fact, let us look at it from whatever point of view we will, 
 we cannot disjoin man from the rest of creation and consider 
 him individually and separately. Neither can we give him the 
 supreme importance that he arrogantly assumes ; the race of 
 flies is more important perhaps to the good of the whole than 
 he is. 
 
 Then what is death? It is simply the removal of the 
 old worn out, and useless matter, from the great body of sen- 
 tient existence, leaving that body always young and vigorous ; 
 the old matter taking new forms and immediately passing into 
 new life. To individual man, " Death is the sleep of the weary. 
 It is the repose, the body's repose, after the busy and toilsome 
 day of life," and when natural and not violent it is as painless 
 as birth of the beginning and the end of life we are equally- 
 unconscious, " the exhausted faculties sinking to their mortal 
 repose, as they do to nightly sleep. Death is as natural as 
 Birth, and equally necessary, for it is the parent of life." 
 
 * The Philosophy of the Bible, pp. 35 and 40.
 
 04 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 Had man made the world, he would have made himself im- 
 mortal, for in the " future" world he does create, immortality is to 
 be his state. He would probably have made a great mistake. 
 Individual drops of water are collected on the brows of the moun- 
 tains, they flow down into the valleys and form rivers, flowing on 
 to the great ocean. By a silent and imperceptible force, calcula- 
 ted by Leslie to be two-hundred thousand times greater than 
 that of the combined exertions of the whole human race, this 
 water raised in vapour, descends in rain, again forms the river, 
 which with sparkling vivid vitality flows again to the ocean, 
 and so goes on in an unbroken circle. The same river flows on 
 in never ending succession and is thus immortal, though not 
 one drop of water retains its individuality ; but had the river 
 been immortal in man's sense of immortality, in identity of 
 individual drops or atoms, the river had been a stagnant, stink- 
 ing, death-diffusing ditch. Again the leaves of the trees are 
 born in spring in tender variegated greens, in summer they 
 take a darker sameness, and in autumn they change again in 
 hues all beautiful, and then conies winter, when pierced by 
 insects, covered with dust, shrivelled by the frost, they fall off 
 and die, that they may again be born in spring. Would we 
 change this that the same leaves might be everlasting? So 
 with man's coveted immortality, would we change the present 
 vigourous everlasting babyhood, childhood, and youth of society, 
 that a comparatively few old people, like the withered leaves 
 of autumn, might boast that they had retained their identity 
 from the beginning of the world till now, selfishly keeping out 
 all others from their term of existence. This change of seasons 
 is closely typical of man's existence. In spring everything is 
 young, fresh, vigourous and green, and all the hilarity and sun- 
 shine of early youth belong to it. Summer has its flowers, 
 Autumn its fruit, and then comes old age and decay the sere 
 and yellow leaf the death of winter. So man has his year 
 of three score and ten journeys round the sun allotted to him, 
 and then come winter and death and his reappearance in the 
 new growth of spring, and what does it matter whether the
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 65 
 
 new body be called Dick Snooks, as before, or Tom Styles. 
 Happiness depends upon a continuous succession of new sensa- 
 tions ; were we organized as we now are, to live much longer 
 than the time allotted to us, our sensations from being habitual 
 and from the decay of our nervous system would be too weak 
 to afford us enjoyment, and life would become a burden to us. 
 When time has blunted the feelings, or the objects of them no 
 longer exist, knowledge, so much coveted, is of little use unless 
 it can be, as it now is, infused into new forms capable of all 
 that freshness of feeling in which youth so much excels old 
 age. 
 
 With the present arrangement, the great Body of Humanity, 
 (considered as an individual,) with its Soul, the principle of 
 Sensation, is ever fresh and vigorous and increasing in enjoy- 
 ment. As yet it is but in its childhood : as its knowledge 
 increases, so will its happiness. Death and Birth, the means 
 of removal and succession, bear the same relation to this body 
 of society, as the system of waste and reproduction do to the 
 human body : the old and useless and decayed material is 
 carried out, and fresh substituted, and thus the frame is reno- 
 vated and rendered capable of ever increasing happiness. The 
 parallel between the soul of society and that of the individual 
 man is equally complete ; as with respect to the latter, all the 
 aimless studies and useless accomplishments of youth are soon 
 forgotten, while only the knowledge that is serviceable is re- 
 membered, so in the great mind of society, the absurd theories 
 and systems that occasionally rear themselves into notice are 
 shortly consigned to oblivion, and all the useful ideas that have 
 existed in the individual minds of the human race, are retained. 
 While our thoughts traverse, as if in personal recollection, the 
 different by-gone ages of society, the minds of all the illustrious 
 men that have lived form part of our own, until we arrive at 
 its infancy, concerning which, as of our own infancy, we can 
 remember nothing. The minds, that is to say, the ideas and 
 feelings of which they were composed, of Socrates, Plato, 
 Epicurus, Galileo, Bacon, Locke, Newton, are thus for ever in 
 K
 
 66 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 existence, and the immortality of the soul is preserved, not in 
 individuals but in the great body of Humanity. 
 
 The song of the lark is as sweet to-day as a thousand years 
 ago what would be gained therefore by its being the same 
 
 lark ? but doubtless he also sighs for immortality and a place 
 
 not in but beyond the skies. What in man is worth preserving 
 but his song, and what matters it in what body that is pre- 
 served? A series or succession of being seems decidedly the 
 best for this world, and may be the best for all worlds. The 
 most that the Natural Theologian is justified in asserting with 
 reference to a future life is, 'If it is better, all things considered, 
 that I should live again in another world, I shall be certain to 
 do so; if it is not better, all things considered, I do not wish it.' 
 There need be no forcible rupture of the known order of God's 
 providence to enable us to retain an indistinct and troubled 
 dream of previous existence, the cessation of which existence 
 could be no more regretted than our non-existence before we 
 were born. The present recognized order of things would 
 certainly be better than a reservation for suffering even of 
 a few, much better indeed than the infinite suffering of the 
 many. The finite happiness of all that have ever lived could 
 never equal the infinite suffering of one. 
 
 To the race, although not to individuals, all beautiful things 
 are preserved for ever ; all that is really good and profitable is 
 immortal. The lovely world, although created anew every 
 year, is yet the same that Adam saw in Paradise. " Life is 
 then like a beautiful starlight night, in which no long-seen 
 constellation sets without the rising of another," and thus gene- 
 ration after generation has risen and set. And yet for all the 
 elements of happiness 
 
 " For love and beauty and delight 
 
 There is no death, nor change," 
 ***** 
 
 "Tis we, 'tis ours are changed ; not they." * 
 
 * " There is nothing new under the sun, and in the view we have taken 
 above it would seem that we only agree with the Realist, in the world-wide 
 dispute between Realist and Nominalist. The Realists maintain, that every
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 67 
 
 It is true 
 
 "All things that we love and cherish 
 Like ourselves, must fade aud perish ; 
 Such is our rude mortal lot 
 Love itself would, did they not." 
 
 SHELLEY. 
 
 We have hitherto considered Death in the light of a succession 
 of being as opposed to immortality ; as a constant change of the 
 material frames, the receptacles for the time of all alone worthy 
 of continued existence. We have referred principally to natu- 
 ral death as it is called, that is, death without violence but 
 natural death in all but man does not take place in the slow pro- 
 cess of decay, but in the being eaten. Life is always preserved at 
 high pressure: population always pressing on the means of sub- 
 sistence. Nature is no respecter of individuals. Her object seems 
 to be to keep the largest possible number in the greatest possible 
 strength and vigour and efficiency for enjoyment. " There is no 
 exception to the rule," says Darwin, " that every organic being 
 naturally increases at so high a rate, that if not destroyed, this 
 earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair." 
 The rate of increase is geometrical. Mr. J. A. Rowell has 
 calculated that from a single specimen of the flesh fly there 
 would proceed in six generations sufficient flies to cover the 
 world to the depth of about a mile and a quarter. Life presses 
 towards existence in a similar way in almost all departments, 
 
 General Term (or abstract idea), such as Men, Virtue, &c., has a real and inde- 
 pendent existence, quite irrespective of any concrete individual determination, 
 such as Smith, Benevolence, &c. The Nominalists, on the contrary, maintain, 
 that all general terms are but the creation of human ingenuity, designating 
 110 distinct entities, but merely used as marks of aggregate conceptions." 
 Lewes' Biographical History of Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 61. Both individuals and 
 Generals are equally the creations of the mind, aud Generals or what we call 
 Abstractions, paradoxical as it may seem, would appear to be, if not the only real, 
 certainly the only permanent existences. For hope and peace, contentment and 
 sympathy, and youth and health, 
 
 " For love and beauty and delight 
 There is no death, nor change;" 
 
 individual bodies aud minds are constantly changing, but they and all that 
 constitutes pleasurable existence transmitted from one generation to another 
 are unchangeable and eternal.
 
 68 
 
 and the most perfect order and arrangement exist in the mode 
 in which it is kept within due bounds ; the good and strong 
 preserved, the weak and bad destroyed. It is most astonish- 
 ing the systematic provision that prevails for this purpose, and 
 the general ignorance on the subject is if anything still more 
 astonishing. Man would get no "cabbage" if not for the 
 ichneumon fly which destroys the caterpillars that are hatched 
 from the eggs of the common white butterfly. " On the oak," 
 says Dr. Carpenter, " not less than two hundred kinds of cater- 
 pillars have been estimated to feed, and the nettle, which scarcely 
 any beast will touch, maintains fifty different species of insects, 
 but for which check it would soon annihilate all the plants in 
 its neighbourhood." Check is placed on check, the death of 
 one superabundant population supporting the life of other des- 
 criptions of beings. " After the inhabitants had contrived to ex- 
 tirpate the little crow from Virginia, at an enormous expense, 
 they would gladly have given twice as much to buy back the 
 tribe. A reward of threepence a dozen was offered in New 
 England for the purple grade, which commits great havoc 
 among the crops, but protects so much more herbage than he 
 destroys, that the insects when he was gone caused the total 
 loss of the grass in 1749, and obliged the colonists to get hay 
 from Pennsylvania and even to import it from Great Britain. A 
 few years since an Act was passed by the Chamber of Deputies 
 to prohibit the destruction of birds in a particular district of 
 France. They had been recklessly killed off, and the harvest 
 being swept away in its first green stage by millions of hungry 
 reapers, the earth had ceased to yield its increase.* Extensive 
 
 * In the Spring of 1861, while Italy and in fact Europe generally were 
 rising in the interests of the Nationalities, the French Legislative Body were 
 engaged in taking into their serious consideration the interests of small birds, 
 a question of far more national importance to them ; and the Times of to-day, 
 August 21st, 1861, says, " the poverty of the French harvest this very year is 
 attributed to the ravages of a particular worm, which it is the function of a 
 certain bird to destroy," and M. Marshall, ex-Deputy of La Meurthe, the 
 Agricultural Society of Toulon, the Acclimatization Society of Nancy, and 
 M. P. Schoeffer, of Robertsau, (Haut-Rhin), have petitioned the French Corps 
 Le"gislatif, requesting that steps may be taken for the preservation of those 
 birda that destroy insects detrimental to Agriculture. The Report says
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 69 
 
 inroads like these upon the economy of nature reveal to us its 
 wisdom, and clearly show us that if one while it is a blessing 
 that particular animals should eat, at another it is a benefit to 
 the world that they should be eaten. A flight of rooks renders 
 services which could not be performed by all the cultivators of 
 the soil put together, and if the poor birds are occasionally 
 
 "Against such enemies man is powerless. His genius may enable him to fol- 
 low the course of the planets, to penetrate mountains or steer a ship against a 
 storm ; he can kill, or bend to his will the monsters of the forest ; but in 
 presence of these myriads of insects which, from every point of the horizon, 
 settle upon his fields, cultivated with so much care, his strength is sheer 
 weakness. His eye is not even sharp enough to discern many of them, his 
 hand too slow to catch them. And even were he to annihilate them by mil- 
 lions they would reappear by milliards. From above, from below, from right 
 to left, they come in legions innumerable, without relapse. In this invincible 
 army which advances to the conquest of the labour of man, each member has 
 its mouth, its day, its season, its tree, its plant; each knows its own battle 
 ground, and never mistakes its post. 
 
 " At the beginning of the world man would have succumbed in his un- 
 equal struggle if God had not given him in the bird a powerful auxiliary, a 
 faithful ally, who wonderfully accomplishes the task which man is incapable 
 of performing. * * * 
 
 " You will easily understand, gentlemen, the mischief done by these insects 
 if you call to mind that the cockroach deposits from 70 to 100 eggs at a time, 
 which soon are transformed into white worms, which for two or three years 
 live exclusively upon the roots of our most valuable vegetables. The weevil 
 produces from 70 to 90 eggs, which, laid in so many grains of corn, become 
 larvae that eat them all up. Thus, one single weevil destroys a whole ear of 
 corn. The pyrale lays from 100 to 130 eggs in as many shoots of vine. Thus 
 attacked, the shoot pines and dies. From 100 to 130 grapes are thus des- 
 troyed by one pyrale before their formation. 
 
 " And now, if you will compare the two orders of figures which I have 
 just submitted to you, admitting that on 500 insects destroyed in one day by 
 a single bird there be only one-tenth of those noxious creatures ; for example, 
 40 weevils and 10 pyrales (and this is below, the mark) that is to say, on an 
 average, 3,200 grains of corn, and 1,150 grapes, which in one day this little 
 bird will have saved you. 
 
 " Give as large a margin as you choose to any other natural causes which 
 might have stopped the ravages of these insects ; reduce as much as you 
 choose that of the bird, and there still remains enough to justify the profound 
 saying of a contemporary : ' The bird can live without man ; but man cannot 
 live without the bird.' 
 
 "And in fact, who but the little bird could be continually looking out for 
 and catching the weevil five millimetres in length, while depositing its eggs in 
 a cornfield in the young incipient grain? Who could catch the small butter- 
 fly of the pyrale when flying about with the same object in view ?
 
 70 THE OEIQIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 mischievous they are richly worthy of their hire. Make the 
 largest probable allowance for their consumption of a portion 
 of that crop, the whole of which they preserve, and they are 
 still immeasurably the cheapest labourers upon a farm. Pages 
 would be required to tell all the mistakes which are committed 
 in the blind rage for destruction, and in the readiness of the 
 lord of creation to believe that everything which tastes what 
 he tastes is a rival and a loss. Even wasps, which find no 
 friends, chiefly because they are armed with a sting, which, 
 unlike man, they rarely or ever use unprovoked, are an impor- 
 tant aid in keeping certain tribes within bounds." Quarterly 
 Review, Jan., 1858.* 
 
 " Who, especially, could find those minute eggs and larvce of which one 
 single m&sange consumes 200,000 in one year ?" 
 
 The Globe's Paris correspondent says, August 21st, 1861, " Le Courrier du 
 Baa Rhin informs us to-day that the harvest time in that district has been 
 heralded by a proclamation from the local authority offering a reward of a 
 penny a dozen for the carcases of field mice killed and produced ; already a 
 hecatomb of 56,000 has been piled up at the Mayoralty of St. Hypolite, after 
 six days slaughter." The people having destroyed their owls are now des- 
 troying their mice ; they will probably have to replace both let it cost what it 
 may. 
 
 A correspondent of the Times, writing August 23rd, says that the keepers, 
 in a mistaken notion of strictly preserving the game, having killed the stoats 
 or weasels, the polecats, the hawks and owls, " rats swarm to an extent 
 almost incredible," defying the farmers to put them down, and preying not 
 only on the eggs and newly-hatched young of partridges and pheasants, and 
 uewly-boru leverets, but on the crops of the hard-working and industrious 
 tenants. The writer says, " let them inquire, and the keepers will think it 
 worth while to restore the balance between the rats and their natural enemies." 
 
 * In fact, although the common spelling book teaches that the pig is man's 
 lest friend, because he can eat him every bit, yet it is certain that he does not 
 always recognize his best fiieuds. The rat, so much persecuted, eats animal 
 matter that would poison and pollute the atmosphere, and the toad, aestheti- 
 cally considered, not handsome, yet protects from slugs the strawberries he 
 is supposed to steal. The writer in the Quarterly quoted above, says " Man- 
 kind have then a direct interest, on their own account, in enforcing mercy to 
 brutes. But it is the imperative right of the animals themselves. The no- 
 tion of coarse and ignorant minds is that all which exists has been created for 
 the sole service of the human race, to use or abuse as the fancy takes them." 
 
 The Spectator Newspaper, one of the highest of its class, says, March 2 1861 
 p. 219, " They (the Committee for the Protection of Animals) must know that 
 the whole race of animals in existence are not worth one human life that the 
 entire bruto creation might justifiably be left to perish to save a pauper one 
 hour of pain." It is questionable I think whether the whole race of paupers
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 71 
 
 The same writer says " Intimately associated with physical 
 injuries and pain is the death in which they ultimately result. 
 This necessary end constitutes to many minds the chief terror 
 of the incidents which produce it. That all which lives should 
 be born to die detracts nothing from the wonders of their being. 
 Which would be the greater marvel, a ship whose timbers 
 should never rot, or a ship which itself should gradually decay, 
 but before its lease was out should give birth to new vessels, 
 which again should bring forth fresh fleets to be multiplied 
 from age to age in increasing numbers and unimpaired vigour ? 
 This last is the prodigious method of Providence. A solitary 
 oak contains within its trunk a power to generate future forests, 
 which will spread their giant arms and rear their kingly heads 
 when their progenitor is returned to the soil from whence it 
 
 could not be better spared than even tbe smallest link in the animal chain of 
 being. The bird, profound Mr. Spectator, can live without man ; but man 
 cannot live without the bird. In nature's plan there are no " paupers." 
 Whatever cannot keep itself is obliged to make way and give its place to that 
 which can. 
 
 As to the ignorant, conceited, and presumptuous idea, that the world was 
 made for man alone, we cannot turn our eyes in any direction in which pleasur- 
 able sensation is not spread around ; every leaf, every blade of grass, the 
 atmosphere, the waters, swarm with creatures in a state of positive happiness, 
 the collective sum of which, perhaps, may greatly exceed that of the human 
 race. 
 
 I was much struck with this truth while recently reclining on a bank in a 
 very beautiful grove some two miles in circumference. Its lordly owner and 
 its keepers were absent, and I was probably the only human being there ; but 
 the whole area seemed quite complete without man, and only his " madness, 
 pride, impiety" could have supposed it made for him alone. There was not an 
 inch un tenanted. There was the voice of the pheasant and the jay, of the 
 wood pigeon and the rook, of the jackdaw and the hawk, and fifty smaller 
 birds; there was tbe hare, the rabbit, the hedge-hog and the dormouse and 
 shrew, and the sun-beam and the half-shut eye showed the air full of humming 
 life ; and the moss on which I lay was full of green and golden beetles, and 
 grass-hoppers and long-legged spiders and the thrifty ant. There was one 
 continued song and hum of enjoyment, and I could not help thinking how 
 vain and presumptuous was man's pretension to monopolize it all. Here at 
 least the owner was the instrument only of a happiness far greater than 
 his own, and probably than of all his dependants. It is true all were 
 happy in eating up each other, but this detracts very little from the sum of 
 enjoyment. "The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the 
 perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel ; and so all the chinks in the 
 scale of being are filled."
 
 72 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 sprung ; while their numerous progeny, from the first-bom 
 which rivals the parent stem to the sprouting acorn which just 
 lifts its leaflets above the earth, will continue to maintain the 
 succeeding line in an unbroken gradation. The system runs 
 through all creation, from man, who is the lord of it, down to 
 the meanest piece of moss that grows upon a wall. In such 
 profusion are the germs of animated things produced, and then 
 cast forth to perish, with no opportunity, from their very ex- 
 cess, to evolve the structure of which each contains the rudi- 
 ments, that we might think there was prodigality, even to 
 wastefulness, if waste were possible where power is infinite. 
 Without death, far narrower limits must have been put to 
 propagation than prevail at present. The same set of men and 
 animals must have occupied the globe, and myriads of creatures, 
 we of this generation included, could never have tasted the de- 
 lights of existence. Death therefore may be said to be the 
 parent of life. What would have been the scheme of the 
 Almighty if sin had never entered into the world is altogether 
 beyond our faculties to conjecture. Our knowledge, we find 
 from experience, is limited to observing what actually exists, 
 and it is with admiration that we perceive how the general 
 good is maintained through the general mortality, and each 
 creature is made to contribute both by its life and by its death 
 to the benefit of the rest. The examples are innumerable, and 
 
 For myself I willingly acknowledge my relationship to the whole of 
 the sensitive creation. I am anxious to reciprocate the great benefits I 
 receive, and I am prouder of the disinterested friendship of my horse and 
 dog, than of that which is contained in many an invitation to dinner. As to 
 the supposed vast intellectual superiority of man, we are, probably, not compe- 
 tent judges, not understanding the language of the brutes; where we do, we 
 often find that the constitution of their minds enables them to go more surely 
 and directly to the object of their desires than m;m. Speaking of Natural 
 Selection, Darwin tells us that " the rock-thrush of Guiana, birds of Paradise, 
 and some others, congregate ; and successive males display their gorgeous 
 plumage and perform strange antics before the females, who, standing by as 
 spectators, at last choose the most attractive partner." Does not man do the 
 same, although not so gracefully, yet for the same object and with the same 
 result ? So much for love, and in war surely the animals are more intelligent ; 
 in fact, further observation in all directions tends to show that our vast pre- 
 tensions are based very much on ignorant presumption.
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 73 
 
 we select a few out of the thousands that might be adduced. 
 " There is a class of animalcules called Infusoria, because they 
 can be obtained by infusing any vegetable or animal substance 
 in water, which, says Professor Owen, ' are the most minute, 
 and apparently the most insignificant of created beings.' Many 
 of them are so diminutive that a single drop of water may 
 contain five hundred millions of individuals. Nevertheless the 
 varieties in size are such that the difference between the smaller 
 and the greater l is greater than between a mouse and an 
 elephant,' though even the elephant of the race is invisible to 
 the naked eye. ' They are the most widely diffused, and by 
 far the most numerous of all the forms of organized life' ; and 
 whether in fresh water or in salt, ' there is hardly a drop of 
 spray flung from the paddle of a steam boat which does not 
 contain some specimens of the race. They pervade every clime 
 torrid, frigid and temperate and extend their reign in the 
 northern latitudes beyond that of the vegetable kingdom. 
 When we consider their incredible numbers, their universal 
 distribution, their insatiable voracity, and that it is the particles 
 of decaying bodies which they are appointed to devour, we 
 must conclude that we are in some degree indebted to these 
 active scavengers for the salubrity of our atmosphere. Nor is 
 this all : they perform a still more important office in prevent- 
 ing the progressive diminution of the present amount of organ- 
 ized matter upon the earth. For when this matter is dissolved 
 or suspended in water, in that state of comminution and decay 
 which immediately precedes its final decomposition into the 
 elementary gases, and its subsequent return from the organic 
 into the inorganic world, these wakeful members of nature's 
 
 ~ ' 
 
 invisible police are everywhere rea'dy to arrest the fugitive 
 organized particles and turn them back into the ascending 
 stream of animal life. Having converted the dead and decom- 
 posing particles into their own living tissues, they themselves 
 become the food of larger Infusoria, as, for example, the Rotifera, 
 and of numerous other small animals which in their turn are 
 devoured by larger animals, such as fishes ; and thus a pabulum, 
 L
 
 74 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 fit for the nourishment of the higher organized beings, is brought 
 back by a short route from the extremities of the realms of 
 organic nature. Truly indeed, says Ehrenberg, as quoted by 
 Professor Owen, l the microscopic organisms are very inferior in 
 individual energy to lions and elephants, but in their united 
 influences they are far more important than all those animals.' 
 Their own life sustained by the product of death, the Infusoria 
 are destined themselves to perish that they may sustain the 
 frames of the creatures above them, death continuing to sup- 
 port life throughout the graduated scale of existence, until, the 
 circle run, the food once more comes back to the nutriment of 
 animalcules from which it originally proceeded. 
 
 " The flesh fly species is another indefatigable scavenger, as 
 they increase their weight two hundred-fold in twenty-four 
 hours, and Professor Owen states that there is no exaggeration in 
 the assertion of Linnasus that three flesh flies would devour the 
 carcase of a horse as quickly as would a lion. 
 
 "The animalcules supported tha dragon-fly, the dragon-fly 
 the newts, the newt the beetle, the beetle the sparrow, and most 
 likely the sparrow some bigger creature before the animal com- 
 pound was given out to the inexorable maggots, and revivified 
 anew in the shape of flies, again to run the destructive round. 
 Nature seems to have taken special pains to maintain in vigour 
 the carnivorous element wherever animal life is congregated 
 together. If the pike is carefully excluded from a fish-pond, 
 he appears there after a time just as though he had smelt out 
 his prey, and made his way to it over earth or through air. 
 The eggs have been carried there on the legs and feathers of the 
 water-fowl, or else been eaten by them, and passed from their 
 bodies undigested. The due balance is maintained in spite of 
 the jealous preserver of fish. 
 
 " In respect of death Pope puts man and his victim on equal 
 terms : 
 
 ' The creature had his feast of life before : 
 Thou too shalt perish when thy feast is o'er.'" 
 
 Tims we find, as Darwin remarks, " that the structure of 
 every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 75 
 
 hidden manner, to that of all other organic beings, with which 
 it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which 
 it has to escape, or on which it preys. * * * All that we 
 can do is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is 
 striving to increase at a geometrical ra tio ; that each at some 
 
 O O 7 
 
 period of its life, during some season of the year, during each 
 generation, or at intervals, has to struggle for life, and to 
 suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, 
 we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of 
 nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is gene- 
 rally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the 
 happy, survive and multiply." If we do not more justly ap- 
 preciate the plan of creation, it is owing to the false light that 
 Theology throws upon it ; misrepresenting the aim and object 
 of existence, and assigning to man a thoroughly false position 
 in relation to the whole. What Bishop Berkeley says of Meta- 
 physicians is true of Theologians, " They have first raised a 
 dust and then complain they cannot see." Mankind cannot be 
 separated from the rest of creation which must be regarded as 
 one and indivisible. Judged as a whole it is ever progressing; 
 the good, the strong, and the beautiful, daily more predomina- 
 ting. Wherever in the " struggle for existence" and in the 
 ever changing circumstances and conditions to which it gives 
 rise, variations occur favourable to individuals, such improve- 
 ments, by the law of hereditary descent or " Natural Selection" 
 are retained and transmitted ; and the new and improved speci- 
 mens having the best chance in the struggle, gradually but 
 necessarily extinguish the old, and take their place. This 
 law of progress this extinction of the less improved forms of 
 life this death of the bad to make room for ever better and 
 better, is regarded by Theologians as a cunningly devi- 
 sed scheme of the devil to thwart and blight the objects 
 of creation. Let us hope that we are approaching the 
 dawn of a brighter day, in which the true nature of evil will 
 be recognized and the glory of creation manifest even to our 
 prejudiced, short-sighted, and imperfect vision. With a fuller
 
 76 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 knowledge of the " Origin, Objects, and Advantages of Evil" 
 will come a clearer perception of the beneficenj; purposes for 
 which it has been allowed, and more strenuous efforts in the 
 direction of our own welfare towards which it was intended to 
 turn us. In the infancy of our race the causes of all great 
 evils were hidden and mysterious, and were consequently 
 ascribed to supernatural intervention ; and were worshipped 
 instead of being sought and removed. Mankind, like a great 
 pig under a burning glass, lay still and squealed instead of 
 getting out of the way. Certain barbarous tribes from rever- 
 ential fear, refused even to destroy wild beasts* and noxious 
 reptiles, and " plague, pestilence, and famine" were manifesta- 
 tions of divine anger. Now although the light of science has 
 dissipated these illusions in the physical world, in the mystery of 
 mind and the moral world they are still as strong as ever ; the 
 investigation of natural causes is neglected and events still as- 
 cribed to supernatural ones. But we are approaching the dawn 
 of a brighter day although, according to some, day-light is still 
 far off. As Buckle says, " The progress of inquiry is becoming 
 so rapid and so earnest, that I entertain little doubt that before 
 another century has elapsed, the chain of evidence will be com- 
 plete, and it will be as rare to find an historian who denies 
 the undeviating regularity of the moral world, as it is now to 
 find a philosopher who denies the regularity of the material 
 world."f 
 
 * We learn from a Report made by General Sir William Sleeman, quoted 
 by Dr. Neil Arnott, that '' Wolves are numerous iu the ravines along the bunks 
 of the river Goomtee, on which the City of Lucknow stands. The Hindoos 
 have a superstitious dread of destroying or even injuring them. As a conse- 
 quence, a great many children are carried off by them to the towns, vil- 
 lages, and camps, to be devoured so many, that some vagrants make their 
 living by searching near the dens of the wolves for ornaments of the pre- 
 cious metals which had been worn by the children. * * In the two 
 years 1859 and 1860, no less than 998 children were killed by wild beasts, 
 principally by wolves. 'A Survey of Human Progress, p. 133. 
 
 t History of Civilization in England, vol. I., p. 21.
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 77 
 
 SECTION IV. 
 
 ON THE SLOW PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE AND CIVILIZATION. 
 
 There is still one question on this subject of evil, to the 
 solution of which the present state of our knowledge seems 
 hardly equal, and on which we have still to offer a few sugges- 
 tions. Considering that happiness is so much dependent upon 
 knowledge and civilization, how is it that society has made 
 such slow progress in knowledge and civilization ? Why is it 
 still in its childhood? Why has moral science, upon which 
 happiness is as dependent as health upon medical science, kept 
 so far in arrear of the other ? No man or people can advance 
 alone. It is necessary that the whole earth should be peopled, 
 the object being to ensure the largest sum of enjoyment the 
 world will contain. It is probable that if civilization had pro- 
 gressed more rapidly, this would not have been effected : man- 
 kind would have preferred keeping their numbers within the 
 means of subsistence in a particular country, to going forth 
 into the wilderness of a new world, if instinct rather than 
 reason had not dictated their increase, and had not necessity 
 in consequence obliged them to encounter all the trials and 
 difficulties of new settlers. Such difficulties are not slight ; 
 Mr. Alison says, " The immense and apparently insurmount- 
 able obstacles which present themselves to the extension of 
 industry on the first cultivation of the earth ; the extent of 
 morasses, the thickness of the forests, the ruggedness of the 
 mountains, forbid the hope of success but from the accumulated 
 force of multitudes. In the first attempts to clear the ground, 
 numbers perish from the unhealthiness of the atmosphere, the 
 severity of the labour, the magnitude of the hardships to which 
 they are exposed. From the narratives of the extreme suffer- 
 ings undergone by the first settlers in distant colonies in our 
 own times, even with the aid of iron instruments and the arts 
 of civilization, we may gather what must have been the
 
 78 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 condition of the human race in remote and now forgotten 
 periods." 51 
 
 Another reason why society has advanced so slowly is, that 
 physical comforts must be first secured, before moral and intel- 
 lectual pleasures can be enjoyed, and necessity was required to 
 drive men forward to the discovery of those arts and sciences 
 upon which the increase of physical comforts depends. We 
 appear to be fast approaching that state in which the powers of 
 production will be so far increased, as to afford leisure for 
 moral and intellectual pleasures to all. To have given man 
 such moral and intellectual desires, at the same time that he 
 was obliged to work eight or ten hours per day in order to 
 supply his physical wants, must have diminished rather than 
 increased the amount of his enjoyment; wants and desires, 
 without the means of gratification, being pains. 
 
 Ao-ain, if either individuals or races rise much above their 
 
 ?5 / 
 
 fellows, they are soon choked in surrounding barbarism. Na- 
 tions seem also to have their natural periods of decay the same 
 as individuals ; they have their youth, maturity, and old age, 
 and then are swept away. As Mr. Alison says, "the corrupted 
 communities, and now decayed empires, which have succes- 
 sively risen and fallen during the constant but unobserved 
 pi'ogress of civilization, have been swept away when they had 
 performed their mission in human affairs. There are destroyers 
 provided for the carrion of nations, not less than the corpses of 
 individuals ; pernicious remains are not permitted to taint the 
 moral any more than the natural atmosphere ; unseen in ordi- 
 nary times, the vultures of the North appear in the distance, 
 when their cleansing is required ; the Scythian cavalry scent 
 from afar the odour of human corruption, and the punishment 
 of the vices of nations conducts the mighty system of human 
 advancement.''! 
 
 There is another consideration of great importance to which 
 we cannot attach too much weight, viz., that all knowledge to 
 be available, must partake of the character of experience : it is 
 
 * Principles of Population, vol. 2, p. 467. t " On Population/' vol. 1, p. 80.
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 79 
 
 probable, therefore, that any quicker mode of revealing know- 
 ledge to mankind than the present slow, experimental process, 
 would have been ineffectual. The wisdom of others is of little 
 or no use to ourselves, until experience has made such 
 wisdom peculiarly our own ; and the same law applies to society 
 at large. 
 
 The present physical perfection of the world is now recog- 
 nized as the result during countless ages of the same laws at 
 present in operation. Every educated person is sufficiently 
 familiar with geology to know how this has taken place, by the 
 gradual operation of varied physical agencies producing stratum 
 after stratum, with organized beings adapted to the varied con- 
 ditions of existence in both earth and water, each continuing 
 till another set had arisen apparently more perfectly organized 
 to take its place ; and in a continuous succession from very 
 early periods, when beings now totally extinct prevailed, down 
 to a time when some now in existence began to divide the 
 world with them. At last came man, at some comparatively 
 very recent epoch, but there is no evidence at present to fix 
 the date. Science speaks only of slow and gradual changes, 
 there has been no sudden cessation of one order of being and 
 equally sudden commencement of another. We can trace no 
 beginning, no chaos, but law and order and supreme intelligence 
 acting through " natural law" throughout. 
 
 The earth has thus been very gradually preparing for its 
 present covering of delicately-framed and highly-organized 
 sentient life. Its external coat is now one net-work of nerves 
 it feels all over. Professor the Rev. Baden Powell says, u If 
 we admit that the earth being still hot internally, must have 
 cooled at its surface, and that this cooling must, in its progress, 
 have caused contortions, dislocations, upheavals of strata ; and 
 again, that the water charged with matter must have deposited 
 it ; and that the various crystalized bodies and metallic veins 
 must have been formed during certain stages of these formations, 
 it is only by parity of reason affirmed that the rudiments of 
 all organic as well as inorganic products and structures must
 
 80 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 have been evolved in like manner, as they were alike included 
 and contained in the same fused, and therefore once vapour- 
 ised, or nebulous, mass. In that mass all kinds of physical 
 agents, or the elements of them, thermotic, electric, chemical, 
 
 & ' 
 
 molecular, gravitational, luminiferous, and by consequence, 
 not less all organic and vital forces, must have been included. 
 Out of it in the same way by equally regular laws in the one 
 case as the other, must have been evolved all forms of inorganic 
 and equally of organic existence, whether amorphous masses, 
 crystals, cells, monads, plants, zoophytes, animals or man, 
 the animal man ; the spiritual man belonging to another order 
 of things, a spiritual creation. "f * * * "A rational physico- 
 theology teaches that the succession of forms of organized life 
 on the globe, up to the first organization of all animated nature, 
 were acts of the Divine will, wisdom and power, in precisely 
 the same sense as the revolutions of the double stars and 
 planets, the daily tide, th fall of rain, the ascent of vapour, 
 the action of the sun's light and heat, and all other natural 
 phenomena, regulated by similar recondite laws, are direct and 
 immediate acts of the same Divine will, wisdom and power."! 
 
 " We are led by all analogy" remarks Sir John Herschel, " to 
 suppose that the Creator operates through a series of intermediate 
 causes; and that in consequence, the origination of fresh species, 
 could it ever come under our cognizance, would be found to be 
 a natural, in contradistinction to a miraculous process ; although 
 we perceive no indication of any process actually in progress 
 which is likely to issue in such a result." 
 
 And to a similar effect, Professor Owen observes, " To what 
 natural laws and secondary causes the orderly succession and 
 progression of such organic phenomena may have been com- 
 mitted, we as yet are ignorant. But if without derogation of 
 the Divine Power we may conceive the existence of such 
 ministers, and personify them by the term nature, we learn 
 from the past history of our globe that she has advanced with 
 slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light, amidst 
 
 t Unity of Worlds, p. 79 ; t Idem p. 451.
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL* 81 
 
 the wreck of worlds, from the first embodiment of the verte- 
 brate idea under its old Ichthyic vestment, until it became 
 arrayed in the glorious garb of the human form." 
 
 Mr. Powell says, " In regard to man's spiritual nature, so 
 fur as that is concerned, it is wholly independent of all mate- 
 rial things, and is therefore relieved from all possibility of con- 
 nection, or collision, with any physical truths or theories." 
 This distinction between the animal and spiritual man is a pure 
 assumption, which the last sixty years' study of man has en- 
 tirely disproved. All the mental powers of man, animal and 
 spiritual, are connected with the brain, and obey precisely the 
 same law, and of this the Professor seems to have at least a 
 suspicion, which might very easily have become a conviction. 
 He says, " If any peculiarity could be shown in man's brain, 
 to confer powers of abstraction, moral consciousness, or the like, 
 which is deficient in the animal brain, this, in like manner, 
 would indicate a clear physiological distinction, and would 
 bring the case under the category of degree of physical organi- 
 zation or development" There is no if, sixty years ago it was 
 demonstrated by Gall that such a peculiarity in man's brain 
 did exist, and this fact ought to have reached the most advanced 
 men even at Oxford before this. The existence of man upon this 
 earth is of comparatively recent date, and he is evidently in his 
 childhood; the development of his mental growth being slow, 
 keeping pace with the previous slow growth of the material world; 
 there is a close analogy throughout. We find man at first very 
 little in advance of other animals; as they preyed upon one 
 another, he preyed upon them, and as they often eat their bro- 
 thers and sisters, so did he his fellow man, until he found him too 
 expensive eating, and that it paid better to set him to work as 
 his slave. As his numbers increased population began to 
 press upon his means of subsistence, and he found it easier to 
 tame animals, and breed and feed them, than to hunt wild 
 ones ; and from a hunter he became a shepherd. The natural 
 fruits of the earth he found also very much increased by culti- 
 vation, and he began to sow and reap and settle down upon 
 H
 
 82 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 the land, and to insist upon vested rights. But the strong- 
 found it easier to steal than to work, and wars became com- 
 mon; and men organised themselves into communities and 
 countries, and gave up their liberty to a king or leader, for a 
 common defence of life and property. Wars were then made 
 for power and distinction ; and to enable men to live under all 
 these disadvantages and conflicting circumstances, many men- 
 tal faculties were called into activity, and the brain grew 
 and the faculties increased in strength proportionate to the 
 exercise they thus received. In mountainous countries, where 
 the temperature was cold and the means of subsistence 
 scarce, and it required all the energies of man's nature, 
 and every faculty to be brought into exercise to enable him 
 to live ; and in temperate climates, where men could work 
 and the rewards of industry were great, the brains grew the 
 largest, and these men have gradually extended their sway 
 over all the rest. Man unlike other animals has a power of 
 profiting by his experience, of saying what effects follow from 
 known causes, and of thus predicting consequences ; and when 
 this knowledge became too great to be handed down from father 
 to son any longer, it was stored in written records, and his pro- 
 gress lias always been in proportion to his experience, and has 
 been based entirely and solely upon it ; and it is only as know- 
 ledge can be thus verified) that is } recorded facts be made to take 
 place over again before his own eyes that experience is of any 
 value. Deductive reason may point to such facts, but they must 
 be tested to be of use. Individual facts were gradually general- 
 ized into laws, and one such law included thousands of 
 facts, of which he had no individual experience. His 
 speculations, metaphysical or theological, upon the nature 
 or essence of the things surrounding him, of either mind 
 or matter, have had little to do with his real progress. 
 At first he supposed a god to preside over every power in 
 nature that was unknown or mysterious to him ; and as he 
 generalized such powers, so he did his gods. A religion based 
 upon such superstition, the produce of the highest minds of the
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 83 
 
 period, might assist a people at its first establishment ; but 
 when the minds of the people have grown beyond this, it then 
 becomes even a greater impediment from its religious sanction 
 than it was originally a help. Necessity, the mother of 
 invention, and circumstances, calls the different mental powers 
 of man into exercise, and they grow with such exercise, and 
 experience, or the Positive Philosophy, as it is called, directs 
 and regulates such powers; and this is the real law of the 
 mind's evolution. While different philosophers have been per- 
 fecting their methods, mankind generally, everywhere impelled 
 instinctively or intuitively by their faculties by the law of their 
 minds, have been acting upon the Inductive or Baconian 
 philosophy, ordinarily not aided but impeded by method. 
 The faculties naturally take their own method, and most of the 
 discoveries that have been made in science have been made by 
 practical men ignorant of all method. It is quite true that a 
 tortoise in the right path will beat a race-horse in the wrong, 
 and fortunately, however philosophers or the race-horses may 
 wander, nature keeps the tortoise, or the bulk of mankind in 
 the right path. Their wants are constantly craving for their 
 gratification, and accumulated experience points the way.* The 
 Theological and Metaphysical stages through which the mind 
 passes, as pointed out by Comte, are not the laiv, but merely 
 the history of its evolution. The laws of the moral are as 
 stable as those of the physical world, and apparently as slow 
 in their operation. It may suit our pride to talk of our fallen 
 nature, but history nowhere supports this assumption. The 
 spiritual nature in the savage man is all but rudimentary, and 
 the mass of mankind are still mere animals, acting only in 
 accordance with animal feeling; in the most advanced race 
 and best specimens of other races, layer after layer has been 
 added to the brain until the animal has been lost in the man,. 
 
 * "Man, like other warm-blooded animals, must always have the four prime 
 essentials to life fit air, warmth, aliment, and rest after action; and that to 
 obtain the pleasure from using, and to escape the pain from wanting these, 
 are the chief motives to his voluntary action." Dr. Neil Arnott'a " Survey of 
 Human Progress."
 
 84 THE ORIGIN, OBJECTS, AND 
 
 and the good, the true, and the beautiful predominate, and he is 
 just, respectful, and benevolent. Why the progress of the phy- 
 sical world or of man should have been so slow we cannot say ; 
 but the same law of development seems to govern both. We 
 cannot say what ought to be ; we can only say what is. That it 
 could have been different that progress could have been more 
 rapid, is more than we know. All seems the result of fixed 
 law ; there is no evidence of what is called special Providence, 
 or interference with law, either in Matter or Mind. On this 
 subject, Professor Powell truly says, " To speak of apparent 
 anomalies and interruptions as special indications of the Deity, 
 is altogether a mistake. In truth, so far as the anomalous 
 character of any phenomenon can affect the inference of pre- 
 siding Intelligence at all, it would rather tend to diminish and 
 detract from that evidence. But, on the other hand, precisely 
 in proportion as the apparent exception might be explained, 
 and made to vindicate its position in a more comprehensive 
 system of order, so would the evidence be increased and ele- 
 vated. 
 
 "In the present state of knowledge, law and order, physical 
 causation and uniformity of action, are the elevated manifesta- 
 tions of Divinity, Creation and Providence. Interruptions of 
 such order (if for a moment they could be admitted as such) 
 could only produce a sort of temporary concealment of such 
 manifestations, and involve the beautiful light shed over the 
 natural world, in a passing cloud. A supreme 
 
 moral cause manifested through law, order, and physical causes, 
 is the confession of science : conflicting operations, abrupt 
 discontinuities, are the idols of ignorance, and if they really 
 prevailed, would so far be to the philosopher only the exponents 
 of chaos and atheism ; the obscurations (as far as it extends) 
 of the sensible manifestation of the Supreme Intelligence."* 
 We know that Mr. Powell intends these observations to apply 
 only to the physical world, but we have shown that they are 
 equally applicable to the moral or spiritual world, and that the 
 * Uuity of Worlds, p. 15T.
 
 ADVANTAGES OF EVIL. 85 
 
 perfection and even the use of reason itself depend upon the 
 equal supremacy of law and order in the world of mind as of 
 matter. 
 
 Had history been written with a right view of the nature 
 and objects of evil, much light would have been thrown upon 
 the question, as well as upon all those connected with the ad- 
 vancement and slow progress of the race. Even now a uni- 
 versal history of civilization would dispel much of the darkness 
 which still envelops the subject. When the common super- 
 stitions concerning Evil, shall give place to the above views of 
 its nature and objects ; when it shall in all cases be regarded 
 as remedial, and its causes, therefore, inquired into, a much 
 more rapid advance of the race towards the perfection of which 
 it is capable may be expected to take place. Nature will then 
 no longer be judged by her dealings with regard to a single 
 people, nation, or even generation whom she no more hesi- 
 tates to cut off, if the general good requires it, than a surgeon 
 does to amputate the limb which threatens the life and welfare 
 of an individual but with regard to the general good of all 
 her children in all times and places ; and the dispensations 
 which to our short-sighted wisdom, frequently appear as un- 
 mixed evils, will then prove her to be guided by an unerring 
 and benevolent Power. Although there must still be many 
 difficulties attached to this subject, and the causes of many 
 evils must still remain unexplained, yet to those who trace out 
 final causes, who study the Creator in his works, the mystery of 
 Evil may be sufficiently unravelled to give infinite confidence 
 in His providence, and faith that farther knowledge will make 
 manifest the benevolent tendency of all creation, and bring 
 home to every heart the all-cheering conviction that " WHAT- 
 EVER is, is BIGHT."
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 SECTION I. 
 
 MORAL OBLIGATION. 
 
 WE hear of Moral Obligation, of acting according to con- 
 science, and not according to self-interest, pleasure, appetite, 
 desire ; but it is seldom clearly defined in what Moral Obliga- 
 tion consists. Some say it is acting in accordance with the 
 will of God : but then arises the question, what is the will 
 of Grod ? Others say that we are to be governed by an in- 
 ward monitor, which all possess : but then what is to be the 
 standard by which the indications of this inward monitor are 
 to be judged, since we seldom find two persons in whom its 
 promptings coincide on all subjects. " We are to do so, 
 because it is right," says one ; u Because common sense, rea- 
 son, the fitness of things, the law of nature, justice, the public 
 good, require it," say others. But as Mr. Bentham has ably 
 shown, all these are mere modes of expressing the individual 
 opinion of any one who chooses to dogmatise concerning right 
 and wrong, without assigning any reason for it beyond his own 
 internal conviction. 
 
 The science of Morality goes farther than merely to lay 
 down rules of conduct : it has to show the reason for them, and 
 the foundation of the obligation to obey them. The Founda- 
 tions of Morality can only be discovered by studying the con- 
 stitution of man and its relation to everything around him. 
 The application of the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity to 
 Virtue and Vice, Praise and Blame, Reward and Punishment, 
 has shown us that, abstractedly, all actions are alike, both with
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 87 
 
 respect to their fitness and un fitness, or with reference to the 
 motives that produce them ; that, in themselves, they are ail 
 equally deserving of praise or blame, reward or punishment, 
 because they are all the produce of causes, arising out of natu- 
 ral constitution and circumstances over which the individual 
 has no control ; and that, therefore, the only distinction which 
 can be made between actions is with regard to their tendency. 
 Individuals may be estimated by their motives, because we 
 cannot help loving that which is amiable and loveable and 
 generally produces good ; but actions must be viewed as right 
 or wrong, as in accordance with common sense, reason, the 
 fitness of things, the law of nature, justice, the public good, 
 not with reference to anything in themselves, that marks 
 them as such, but according to their tendency their ten- 
 dency to produce happiness or misery, pleasure or pain. That 
 it must be as their tendency to produce happiness or misery, 
 has been proved by showing the nature of man's responsi- 
 bility or obligation to act in one way rather than another; 
 as it appears that such accountability is founded upon pain 
 attending some actions, and pleasure others, in proportion as 
 such actions are or are not calculated to promote the welfare 
 of the individual and the happiness of all the sensitive crea- 
 tion. It is to this issue that all the advocates for different 
 standards of morality are obliged to come, if pushed to a 
 conclusion : they are all obliged to acknowledge that the fit- 
 ness of things means their fitness to produce happiness ; and 
 so of the rest ; and that conscientiousness and veneration, 
 which teach us to "do justly and to walk humbly with our 
 God," are virtues only because they promote the general happi- 
 ness. All moral rules are derived originally from utility, but 
 the pleasures and pains, or likes and antipathies on which they 
 are based are transmitted to offspring and thus become intui- 
 tions, similar to the feelings with which the kitten regards a 
 dog, it sets up its back and spits at it directly it opens its eyes ; 
 the cow also from the same cause, from its having been the 
 custom years ago to bait her fore-fathers, keeps making imagi-
 
 88 THE TRINCirLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 nary tosses of the dog, whenever she sees one ; and the bull 
 himself is still made furious by the sight of a red colour, al- 
 though the feeling may have been derived ages ago in the bull 
 fio-hts of Spain. In this way are mixed the tendencies of 
 actions and the feelings with which in a long course of time we 
 intuitively come to regard them, and their original source is 
 thus sometimes lost. What is called the Intuitive School of 
 Moralists bases its conclusions partly on utility, and partly on 
 such internal convictions, for which no reason can be assigned, 
 except a certain feeling on the subject, and which usually takes 
 the shape of " all men think," " we cannot help feeling," &c. 
 To recognize however the obligations of morality is simply to 
 recognize the conditions on which it is desirable men should 
 live, and the authority is enforced by pains and penalties which 
 all are forcsd to attend to whether the obligations are recognized 
 and acknowledged or not. 
 
 It is often said that it is impossible to speak definitely of 
 the objects of creation, that happiness is not a sufficiently 
 worthy object, but that development seems more the end and aim 
 of the Creator than happiness. But what is the use of " develop- 
 ment" unless attended by consciousness and that a pleasurable 
 consciousness? a painful consciousness would be worse then 
 nothing. World on world, in infinite beauty would be the same 
 as none without beings conscious of their existence, and unless 
 that beauty gave pleasure a happy consciousness, it would be 
 useless. Were a universe developed in all possible power and 
 beauty and but one little fly conscious of its existence, that 
 little fly would be of vastly more importance than the universe. 
 Beings might be "developed" in infinite number, size, and 
 power, but of what use would their existence be if they were 
 not happy, or at least a source of happiness? Pain checks 
 development, and all legitimate development is attended with 
 pleasure, and, in fact, we can see no good in development unless 
 it produces happiness. We cannot see or even understand 
 any other purpose in creation : to be without consciousness is 
 the same as not being ; and consciousness that was neither
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 89 
 
 pleasurable nor painful would be no consciousness, for there is no 
 negation or state of indifference, no sensation, or feeling, or idea, 
 attending either the intellect or sentiments that is not slightly 
 either one or the other. Certainly pain would not be worth 
 living for, and happiness is the only thing left. People speak 
 of pleasure with contempt, because by it is usually meant some- 
 thing carnal and resulting from the lower feelings, but happi- 
 ness is simply the aggregate of pleasurable sensations from 
 whatever source derived : again, you hear people talk and decry 
 happiness as poor and paltry,* as something scarcely worth 
 having, and speak of blessedness as the end to be attained ; 
 but by blessedness they evidently mean a refined kind of happi- 
 ness, composed principally of the religious and aesthetic feelings. 
 We hear much also in the present day of "Law, Order, and 
 Unity;" but law, order, and unity, that serve no purpose, 
 are no evidence of wisdom of design. But though all are 
 ultimately obliged to admit that happiness must be the end and 
 aim of creation, yet a great point of dispute still remains, 
 whether happiness here or hereafter in another world, is 
 the end, and ought to be the aim, of our existence. This 
 question must be decided by the relation which our faculties 
 bear to things around us. We know, from the relation that the 
 lungs bear to water, that we were not intended to live in the 
 water; we know from the relation that the human stomach 
 
 * " The teaching of the miserable Theology of the last century," says Miss 
 Cobbe, in a clever and admirable paper in Fraser, " infects us still, though 
 there are signs on every hand that wo are outgrowing it. The doctrine that 
 Paley taught so lucidly, that virtue consists in doing right, for the sake of ever- 
 lasting felicity, is perhaps rarely preached now in all the effrontery of its base- 
 ness. Yet we go on most of us mixing up such hopes with more disinterested 
 motives, and in the depths of our hearts longing not for more work to 
 do and more power to do it to serve God and man but for mere rest, or poor 
 paltry happiuess.'' It is true that virtue consists in doing what is right, 
 without reference to the consequence to ourselves, here or hereafter; but 
 right is right, only because it leads to happiness. More work to do and more 
 power to do it in the service of our fellow-creatures is ordinarily the most 
 direct path to the highest happiness, but if in particular cases it should not 
 be, we are bound to go on, and although we may not meet our reward for this 
 particular act, we meet it in the same principle of self-sacrifice that has been 
 and is similarly at work elsewhere for our benefit 
 
 N
 
 90 THE PBINCIPLES OF MOKALITY. 
 
 bears to the different kinds of food, that it was not intended to 
 digest grass, like that of a cow ; from the relation of the eye 
 to light, Ave know that we were not intended to live in dark- 
 ness ; so with respect to the relation that the mental faculties 
 bear to things around us, we find that they have direct refer- 
 ence to the present life, and that they would be as useless in a 
 state unlike the present, as the fins of a fish on land or the 
 wings of a bird in the water. So that whatever may be the 
 intention of our Creator with regard to us in a future state, 
 we are certain that he intended us for happiness in this, as 
 happiness is the natural result of the legitimate exercise of 
 all our faculties ; and those faculties, although some few of 
 them are capable of a direction towards a future state of being, 
 have all direct reference to the present world. The obligation, 
 then, that a man is under to act in one way rather than in 
 another, is owing to its tendency to happiness or to the avoid- 
 ance of pain, and Morality may be defined as " the science 
 which teaches men to live together in the most happy manner 
 possible. ' ' (Helvetim.) 
 
 SECTION II. 
 
 PAIN AND PLEASURE. 
 
 The ground being so far cleared before us, our line of rea- 
 soning is henceforth simple and straightforward, relating only 
 to the question of Pain and Pleasure Happiness and Miserv. 
 These will be found the ultimate springs of all our actions. 
 Pain and Pleasure, which are only other names for desire and 
 aversion, liking and antipathy, being to volition in the sensitive 
 creation, what attraction and repulsion are to the motions that 
 go on in the physical world. Man, as we have seen, is equally 
 the agent of Necessity with all other created beings, and this is 
 the law, the first law of his nature, that he should wish for and
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 91 
 
 seek his own happiness ; and he is no more capable of avoiding 
 it, or of acting contrary to it, than the atoms of matter can 
 refuse to be guided by the influence which is called attraction. 
 Tliis proposition, however, requires explanation, for it will be 
 immediately denied by many, who, from want of clearly under- 
 standing the nature of the law referred to, feel convinced that 
 they are impelled to action by a thousand motives which cannot 
 be said to partake of the character of either pleasure or pain. 
 But those who reason in this way, for the most part think only 
 of mere bodily pleasure and pain. All kinds of feelings ema- 
 nating from any part of the body ; all actions of the mind, 
 whether proceeding from the Intellectual Faculties, the Senti- 
 ments, or the Propensities, come under the denomination of 
 Sensations, as before explained ; and all sensations are pleasur- 
 able or painful, though in a thousand different degrees, at least 
 all that are powerful enough to impel to action. Locke says, 
 " all action has its source in uneasiness ;" at all events, we 
 have previously seen that all action has a cause. We act either 
 instinctively or from motive. If instinctively, we are impelled 
 directly by some desire, which desire proceeds from the action 
 of some faculty, and each faculty, when indulged in its natural 
 action, is the source of pleasure, and when ungratified, or dis- 
 agreeably affected, produces pain ; pains and pleasures are thus 
 as numerous in their kind as the faculties. One individual will 
 feel pleasure in doing good, another in doing mischief; one in 
 saving money, another in spending it ; one will instinctively 
 run away at the slightest cause of alarm, another will as instinc- 
 tively face it. In all which cases it is not the less a pleasurable 
 or painful sensation that induces each individual so to act, be- 
 cause he does not stay to make a calculation of the balance of 
 pleasures or pains. When we act from motives and calculation 
 does take place, we have seen that the will is determined by 
 the greatest apparent good; good meaning right, duty, &c., 
 which really means pleasure or happiness or the avoidance of 
 pain. The lower animals are impelled immediately to action 
 by pleasures and pains, without even knowing that there are
 
 92 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 such feelings, i.e. without having any abstract notion of either 
 one or the other, and by far the greater part of our actions 
 are performed in the same way, instinctively, and without any 
 calculation or reference to either pleasure or pain. Some of 
 the most intelligent of the animals, dogs for example, are ena- 
 bled to make some sort of calculation, and to balance future 
 punishment against present enjoyment, and so also does man in 
 proportion as he becomes enlightened and his feelings are put 
 under the direction of reason. It is here that the moralist can 
 be of use, by enabling us to make a more correct calculation 
 than our unassisted reason could otherwise accomplish; by 
 showing from experience and from our own constitution and 
 from the constitution of nature, what conduct invariably leads 
 to happiness in the end, and what to misery. The duty of the 
 moralist then is to enable us to make a correct calculation of 
 our pleasures and pains. 
 
 If the common objection be urged Are all men, then, 
 eternally calculating pains and pleasures in all their actions ? 
 we answer, no ; they more frequently act instinctively, that is, 
 without calculation ; but the pain or pleasure of the gratifica- 
 tion or non-gratification of their wish, or desire, impel them into 
 action. Take, for instance, the most common desire, that of food 
 appetite. A man, before he eats, does not sit down to calcu- 
 late the pleasure he shall have in eating, or the pain he shall 
 suffer if he do not ; but he feels a desire to eat, which desire, if 
 analysed, will be found to consist of a slightly painful or un- 
 comfortable feeling which increases in intensity until it is 
 gratified. All other desires which form the motives to action, 
 are similar in character, but not being equally necessary to the 
 preservation of self, if not gratified the uneasy feeling ceases 
 instead of increasing in intensity. 
 
 Again, are all men moved to action only by the expectation 
 of self-enjoyment, or is it possible to disregard our own indi- 
 vidual interests ? Self-enjoyment or individual interest may form 
 no part of our object or aim, and yet it is not the less pain or 
 pleasure that impels us to action. . It may be the pleasure
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 93 
 
 of performing what we conceive to be our duty, or the pain 
 following the neglect of it. It may be the pleasure we have 
 in promoting the interests of others, or the pain of seeing them 
 in want of such assistance; at any rate we cannot be indifferent, 
 whether the end of the action regards ourselves individually or 
 not ; for in a state of indifference there is no motive, nothing to 
 move the will, and we must will before we act. Our choice 
 may lead us willingly to great and continued suffering, but the 
 pains of remorse and self-reproach may be less easy to bear. 
 
 Bentham says, " No man ever had, can, or could have a 
 motive differing from the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance 
 of pain." And also that "the first law of nature is to seek 
 our own happiness;" and in illustration of this he says, "Pru- 
 dence, in common parlance, is the adaptation of means to an 
 end. In the moral field that end is happiness. The subjects 
 on which prudence is to be exercised are ourselves and all 
 besides : ourselves as instrumental, and all besides as instru- 
 mental to our own felicity." 
 
 " Of what can the sum total of happiness be made up, but 
 of the individual units ? "What is demanded by prudence and 
 benevolence is required by necessity. Existence itself depends 
 for its continuance on the self-regarding principle. Had Adam 
 cared more for the happiness of Eve than for his own, and Eve, 
 at the same time, more for the happiness of Adam than for her 
 own, Satan might have saved himself the trouble of temptation. 
 Mutual misery would have marred all prospects of bliss, and 
 the death of both have brought to a speedy finale the history of 
 man."* 
 
 " But self-regarding prudence is not only a virtue it is a 
 virtue on which the very existence of the race depends. If I 
 thought more about you than I thought about myself, I should 
 be the blind leading the blind, and we should fall into the ditch 
 together. It is as impossible that your pleasures should be 
 better to me than my own, as that your eye-sight should be 
 better to me than my own. My happiness and my unhappiness 
 * Deontology, vol. 1, p. 18.
 
 94 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 are as much a part of me as any of my faculties or organs, and 
 I might as well profess to feel your toothache more keenly than 
 you do, as to be more interested in your well-being than in my 
 own well-being." 
 
 " It will scarcely be denied that every man acts with a 
 view to his own interest not a correct view, because that 
 would obtain for him the greatest possible portion of felicity ; 
 and if every man acting correctly for his own interest, obtained 
 the maximum of obtainable happiness, mankind would reach 
 the millennium of accessible bliss ; and the end of morality the 
 general happiness, be accomplished. To prove that the im- 
 moral action is a miscalculation of self-interest ; to show how 
 erroneous an estimate the vicious man makes of pains and 
 pleasures, is the purpose of the intelligent moralist. Unless he 
 can do this he does nothing: for, as has been stated above, for 
 a man not to pursue what he deems likely to produce to him 
 the greatest sum of enjoyment, is in the very nature of things 
 impossible." 
 
 " Every man is able to form the best estimate of his own 
 pleasures and his own pains. No description of them, no sym- 
 pathy for them, can be equivalent to their reality. No story of 
 a blow ever produced a bruise ; nor was the agony of tooth- 
 drawing ever felt by mere interest excited in the sufferings of 
 a friend under the hands of a dentist. Even were it otherwise, 
 the power of sympathy is nothing till it acts upon self; a truism, 
 which is almost reducible to the self-identical proposition that 
 a man can feel nothing else but his own feelings. To escape 
 from one's self, to forget one's own interests, to make unre- 
 quited sacrifices, and all for duty, are high-sounding phrases, 
 and, to say the truth, as nonsensical as high-sounding. Self- 
 preference is universal and necessary : if destiny be anywhere 
 despotic, it is here. When self is sacrificed, it is self in one 
 shape to self in another shape ; and a man can no more cast off 
 regard to his own happiness, meaning the happiness of the 
 moment, than he can cast off his own skin, or jump out of it. 
 And if he could, why should he ? What provision could have
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 95 
 
 been made for the happiness of the whole, so successful, so 
 complete, as that which engages every individual of that whole 
 to obtain for himself the greatest possible portion of happiness ? 
 and what amount of happiness to mankind at large could be so 
 great, on the aggregate, as that which is made up of the greatest 
 possible portion obtained by every individual man? Of the 
 largest number of units, and those units of the largest amount, 
 the largest sum total must be the necessary result."" 
 
 The above quotations speak very plainly, and it is absolutely 
 necessary that the principle should be stated as broadly as 
 possible, because there has been and still is, among moral 
 philosophers, considerable mystification of the subject. The 
 want of proper attention to two facts has mainly caused tin's 
 obscurity, one of which is, that mankind do not seek happiness 
 or pleasure immediately, but they seek the object of their de- 
 sires, children, friends, property, to do what is right and just 
 and kind, and happiness attends upon their gratification : the 
 other, that one class of these desires has the happiness and 
 welfare of others for its object, and it is supposed that in at- 
 tending to such impulses we disregard ourselves, which is not 
 the case, as we merely sacrifice " self in one form to self in 
 another." To be constantly preaching self-sacrifice is of no 
 avail, for it is only where those feelings predominate that give a 
 pleasure in acting for the good of others, that the good of others 
 will be preferred. An habitual disregard of self and attention 
 to the interests of others, is frequently found, but it is only 
 where there is more pleasure in attending to others than to self. 
 When this is clearly understood, the folly of preaching self- 
 sacrifice to the selfish will be manifest ; and it will be seen that 
 to further the interests of morality, we must strengthen by cul- 
 tivation that part of our nature, those moral feelings, that have 
 the good of others for their object : in short, would we have a 
 man pay habitual regard to the welfare of his neighbour, we 
 must address those feelings, and place him in those circum- 
 stances that will make it both his pleasure and his interest to 
 do so. 
 
 * Deontology, vol. 2, p. 121.
 
 96 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 Religion is now ordinarily used for that purpose, and 
 people are told that unless they " love their neighbour as them- 
 selves" they will not go to Heaven, but quite the reverse. 
 Their conduct in consequence where such teaching acts as a 
 motive, shows at least how much they love themselves. 
 
 We need not fear the conclusion to which we are constrained 
 to come, that pleasures and pains are the sole springs of action, 
 and that a man necessarily seeks his own happiness, as the law 
 of his being ; in fact, " that he can feel nothing else but his 
 own feelings." The object of the Science of Morality, there- 
 fore, is simple ; it is to show what conduct will, on all occasions, 
 best promote our real interest ; what will produce to mankind 
 the largest sum of enjoyment ; for this only constitutes duty. 
 We shall find that the conduct which produces the greatest 
 happiness to the whole of the sensitive creation, produces the 
 greatest amount of enjoyment to the individual. 
 
 We have before asked the question, are men always cal- 
 culating pains and pleasures ? and we have answered it in the 
 negative, we now ask " ought they always to be so doing?" and 
 again we most emphatically say " No." The laws of morality 
 are such as produce the greatest good to the whole and not 
 always the greatest good to the individual at the time. The 
 calculation of consequence must be used therefore only to es- 
 tablish general laws which admit of no appeal from which 
 there can be no deviation whatever the interest of the individual 
 may appear to be. We act instinctively in obedience to the 
 laws of gravitation and we have besides certain general laws 
 of motion and mechanics, and so it ought to be in Morals. 
 Mankind might as reasonably be expected to determine, on all 
 o'ccasions, the effect of the varied influences of attraction and 
 repulsion, or to state at once what chemical results would be 
 produced by the combination of different materials, as to be 
 able, without reference to general laws, to decide what conduct 
 would lead to the greatest happiness on the whole. The error 
 most to be guarded against in the carrying out of the greatest 
 happiness principle, according to the utilitarian Philosophy, is,
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 97 
 
 as remarked by Mackintosh, " that of sliding from general to 
 particular consequences ; that of trying single actions, instead 
 of dispositions, habits, and rules, by the standard of utility ; 
 that of authorizing too great a latitude for discretion and policy 
 in moral conduct ; that of readily allowing exceptions in the 
 most important rules ; that of too lenient a censure of the use 
 of doubtful means when the end seems to them to be good ; 
 and that of believing unphilosophically, as well as dangerously, 
 that there can be any measure or scheme so useful in the world, 
 as the existence of men who would not do a base thing for any 
 public advantage. It was said of Andrew Fletcher, l he would 
 lose his life to serve his country, but would not do a base thing 
 to save it.'* These principles have been strongly and legibly 
 marked in our constitution. It is a matter of calculation for 
 the intellect, based upon experience and forethought, to tell 
 on all occasions what is right, what is just, respectful, and 
 kind ; but there is a principle implanted within us that gives 
 us great pleasure in acting up to it, or great pain if we do 
 not : and it is this feeling that we properly dignify by the 
 name of conscience. The object of morality therefore is to 
 associate what is right, calculated in the widest circumstances 
 by the highest minds, with these feelings, so as to generate a 
 habit of mind that shall instinctively and at once, without cal- 
 culation, act up to it. To act, in fact, in accordance with the 
 dictates of conscience, regardless of consequence, whether that 
 lead us direct to the gulf of Curtius, the spiked-barrel of 
 Regulus, the cannon's mouth or the burning stake. In such a 
 state of mind, wherever it may in exceptional cases ultimately 
 lead us, is to be found the greatest happiness to the race, and 
 as may be readily proved, to the individual also. Although 
 therefore we are moved, and ought to be moved, by the plea- 
 sures or pains of conscience, in a rightly constituted nature 
 the strongest feeling of all, still morality, based upon the 
 greatest happiness principle, is not, as it has been falsely re- 
 presented by short-sighted or narrow-minded people, a selfish 
 
 * Mackintosh's Dissertations, Encyc. Brit., p. 383. 
 O
 
 98 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 calculation of individual interests, or in action a calculation at 
 all, but its universal prayer is 
 
 " What conscience dictates to be done, 
 
 Or warns me not to do ; 
 
 This teach me more than Hell to shun, 
 
 That more than Heaven pursue." 
 
 SECTION III. 
 
 THE PRACTICE OF MORALITY. 
 
 The object of this Chapter is an exposition of the Principles of 
 Morality and not the carrying out of those principles into prac- 
 tice ; the practice of Morality would require a book in itself. As 
 regards the Practice of Morality, if Law rules in mind as well 
 as in matter, the distinction hitherto set up between the physical 
 and moral laws does not exist, and moral actions have their 
 causes, or invariable antecedents, as well as physical. If Mo- 
 rality then is " the Science which teaches men to live together 
 in the most L happy manner possible," if more than this, it in- 
 cludes his well-being altogether, it must take a wider range 
 than has yet been given to it, and it must embrace the physical 
 and mental as well as moral laws as equally obligatory. 
 
 By the study of the physical laws we make ourselves ac- 
 quainted with the great forces of nature,"and according as we 
 use them they either become our servants or overwhelm us in 
 their resistless energy. All material civilization is based upon 
 the study of Physics, and a man with a weekly income of a 
 pound sterling, is now enabled to the extent of a pound to set 
 other men in all parts of the world to work for him. It is not 
 easy to calculate the number of men that may be thus set in 
 motion on his behalf; there is his tea, sugar, coffee, tobacco, 
 silk for his wife's dress, wool for his own, the men to take
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 99 
 
 his letters and to print his penny paper in fact in half the 
 earth they are at work for him for his pound a week. For 
 his rates and taxes, which he so much grudges, he has an 
 army to guard him and to keep all those sources of enjoyment 
 open to him, and judges to see justice done to him, policemen 
 to protect him and his property while he makes this pound a 
 week ; roads mended, drained, and lighted for him ; bridges 
 kept in repair, &c. ; the river is turned in a gentle stream, not 
 as a raging torrent through his house ; a church is opened for 
 him for his Spiritual needs : and all this may come within this 
 pound a week, so much have the powers of production been 
 increased by enlisting the forces of nature in our service. By 
 the study of the mental laws we become acquainted with our 
 own constitution. This includes the organic laws, for mind is 
 connected with organization. On the knowledge of the organic 
 laws health is dependent, and the transmission of a strong mind 
 and body to our children ;* and upon the ignorance of the laws 
 of the mind is based not only increased mental disease but all 
 
 * The Sciences of Physiology and Pathology are doubtless yet in their 
 infancy, and our leading physicians sometimes candidly admit that in our 
 attempts to interfere at least by the aid of medicine with Nature's opera- 
 tions in the cure of disease, we, oftener than not, interfere injuriously. Mr. 
 Buckle no doubt is right when he says " Even now, and notwithstanding the 
 great steps that have been taken in morbid anatomy, in animal chemistry, and 
 in the microscopic investigation both of the fluids and solids of the human 
 frame, the treatment of disease is a question of art, far more than a question 
 of science. What chiefly characterises the most eminent physicians, and gives 
 them their real superiority, is not so much the extent of their theoretical 
 knowledge, though that too is often considerable, but it is the fine and deli- 
 cate perception which they owe, partly to experience, and partly to a natural 
 quickness in detecting analogies and differences which escape ordinary ob- 
 servers." (History of Civilization in England, vol. ii, p. 538.) 
 
 Nevertheless the Registrar-General's Quarterly Return, ending June 30, 
 1861, shows how much we have benefited by the greater attention we have 
 lately paid to the little knowledge we have. The Report contrasts the sta- 
 tistics of disease, so far as we are possessed of them, of two centuries back 
 with those of the present day. It takes 100,000 people of the London of 
 1660-79, and compares them with the same number of 1859. The same 
 number presents at the two different dates respectively 357 and 42 annual deaths 
 by smallpox ; 759 and 227 by fever, ague, scarlatina, quinsy, and croup ; 
 1,079 and 611 by consumption and diseases of the breathing organs; 763 and 
 8 by dysentery ; 142 and 2 by scurvy ; 298 and 26 by dropsy ; 1,175 and 136
 
 100 THE PKINCIPLES OF MOKALITY. 
 
 those superstitions that at present so much impede the progress 
 of the race. We have banished chance and supernatural agency 
 from physics, but from ignorance of the laws of mind as being 
 equally fixed with those of physics, we have retained them 
 in this department to the great detriment of certain and scien- 
 tific progress. 
 
 The moral laws are supposed only to regulate the intercourse 
 which men have together in society, that they may live together 
 as happily as possible ; but it is right, and what is right consti- 
 tutes the essence of morality, that we should attend equally 
 to all the natural laws, for unless we do so we cannot be happy 
 ourselves or make others happy. Each set of laws has its own 
 sanctions, its own rewards and punishments, and they all act in 
 harmony. Fire will burn, water will drown the virtuous man 
 no less than the vicious ; but upon him whose bodily frame is 
 in a healthy state physical injury is less likely to take serious 
 effect than upon him who has neglected the organic laws ; while 
 he whose moral faculties have their proper supremacy, is less 
 liable to incur the risk of such injury, than he whose reason 
 and moral powers are disordered by headlong passions and 
 blind propensities. This subject has been so admirably treated 
 
 children's deaths from convulsions and teething, and 86 and 17 women's 
 deaths in childbearing. All this decrease in the modern figures is over aud 
 above the decrease which we gain when we count the deaths of the Great 
 Plague. In one article, however, that of diseases of the brain, apoplexy, 
 paralysis, epilepsy, the older figures have the advantage of the latter, being 
 57 then to 151 now. Some forms of violent death, too, are more numerous 
 now than then, especially deaths from fire, which are 13 at the present date to 
 3 at the former date. The opposite element, however, restores the balance, 
 cases of drowning being 10 now to 20 then. " The supply of food, and parti- 
 cularly of vegetable and fresh animal food, in certain seasons of the year was 
 defective, BO that a large portion of the population became scorbutic. The 
 houses were nearly as close and dirty as the houses now are in Constantinople 
 and Cairo ; the water supply was imperfect. Parasitic insects and diseases of 
 the skin betrayed its impurities. The dirt of the houses struck foreigners, 
 the sewers were imperfect, and the soil gave off marsh malaria." The pre- 
 sent great difference is doubtless very encouraging, and illustrates the nature 
 of " evil," and also how it is to be got rid of. The increase of disease of the 
 head is caused by the prevailing ignorance or disregard of the connection of 
 the mind with the brain, and the tendency in consequence to overwork the 
 latter organ.
 
 THE PKINCIPLES OF MOKALITY. 101 
 
 in Mr. George Combe's Constitution of Man that it is unneces- 
 sary to pursue it here. When a good and pious man, negligent 
 of the organic laws and of the laws of political economy, falls 
 into ill-health and poverty, it is thought to be a mysterious 
 dispensation of Providence for which provision requires to be 
 made in another and a better world. The mass of suffering 
 incident to ignorance and the consequent neglect of the natural 
 laws is incalculable ; plague, epidemic, disease, melancholy, 
 madness, poverty ; and these continue to be represented by our 
 religious teachers, not as the consequence of our ignorance and 
 transgression of laws with which we ought to be acquainted, 
 but as a necessary part of human nature, consequent upon the 
 transgression of Adam ; inflicted as arbitrary chastisements or 
 trials by God, to be removed only by Him in the same manner, 
 prayer being the only proper way to effect their removal. 
 Whereas were they removed by prayer without our first having 
 our attention called to their cause and removing it, it would 
 probably be to our destruction and not our good. 
 
 It is our moral duty then to study the nature of everything 
 around us, and to make ourselves acquainted with the particular 
 constitution it has received from the hand of the Creator, and 
 its relation to our own organization, for whether it will do us 
 good or harm depends upon the adaptation of our conduct to 
 such properties and relations. 
 
 It is the province of Moral Science to teach us what our 
 duties are, and of Social Science to place us in circumstances 
 that will best enable us to perform them. Perhaps the most 
 direct means of ascertaining what our duties are, that is, what 
 are the purposes for which we have been made, is to study the 
 faculties and attributes with which we have been endowed, and 
 thus basing our moral code upon the use of each in the direc- 
 tion for which its nature shows it was evidently intended. I 
 have endeavoured to work out this principle in my " Education 
 of the Feelings and Affections," which will make it unnecessary 
 to pursue the subject at any length here. MoraKty ought to 
 be at least as certain a science as Chemistry or Medicine ; a
 
 102 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 Moralist ought to be able to speak as certainly, as the Chemist 
 or Physician each in his department, of what a person with a 
 definite mental constitution ought to do, and in what circum- 
 stances he ought to be placed to make him as happy as possible. 
 Under the head of Mental Science we shall see how far our 
 knowledge of the mental constitution will enable us to do this. 
 
 O 
 
 As I have said, my object here is the elucidation of Princi- 
 ples, but I may just mention two or three things in the practice 
 of Morality, that are calculated to work the greatest change for 
 the better in the present state of society, when they come to be 
 clearly recognized as duties. Now they are either overlooked 
 or completely ignored. Thus, no man will consider it right, 
 either with a license or without, to bring children into the 
 world for which he has not a moral certainty of providing pro- 
 perly without the assistance of others. Surely it would be 
 wrong to bring children into the world that we knew would die 
 of starvation ; is it not also wrong to bring them into the world 
 with the certainty that their support must depend upon other 
 people, either in an exacted poor's rate or any other way? 
 When a provident person has economised his time and done his 
 work it is quite unjust that he should be set to work again to 
 help to keep a dozen children for another man whose own 
 earnings have never been properly equal to the support of one. 
 Strange as it may seem, the opposite feeling to this almost uni- 
 versally prevails, and prizes are given to agricultural labourers 
 for having families of 12 or 16 children upon twelve shillings a 
 week. Any improvement in the condition of the Working 
 Classes must be based on provident habits ; and all providence, 
 to be effectual, must commence here. 
 
 Again, it will not much longer be considered right and fair 
 that when the Capitalist and a hundred Labourers shall work 
 together an equal number of hours with a common object, that 
 the Capitalist shall carry off as his share one half of the common 
 produce, merely because the present working of the law of 
 supply and demand gives him power to do so. Attention to 
 the " moral check" on population, mentioned above, will stop
 
 THE PEINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 103 
 
 this abuse and enable the workman by lessening his numbers 
 to make a better bargain for himself. 
 
 A more equal and just division of the produce of labour will 
 be a check on the present luxurious mode of living, which is 
 the scandal of the present age; and the upper and middle classes 
 will be obliged to return to nature's more simple pleasures, 
 which are higher, purer, more lasting, and distinguish man 
 peculiarly as man. Pure air, exercise, healthy appetite, the 
 pursuit of truth, the poetry of nature in beautiful scenery, 
 change of season, the blue sky and clouds and sunsets, the hum 
 and buz and quietude of enjoyment of insect and animal life, 
 books and the company through them of all the great and good 
 that have departed, how cheap are these, yet how lasting ! 
 
 It is often thought that vice would be pleasant enough in 
 this world if it were not for the penalties that attend it in 
 another ; but this is a great mistake, for every deviation from 
 the moral laws is attended with suffering as certainly, although 
 not so directly and immediately, as in the physical or organic 
 laws, and a person guilty of an immorality will be as surely 
 punished for it as if he were to put his hand into the fire. The 
 instances given above are certainly breaches of the moral law, 
 although, as I have said, not generally recognized and ac- 
 knowledged, and very much of what is called " evil" in the 
 world is consequent upon them and may be removed upon the 
 removal of the cause. Mankind are scrambling to get all the 
 good they can for themselves individually, and they miss in 
 consequence the higher good to be attained only by arrange- 
 ments made best to promote the happiness of all. The Myste- 
 ries of God's Moral Providence are principles owing : 
 
 First, to the non-recognition that all God's laws, physical, 
 moral, and mental, are equally binding upon us. 
 
 Second, we compare our condition with that of other 
 people, both real and imaginary, and we consider ourselves 
 entitled to something better than the state and position in which 
 we find ourselves; whereas, if we carry out the doctrine of 
 Necessity to its legitimate consequences, we are really entitled
 
 104 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 to nothing, save a balance of enjoyment, as all our merit is 
 derived. 
 
 Third, we have looked upon ourselves as individuals, and 
 have acted too much without reference to the whole, of which 
 we are only a very small part. But what is man, looked at 
 through the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity ? A mere 
 link in the chain of causation, connected with innumerable links 
 before his existence, and with the future chain ad infinitum, 
 the consequences of his existence being endless ; calling, pro- 
 bably, numberless beings into existence by the same necessaiy 
 law by which he himself began to be. A mere atom in the 
 mass of sensitive creation, called into existence without any 
 choice on his part, and moved by influences over which he has 
 no more control than an atom of matter over attraction or 
 repulsion, or whatever other laws it may be constituted to obey. 
 He, an atom of the great body of mankind, bearing the same 
 relation to it as a single atom of the human body does to the 
 whole : the atom is introduced into the system by the laws of 
 nature ; it passes through the several stages of assimilation 
 becomes capable of feeling, and again passes away ; so does 
 man from the great body of society. He, however, makes 
 himself the centre of time and space, and if one within his little 
 world is removed by death, the whole economy of nature must 
 be inverted to afford him relief; yet from the great body of 
 mankind some hundreds depart and are born every minute. To 
 the eye that views mankind and not man, it would seem as wise 
 to mourn for the departed, supposing even that they exist no 
 more, and are to us as before they were born, as to mourn for 
 those who might have been born, but yet were not. 
 
 In the moral government of the world we everywhere find 
 individual happiness made subservient to the general good. 
 Moved on all occasions by necessity, man can merit nothing, 
 and can, in justice, claim nothing but a balance of enjoyment 
 upon the whole of his being. To the very existence of man, 
 as man, general laws are necessary, and the result of these 
 general laws is to produce great variety of conditions with
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 105 
 
 reference to the relative quantity of happiness enjoyed by each 
 creature. Throughout social existence, as we have previously 
 seen, man is made to suffer for the faults of his fellows ; the 
 effects of his neighbour's ignorance or injustice fall upon him- 
 self, and by this arrangement the general well-being is secured, 
 by creating the strongest of all motives for each to dispel the 
 clouds of ignorance around him, and to endeavour to carry 
 others forward with himself in the march of improvement. 
 
 The principal reason why Morality has not advanced as a 
 science is, that the mental constitution has not been understood, 
 and in ignorance of this, laws for the production of the greatest 
 happiness were empirical and fruitless, as they could have no 
 more foundation in real knowledge than the science of Medicine 
 before the discovery of the circulation of the blood; but as 
 knowledge of the structure and functions of the several organs 
 of the body is essential to minister to their disorders, so an 
 intimate acquaintance with the faculties and functions of the 
 mind is requisite to remedy moral disease. 
 
 Man is a compound of instincts, and of reason or intellectual 
 faculties for the proper direction of these instincts. The instinct 
 is the incentive to action, and reason the guide to the object of 
 such action. Some of these instincts have reference to our 
 individual welfare. They induce us to cling to life, though 
 excessive pain should for the moment predominate, rendering 
 life for the time being undesirable ; they induce us to supply 
 our body with the material necessary for its sustenance; to 
 attach ourselves to those who administer to our pleasures ; to 
 accumulate for a future day; to defend ourselves and repel 
 aggression ; to meet necessary danger ; cautiously to avoid that 
 which has a tendency to injure; to desire approbation; to 
 exalt ourselves, and to view things only with reference to self. 
 These are called the selfish feelings. Another class of our 
 instincts leads us to seek for gratification in the welfare of the 
 great body of society ; to desire the happiness of our fellow- 
 creatures ; to treat them with deference and respect ; to do 
 justly ourselves, and to see that justice is done to others. These
 
 106 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 are termed disinterested feelings, not because they have not as 
 direct a reference to individual happiness as any of the others, 
 but because the happiness derived from their gratification is a 
 consequence and reflection of the happiness of others. We are 
 thus connected by one part of our organization with the earth, 
 and our happiness requires obedience to the physical and 
 organic laws : by the other portion we are connected with 
 the whole mass of sensitive existence, and our happiness 
 equally requires that the laws that connect us with these 
 should be obeyed. 
 
 All our faculties are sources of happiness when exercised 
 legitimately, and all have a wide field of action without inter- 
 fering with the rights or happiness of others, and the object 
 of the moralist is to show how each may be gratified consistently 
 with this limitation. The greatest possible amount of happiness 
 can only be experienced when the disinterested feelings pre- 
 dominate, and in proportion as these take precedence over the 
 rest, does happiness increase ; the reason of which is, that the 
 gratification of the selfish desires decreases with age, it is single 
 and solitary, and confined to one object, while that of the disin- 
 terested feelings is boundless in its range, and is composed, not 
 only of the enjoyment which always results from the legitimate 
 exercise of the faculties, but also of the happiness reflected from 
 that of all benefited by such exercise : the former is ever but 
 an unit ; the latter always compound. 
 
 Not only is it necessary to morality that those feelings which 
 have the interest of others for their object should have the 
 supremacy, but the intellectual faculties must also be cultivated 
 and enlightened ; for the feelings that prompt us to action are 
 mere blind impulses ; those that have for their object our own 
 individual welfare are as likely to destroy as to benefit us, un- 
 less guided by reason, and those that have for their object the 
 welfare of our fellow- creatures are as likely to injure them as 
 to increase their enjoyment, unless similarly directed. 
 
 As almost all the "evil" in this world originates in 
 passion and perverted feeling, and in error consequent on the
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 107 
 
 limitation of our faculties, and as it is not only necessary to 
 wish to do right, but we must also know what is right, per- 
 haps the highest pursuit of all is the elucidation and spread 
 of truth. We may not all be able to discover new truths, but 
 we may all aid in making what truth there is shine a little 
 brighter. Truthfulness and sincerity therefore must always be 
 reckoned among the first moral duties. It is the one thing 
 needful in this world of shams. While merit and demerit are 
 attached to opinion, as if we could form what opinions we 
 liked, insincerity is likely greatly to prevail. The best mode of 
 attacking error is by spreading truth, and whatever may be the 
 convictions at which we may arrive, and whatever may be 
 the opinion of society with respect to such convictions, we are 
 bound to state them if called upon. Were each mind thus 
 honestly to declare the faith that it holds, truths that are now 
 treated as errors dangerous to the interests of society, would be 
 at least regarded with respect, out of deference to the talents 
 and character of those that entertain them, and the improve- 
 ment of our institutions would be more rapid. For though 
 the " world has ever shown but small favour to its teachers ;"* 
 though it has ever regarded with an evil and a jealous eye the 
 propounders of new truths, yet the honest expression of all that 
 we believe will be found to be most in accordance with the 
 promotion of our own well-being. We may be neglected and 
 even persecuted by society at large ; yet the sympathy and 
 friendship of the few real lovers of truth, who are capable of 
 appreciating our motives and views, and the internal conscious- 
 ness arising from the activity of the highest feelings, will more 
 
 * " The world has ever, we fear, shown but small favour to its teachers : 
 hunger and nakedness, perils and reviling, the prison, the cross, the poison- 
 chalice, have, in most times and countries, been the market-price it has offered 
 for wisdom, the welcome with which it has greeted those who have come to 
 enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, 
 belong to old days ; but the world's martyrology was not completed with 
 these ; Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in 
 the cell of a madhouse, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So 
 neglected, so 'persecuted they the prophets,' not in Judea only, but ill all 
 places where men have been." Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. 1, p. 341.
 
 108 THE PEINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 than repay us for all that the world is capable of withholding. 
 Unless this virtue of perfect sincerity be practised, it is im- 
 possible that a man's friendships and connexions can be formed 
 upon the only lasting and desirable footing, viz., sympathy of 
 thought and feeling ; and though the friends of the man who 
 dares to promulgate and support unpopular truths are neces- 
 sarily few, yet they are more valuable, and are the source of 
 more happiness than a host bound to him by the ordinary 
 worldly ties, or than the stupid staring and loud huzzas of the 
 multitude. 
 
 By expediency we generally mean the adaptation of abstract 
 truths to the present circumstances of the world ; giving a body 
 to what has hitherto been a mere spirit ; and no spirit can live 
 here without a body, and that adapted to the conditions of its 
 existence. But exceptions to general rules, the dictates of the 
 higher feelings never can be really expedient, and therefore 
 can never be allowed. Attempting to do good by the habitual 
 disregard of any of the great moral laws is a fatal mistake. 
 The history of the Jesuits is an instructive illustration. The 
 Jesuits' was the holiest of causes the support of Religion and 
 the Church, but unfortunately they taught that all means were 
 fair and right in such a cause they held " that they might 
 do evil that good might come," and what was the consequence? 
 Macaulay says, " Before the order had existed a hundred years, 
 it had filled the whole world with memorials of great things 
 done and suffered for the faith. No religious community could 
 produce a list of men so variously distinguished: none had 
 extended its operations over so vast a space ; yet in none had 
 there ever been such perfect unity of feeling and action. There 
 was no region of the globe, no walk of speculative or of active 
 life, in which Jesuits were not to be found. They guided the 
 counsels of Kings. They deciphered Latin inscriptions. They 
 observed the motions of Jupiter's satellites. They published 
 whole libraries, controversy, history, treatises on optics, Alcari 
 odes, editions of the fathers, madrigals, catechisms, and lam- 
 poons."* But with the admirable energy, 
 
 * Macaulay, rol. 2, p. 54.
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 109 
 
 cKsinterestedness, and self-devotion, which were characteristic 
 of the society, great vices were mingled. It was alleged, and 
 not without foundation, that the ardent public spirit which 
 made the Jesuit regardless of his ease, of his liberty, and of his 
 life, made him also regardless of truth and of mercy ; that no 
 means which could promote the interest of his religion seemed 
 to him unlawful, and that by the interest of his religion he too 
 often meant the interest of his society. Consequently at the 
 end of this hundred years these principles had brought the 
 whole of the Catholic Church into disrepute, and we find that 
 Tillotson, whose indulgence for various schismatics and heretics 
 brought on him the reproach of heterodoxy, told the House 
 of Commons from the pulpit that it was their duty to make 
 effectual provision against the propagation of a religion which 
 demanded from its followers services directly opposed to the 
 first principles of morality. Macaulay tells us that the inference 
 popularly drawn was " that, however fair the general character 
 of a Papist may be, there was no excess of fraud or cruelty of 
 which he was not capable when the safety and honour of his 
 church were at stake ;"* and that the extraordinary success of 
 the fables of Gates is to be chiefly ascribed to the prevalence of 
 this opinion. He says, " It was to no purpose that the accused 
 Roman Catholic appealed to the integrity, humanity and loyalty 
 which he had shown through the whole course of his life. It 
 was to no purpose that he called crowds of respectable wit- 
 nesses, of his own persuasion, to contradict monstrous romances 
 invented by the most infamous of mankind. It was to no 
 purpose that with the halter round his neck, he ^invoked on 
 himself the whole vengeance of God, before whom in a few 
 moments he must appear, if he had been guilty of meditating 
 any ill to his prince or to his Protestant fellow-countrymen. 
 The evidence which he produced in his favour proved only how 
 little Popish oaths were worth. His very virtues raised a pre- 
 sumption of his guilt. That he had before him death and 
 judgment in immediate prospect only made it more likely that 
 
 * Macaulay, v. 2, p. 9.
 
 HO THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 he would deny what, without injury to the holiest of causes, he 
 could not confess. Among the unhappy men who were con- 
 victed of the murder of Godfrey was one Protestant of no high 
 character, Henry Berry. It is a remarkable and well-attested 
 circumstance, that Berry's last words did more to shake the 
 credit 'of the plot than the dying declarations of ah 1 the pious 
 and honourable Roman Catholics who underwent the same 
 fate.*" The Jesuits sought power at the expense of truth and 
 mercy, they outraged the fundamental laws by which alone 
 society can be held together, and notwithstanding their training, 
 their talent, and the high objects for which they sought that 
 power, they lived to be powerless, except when working in the 
 dark or under false colours, for in their own characters no one 
 could trust them or place the slightest reliance upon anything 
 they said or did, since with them truth was not sacred and no 
 contract was binding. 
 
 A serious mischief is done to the mind by admitting even 
 the supposition that, in any case, the greatest happiness prin- 
 ciple will allow of a departure from the general rule of right. 
 Conscience can admit of no appeal ; it must be a supreme 
 ruler ; for habitual obedience to its dictates is the only means 
 of preventing the mind from being divided against itself, and of 
 keeping it in a healthy state. The Utilitarian Philosophy re- 
 quires, therefore, to be used with caution. It serves to test the 
 soundness of general rules, and to supply a motive where no 
 such general rules exist : the well-being of society can never 
 be secured by leaving it to every individual to calculate the 
 consequences of each action, but by the obedience of each to 
 those rules that experience has shown generally to tend to 
 happiness. The performance of duty to do on all occasions 
 what is right, therefore, not the pursuit of happiness, may be 
 considered as the safest road to happiness ; trusting, as we may 
 do implicitly, that if we act in obedience to the moral law, our 
 well-being will be best secured. 
 
 The main thing to be sought is the habitual predominance 
 * Idem. vol. 2, p. 8.
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. Ill 
 
 of the moral feelings; the maintenance of them in a state in 
 which " the prospect of advantage through unlawful means 
 should never present itself to the mind ;" or if it did, that its 
 expulsion should follow instinctively, without any calculation 
 on the subject as to whether the " particular circumstances" do 
 not make it lawful ; for he that hesitates is lost. If an action 
 be considered at all doubtful, the thought of it is occasionally 
 entertained, the mind becomes accustomed to the possibility of 
 its performance, and will then generally yield to the first strong 
 temptation. Thus even thoughts at variance with the highest 
 purity of mind should never be permitted to gain entrance, for 
 evil thoughts invariably lead to evil deeds, as minor crimes to 
 greater. So the habitual indulgence of one fault lowers the 
 tone of the whole of the moral sentiments, and is incompatible 
 with the higher virtues. It acts physically as well as morally 
 by depriving the moral organs of the nervous energy requisite 
 for their full activity. A certain portion of nervous fluid is 
 generated by the brain, and if this is used by the propensities, 
 it is at the expense of the moral and intellectual organs.* 
 
 In the present artificial state of society, where its laws are 
 in so many instances opposed to the laws of nature, every 
 individual act of virtue cannot be supposed to lead directly to 
 happiness. The sacrifice of external advantages required by 
 such an act may even be very great; but we must bear in 
 mind, what moralists too often forget, that it is not in every 
 
 * J. S. Mill says, " Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very 
 tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of 
 sustenance ; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the 
 occupation to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society 
 into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capa- 
 city in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual 
 tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them ; and 
 they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer 
 them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or 
 the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. Ic may be ques- 
 tioned whether any one who has remained equally susceptible to both classes 
 of pleasures, ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower ; though many, 
 iu all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both.'' 
 Fraser, Oct. 16, 1861.
 
 112 THE PEINCIPLES OF MOKALITY. 
 
 act of virtue that the reward is to be looked for, but in the 
 general amount of happiness resulting from virtuous dispositions, 
 habits, and feelings ; a state of mind which is only attainable 
 by the invariable and constant practice of virtue. A man's 
 virtue may be of the negative kind, that is, confined to doing 
 no one any injury ; but if he do to no one any good, although 
 he may not actually suffer in consequence, he will lose all the 
 happiness derived from active virtue. His condition will be 
 similar to that of a man born blind, who suffers not positively 
 from the want of sight, never having known what it is to see, 
 but who loses all the advantages derivable from that sense. So 
 the man of low moral manifestation may not be a greater 
 sufferer, but he is susceptible of many degrees less happiness 
 than the highly moral man, in the same way that the brutes are 
 capable of less enjoyment than himself: a pig eats and drinks 
 and sleeps and grunts away his life in a comparatively low kind 
 of enjoyment, and so may he. " If we know a man who is 
 palpably cold-hearted, grasping and selfish, we are authorised 
 to conclude, First, that he is deprived of that delicious sunshine 
 of the soul and all those thrilling sympathies with whatever is 
 noble, beautiful, and holy, which attend the vivacious action of 
 the moral and religious faculties : and, Second, that he is de- 
 prived of the reflected influence of the same emotions from the 
 hearts and countenances of the good men around him."* 
 Mackintosh, in speaking of Leibnitz's Ethics, observes, " It 
 entirely escaped his sagacity as it has that of nearly all other 
 moralists, that the coincidence of morality with well-understood 
 interest in our outward actions, is very far from being the most 
 important part of the question ; for these actions flow from 
 habitual dispositions, from affections and sensibilities which 
 determine their nature. There may be, and there are, many 
 immoral acts, which, in the sense in which words are commonly 
 used, are advantageous to the actor. But the whole sagacity 
 and ingenuity of the world may be safely challenged to point 
 out a case in which virtuous dispositions, habits, and feelings, 
 
 * Combe's Moral Philosophy.
 
 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 113 
 
 are not conducive in the highest degree to the happiness of the 
 individual ; or to maintain that he is not the happiest, whose 
 moral sentiments and affections are such as to prevent the pos- 
 sibility of the prospect of advantage, through unlawful means, 
 presenting itself to his mind. It would indeed have been im- 
 possible to prove to Regulus that it was his interest to return to 
 a death of torture in Africa. But what if the proof had been 
 easy ? The most thorough conviction on such a point would 
 not have enabled him to set this example, if he had not been 
 supported by his own integrity and generosity, by love of his 
 country and reverence for his pledged faith. What could the 
 conviction add to that greatness of soul, and to these glorious 
 attributes? With such virtues he could not act otherwise than 
 he did. Would a father, affectionately interested in a son's 
 happiness, of very lukewarm feelings of morality, but of good 
 sense enough to weigh gratifications and sufferings exactly, be 
 really desirous that his son should have these virtues in a less 
 degree than Regulus, merely because they might expose him to 
 the fate that Regulus chose? On the coldest calculation he 
 would surely perceive that the high and glowing feelings of 
 such a mind during life, altogether throw into the shade a few 
 hours of agony in leaving it. And, if he himself were so 
 unfortunate that no more generous sentiment arose in his mind 
 to silence such calculations, would it not be a reproach to his 
 understanding not to discover that though in one case out of 
 millions such a character might lead a Regulus to torture, yet, 
 in the common course of nature, it is the source, not only of 
 happiness in life, but of quiet and honour in death ? A case so 
 extreme as that of Regulus will not perplex, if we bear in 
 mind, that though we cannot prove the act of heroic virtue to be 
 conducive to the interest of the hero, yet we may perceive at 
 once that nothing is so conducive to his interest as to have a mind 
 so formed that it could not shrink from it, but must rather em- 
 brace it with gladness and triumph. Men of vigorous health are 
 said sometimes to suffer most in a pestilence. No man was ever 
 so absurd as for that reason to wish that he were more infirm. 
 Q
 
 114 THE PRINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 
 
 The distemper might return once in a century. If he were 
 then alive he might escape it ; and even if he fell, the balance 
 of advantage would be in most cases greatly on the side of 
 robust health. In estimating beforehand the value of a strong 
 bodily frame, a man of sense would throw the small chance of 
 a rare and short evil entirely out of the account. So must the 
 coldest and most selfish moral calculator, who, if he be saga- 
 cious and exact, must pronounce that the inconveniences to 
 which a man may be sometimes exposed by a pure and sound 
 mind, are no reasons for regretting that we do not escape by 
 possessing minds more enfeebled and distempered." 
 
 It may be asked, whether our own happiness be an induce- 
 ment to morality sufficiently strong ? Whether it will be able 
 to produce the self-denial necessary to form a highly moral 
 character? For morality constantly requires the sacrifice of 
 immediate pleasures to greater ones more distant, and of pre- 
 sent enjoyment to the good of others. But if our own 
 happiness is not a sufficient inducement to morality, what is ? 
 It is true we never directly seek our own happiness, but happi- 
 ness results from the gratification of our desires and affections ; 
 we desire the approbation of the public and our own esteem ; 
 the love of those with whom we associate : we desire to do what 
 is right ; the happiness of others ; the love of God ; and if 
 stronger motives to action than these can be pointed out, what 
 are they ? Are not these the principles of action by which the 
 generality of mankind are influenced ? The enjoyments pro- 
 ceeding from the highest feelings of our nature, the love of 
 mankind and of that which is right, are beyond all comparison 
 more animating and durable, as well as more refined and 
 elevated, than those proceeding from selfish or sensual gratifica- 
 tions ; and all that can be said, therefore, of him who is called 
 the sufferer for conscience sake, is, that he prefers the higher 
 pleasure to the lower, or the great good in the future to the 
 little good now. 
 
 One more essential to the interests of morality we shall 
 * Mackintosh's Dissertations, p. 333.
 
 THE PKINCIPLES OF MORALITY. 115 
 
 mention. It is requisite that the mind should be freed from 
 the degrading notions of the character of the Deity that have 
 been handed down to us from the dark ages of ignorance and 
 superstition, and that it should entertain views more consistent 
 with the Divine Perfections. We must be able to reject, as 
 derogatory to the character of God, whatever is inconsistent 
 with the highest principles of our nature. We must not allow 
 ourselves to suppose that what are Benevolence and Justice to 
 us, are not so to God ; or that He has a love of adulation that 
 we should despise in a human being ; that Infinite Benevolence 
 can ordain a balance of miser}', or that a balance of misery in 
 this world, and infinite misery in the next, must necessarily be 
 the portion of one part of God's creatures to ensure the welfare 
 of the rest ; or that punishment is vengeance, and that ven- 
 geance everlasting ; or that a disinterested lover of truth and 
 rectitude will be lost, when belief because it is safest would save 
 him ; that the Omniscient Deity can propose a plan for the 
 temporal and eternal interests of His creatures, which at the 
 same time He knows is inefficient to the purpose, because it 
 will not be accepted by them ; that the best and highest happi- 
 ness of his creatures here is inconsistent with their happiness 
 hereafter ; or that the final purposes of creation are God's 
 honour and glory. No ; from the mind that has contemplated 
 the perfections of the Almighty in the book of his works, such 
 degrading notions will be banished, and it will tremble to im- 
 pute motives and actions to God that are inconsistent with the 
 highest virtue even of His creatures ; though they should be 
 revealed by an angel from heaven, or by a priesthood claiming 
 for itself inspiration from the Highest. More consistent is the 
 Atheist than he who allows himself to entertain such ideas ; 
 more reasonable were it to believe in no God, than in one 
 possessing such attributes ! But he who looks deeper into the 
 ways of Providence, finds a scheme worthy of Omnipotence, in 
 the production of the largest sum of enjoyment possible ; finds 
 that He works not by partial laws, but by such as pervade the 
 whole sensitive creation, and cannot be resisted by any supposed
 
 116 THE PBiyCIPUES OF MORALITY. 
 
 freedom of will. He feels the most implicit confidence in God, 
 finding that there is no evidence for the existence of any other 
 object but the good of his creatures ; that pain is necessary for 
 his preservation, and is as his schoolmaster to instruct him and 
 impel him forward in the race of improvement that it is in- 
 tended to correct error, not to punish it. He feels and knows 
 that the laws of God are not changeable, but that he may 
 depend upon them in the calculation of his well-being ; and that 
 there is no necessity for us to pray to God that He will alter 
 His laws for us to be happy, but that if we do but study and 
 obey them, our happiness will infallibly follow ; that, as it is the 
 law of his existence that he should desire his own happiness, 
 and morality is the most direct road to it, he must, as he ad- 
 vances in intelligence and sees more clearly this connexion 
 between virtue and happiness, of necessity choose the former. 
 To the man who can divest his mind of the degrading super- 
 stitions of his childhood, and exercise it upon the great plan of 
 Providence, every cause and effect that he may witness, every 
 truth that he may discover, is a new illustration of the goodness 
 of God. To see Him in His works ; to know what he does, 
 and wherefore he does it, is to feel for ever in His presence ; 
 he who thus seeks the Pervading and Creating Spirit of the 
 universe, sees on every side of him wonders going forward 
 which only a God can perform ; each atom obeying the laws of 
 order given to it ; each plant elaborately and systematically 
 assuming the form peculiarly its own ; each animal working out 
 the object of its being, and Sensation Feeling the great Soul 
 of the world, periodically changing its garment, as generation 
 after generation of men, and all living creatures, are organized, 
 vitalized, and again return to their mother Earth to form new 
 combinations. " Is not God's Universe a Symbol of the God- 
 like, is not Immensity a Temple? Listen, and for organ- 
 music thou wilt ever, as of old, hear the morning stars sing 
 together." * 
 
 Sartor Resartus, p, 263.
 
 PABT II, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 MATTER. 
 
 SUBSTANCES appear naturally to divide themselves into 
 three grand classes : inorganic ; organic, or those which have 
 Life ; and those organic structures which have received 
 another and apparently totally distinct principle, viz., Sensation 
 or Sensibility. 
 
 Inorganic Matter is distinguished by the possession of pro- 
 perties which we call Attraction, Repulsion, Inertia, that is to 
 say, without sensation, and consequently without volition; it 
 possesses certain tendencies to act in a certain way, which 
 tendencies are called the laws to which it is subjected, and 
 which are always uniform. It is to these tendencies that all 
 the motions going on in inorganic matter are owing all the 
 phenomena of Physics. In relation to such laws, however, 
 when we say that it is attraction that causes all bodies to tend 
 towards each other, we are not in the least better instructed 
 with respect to the cause of this tendency, for attraction is only 
 a name invented to express the fact. Newton, therefore, when 
 he showed that the heavenly bodies in revolving round each 
 other obey the same law as the apple in its descent to the earth, 
 did not make us better acquainted with the cause of the motion 
 of either ; although he explained the phenomenon in the only 
 way that it admitted of explanation, by showing that the order 
 in which it takes place is similar to the observed succession of 
 more familiar facts. There are also other general laws or 
 tendencies which are probably only modifications of those 
 above mentioned. Such are chemical affinities; which, by
 
 MATTER. 
 
 variously combining what are supposed to be the different 
 kinds of matter, form all the endless variety of bodies on the 
 face of the globe. 
 
 By tracing out and registering the tendencies or laws of 
 matter in the departments of Physics and Chemistry, and by 
 actino- in accordance with them, have we been able to turn her 
 powers to our own use and comfort. Such powers now at our 
 command in this country are said to be equal to the joint force 
 of 900 millions of men, or to the inhabitants of the whole 
 globe.* 
 
 Organized or living matter possesses the same properties 
 and is subjected to the same laws as inorganic ; and such laws 
 are so little suspended with regard to organic bodies as to 
 determine the size of both plants and animals all over the 
 world, and ultimately causing old age, decay, and death, or 
 the extinction of life. 
 
 Striking as are the phenomena revealed to us in the first- 
 named departments of nature, the phenomena of Life are still 
 more so. Two bodies, almost identical to the eye, a stone and 
 a seed, are buried in the ground. In the one there is little or 
 no change ; the other expands, bursts, rises from the ground, 
 and makes to itself organs whereby its various functions are 
 performed ; the matter of which it is composed is continually 
 changing, 'throwing off the old and useless material, and con- 
 verting other matter into its own substance to supply its place ; 
 giving to other bodies the power of exercising the same vital 
 energy, i. e. } producing forms similar to itself; and then it 
 
 * Men, stimulated by their natural wants, and using their faculties of 
 mind and hody to supply these from around them, have gradually discovered 
 that all the things or objects in nature are but repetitions or multiplications 
 of a few kinds which they conveniently class as being of three kingdoms, 
 called Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral: and further, they have discovered 
 that all the changes or motions incessantly going on among these objects are 
 of but four great kinds, which they have called Mechanical, Chemical, Vital, 
 and Mental, By study of fit types in these simple classifications, men have 
 acquired such wide knowledge of things and their changing conditions as has 
 enabled them to devise very numerous processes or arts, by which they pro- 
 digiously advance human well-being.
 
 MATTER. 119 
 
 dies the vital power leaves tlie individual existence and is 
 incapable of being further traced by us. 
 
 Thus the characteristic of vegetative life is to perform 
 the functions of nutrition, respiration, circulation, secretion, 
 excretion, and reproduction ; the object of these functions 
 being to produce the changes above mentioned, and thus to 
 preserve the individual existence and the life which supports it. 
 
 Two seeds very much alike, shall in their growth present 
 altogether opposite appearances, and the same power acting 
 upon what appear to us to be similar structures and upon others 
 in which there is very little difference, produces all the varied 
 beauties of the vegetative kingdom. With reference to the pri- 
 mary laws which regulate these differences we are at present little 
 enlightened; one thing, however, appears certain, that however 
 complicated the peculiar laws of life may appear to us to be in 
 the present state of our knowledge, they are fixed and in- 
 variable. 
 
 Life proceeds only from life;* no instance having been 
 known of its existence where it has not been transmitted from 
 one organized body to another ; in its lowest state of energy it 
 requires to be placed in certain relations to light, heat, and 
 moisture ; it depends upon organization. Sensation depends 
 upon life, and all things in inorganic matter, body, and mind, 
 bear a fixed relation to each other, and if this relation be 
 altered in one part the whole is destroyed. 
 
 * We are told by some naturalists that the nervous system does not mark 
 the distinction between the animal and vegetable Kingdom, because there are 
 large classes of animals which hare none ; for instance, its existence lias not 
 been yet traced in all infusoria, in the myriad species of Hydrozoa and 
 Anthozoa, and it is now doubted whether what has hitherto been taken for 
 a nervous system in the Echinodermata has any real existence. But as life 
 appears only to proceed from life, and all sensation to depend upon a nervous 
 system in like manner where we can see clearly, all that we can say is that 
 a nervous system in some cases has yet to be discovered, and with clearer vision 
 and more knowledge it is a fair inference that it will be, for what did we know 
 of the circulation of insects, or of the organ of hearing in the cephalopoda, 
 before John Hunter's time ? We are justified, we think, by analogy in saying 
 that the nervous system in these miuute classes has not yet been clearly 
 demonstrated, and that is all.
 
 120 MATTER. 
 
 As there is an apparent difference between inert or dead 
 matter and matter which possesses life, so there is an important 
 difference between mere organic life and animal life, or that 
 which has received the additional principle of Sensation. Life 
 and sensation appear to be entirely distinct principles ; for 
 although sensation cannot exist without life, yet life may exist 
 altogether independently of sensation. 
 
 Life seems to be carried on in the same way in animals as 
 in vegetables. In both, the materials for growth and reproduc- 
 tion of waste particles are supplied by means of the circulation 
 of a fluid through innumerable tubes ; the root may be said to 
 be the stomach of the plant, imbibing nutrition from the soil ; 
 a system of tubes rising upwards, called the common vessels, 
 correspond to the lacteals and pulmonary arteries of animals ; 
 these are distributed in minute ramifications over the surface 
 of the leaves, which may be termed the lungs of the plant, as 
 here the sap is exposed to the agency of light and air, and like 
 the blood in animals, undergoes a change which adapts it to 
 the wants of the vegetable ; this sap then descends through 
 another system of minute tubes in the inner layer of the bark, 
 yielding all the juices peculiar to the plant. 
 
 There is, however, a difference and a very striking one in 
 the nature of the food proper to plants and animals ; by means 
 of which difference the vegetable kingdom is made to prepare 
 the way for the animal. The plant subsists upon inorganic 
 matter, whilst organic is the necessary food of the animal. 
 Life in the vegetable converts inorganic into organic matter. 
 Thus the soil is subservient to the plant ; the plant to the 
 animal ; one animal lower in the scale of sensation to another 
 that his higher ; and all to the superior capabilities of enjoy- 
 ment in man. 
 
 Another noticeable difference between plants and animals, 
 in reference to the organic processes upon which life depends, 
 is that the former are fixed to the soil and are therefore always 
 in contact with their food ; whereas in animals which possess a 
 power of locomotion a different arrangement is necessary for
 
 MATTER. 121 
 
 the supply of nutriment, and these are, consequently, provided 
 with a receptacle by which they can carry their food about with 
 them. To convert this food into a proper supply to replace 
 the waste particles, other functions are requisite, more nume- 
 rous and complicated in the animal than in the plant. 
 
 At the commencement of the scale of organization, 0., 
 where life seems least removed from inorganic matter, the 
 structure is so simple that a single organ seems all that is 
 necessary for the existence of the individual. But the higher 
 the individual in the scale of existence and the more its vital 
 energy, the greater is the multiplication of its organs, the more 
 numerous its functions, and the more elaborate and complex 
 its structure. From the lowest end of the scale to the highest 
 for every different function performed by either plant or animal 
 an additional organ is necessary. The animal performs more 
 functions than the plant, and its structure is, consequently, 
 much more complex ; but the organs in both are neither more 
 nor less than are required for their individual wants. 
 
 Life, then, is common to both plants and animals, and is 
 supported in the same way in both ; the only difference being 
 complexity of structure in proportion as the functions are more 
 numerous and of a higher order. 
 
 The chief distinction between them is now to be noticed, 
 viz., that to animals is given sensation,* or the power of 
 feeling, in addition to life.f Living and feeling are distinct 
 states, although both existing in one frame. Each state has 
 its own organs and distinct functions, and though sensation is 
 nowhere known to exist without life, yet life continues sorne- 
 
 * The term sensation throughout this work is not used in the accepted 
 Bense of that term in this country, as denoting the feeling which we have by 
 the senses, but as the particular characteristic of the animal life, and as 
 synonymous with sensibility or feeling, but not the sense of feeling. Con- 
 sciousness, which is the term many writers make use of to express this 
 faculty, appears to me to result only from Reflection, which no animal but 
 man possesses. 
 
 + I would here refer the reader to the three first chapters of Dr. S. 
 Smith's " Philosophy of Health," in which, and more especially in the second, 
 this subject is admirably elucidated. 
 
 B
 
 122 MATTER. 
 
 times to exist when all sensation has ceased or is even extinct. 
 Thus we continue to live when sensation is lost in sleep, and 
 sleep which is rest to the organs of sensation is necessary to 
 the healthy exercise of their functions and even to their very 
 existence. The organs which support life, on the contrary, 
 work without intermission, death being the consequence of 
 their ceasing to act. Could they rest when we are no longer 
 conscious, they would not in all probability wear out so soon, 
 and we should live longer. In cases of apoplexy sensation 
 frequently becomes extinct, at least to all appearance, some 
 days before the merely vital functions cease. In drowning, 
 also, sensation ceases some considerable time before death, and 
 may be again restored if the organic functions have not quite 
 stopped; so also the stoppage of the heart, or of the cir- 
 culation of the blood in the brain from pressure, immedi- 
 ately entails unconsciousness ; thus proving the fact that 
 sensation is distinct from life though dependent upon it. 
 
 Dr. S. Smith observes in reference to the distinction 
 between organic and animal life, " The action of the apparatus 
 of the organic life when sound is without consciousness ; the 
 object of the action of the apparatus of the animal life is the 
 production of consciousness. The final cause of the action 
 of the apparatus of the organic life is the maintenance of 
 existence: the final cause of the action of the apparatus of 
 the animal life is the production of conscious existence." 
 " When, however, consciousness of the organic processes 
 would be of service to us ; when they are going wrong ; when 
 their too feeble or intense action is in danger of destroying 
 existence, the animal life is made sensible of what is passing 
 in the organic, in order that the former may take beneficial 
 cognizance of the latter, may do what experience may have 
 taught to be conducive to the restoration of the diseased organ 
 to a sound state, or avoid doing what may conduce to the 
 increase or maintenance of its morbid condition." Again, 
 " The two lives are born at different periods, and the one is in 
 active operation before the other is even in existence. The
 
 MATTEK. 123 
 
 first action observable in the embryo is a minute pulsating 
 point. It is the young heart propelling its infant stream. 
 Before brain or nerve or muscle can be distinguished the heart 
 is in existence and in action ; that is, the apparatus of the 
 organic function of the circulation is built up and is in opera- 
 tion before there is any trace of an animal organ. Arteries 
 and veins circulate blood, capillary vessels receive the vital fluid, 
 and out of it form brain and muscle, the organs of the animal, 
 no less than the various substances that compose the organs of 
 the organic life. The organic is not only anterior to the animal 
 life, but it is by the action of the organic that existence is given 
 to the animal life. The organic life is born at the first moment 
 of existence, the animal life not until a period comparatively 
 distant; the epoch emphatically called the period of birth, 
 namely, the period when the new being is detached from its 
 mother ; when it first comes in contact with external objects j 
 when it carries on all the functions of its economy by its own 
 organs, and consequently enjoys independent existence."* 
 
 It is difficult to tell when and where the animal life is first 
 added to the organic. So feeble is the energy, so indistinct is 
 the appearance of sensation when it is first added to matter, 
 that naturalists have mistaken what are now known to be ani- 
 mals for plants. The energy of sensation, however, gradually 
 increases as we trace it upwards in the scale of creation, and 
 always with it the enlargement and complexity of the nervous 
 system. The senses and voluntary motion gradually make 
 their appearance in worms, insects, &c., the extra necessary 
 vital functions being at the same time added. We thus ascend 
 the scale through fishes, reptiles, birds, and quadrupeds, the 
 complexity of organs, both nervous and vital, increasing in 
 proportion as sensation and motion become more energetic. 
 Thus the cerebral functions or the diversified powers of think- 
 ing and feeling gradually increase until they receive their final 
 development in man, where they produce all the phenomena 
 of Intellect, so far surpassing anything analogous in animals 
 that it requires considerable knowledge of comparative anatomy 
 to refer them to the same source. 
 
 * Philosophy of Health, Chap. 2.
 
 124 MATTER. 
 
 Dr. Smith says, " The relation is still stricter between the 
 complexity of apparatus of sensation and the range of feeling 
 than between the complexity of the inferior or organic func- 
 tions. The greater the number of senses the greater the 
 number of the organs of sense ; the more accurate and varied 
 the impressions conveyed by each, the more complex the 
 structure of the instrument by which they are communicated ; 
 the more extended the range of the intellectual operations, the 
 larger the bulk of brain, the greater the number of its distinct 
 parts, and the more exquisite their organization. From the 
 point of the animal scale, at which the brain first becomes 
 distinctly visible, up to man, the basis of the organ is the 
 same ; but as the range of its functions extends, part after 
 part is superadded, and the structure of each part becomes 
 progressively more and more complex. The evidence of this, 
 afforded by comparative anatomy, is irresistible, and the 
 interest connected with the study of it can scarcely be 
 exceeded." ' 
 
 Again, observes a writer in the Edinburgh Review, No. 94, 
 " In the nervous system alone we can trace a gradual progress 
 in the provision for the subordination of one animal to another, 
 and of all to man ; and are enabled to associate every faculty 
 which gives superiority with some additions to the nervous 
 mass, even from the smallest indication of sensation and will, 
 up to the highest degree of sensibility, judgment, and ex- 
 pression. The brain is observed to be progressively improved 
 in its structure ; and, with reference to the spinal marrow and 
 nerves, augmented in volume more and more, until we reach 
 the human brain, each addition being marked by some addition 
 to, or amplification of the power of the animal, until in man 
 we behold it possessing some parts of which animals are 
 destitute, and wanting none which they possess." 
 
 All facts seem, then, to imply that in precisely the same 
 way that life depends upon organization, so sensation or the 
 animal life depends upon a superstructure raised upon this 
 
 * Philosophy of Health, Chap. 1.
 
 MATTER. 125 
 
 organization, viz., the nervous system. Neither is there a 
 single fact to prove that man is in any way an exception to 
 this rule. His mind and feelings seem to be equally dependent 
 upon his nervous system, and the difference between him and 
 other animals, however great, seems owing to the greater com- 
 plexity of this system ; from which it is evident that, important 
 as this difference may be, there is no necessity for the intro- 
 duction of a fourth principle, as distinct as life from sensation, 
 to account for it. The functions of parts of the brain which 
 man has in addition to those possessed by the highest order of 
 brutes, enable^him to communicate his ideas and to register and 
 generalize his experience, and these powers constitute his dis- 
 tinguishing characteristic, without which he would never have 
 risen above the savage state. 
 
 That he is a progressive being is the grand distinction 
 of man, and the reason of an intelligent individual of the pre- 
 sent age is not so much the reason of one, as of the whole 
 human race : everything worthy of being preserved in every 
 mind that has existed having been handed down to us, first by 
 oral tradition and then by written records, making ultimately 
 a greater difference between a cultivated mind of the present 
 day, and that of one who has only had the experience of a life 
 to teach'him, than between the latter individual and one of the 
 higher order of brutes. It is well said by Dr. Arnott that " a 
 well-informed man of the present day may be said to possess 
 within the boundaries of his mind the universe in miniature, 
 where he can contemplate at pleasure, past events and the 
 present and the future." 
 
 To those who are unaccustomed to trace the origin and 
 growth of ideas through successive ages, and to consider the 
 expansion of mind as the result of the registered experience of 
 all that have preceded us, it is difficult to perceive the resem- 
 blance between the wonderful powers of man and those that are 
 developed in a minor degree in the brutes. The following pas- 
 sage from the " Philosophy of Health," seems to prove, never- 
 theless, incontrovertibly, that the mind of man is not an excep-
 
 126 MATTER. 
 
 tion to the universal law, which makes the animal life, viz., 
 sensation thought consciousness dependent upon the brain 
 and shows also, in a highly interesting manner, the progression 
 of the mind from childhood to manhood, and the retrogression 
 from manhood to second childhood, as the organs of the brain 
 gradually attain maturity with age, and again with age decay : 
 
 " The functions of the organic life are perfect at once. The 
 heart contracts as well, the arteries secrete as well, the respira- 
 tory organs work as well, the first moment they begin to act as 
 at any subsequent period. They require no teaching from 
 experience, and they profit nothing from its lessons. On 
 the contrary, the operations of the brain, and the actions of 
 the voluntary muscles, feeble and uncertain at first, acquire 
 strength by slow degress, and attain their ultimate perfection 
 only at the adult age." 
 
 " In the descending series, the animal life fails before the 
 organic, and its nobler powers decay sooner and more speedily 
 than the subordinate. First of all the impressions which 
 the organs of sense convey to the brain become less numerous 
 and distinct, and consequently the material on which the mind 
 operates is less abundant and perfect ; but at the same time, 
 the power of working vigorously with the material it possesses 
 more than proportionally diminishes. Memory fails ; analogous 
 phenomena are less readily and less completely recalled by the 
 presence of those which should suggest the entire train ; the 
 connecting links are dimly seen or wholly lost ; the brain itself 
 is less vivid and less coherent ; train succeeds train with pre- 
 ternatural slowness, and the consequence of these growing im- 
 perfections is that at last, induction becomes unsound just as it 
 was in early youth ; and for the same reason, namely, because 
 there is not in the mental view an adequate range of individual 
 phenomena ; and the only difference being that the range com- 
 prehended in the view of the old man is too narrow, because 
 that which he had learnt he has forgotten ; while in the youth 
 it is too narrow, because that which it is necessary to learn has 
 not been acquired.
 
 MATTER. 127 
 
 " And with the diminution of intellectual power the senses 
 continue progressively to fail ; the eye grows more dim, the 
 ear more dull, the sense of smell less delicate, the sense of 
 touch less acute, while the sense of taste, immediately sub- 
 servient to the organic function of nutrition, is the last to 
 diminish in intensity and correctness, and wholly fails but 
 with the extinction of the life it serves. 
 
 " But the senses are not the only servants of the brain ; the 
 voluntary muscles are so equally ; but these ministers to the 
 master power, no longer kept in active service, the former no 
 longer employed to convey new, varied, and vivid impressions, 
 the latter no longer employed to execute the commands of new, 
 varied, and intense desires, become successively feebler, 
 slower, and more uncertain in their action. The hand trem- 
 bles, the step totters, and every movement is tardy and un- 
 steady. And thus, by the loss of one intellectual faculty after 
 another, by the obliteration of sense after sense, by the pro- 
 gressive failure of the power of voluntary motion, in a word, 
 by the declining energy and the ultimate extinction of the ani- 
 mal life, man, from the state of maturity, passes a second time 
 through the stage of childhood back to that of infancy ; lapses 
 even into the condition of the embryo ; what the foetus was, 
 the man of extreme old age is : when he began to exist he 
 possessed only organic life ; and before he is ripe for the tomb, 
 he returns to the condition of a plant* 
 
 * On the same subject Dr. Elliotson, in his Human Physiology, p. 1,028, 
 remarks, " In this miserable state of wreck, the power of the brain called mind, 
 like the power of all other organs, and every organ, is reduced to the lowest 
 point compatible with life, and without Divine assurance to the contrary, must 
 indicate a final extinction, since a gradual expansion of intellectual and high 
 moral faculties might be expected the nearer our entrance into a higher state 
 of existence, and not a steadily increasing decline into childishness, incapacity, 
 and absolute fatuity dementia senilis, as it is technically called, in which no 
 evidence can be appreciated, no views conceived ; and the longer life is pushed, 
 the nearer to another world the individual arrives, the more fatuitous does 
 he grow, the more and more below the brute creation. Though few live long 
 enough to die thus fatuous, it must be remembered that the faculties of the 
 old are always more and more impaired and employed upon old experiewce 
 without the power of advancing, and that, among those who perish in the 
 vigour of their minds, they who are not cut off suddenly, nay even they who 
 become very acute before death, generally become delirious or unintelligent 
 ultimately before they expire."
 
 128 MATTER. 
 
 " And even this merely organic existence cannot be long 
 maintained. Slow may be the waste of the organic organs ; 
 but they do waste, and that waste is not repaired, and conse- 
 quently their functions languish, and no amount of stimulus is 
 capable of invigorating their failing action. The arteries are 
 rigid and cannot nourish ; the veins are relaxed and cannot 
 carry on the mass of blood that oppresses them ; the lungs, 
 partly choked up by adventitious matter, and partly incapable 
 of expanding and collapsing by reason of the feeble action f 
 the respiratory apparatus, imperfectly aerate the small quantity 
 of blood that flows through them ; the heart, deprived of its 
 wonted nutriment and stimulus, is unable to contract with the 
 energy requisite to propel the vital current ; the various organs, 
 no longer supplied with the quantity and quality of material 
 necessary for carrying on their respective processes, cease to 
 act ; the machinery stops, and this is death. 
 
 " And now the processes of life at an end, the body falls 
 within the dominion of the powers which preside universally 
 over matter ; the tie that linked all its parts together, holding 
 them in union and keeping them in action, in direct opposition 
 to those powers dissolved, it feels and obeys the new attrac- 
 tions to which it has become subject ; particle after particle 
 that stood in beautiful order, fall from their place ; the wonder- 
 ful structures they composed melt away ; the very substances 
 of which those structures were built are resolved into their 
 primitive elements ; these elements, set at liberty, enter into 
 new combinations and become constituent parts of new beings ; 
 those new beings, in their turn, perish ; from their death 
 springs life, and so the change goes on in an everlasting 
 circle." 
 
 As the elements of which the body has been composed 
 " enter into new combinations and become constituent parts 
 of new beings," so, even with reference to this world, may it 
 be truly said that the mind does not perish, but that the essen- 
 tial parts of it descend to our children, or in the shape of 
 written documents registered experience, help to form the 
 minds of hundreds of the human race.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 MIND. 
 
 IN the previous chapter we have seen how nature, in the 
 vast variety of her movements, seems systematically to ap- 
 proach towards one object, the production of Sensation or 
 Sensibility or Consciousness. The laws of inorganic matter 
 prepare the way for organic, for plants and vegetables pos- 
 sessing life ; the vegetable kingdom prepares the way for the 
 animal, and upon the vital functions of animals is dependent 
 the nervous system which it seems to be the object of all the 
 other complicated processes to produce, and with which Sensa- 
 tion or feeling is as intimately connected, as Attraction with 
 inorganic matter, or Life with organic. 
 
 The world appears to have been created with .the view of 
 containing the largest possible amount of sentient existence. 
 Not only organized structures possessing life, but beings en- 
 dowed with sensation teem on every side of us ; the wide- 
 spreading ocean, the earth, the air, are full of them ; each 
 possessing a constitution adapted to the sphere in which it 
 moves. There appears to be no situation where vegetation or 
 the effects of vegetation exist that does not support some kind 
 of animal life : stagnant water and noxious marshes, decaying 
 vegetable and animal matter, all swarm with sentient beings, 
 and what is death to the more perfectly organized beings, is 
 the source of life to others lower in the scale. Distinct worlds 
 of sensation seem to exist, in the water, in the air, in the earth, 
 as well as on the earth, all possessing a wonderful adaptation 
 of structure to their place in creation. How beautiful, for 
 instance, is the world of insects, fitted as these are, in their 
 various transformations, to inhabit the different elements. 
 How complicated is their structure, bodily and mental, en- 
 s
 
 130 MIND. 
 
 ablino- them to live in a world of their own, inaccessible to 
 
 to 
 
 the obtuser senses of man. They hear and see and feel and 
 smell and taste what is too subtle for his perception : they have 
 music and a language that he cannot understand : they sport 
 in all the colours of the rainbow, and delight in their own gay 
 clothing. The variety of structure in the organs of the senses, 
 in the wings, legs, stings, ovipositors, mouths, and internal 
 machinery for the supply of waste, of these little creatures, 
 is among the great wonders of comparative anatomy. Not 
 less wonderful is the perfection with which such internal 
 machinery, in beings so frail and low in the scale of existence, 
 performs its work ; turning death into life, putrefaction into 
 the most beautiful and variegated structure; eliminating the 
 lamp of the glow-worm, the sting of the bee, and the venom 
 that maddens the sluggish ox. No less admirable and appro- 
 priate is the structure of every living creature, from the tribes 
 of infusoria upwards, each possessing the powers of sensation, 
 and consequently intelligence, in the degree that is requisite 
 for its happiness and maintenance in creation. 
 
 The most highly organized being is Man, and the aggregate 
 of all his sensations, whether proceeding from external or 
 internal impressions, we denominate his mind. The mind, 
 therefore, is intimately connected with the brain and nervous 
 system, and all the functions of the body are important only 
 as they promote the healthy action of the brain, for it is 
 sensation alone that makes life of any value. The due regula- 
 tion of such functions is essential, therefore, to the proper 
 action of the mind. 
 
 It is represented by some who fear the supposed results of 
 what is called materialism, that the brain is merely the instru- 
 ment that the mind makes use of in its connexion with the 
 body. On the other hand, it is said " Mind is the functional 
 power of the living brain." "As I cannot conceive Life any 
 more than the power of attraction," says Dr. Elliotson, " unless 
 possessed by matter, so I cannot conceive mind unless possessed 
 by a brain, or by some nervous organ, whatever name we may
 
 MIND. 131 
 
 choose to give it, endowed with life. I speak of terrestrial or 
 animal mind ; with angelic and divine natures we have nothing 
 to do, and of them we know, in the same respects, nothing. 
 Observation shows that superiority of mind in the animal 
 creation is exactly commensurate with superiority of brain ;* 
 
 * " The same progression which exists in the gradual perfection of animal 
 organization, as far as regards vegetable life only, is observed in the gradual 
 perfection of the nervous system, and of animal life which depends upon it. 
 Comparative anatomy has followed the gradual perfection of animals, from 
 the most simple absorbent vessels to the most complicated apparatus of 
 mastication, deglutition, and digestion, to the most perfect circulation. With 
 every fresh viscus, every fresh apparatus for sensation, is discovered a fresh 
 function, and this function is more complicated in proportion as the organiza- 
 tion of the viscus or apparatus of sensation is more perfect. The stomach, 
 kidneys, lungs, heart, eyes, ears, are the more complicated as the functions 
 become so. 
 
 " The same gradation may be demonstrated in the structure of the 
 brains of the different species. I have demonstrated in the preceding chapter 
 that the existence of each moral quality and intellectual faculty depends solely 
 upon the presence of certain determinate cerebral parts, and not upon the 
 whole mass of brain.* It follows, that the number of the faculties is in direct 
 proportion to the integrant parts of the brain. In insects, fish, and amphibia, 
 the nervous mass contained in the cerebral reservoir is still divided into several 
 distinct masses. The greater part of these are not integrant parts of the 
 brain, properly so called ; they are ganglia, from which arise the nerves of 
 smell, hearing, sight, &c. The two hemispheres, properly so called, are 
 placed behind the two ganglia of the olfactory nerves, and are the more 
 complicated as the industrial instincts are more numerous ; the cerebellum in 
 these animals generally forms a hollow pouch, sometimes placed horizontally, 
 sometimes folded together. 
 
 " In birds, the two hemispheres are already more considerable, although 
 distinct convolutions cannot be discerned. The cerebellum still consists 
 merely of its middle or fundamental part ; but already appears composed of 
 many rings placed side by side. 
 
 " In the small mammalia, the shrew-mouse, mouse, rat, squirrel, weasel, 
 &c., convolutions are not yet discoverable. But as they are already distinctly 
 found in other" larger rodentia, the beaver, kangaroo, &c., we may suppose 
 that they equally exist in them. 
 
 " In the larger mammalia, the cat, polecat, fox, dog, ape, the convolu- 
 tions are more distinct and numerous, but their form varies according to the 
 species. 
 
 " In the dolphin, elephant, and man, they are more numerous and deep 
 than in the beaver, kangaroo, &c., and their form and direction vary com- 
 pletely according to the species.' 
 
 " In all the mammalia, the cerebellum possesses, besides the middle or 
 fundamental part, two lateral parts, which are more or less complicated, 
 according to the species ; and as the soi-disant pons variolii, or the soi-disant
 
 132 MIND. 
 
 that activity of brain and of mind are coequal ; and that, as 
 long as the brain is endowed with life, and remains uninjured, 
 it, like all other organs, can perform its functions, and mind 
 continues ; but, as in all other organs, when its life ceases, its 
 power to perform' its function ceases, and the mind ceases; 
 when disease or mechanical injury affects it, the mind is 
 affected inflammation of the stomach causes vomiting, of the 
 brain delirium ; a blow upon the head stuns ; if originally 
 constituted defective, the mind is defective ; if fully developed, 
 and properly acted on, the mind is vigorous : accordingly, as 
 
 cerebral ganglia, i.e., the transverse layers of nervous bands, are only the 
 commissure or junction of the lateral parts of the cerebellum, they are found 
 in all the mammalia, and in none of the ovipara. 
 
 " The number of the integral parts, or of the convolutions of the brain, 
 varies equally in the different species of mammalia ; in some the anterior 
 lobes of the hemispheres are larger or more elevated; in others, again, the 
 inferior parts of the anterior lobes are nearly wanting. The middle lobes, 
 and the other convolutions, present similar varieties. 
 
 " In this way, the integrant parts of the brain augment in number and 
 development, as we pass from a less perfect to a more perfect animal, till we 
 arrive at the brain of man, who, in the anterior-superior, and in the superior 
 region of the frontal bone, possesses several parts of which other animals are 
 deprived, and by means of which he is endowed with the moat eminent 
 qualities and faculties, with reason, and the feeling of religion and the exist- 
 ence of God. 
 
 " Some pretend to discover a striking resemblance between the brain of 
 an orang-outang and that of man. But, in the first place, the difference of 
 their volume is as five to one ; their convolutions differ considerably in number 
 and structure ; the anterior lobes, especially, are contracted into a cone, 
 flattened above, hollow below, &c. ; and the difference is still more remarkable 
 in other simise." Gall, as quoted by Elliotson, in his " Human Physiology," 
 p. 32. 
 
 Professor Owen, at the Meeting of the British Association for the Advance- 
 ment of Science, 1861, speaking of the Gorilla, said : "What then were the 
 differences between the gorilla, and boschman, the negro, or the lowest in 
 form of our species ? First, there was a difference in the position of the 
 innermost digit of the lower limb. The upper limbs were made in an harmo- 
 nious kind of proportion to the lower limba, not longer, but somewhat 
 shorter. These differences were associated with still greater modifications of 
 the skull. There were the same bones and in the same relative position, but 
 there was an almost hydrocephalous expansion of the head in man as com- 
 pared with the gorilla. The brain cavity iu man was a fine globular part, with 
 which we associated the idea of highest beauty, and the Greeks exaggerated 
 it to show that beauty ; yet there was a connection between the vast head of 
 man aud the mere spines sticking upon the head of a fish."
 
 MIND. 133 
 
 it varies with age, in quality and bulk, is the mind also varied 
 the mind of the child is weak and very excitable ; of the 
 adult, vigorous and firm ; and of the old man, weak and dull, 
 exactly like the body ; and the character of the mind of an 
 individual agrees with the character of his body, being equally 
 excitable, languid, or torpid, evidently because the brain is of 
 the same character as the rest of the body to which it belongs ; 
 the female mind exceeds the male in excitability as much as 
 her body ; the qualities of the mind are also hereditary, which 
 they could not be, unless they were, like our other qualities, 
 corporeal conditions ; and the mind is often disordered upon 
 the disappearance of a bodily complaint, just as other organs, 
 besides the brain, are affected under similar circumstances, 
 the retrocession of an eruption may affect the lungs, causing 
 asthma ; the bowels, causing interitis ; or the brain, causing 
 insanity, phthisis and insanity sometimes alternate with each 
 other, just like affections of other organs ; the laws of the 
 mind are precisely those of the functions of all other organs, 
 a certain degree of excitement strengthens it, too much ex- 
 hausts it ; physical agents affect it, and some specifically, as is 
 the case with other functions, for example, narcotics. The 
 argument of Bishop Butler that the soul is immortal and inde- 
 pendent of matter because in fatal diseases the mind often 
 remains vigorous to the last, is perfectly groundless, for any 
 function will remain vigorous to the last, if the organ which 
 performs it is not the seat of disease, nor much connected by 
 sympathy, or in other modes with the organ which is the seat 
 of the disease, the stomach often calls regularly for food, and 
 digests it vigorously, while the lungs are almost completely 
 consumed by ulceration. All the cases that are adduced to 
 prove the little dependence of the mind upon the brain, are 
 adduced in opposition to the myriads of others that daily occur 
 in the usual course of nature, and are evidently regarded as 
 extraordinary by those who bring them forward. An exact 
 parallel to each may be found in the affections of every other 
 organ, and each admits of so easy an explanation, that it may 
 be truly said, " Exceptio probat regulum."* 
 * Human Physiology, p. 32.
 
 134 MIND. 
 
 But whatever may be the way in which Sensation is con- 
 nected with the nervous system, it does not at all affect the 
 reasoning founded upon the fact of that connexion. We do 
 not call attraction a function of matter, but we never find 
 matter existing without attraction so we never find Life 
 without organization, or Sensation without a nervous system. 
 
 The world is sustained and governed by " forces" of which 
 we really know nothing, although we hide our ignorance under 
 high-sounding names, such as Attraction, Repulsion, Chemical, 
 Electrical, Vital, Mental, &c. When we say a thing takes 
 place by the force of attraction, we think we have explained it, 
 but it is no such thing ; we have merely named a certain group 
 of phenomena occurring in a certain order, and which occur 
 uniformly or invariably in that order. We know nothing of 
 the " force" of attraction in itself- it is only known to us in 
 its effects ; we have no powers which enable us to lift the veil 
 and look beyond.* Apart from what it does we have no 
 knowledge of it, and we separate it from other forces by any 
 dissimilarity in its action. Mind as a force should be treated 
 in the same way, for we know nothing of it apart from what 
 it does, and we can define it only by the appearances it puts 
 
 * The theory of " force " is that it is equ illy indestructible with matter. 
 Like matter, it may change its forms in a thousand ways, hut it cannot be 
 lessened or annihilated. Ligu,t and heat are forces, and heat may become 
 what is called latent, but it is iiot the less present and at work, although for 
 a time hidden from us. If we may theorise on the formation of worlds, and 
 on this " interchange of forces," we may suppose that when the stars or 
 planets, from their original nebulous state, took a more solid form, there 
 would be a great evolution of heat, which force would gradually take other 
 shapes, such as attraction, light, electricity, chemical affinity, life and nervous 
 force, and feeling or mind. We hear much of the power of mind over matter, 
 and it is popularly supposed that it is the soul that sets the body in motion ; 
 but the force that moves the steam-engine and that which moves the body are 
 precisely similar and generated in a similar way. Thus Dr. Arnott says: 
 
 "James Watt, when devising his great engine, knew well that the rapid 
 combination of the oxygen of atmospheric air with the combustible fuel in the 
 furnace, produced the heat and force of the engine ; but he did not know that 
 in living bodies there is going on, only more slowly, a similar combination of 
 the oxygen of the air with the like combustible matter in the food, as this 
 circulates after digestion in the form of blood through the lungs, which com- 
 bination produces the warmth and force of the living animal, The chief
 
 MIND. 
 
 135 
 
 forth, that is, by its effects. The Irishman's directions for 
 making a cannon, were to " take a round hole and pour metal 
 
 resemblances of the two objects nre exhibited strikingly in the following table 
 of comparison, where, in two adjoining columns, are set forth nearly the 
 same things and actions, with difference only in the names : 
 The steam-engine in action takes 
 
 1. Fuel, viz., coal and wood, both 
 being old or dry vegetable matter, 
 and both combustible. 
 
 2. Water. 
 
 3. Air. 
 
 And produce! 
 
 4. Steady boiling heat of 212 de- 
 grees by quick combustion. 
 
 5. Smoke from the chimney, or 
 air loaded with carbonic acid and 
 vapour. 
 
 6. Ashes, part of the fuel which 
 does not burn. 
 
 7. Motive force, of simple alter, 
 nate push and pull in the piston, 
 which, acting through levers, joints, 
 bands, &c., does work of endless 
 variety. 
 
 8. A deficiency of fuel, water, or 
 air, first disturbs, and then stops 
 the motion. 
 
 9. Local damage from violence 
 in a machine is repaired by the 
 maker. 
 
 The animal body in life takes 
 
 1. Food, viz., recent or fresh 
 vegetable matter and flesh, both 
 being of kindred composition, and 
 both combustible. 
 
 2. Diink (essentially water). 
 
 3. Breath (common air). 
 
 And produces 
 
 4. Steady animal heat of 98 de- 
 grees by slow combustion. 
 
 5. Foul breaih from the wind- 
 pipe, or air loaded with carbonic 
 acid and vapour. 
 
 6. Animal refuse, part of the 
 food which does not burn. 
 
 7. Motive force, of simple alter- 
 nate contraction and relaxation in 
 the muscles, which, acting through 
 the levers, joints, tendons, &c., of 
 the limbs, does work of endless 
 variety. 
 
 8. A deficiency of food, drink, 
 or breath, first disturbs, and then 
 stops the motion and the life. 
 
 9. Local hurt or disease in a 
 living body is repaired or cured by 
 the action of internal vital powers 
 
 I given by the Creator." 
 A Survey of Human Progress, p. 158. 
 
 This generation of force it is which makes the inactivity of solitary con- 
 finement and ennui so painful, and which makes employment necessary. 
 
 " Generally speaking, the average amount of daily food necessary for healthy 
 men is estimated at 12 oz. of beef, 20 oz. of bread, with about J oz. of butter. 
 These articles contain a force capable, if applied by a machine, of raising 
 fourteen (?) million pounds weight to a height of one foot; that is, the oxida- 
 tion of the elements contained in them would give rise to an amount of heat 
 equivalent to that effect. But in the human body, though it far surpasses all 
 machines in economy of force, the utmost amount of power attainable from 
 them is not more than equivalent to three and a-half millions of pounds 
 raised to the height of a foot ; and an average day's labour does not exceed 
 two millions of pounds thus raised. The difference is mainly due, doubtless, 
 to the number of internal actions which are carried on in the living body ;
 
 136 MIND. 
 
 round it." Now this is the process the metaphysicians have been 
 pursuing in the construction of their psychological systems ; 
 
 such as the circulation, the movements of respiration, and the production of 
 animal heat. These consume a great part of the force of the food, and leave 
 only a remainder to be disposed of in muscular exertion." Cornhill Magazine, 
 September, 1861. 
 
 The action of the cerebellum is the most expensive of all forces, and if 
 this begins too early it seriously impairs the growth of the body ; if it is too 
 large and active in after life it very much decreases the muscular energy. 
 
 We require a new system of hygiene in which " force " shall be properly 
 and proportionally distributed. The thinking powers probably absorb a larger 
 portion than the vital, and the vital than the merely muscular. A due 
 balance is required between the feelings and the activities between bodily 
 labour and head work. 
 
 The force generated or the energy of the locomotive organs in the animal 
 is supposed to depend upon the quantity of the red globules which cany the 
 oxygen, the union of the oxygen and carbon taking place in the general circu- 
 lation, and not, as is usually supposed, in the lungs only, in respiration ; the 
 lungs not being hotter than the rest of the body. On the other hand, it is 
 well known that increased respiration consequent on exercise generates an 
 increase of heat, so that it is probable that the union goes on in both. In 
 some admirable papers, called Physiological Riddles, in the Cornhill Maga- 
 zine, the writer says : 
 
 . " Living bodies GROW by the operation of chemical force, which exhibits 
 in them a two-fold action, ami produces substances which tend to decompose. 
 Chemical change, or decomposition, causes the nourishment of the body, and 
 the opposite forces of growth and decay proceedjn mutual dependence. It ia 
 this chemical action produces the vital action ; and the vital action furnishes 
 the conditions under which the chemical action can again take place. 
 
 "The body, thus growing, receives its FORM or structure from the con- 
 ditions under which it is placed in its development. 
 
 " This form adapts itself to its FUNCTIONS. The body tends to decom- 
 pose, or to undergo chemical changes which give rise to force. The absorp- 
 tion of power in nutrition by which is meant those minute changes by 
 which the growth and repair of the body are effected ; and the evolu- 
 tion of it again in the decomposition of the tissues, (ihe muscles, brain, 
 &c.,) is precisely analogous to that which takes place in forcibly separating 
 the poles of the magnets, retaining them apart for a certain time, and 
 suffering them to return by their attractive force to their former union. 
 The energy developed in the approach of the magnets towards each other 
 is exactly equal to the force expended in their separation. In the case of the 
 living body, the force thus developed within it necessarily produces the 
 actions to which its strucftire is adapted. 
 
 " Thus, for example, when a seed is placed in the ground, the first process 
 which takes place within it is one of decomposition. The mass of the seed 
 consists of starch and albumen, in the midst of which is placed a small cellular 
 body, called the germ. This germ will grow, and develop into the future 
 plant, but only on condition that a process of decay goes on in the starchy and
 
 MIND. 137 
 
 they have been studying the nature of the force of the spirit 
 by a process called " reflection on consciousness " instead 
 
 albuminous matter with which it is in connection. Part of the latter sinks 
 into the inorganic state, uniting with oxygen, and passing off as carbonic 
 ncid. The young plant is at first of less weight than the seed or root which 
 has disappeared in generating it. When it arrives at the surface of the soil, 
 a new process commences. The rays of the sun, falling on its leaves, main- 
 tain in them a continuance of the same process (one of chemical change) by 
 which the first development of the germ was determined. Thus new materials 
 are added to the plant, the light exciting those chemical processes which 
 produce the organic arrangement of fresh portions of matter. The leaves, 
 under the stimulus of the sun's rays, decompose carbonic acid, giving off 
 part of the oxygen, and ' fix,' as it is said, the carbon in union with hydrogen, 
 and sometimes with nitrogen, <fcc., to form the various vegetable cells and their 
 contents. 
 
 " An animal now consumes this plant. In digestion there takes place 
 again a precisely similar process to that with which we started the germina- 
 tion of the seed. The substance of the plant partially decomposes; a portion 
 of it sinks into a state approximating to the inorganic, while anoiher portion 
 (doubtless by means of the force thus generated) becomes more highly vital- 
 ized, and fitted to form part of. the animal structure. The germination of 
 the seed, and animal digestion, are parallel processes. Each of them is two- 
 fold a decomposing and a vitalizing action going on together, the latter having 
 it origin in and depending on the other. Having formed part of the animal 
 structure for a time, this living matter decomposes yet again, and again gives 
 off its force. But now, instead of effecting, as in the previous cases, a 
 vitalizing action, the force produces a mechanical action in the muscles, or a 
 nervous action in the brain, or, in short, the function of whatever organ the 
 matter we are tracing may have been incorporated with ; the function being 
 but another mode of operation of the same force which caused the nutrition. 
 And thus, supposing the action to have been a muscular exertion, say the 
 lifting of a weight, we shall have traced the force, which came from the inor- 
 ganic world at first, in the form of the sun's rays, and was embodied in the 
 eubstance of the plant, back again into the inorganic world in the form of 
 motion. * * * The plant yields up its life to nourish the animal body, as 
 that body, so nourished, in its activity yields up its life to impart force to the 
 world around. * * Every giving off of force has for its necessary effect the 
 storing up of force in equal amount elsewhere. The two halves of this process 
 cannot be divided." 
 
 The original mind of George Stephenson was among the first to perceive 
 these truths. He said of the power propelling his locomotives, that it was the 
 light of the sun bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years 
 " light, absorbed by plants and vegetables, being necessary for the condensa- 
 tion of carbon during their growth, if it be not carbon in another form, and 
 now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that latent 
 light is again brought forth and liberated made to work, as in that 
 locomotive, for great human purposes." The Life of George Stephenson, by 
 Samuel Smiles, p. 475. 
 T
 
 138 MIND. 
 
 of its conditions and manifestations, and their practical pro- 
 gress has been in proportion. Dr. Gall was the first to 
 
 This does not in any way, however, account for the origin of the germ, 
 nor are " the conditions under which it is placed in its development " sufficient 
 to account for the difference in the form or structure between one germ and 
 another. The Cornhill writer, however, tells us that "theorganic world does not 
 differ from the inorganic in its essence ;" but he says, " there is a difference 
 in their mode of operation though the elements are the same. The physical 
 powers have received in the organic world a particular direction, and are made 
 to work to certain results which are attainable only through living structures." 
 Thus it is easy, he says, to understand how there has arisen the conception 
 of a peculiar vital Entity or Principle. " This was a rapid generalization 
 before the working of the various forces that conspire in life had been dis- 
 cerned. For the peculiar results, a peculiar agent was supposed, instead of a 
 peculiar mode of operation." He quotes Coleridge for the opinion that " life" 
 is " a mode of operation" of the same powers which we recognize under other 
 names, as magnetism, electricity, or chemical affinity. A living body, we are 
 told, is an individuation of the forces of nature. " Nothing is there which is 
 not elsewhere in nature, but a limit is applied to that which is freely circulat- 
 ing." " No new or special power is required for organic life ; the common and 
 all-pervading powers of nature are enough. * * That which constitutes 
 matter living, in the ordinary sense, is a certain arrangement of its elements, 
 in relations opposed, more or less, to their chemical tendencies. This arrange- 
 ment of the elements gives rise to a substance in which there exists a tendency 
 to decompose the organic substance. This substance, moulded into adapted 
 structures, constitutes an organic body. The conditions essential to organic 
 life are these two : an opposition to chemical affinity in the arrangement of 
 the elements, and a structure adapted to the performance of the necessary 
 functions." We are all more or less familiar with the experiment of Cross 
 and some others who are supposed to have originated life by electrical cur- 
 rents, but these have not been considered as satisfactory by the scientific 
 world. 
 
 Thoughts and feelings are now supposed to be the immediate correlates of 
 the vital forces, and the vital of the physical. The quantity or intensity of 
 consciousness or feeling is determined by the constituents of the blood, as is 
 familiarly seen in the action of alcohol, opium, and hashish upon the mind. 
 
 Herbert Spencer says " Various classes of facts thus unite to prove that 
 the law of metamorphosis, which holds among the physical forces, holds equally 
 between them and the mental forces. Those modes of the Unknowable which 
 we call motion, heat, light, chemical affinity, &c., are alike transformable 
 into each other, and into those modes of the Unknowable which we distinguish 
 as sensation, emotion, thought : these, in their turns, being directly or indi- 
 rectly re-transformable into the original shapes. That no idea or feeling arises, 
 save as a result of some physical force expended in producing it, is fast 
 becoming a common-place of science ; and whoever duly weighs the evidence 
 will see, that nothing but an overwhelming bias in favour of a pre-conceived 
 theory, can explain its non-acceptance. How this metamorphosis takes place 
 how a force existing as motion, heat, or light, can become a mode of con-
 
 MIND. 139 
 
 follow the right method. He observed mental manifesta- 
 tions and characteristics, that is, Mind in its effects only. 
 
 sciousness how it is possible for aerial vibrations to generate the sensation we 
 call sound, or for the forces liberated by chemical changes in the brain to give 
 rise to emotion these are mysteries which it is impossible to fathom. But 
 they are not profounder mysteries than the transformations of the physical 
 forces into each other. They are not more completely beyond our comprehen- 
 sion than the natures of Mind and Matter. They have simply the same insolu- 
 bility as all other ultimate questions. We can learn nothing more than that 
 here is one of the uniformities in the order of phenomena*" First Principles, 
 p. 280. 
 
 " Of course if the law of correlation and equivalence holds of the forces 
 we class as vital and mental, it must hold alsoof those we class as social." p. 281. 
 That is, what is true of man is true of mankind what is true of the indi- 
 vidual is true of the race. 
 
 " If we ask whence come these physical forces from which, through the 
 intermediation of the vital forces, the social forces arise, the reply is of course 
 as heretofore the solar radiations. Based as the life of a society is on animal 
 and vegetable products ; and dependant as these animal and vegetable pro- 
 ducts are on the light and heat of the sun ; it follows that the changes going 
 on in societies are effects of forces having a common origin with those which 
 produce all the other orders of changes that have been analyzed. Not only is 
 the force expended by the horse transferred to the plough, and the labourer 
 guiding it, derived from the same reservoir as is the force of the falling 
 cataract and the roaring hurricane ; but to this same reservoir are eventually 
 traceable those subtler and more complex manifestations of force which 
 humanity, as socially embodied, evolves. The assertion is a startling one, 
 and by many will be thought ludicrous ; but it is an unavoidable deduction 
 which cannot here be passed over. Of the physical forces that are directly 
 transformed into social ones, the like is to be said. Currents of air and water, 
 which before the use of steam were the only agencies brought in aid of muscu- 
 lar effort for the performance of industrial processes, are, as we have seen, 
 generated by the heat of the sun. And the inanimate power that now, to so 
 vast an extent, supplements human labour, is similarly derived. The late 
 George Stephenson was one of the first to recognize the fact that the force 
 impelling his locomotive, originally emanated from the sun. Step by step we 
 go back from the motion of the piston to the evaporation of the water ; 
 thence to the heat evolved during the oxidation of coal ; thence to the assimi- 
 lation of carbon by the plants of whose embedded remains coal consists; 
 thence to the carbonic acid from which their carbon was obtained ; and thence 
 to the rays of light that de-oxidized this carbonic acid. Solar forces millions 
 of years ago expended on the Earth's vegetation, and since locked up beneath 
 its surface, now smelt the metals required for our machines, turn the lathes 
 by which the machines are shaped, work them when put together, and dis- 
 tribute the fabrics they produce. And in so far as economy of labour makes 
 possible the support of a large population ; gives a surplus of human power 
 that would else be absorbed in manual occupations ; and so facilitates the
 
 140 MIND. 
 
 At school he observed that the boys most famous for 
 verbal memory had very prominent eyes ; he also observed 
 
 development of higher kinda of activity ; it is clear that these social forces 
 which are directlj correlated with physical forces anciently derived from the 
 sun, are only less important than those whose correlates are the vital forces 
 recently derived from it." p.282,etseq. 
 
 "The universal truth above illustrated under its various aspects, is a 
 necessary corollary from the persistence of force. Setting out with the propo- 
 sition that force can neither come into existence nor cease to exist, the 
 several foregoing general conclusions inevitably follow. Each manifestation 
 of force can be interpreted only as the effect of some antecedent force : no 
 matter whether it be an inorganic action, an animal movement, a thought, or 
 a feeling. Either this must be conceded, or else it must be asserted that our 
 successive states of consciousness are self-created. Either mental energies, aa 
 well as bodily ones, are quantitatively correlated to certain energies expended 
 in their production, and to certain other energies which they initiate ; or else 
 nothing must become something and something must become nothing. The 
 alternatives are, to deny the persistence of force, or to admit that every 
 physical and psychial change is generated by certain antecedent forces, and 
 from given amounts of such forces neither more nor less of such physical and 
 psychial changes can result. And since the persistence of force, being a 
 datum of consciousness, cannot be denied, its unavoidable corollary must be 
 accepted." p. 284. 
 
 Dr. Laycock says: "Now, the most general force of this kind is the 
 force of gravity or attraction, and its correlate, repulsion. Motion is the 
 result of the reciprocal action of these forces. The derivative physical forces 
 are those termed the imponderables namely, heat, light, magnetism, chemical 
 affinity, in an evolving scale of progress. Derivative again from these are the 
 vital forces, which finally culminate in the vis nervosa and Mind." * * * * 
 Mind and Brain, p. 279. 
 
 " The life of a man is therefore like a stream of events or changes in linked 
 sequence, flowing on as necessarily as the waters of Niagara. It is true 
 that, in common language, the will is spoken of as the first cause of 
 conscious thoughts and acts, but no act of will (that is, of mental energising) 
 can occur without its necessary co-existents and antecedents that is, its 
 causes ; and such as these are, so will the act of will be. There is, in fact, no 
 more a spontaneous act of will than there is spontaneous generation. Strictly, 
 such an act is a creation, and belongs only to creative power. 
 
 " And this general truth points to another viz., that the causes of every 
 present stale of consciousness of organisms extend far back into time. Trac- 
 ing the life of any organism whatever, we find that the necessary antecedent 
 to its existence in time and space is the existence of another organism in time 
 and space." p. 275. 
 
 " That no idea or feeling arises," as Mr. Spencer says, "save as a result 
 of some physical force expended in producing it ;" " that each manifestation 
 of force can be interpreted only as the effect of some antecedent force: no 
 matter whether it be an inorganic action, an animal movement, a thought, or
 
 MIND. 141 
 
 that there were large and prominent eyes without this mental 
 characteristic. He afterwards discovered that in the case where 
 it was connected with verbal memory and a facility of learning 
 languages the prominence of the eye was owing to the large 
 size of a convolution of the brain at the back of it, which 
 pushed it outwards and a little downwards, and thus enabled 
 him to distinguish it from a mere large and prominent eyeball. 
 He conceived that if there was an external sign of one mental 
 faculty there might be of others, and he set himself henceforth 
 to observe. He heard of people celebrated as mathematicians, 
 for mental calculation, for drawing, music, &c., and he ex- 
 amined and took casts of their heads. He found that a faculty 
 for drawing was much too general, for many who had a very 
 correct appreciation of form had little of size, and where the 
 idea of form and size was correct there was none of relative 
 proportion. He found many also with colour blindness that 
 is, who could not distinguish one colour from another, or par- 
 ticular colours from others. He found in all these cases 
 particular parts of the brain more or less developed, and by 
 comparing one brain with another he ascertained which part 
 was connected with particular mental faculties. So that by 
 this means of investigation he did not discover faculties of 
 perception, conception, memory, imagination, and judgment, 
 as the metaphysicians had done, and which are merely modes 
 of action of all the faculties ; but he discovered faculties of 
 form, size, weight, colour, order, number, time, tune, &c. 
 He found similar differences between the brave and the timid, 
 the firm and the yielding, the cruel and the humane, 
 the hopeful and the desponding, the rogue and the honest, 
 
 feeliug;" "that no act of will," as Dr. Laycock says, "(that is, of mental 
 energising) can occur without its necessary co-existeuts aud antecedents, and 
 that " the causes of every present state of consciousness of organisms extend 
 far back into time," what is this but the last proof of the doctrine of 
 " Necessity" we are inculcating ? The forces of nature culminate in mind, and 
 then react on nature, through the mental organism thus generated, as an order- 
 ing and regulating power, and, as Dr. Laycock says, there is " no more a 
 spontaneous act of will (of free will) than there is spontaneous generation." 
 Is it not time, therefore, that Scientific men began to endeavour to reconcile 
 this fact with their theory of Ethics ?
 
 142 MIND. 
 
 the open and the secretive, and wherever he heard of any 
 mental peculiarity, any great virtue or deficiency, there he 
 directed his observation; and we are told that "abandoning 
 every theory and preconceived opinion, Dr. Gall gave himself 
 up entirely to the observation of nature. Being a friend to Dr. 
 Nord, Physician to a Lunatic Asylum in Vienna, he had 
 opportunities, of which he availed himself, of making observa- 
 tions on the insane. He visited prisons, and resorted to 
 schools; he was introduced to the courts of princes, to colleges, 
 and to courts of justice ; and wherever he heard of an indi- 
 vidual distinguished in any particular way, either by remark- 
 able endowment or deficiency, he observed and studied the 
 development of his head. In this manner, by an almost 
 imperceptible induction, he at last considered himself warranted 
 in believing that particular mental powers are indicated by 
 particular configurations of the head."* In this way com- 
 menced the purely inductive mode of studying the mind : he 
 did not sit down and reflect upon his consciousness upon 
 the various trains of thought and feeling that passed through 
 his own mind, but he looked at mind objectively as it displayed 
 itself in others, showing what it could do from what it had 
 done. In fact, it was the Order of nature only in this depart- 
 ment as in every other that he set himself to observe. The 
 mode of investigation has been assiduously followed by others, 
 and thence has arisen a tolerably complete list of the primitive 
 mental faculties, and a system of mental philosophy which 
 furnishes the key to most of the disputes upon the subject 
 which have occupied so much of the time of ancient philoso- 
 phers and modern metaphysicians. 
 
 Dr. Gall did not confine his observations to man, but turned 
 his attention to animals also, and found their intellectual facul- 
 ties and what are called their instincts that is, their peculiar 
 habits and propensities, dependent upon their nervous systems, 
 differing from man only in the degree and completeness of 
 development. He says " The integral parts of the brain 
 * Combe's System of Phrenology, p. 69, 4th Edition.
 
 MIND. 143 
 
 augment in number and development, as we pass from a less 
 perfect to a more perfect animal, till we arrive at the brain of 
 man, who, in the anterior-superior and the superior region of 
 the frontal bone, possesses several parts of which other animals 
 are deprived, and by means of which he is is endowed with 
 the most eminent qualities and faculties, with reason, and the 
 feeling of religion and the existence of God." 
 
 All facts tend to prove that mind in man and in the lower ani- 
 mals is marked by a difference only of degree; the self-protecting, 
 the self-regarding, the social, the perceptive faculties are common 
 to both, and in both they are alike connected with organization. 
 The mind of animals is what each requires for its peculiar 
 position, and we find them combative, passionate, proud, vain, 
 cunning, acquisitive, affectionate towards their wives, children, 
 and friends, and possessing some of the intellectual powers 
 in a higher degree than man. We have no wish to lower man 
 in the scale of creation, and there is certainly great superiority 
 in the human mind over the brute ; but the airs of superiority 
 which he gives himself, as if there were no relationship, are 
 based upon pure assumption. Such airs are often superlatively 
 ridiculous in those who think themselves the highest specimens 
 of their race, as well as in the lowest. We may respect the 
 noble brute, but to respect the human brute is impossible ! 
 
 Phrenologists then have laid down as certain knowledge on 
 the subject that the brain (in either sense as functional or as 
 the medium of manifestation) is the organ of mind ; that it is 
 not a single organ, but consists of a number of parts, perform- 
 ing distinct functions, comprising all the different propensities, 
 feelings, and faculties which distinguish one animal from 
 another, and all others from man. 
 
 They have not only demonstrated that each mental faculty 
 is connected with a particular part of the brain, but also that 
 the power and intensity which each faculty is capable of mani- 
 festing is in proportion to the health, quality, and size of the 
 part. Also that such health, quality, and size, depend upon 
 hereditary tendencies as well as upon the health and strength 
 of the vital functions and the general appearance of the person. 
 
 *
 
 144 MIND. 
 
 The power of manifestation of the mental faculties is found 
 to increase with exercise, and to decrease with disuse. 
 
 Phrenologists have also shown that the size of the organs 
 of the brain is indicated by the shape of the head ; the health 
 and quality are not so obvious, but may generally be deter- 
 mined. 
 
 A faculty is admitted as primitive ; that is, as the function 
 of a single organ, and not compounded of several united by a 
 principle of association ; 
 
 " Which, exists in one kind of animal and not in another ; 
 
 " Which varies in the two sexes of the same species ; 
 
 "Which is not proportionate to the other faculties of the same individual. 
 
 " Which does not manifest itself simultaneously with the other faculties ; 
 that ia, which appears or disappears earlier or later in life than other facul- 
 ties; 
 
 " Which may act or rest singly ; 
 
 " Which is propagated in a distinct manner from parents ta children ; 
 
 " Which may singly preserve its proper state of health or disense." G. 
 Combe's System of Phrenology, p. 140, 4th Edit.* 
 
 * It is not my intention in this work to enter at any length into tha 
 merits of Phrenology as an Art ; I merely adopt its Psychology as based 
 upon its new method of investigation. There are few men in the present 
 day with any pretensions to scientific reputation who deny altogether tha 
 truth of Phrenology both as an Art and Science ; still it is too much 
 the fashion with scientific men either altogether to neglect it, or to 
 underrate what it either has done or can do in both departments. Thus 
 in the 2nd Edition of Mr. Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy a 
 standard work now at our Universities, and distinguished for its clearness 
 and conciseness the notice of this subject is decidedly of this character ; 
 for although the writer admits " that now there is no physiologist who openly 
 denies that mental phenomena are directly connected with nervous structure," 
 and although he ably points out how much there is still to do, and correctly 
 indicates the direction in which it is to be done, still he altogether under- 
 rates what Phrenologists have done or can do. I allude to this notice because of 
 the place in which it appears ; the general excellence of the Biographical History 
 of Philosophy is such that it may I think mislead people on this subject ; and 
 yet I have not space to reply to half the errors that it seems to me to contain. 
 
 Mr. Lewes says " Had phrenologists kept themselveg acquainted with 
 what was gradually being discovered by physiologists, they would have dis-
 
 MIND. 145 
 
 covered that something more than prejudice must be at work when all the 
 eminent neurologists, such as Serres, Flourens, Magendie, Leuret, Selut, 
 Lafargue, Boulland, Baillarger, Miiller, Valentine, and comparative anato- 
 mists such as Owen, declare against Phrenology ; although every one of these 
 is ready to admit the importance of Gall's Method of diasection, ready to 
 incorporate whatever results Gall arrived at, which can be in any way con- 
 firmed." The "something more than prejudice" that phrenologists have 
 discovered in these gentlemen is their neglecting or ignoring altogether Gall's 
 "Method." They admit the importance of Gall's method of "dissection," 
 and continue to expect to discover, rather than to confirm, function by 
 anatomy ; but as to the attempt to confirm Gall's other discoveries in the way 
 in which he made them, that is quite beneath them. Like the opponents of 
 Galileo, they refuse to look through his telescope. We have never met with 
 or even heard of one of these gentlemen who could correctly map out a skull 
 as Gall and his followers would do it. As therefore they have never looked, 
 and apparently do not know how to look, for Gall's discoveries, it is useless 
 to talk about their accepting all of them that can be confirmed. 
 
 What Phrenologists may expect from the mere physiologists who neglect 
 to follow Gall's Method may we think be fairly inferred from the opinions of Dr. 
 Carpenter, himself one of the first of our physiologists. He holds, we believe, 
 that the cerebrum is not the seat of sensation, but is restricted to intellectual 
 operations; but this, he says, allows full weight to the operation, through the in- 
 strumentality of the cerebrum, of what are commonly called the emotions, or the 
 active principles in the guidance of our conduct ; since the emotions are not 
 simple but composite states, the formation of ideas being the part of them 
 that is performed by the cerebrum, whilst the pleasure or pain, which is the 
 real feeling connected with them, has its seat in the sensory ganglia. Now if 
 Gall and his followers have established anything they have established the 
 fact that the intensity or strength of the feeling, is in proportion to the size 
 of the organ or part of the cerebrum with which, such propensity or sentiment 
 is connected, and that intellectual operations are connected with the anterior 
 or frontal region of the cerebrum only ; whereas Dr. Carpenter would have us 
 infer that the emotions or most active principles of the mind, were located in 
 a portion of the nervous centre, the size of which bears no relation to their im- 
 portance. Mr. Lewes says phrenologists "are xinable to accommodate their 
 principles to the principles of Physiology." Are they then called upon to 
 give up the whole of their 60 years' recorded experience and thousand times 
 repeated observations, and remodel their science in accordance with these 
 views of Dr. Carpenter ? Mr. Lewes fxlso saya, " The neglect of which 
 phrenologists complain, is entirely owing to their presenting a rude sketch as 
 a perfect science, and to their keeping behiud the science of their day, instead 
 of on a level with it." We know that Mr. Lewea considers Auguste Comte 
 quite up to the science of the day, and he in his Catechism of Positive Relipion 
 gives " Positive Classification of the internal functions of the Brain,'' wherein 
 in virtue of a mental analysis purely hypothetical he throws several organi 
 into one, reducing the number to 18. He might as well have thrown several 
 nerves or muscles into one, notwithstanding their distinct organic structure. 
 But are phrenologists called upon to give iip their six or eight and thirty 
 well-established organs, in order not to be behind this " science of their day ?" 
 U
 
 146 MIND. 
 
 The real questions are Did Gall discover a new method of ascertaining 
 the functions of the different parts of the brain ? Is his the true method ? 
 Can the end be gained by any other method ? If Gall's method be the only 
 possible one, then he and his successors have been right, and every one else, 
 however high in name and reputation, in the wrong, and their opinions can 
 have and ought to have little weight against those of Gall and his followers. 
 
 Mr. Lewes's own criticisms on the subject are not distinguished by his 
 usual acumen and accuracy. The fundamental principles of Phrenology 
 are : That the Brain is the organ of Mind ; that it is not a single organ, but 
 manifests a plurality of faculties ; and that vigour of function is in proportion 
 to the size of the organ, and not in proportion to the general size of the brain. Mr. 
 Lewes's criticisms proceed in utter ignorance, or at least in entire disregard, of 
 this latter distinction. Thus he says, " Large heads are sometimes observed 
 in connection with very mediocre abilities ; small heads, on the contrary, with 
 very splendid abilities." No Phrenologist will deny this, as " ability" has 
 nothing to do with the general size of the head, but with the size of a small 
 part of it only. The intellect, on which* ability principally depends, ia 
 connected with the anterior lobe, and may be very small, amounting almost 
 to idiocy, in a very large head. Particular power does not depend upon 
 general size, but upon the direction of the size. This is so elementary a 
 principle in phrenology that we must in all candoiir have supposed Mr. Lewes 
 as well acquainted with it as every one who has read a sixpenny book upon 
 the subject, and we must have necessarily inferred that all he meant was that 
 quality of brain and education made great differences in the abilities of the 
 same sized heads, or even between a large and small one, had not the same error 
 run throughout his whole notice of the subject. Thus he says, " I find M. 
 Baillarger who invented a new method of measuring the surfaces of brains, 
 by dissecting out all the white substance from their interior, and then un- 
 folding the exterior, and taking a cast of it declaring from his measurements 
 that it is far from true that in general the intelligence of different animals is 
 in direct proportion to their respective extents of cerebral surface." No 
 Phrenologist ever said it was true. Again, " The researches of M. Camille 
 Dareste establish beyond dispute that the number and depth of the convolu- 
 tions bear no direct relation to the development of intelligence ; whereas they 
 do bear a direct relation to the size of the animal : * * further, I am 
 informed by Professor Owen that the grampus has convolutions deeper and 
 more complicated than those of men." There is nothing here that militates 
 against the principles of phrenology, and yet Mr. Lewes says, " From all 
 which facts it becomes evident that the phrenological basis is so far from 
 being in accordance with the present state of our knowledge of the nervous 
 system as to require complete revision." Mr. Lewes still pursues the same 
 error ; he says, " Phrenology has another important point to determine, 
 namely, the relation of the size of the brain to mental power. Is the size of 
 the brain to be taken absolutely, and its functional activity in the purely 
 mental direction to be measured by its absolute bulk ? * * We find no 
 such absolute and constant relation between size and mental power as would 
 justify the phrenological position ; the weight of the human brain being 
 about three pounds ; the weight of the whale's brain being five pounds ; the 
 weight of the elephant's between eight and ten pounds. If therefore the
 
 MIND. 147 
 
 function of the brain be solely or mainly tbat of mental manifestation, and if 
 size be the measure of power, the whale and the elephant ought to surpass 
 mau as a Newton surpasses an idiot." We again must remind Mr. Lewes that 
 general size of brain may have nothing whatever to do with the difference 
 between Newton and an idiot ; the difference is measured by the relative size 
 of the anterior lobe, alone connected with intellect, and not only is this lesa 
 in the whale and elephant than it is in man, but in them there is no brain at 
 all in the direction of the reasoning powers the highest powers of the intel- 
 lect. Mr. Lewes says, "It is true that phrenologists have been aware of these 
 discrepancies; and unable to admit the whale and elephant as superior to 
 man, they have met the objection by saying the size must be estimated rela- 
 tively, not absolutely. Compared with the weight of his body, the brain of 
 man is certainly heavier than the brains of most animals, including the whale 
 and the elephant ; and this fact seems to restore Phrenology to its cheerfulness 
 on the subject ; but the fact does not hold good of monkeys, the smaller apes, 
 many species of birds, and some rodents. This is the dilemma : either the 
 ratio of mental power depends on the absolute size of the brain, and in this 
 case the elephant will be thrice as intelligent as man ; or it depends on rela- 
 tive size of the brain compared with the body, and in this case man will be 
 less intelligent than a monkey or a rat, although more intelligent than the 
 elephant. Moreover, if relative size is the basis taken, phrenologists would 
 be bound to compare in each case the weight of the brain with the weight of 
 the body, before they could establish a conclusion ; and this is obviously 
 impracticable. I have stated the dilemma ; but having stated it, I will add 
 that although phrenologists attach importance to questions of weight of the 
 brain, there seems to me a great fallacy involved in such estimates. Intelli- 
 gence is not to be measured by the balance. Weight is no index of cerebral 
 activity, nor of the special directions of the activity." 
 
 When phrenologists say that size must be estimated " relatively " they do 
 not mean the general size of brain in relation to the size of the body, as Mr. 
 Lewes erroneously supposes. No phrenologist ever said that intelligence was 
 measured by " the balance," that is, the difference between the general size of 
 one brain and another ; intelligence is measured alone by the size of that 
 portion of the brain connected with it, and this is considerably less in 
 monkeys and rats, even relatively to the size of their bodies, than in man. 
 Relative size of body, however, is not to be left entirely out of consideration, 
 for the fact would appear to be, that the brain generates a given quantity of 
 nervous fluid, energy, or force, which if used in muscular exercise or vital 
 action cannot be used in thinking and feeling; or if in feeling, not in thinking. 
 People who spend much time in bodily labour or in out-door exercise never 
 manifest much power of thinking, and the best quieter of the feelings and 
 cure for love is a thirty-mile walk. We cannot think to any purpose imme- 
 diately after dinner while digestion is going on, and men of great study are 
 generally men of calm passions. Men of large bodies require proportionally 
 large brains to carry them about ; a large portion of the thinking power being 
 used in muscular force. These facts are quite sufficient to account for the 
 apparent discrepancies to which Mr. Lewes alludes. He says, however, 
 11 Enough has been said to show that Phrenology, so far from at present being 
 the only true physiological explanation of the nervous system, is in BO chaotic
 
 148 MIND. 
 
 and unstable a position with respect to its basis, as to need thorough revision ; 
 and until some phrenologist shall arise who, following up the impulsion given 
 ; mice more place the doctrine on a level with ihe science of the 
 age, all men of science must be expected to slight the pretensions of Phren- 
 ology as a Psychological system, whatever it may hereafter become." If it 
 were not for Mr. Lewes's well-earned scientific reputation, I should be 
 inclined to suspect that the " chaotic position " to which he alludes be- 
 longed more to the state of his own knowledge of the subject than to the 
 basis of phrenology itself. 
 
 Mr. Lewes says, " Size is the measure of power, other things being equal. 
 In this formula there is a truth, and an equivoque. The truth may be passed 
 over by us, as claiming instantaneous assent. The equivoque must arrest us. 
 Phrenologists forget that here ' ihe other things' never are equal ; and conse- 
 quently their dictum of ' size is a measure of power* is without application." 
 Mr. Lewes might as well say that because no two cases in medicine are exactly 
 alike, all our knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and pathology, upon which 
 the practice of "Physic" is founded, is altogether inapplicable. The fact is, 
 that no two things ever were exactly alike ; that absolute certainty is an 
 impossibility ; that an approximation is all that can be effected practically, 
 in any science. Mathematics is the only certain science, and that only in 
 theory, immediately you put it into practice in mechanics all kinds of 
 allowances have to be made, and it is altogether inapplicable to living tissues 
 and vital powers, which never can be measured mathematically. Phrenology 
 is a branch of Physiology, and Physiology never can become an exact science. 
 Can any one measure digestion, respiration, muscular motion, or arterial or 
 venous circulation exactly? or is all our knowledge of them therefore 
 " without application ?" Physiology is a science of observation of structure 
 and of " estimation" of magnitudes and forces, and in this respect Phrenology 
 does not differ from any of the other departments of it. 
 
 Mr. Lewes says Phrenologists " present a rude sketch as a perfect science." 
 We fear he must have taken his ideas on the subject from amateurs in society 
 who with a sixpenny book and a marked cast profess to give every one's 
 development, or from professors who engage to tell all about you for a shilling 
 a head, instead of from the recognized leaders in the science. Too much 
 cannot be said against this abuse of the subject against this assumption of 
 accuracy in a department in which accuracy has not yet been attained. But 
 the true Phrenologist proceeds in quite a different way : he makes every 
 allowance for temperament or quality of brain, for health, for exercise, for 
 education and circumstances, for natural associations and combinations among 
 groups of organs, and he knows besides the extreme difficulty of judging in 
 ordinary cases of the relative development of 36 or more organs ; hut with all 
 these known and acknowledged difficulties, he can do far more than Mr. 
 Lewes allows. In cases of equally-balanced brains, education and circum- 
 stances may give the ascendancy ; but iu cases in which there are some organs 
 very large and others very small, he can decide on the natural qualities by 
 the brain, in preference to all other testimony, and experience of conduct will 
 support his conclusion. With all the difficulties which phrenologists have to 
 contend with, human nature may yet be more advantageously studied through 
 this medium than through any other, and a single glance at the head may
 
 MIND. 149 
 
 reveal more of character than years of ordinary acquaintance, and a correct 
 general estimate may always be arrived at ; but the practice of phrenology 
 should be accompanied with long study, and with extreme caution, and after 
 Btating and allowing fully for the difficulties to be contended with and the 
 consequent liability to error. The " temperaments " so much iusisted upon 
 by Mr. Lewes and anti-phrenologists generally do not furnish the difficulties 
 supposed, for practically their effects can be correctly estimated, and their 
 external indications are as marked as the want of due action in the liver or 
 lungs is to the physician. As a psychological classification, Mr. Lewes allows 
 it to be superior to those that preceded it, but says thab daily experience 
 Bhows it to be insufficient. May we be allowed to ask in what respect ? 
 Comte has required only half the organs (18) to make his classification com- 
 plete and " positive." We are far from representing the mental analysis as 
 complete or perfect, but our own consciousness supplies us with no strong 
 feeliugs or emotions which have not already received their location in the 
 brain ; neither can the deficiencies be supplied from other writers on Mental 
 Science, and phrenologists therefore, we have no doubt, would be delighted 
 to fall back upon Mr. Lewes's " daily experience." It is true that they may 
 not have arrived at the primitive functions of all the organs that some of 
 them may admit of subdividing, but this does not in the least invalidate what 
 has been already discovered with respect to them. The knowledge we have 
 of the properties of common air is not the less true and useful from our 
 afterwards discovering that it is not simple, but compounded of oxygen and 
 nitrogen. 
 
 On the whole, I think it will be found that phrenology, even at present, 
 reveals enough of the Science of Mind to furnish ground for prudent fore- 
 sight and for the foundations of moral and social science. From the 
 Constitution of man thus known, we can determine in what circumstances 
 each person should be placed the best to enable him to do his duty and thus 
 to make him most happy.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ANALYSIS OF THE MENTAL FACULTIES. 
 
 SENSATION may be said to be the Soul, the something that 
 is distinct from that to which we give the name of matter, but 
 of which matter we know nothing but as the cause or the 
 immediate antecedent of Sensation. It is distinct, inasmuch 
 as the cause must always be distinguished from the effect ; but 
 how it differs from matter in essence, or whether it differs at 
 all, our faculties do not inform us. 
 
 Sensation, as far as we are able to trace it, exists only in 
 connection with organization, and we have no evidence of its 
 being able to exist separately ; but we cannot say on that 
 account that it is necessarily dependent upon it ; the brain and 
 nervous system may be only the conditions necessary for its 
 manifestation. Electricity is made evident to us by a machine,
 
 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 151 
 
 but it is known to exist independently and separately throughout 
 the universe ; so there may be a General Soul, individualized 
 and made evident to us vnly in our various machines or organi- 
 zations. As Coleridge says : 
 
 "And what if all of animated nature 
 Be but organic harps diversely framed, 
 That tremble into thought, as over them sweeps, 
 Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 
 At once the soul of each, and God of all ?" 
 
 The Mind has previously been defined as the aggregate of 
 all sensations, from whatever source derived ; the comfortable 
 or uneasy feelings arising from the alimentarj'- canal ; the sense 
 of feeling common to all parts of the body ; the action of the 
 intellectual faculties through the medium of the senses ; and 
 the variety of different feelings which propel to action, or which 
 regulate and restrain it, constituting the mind in the general 
 acceptation of the term. 
 
 These sensations are of a much more diversified kind in 
 man than in other animals ; for he not only possesses the feel- 
 ings, or instincts, and intellectual faculties which belong to the 
 most perfect of the brute creation, but many additional ones 
 which raise him almost infinitely above them. He may, 
 however, be considered as, in part, a representative of other 
 animals, and the same causes that act upon them, put him in 
 motion; like them he is influenced by strong desires, the 
 gratification of which is highly pleasurable, and the non- 
 gratification, in some cases, insupportably painfuL 
 
 The most simple division of the mind is into FEELING and 
 INTELLECT ; or, into Animal, Moral, and Intellectual faculties ; 
 comprising the feelings, or propensities, and intellectual facul- 
 ties which we have in common with other animals, and those 
 which are peculiarly our own. All sensations derived from 
 other sources influence, directly or indirectly, some of these 
 faculties^ and may, therefore, be said to be included in them.
 
 152 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 The ANIMAL FEELINGS or propensities are instincts pecu- 
 liarly selfish in their object; that is, they tend only to the 
 welfare of the individual, or of those that are so intimately 
 connected with him that they may be said to form a part of 
 himself viz., his wife, children, and friends. 
 
 Man, although his progressive nature and his highest 
 enjoyments are made to depend upon reason, yet is kept in 
 existence and preserved by instinct Mr. Sidney Smith 
 observes " It cannot be too often repeated that none of those 
 necessaries which an animal requires are ever left to reason or 
 the mere perception of utility. The superstructure and basis 
 of humanity is animalism. Man lives 'before he thinks ; he 
 eats before he reasons ; he is social before he is civilized ; loves 
 even against reason ; and becomes a Nimrod long before he is 
 a Nestor. Had man not been an animal before he became 
 rational, he would not have existed at all. Reason is evidently 
 the last care of nature. She first secures existence, and then 
 finds leisure to think. She begins with endowing man with 
 the faculties necessary to enable him to provide for himself, 
 before she ventures to animate him with the sentiments which 
 dictate to him to look abroad for the help of others ; and she 
 bids him provide for others before she allows to him that high 
 advance in reason which gives him leisure to indulge in the 
 mere exercise of intellect. She has not formed him totally 
 different from other animals, but rather added to his brain 
 new organs. She has not, in his case, pulled down the fabric 
 of sentient being, and reconstructed it upon a totally different 
 plan. All that she has done, has been to add to the original 
 edifice Corinthian capitals and Doric columns, bestowing 
 reason, not to supersede, but to guide, direct, and perfect his 
 animal nature. We may rest assured, therefore, that whatever 
 principles in the shape of instincts are given to animals for 
 their preservation and protection, are also instincts in man ; 
 and that what in them is a propensity or desire, is not in him 
 anything else."* 
 
 * Principles of Phrenology, p. 123.
 
 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 153 
 
 We have not regarded the usually observed order, but have 
 given our own classification of the faculties. The feelings 
 consist of 
 
 THE SELF-PROTECTING. 
 THE LOVE OF LIFE. 
 APPETITE FOR FOOD. 
 COMBATIVENESS. 
 DESTRUCTIVENESS. 
 SECRETIVENESS. 
 ACQUISITIVENESS. 
 CONSTRUCTIVENESS. 
 CAUTIOUSNESS. 
 
 THE SELF-REGARDING. 
 SELF-ESTEEM. 
 LOVE OF APPROBATION. 
 
 THE SOCIAL. 
 AMATIVENESS. 
 PHILOPROGENITIVENESS. 
 ADHESIVENESS. 
 
 THE MORAL. 
 CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. 
 BENEVOLENCE. 
 VENERATION. 
 HOPE. 
 WONDER OR FAITH. 
 
 THE AESTHETIC. 
 IDEALITY. 
 
 CONCENTRATIVENESS } These 
 
 & INHABITIVENESS. f faculties 
 FIRMNESS. ^ may 
 
 IMITATION. ) furnish 
 
 equal aid to all. 
 THE FEELING OF THE LUDIC- 
 ROUS. 
 
 Suggested faculties 
 
 MENTAL ACQUISITIVENESS, AND MENTAL IMITATION. 
 
 To these must be added the intellectual faculties, consistino of 
 
 * O 
 
 THE EXTERNAL SENSES. 
 
 THE PERCEPTIVE FACULTIES, AND THE REFLECTIVE. 
 
 THE SELF-PROTECTING. 
 
 The LOVE OF LIFE. Nature has made two especial pro- 
 visions for the protection and support of life, besides that of 
 pain in general, which she always inflicts when anything is 
 done calculated to injure those organs on which the vital 
 functions depend. First, an instinctive propensity or desire 
 to preserve life for its own sake^ independently of the pleasures 
 with which it is accompanied. Without such a feeling the 
 temporary predominance of pain over pleasure, which we are 
 frequently called upon to endure, would often not be supported, 
 v
 
 154 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 and suicide would be resorted to as the easiest and most 
 obvious mode of escaping from suffering. Man clings, 
 however, instinctively to life, in circumstances in which its 
 continuance can scarcely be thought desirable, and some would 
 wish still to be, though everlasting pain should be their por- 
 tion. It is this feeling, assisted, perhaps, by Hope and 
 Wonder or Faith, that has in all countries, unaided by 
 supposed supernatural revelation, originated the idea of a 
 future state. It produces an instinctive dread of annihilation ; 
 to be as if we had not been if we may use such an expres- 
 sion is an idea that few like to entertain. Yet, said one of 
 the sages of old " Where I am, death is not ; where death 
 is, I am not." This instinctive desire for the continuation of 
 life, which has for its object the preservation of our life here, 
 is frequently brought forward as indicating nature's intention 
 with respect to our existence in a future state of being. It is 
 said, because we have this strong desire for a continued exist- 
 ence, therefore we shall live again ; but when we know the use 
 in this world for which this feeling is intended, we shall feel 
 that such an argument has little weight as evidence of a future 
 state of being. The principal abuse of this faculty is the great 
 dread of death that it so frequently inspires ; superstition, aided 
 by the overwrought activity of this impulse, creates the most 
 horrible forebodings, and draws the most dreadful pictures of 
 what, in the ordinary state, is no more than a falling asleep, 
 a gradual and insensible suspension of the mental faculties, 
 and what may be only a change from one state of being to 
 another. Another abuse is, that, owing to the tendency it 
 gives to look forward to continued existence in another state 
 of being, the advantages of the present are too much neglected 
 and too little appreciated. The numberless bounties that 
 Providence has bestowed on us here are ungraciously received ; 
 our beautiful world is called a vale of tears, the mere passage 
 to a better ; and we thank God not so much for what he has 
 already given, as for what we consider we are, and ought, to 
 receive.
 
 LOVE OF LIFE. 155 
 
 The question of Suicide, or, as Shakspeare puts it 
 
 " Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer 
 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ; 
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
 And, by opposing, end them ?" 
 
 has been argued and variously decided in all parts of the world, 
 in all ages. The noble Roman thought death by his own hand 
 always preferable to dishonour. The sacredness of human life 
 increases always with civilization, so that self-murder in 
 Christian countries has come to be regarded in the same light 
 as any other murder. Those even who are not bound by such 
 views yet regard suicide as cowardice, and if one single duty 
 remains to be performed that can be performed they are right ; 
 but it is a question whether in cases of hopeless bed-ridden 
 suffering and poverty, where life becomes a burden to its 
 possessor and to all around, to cling to it under such circum- 
 stances, the cowardice, as mankind advances, will not come 
 to be considered as on the other side : neither God nor man 
 calls for useless suffering. 
 
 Secondly, ALIMENTIVENESS, or the desire of Food, is a 
 means which nature has taken to preserve life. The necessity 
 exists for food to be taken to supply the force and the 
 waste in the human frame, as death must be the inevi- 
 table consequence of the neglect of this duty. But the 
 mere knowledge of this would not be sufficient to induce us to 
 attend regularly to this want of the system. To prevent, 
 therefore, any neglect on our part, a strong desire or appetite 
 for food is given, which when too long unsatisfied amounts to 
 the pain of hunger. The ultimate function of this faculty is 
 the preservation of the vital principle, by obliging man to 
 supply the necessary aliment; the object of the desire is the 
 gratification of appetite, or the assuaging of hunger. It is 
 most important, both as a physical and moral agent. It is 
 the prime mover in man and in all other animals. It is a main 
 source of order ; for if mankind could do without food, they 
 would, as now constituted, soon be independent of ah 1 rule
 
 156 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 and control, and necessary subordination would no longer 
 exist, It lias been the chief impulse to man's progression, 
 constituting, principally, that necessity which is the mother of 
 invention. It has been instrumental in taming all animals, 
 and man no less than others. The abuses of this faculty are 
 Gluttony and Drunkenness in all their various degrees ; the 
 sacrifice of that nervous energy in digestion which ought to 
 be used in supplying the organs of our highest and most 
 ennobling faculties with their necessary stimulant, and thus 
 diminishing the moral and intellectual pleasures. 
 
 COMBATIVENESS or OpPOSiTiVENESS. In a world in which 
 difficulties and dangers abound, and where the path to every- 
 thing really good and excellent is strewn with obstacles, it 
 is not enough that man should only possess the power of 
 overcoming them ; there must be a pleasure attending the 
 contest, and a desire to overcome ; and these are furnished by 
 this faculty. Its office is 
 
 " Firm 
 
 Against the torrent and tlie stubborn hill, 
 To urge bold Virtue's unremitting nerve 
 And wake the strong divinity of soul 
 That conquers chance and fate." 
 
 Courage is its use, and the love of contention and oppo- 
 sition for their own sakes constitute the abuses of the faculty. 
 
 DESTRUCTIVENESS. Destruction is as necessary as Creation ; 
 to make room for young and vigorous and improved organiza- 
 tions, the old ones must be destroyed, and among animals it is 
 much better that they should be violently destroyed than that 
 they should linger out " a long and snake-like life of dull 
 decay" and decrepitude. " By the existing dispensations of 
 sudden destruction and rapid succession, the feeble and dis- 
 abled are speedily relieved from suffering, and the world is at 
 all times crowded with myriads of sentient and happy beings ; 
 and though to many individuals their allotted share of life be 
 often short, it is usually a period of uninterrupted gratification ; 
 whilst the momentary sudden and unexpected death is an evil 
 infinitely small, in comparison with the enjoyments of which
 
 DEST1UXTIYENESS. If) 7 
 
 it is the termination."* Throughout all nature Life is every- 
 where bursting out into luxuriant existence ; it is ever pressing 
 upwards and outwards ; and it requires the strong instinctive 
 action of this faculty to keep it down within the bounds in 
 which enjoyment is possible. Among animals it constitutes 
 the preventive check, and keeps the population within the 
 means of subsistence. In the aggregate the "good" is most 
 evident ; yet in each individual case it is called " evil." 
 
 This faculty also writes with the finger of nature, in a 
 language perfectly intelligible to all, nemo me impune lacessit, 
 upon the whole of the animal creation. The selfish propensi- 
 ties of man are very strong : many of them necessarily so, 
 even to keep him in existence, and in their exercise he is 
 frequently tempted to encroach upon the happiness and in- 
 terests of others. How is this to be prevented in cases where 
 the selfish feelings predominate, and where benevolence is 
 consequently partially inoperative for that purpose? Nature, 
 for the protection of man against the assaults of his fellow-man, 
 has furnished each with this faculty, which is a strong desire 
 to give pain to those who give pain to us ; who disagreeably 
 excite our feelings, or otherwise encroach upon our happiness 
 or interests. As the pain a child experiences on approaching 
 too near the fire deters it in future, so the fear of the un- 
 pleasant manifestation of this faculty, often instinctively, and 
 almost unconsciously, affords a more effectual check to the 
 improper exercise of the selfish propensities than the whole 
 combined action of the moral feelings. The manifestations of 
 destructiveness have been considered by some to result only 
 from the depravity of our nature ; but if utility is to be con- 
 stituted our standard of excellence, this principle will be 
 allowed to be one of nature's best gifts, in this age in which the 
 mere animal feelings so decidedly predominate, when we consider 
 that by its expected reaction alone are we preserved from being 
 
 * Backhand's Bridgewater Treatise, Chap. 13, on the ''Aggregate of 
 Animal Enjoyment increased, and that of Pain diminished by the existence 
 of Carnivorous Rice<." See the whole Chap.
 
 158 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 continually trampled upon, and from having our interests 
 interfered with by those of others in all the daily occurrences 
 of life. This is an important use of the organ in the present 
 state of society, but we may hope that as mankind advance in 
 civilization and those faculties increase in energy which dis- 
 tino-uish our race from the rest of the animal creation, its 
 
 ID ' 
 
 chief and proper office may be to act as a stimulant to the 
 other faculties, when unduly depressed, and to supply determi- 
 nation, energy, and force to the character. It may well be 
 compared to fire ; if improperly used, that is, if so as to 
 interfere with the happiness of others, it gives us pain ; but 
 when confined within due bounds, it answers a thousand useful 
 purposes. It would be equally sensible to call fire an evil 
 because we sometimes suffer from its destroying and desolating 
 ravages, when allowed to escape from its natural boundary, as 
 this feeling, because it sometimes acts without the restraining 
 and guiding influence of the sentiments and intellect. Passion, 
 revenge, and malice are the abuses of this faculty. 
 
 SECRETIVENESS. The mind, like the body, requires a 
 covering. If we cannot always determine what emotions and 
 thoughts shall pass through the mind, yet the happiness of 
 others, as well as true dignity, requires that expression shall 
 not be given to them till the intellect shall have decided upon 
 their propriety. This faculty gives a tendency to conceal our 
 thoughts, feelings, and purposes; and it is true that the 
 thoughts and feelings on which most happiness depends, are 
 not such as will flourish when exposed to the cold gaze of the 
 world, neither would the best and most laudable objects always 
 succeed, were they first made public. One great abuse of 
 this faculty, in the present, as it has been in all previous ages, 
 is to conceal what we believe to be the truth, out of deference 
 to public opinion. 
 
 ACQUISITIVENESS. To increase and multiply is a law of 
 the human race, and that the population of a country may be 
 able to live in comfort, it is necessary that capital should 
 increase as fast as population. The object of this faculty is to
 
 CONSTRUCTIVENESS. 159 
 
 promote that end, by furnishing an instinctive desire to save, 
 to make accumulations ; not only to provide against want, but 
 to add store to store. Generation after generation are thus 
 provided for, at a period when they must needs consume, but 
 are unable to produce. It is not this organ by itself that gives 
 pleasure in individual acquisitions ; but when joined with 
 Self-esteem it gives the desire to possess, and the tendency to 
 accumulate, for the purpose of calling such property " mine." 
 This faculty up to the present time has acted as a mere instinct, 
 and every one has been anxious to accumulate, to possess as 
 much of the common stock as possible, at whatever expense of 
 the labour and happiness of others. The whole world has been 
 appropriated, and those who came into existence too late to be 
 present at this appropriation, and who, therefore, possess 
 nothing, are allowed to make use of the world's wealth upon 
 such terms only as reduces the great body of them to incessant 
 labour. This division of society into capitalist and labourer, 
 if it has been and still is useful, produces a manifestation of 
 this faculty which constitutes its greatest abuse.* 
 
 CONSTRUCTIVENESS. The last faculty was regarded as 
 nature's instinctive mode of teaching that capital is to keep 
 pace with population ; to this end Constructiveness seems also 
 intended to lend its aid ; not by teaching man hoiv to invent 
 or to construct, but by giving him the desire to do so, and 
 affording a high pleasure when the intellectual faculties are so 
 employed. " Man is a tool-using animal. Weak in himself, 
 and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most, for the 
 flattest-soled, of some half square foot, insecurely enough has 
 
 * The tendency of this faculty, it is said, is to make individual accumu- 
 lations ; but in those among ihe lower animals in which it is most marked, 
 the beaver, the bee, for instance, this is by no means the case. So man 
 accumulates, his ultimate aim being the advantages such accumulations will 
 confer upon himself and family, which family may be indefinitely extended. 
 Thus individual families may be united into associations until they form much 
 larger families of one or two thousand, and all that would be requisite for 
 the gratification of acquisitiveness would be a joint proprietorship in the 
 capital of the community, and the understanding that it should yield as many 
 advantages as would the produce of each man's labour, if it belonged entirely 
 to himself.
 
 100 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 to straddle out his legs lest the very wind supplant him. 
 Feeblest of bipeds. Three quintals are a crushing load for him ; 
 the Steer of the meadow tosses him aloft, like a waste rag. 
 Nevertheless he can use Tools, can devise Tools: with these 
 the granite mountain melts into light dust before him ; he 
 kneads glowing iron as if it were soft paste ; seas are his smooth 
 highway ; winds and fire his unwearying steeds. No where do 
 you find him without Tools; without Tools he is nothing, with 
 Tools he is all."* Necessity is said to be the mother of inven- 
 tion ; it never would have been sufficient in itself to have 
 constituted man so completely a tool-using animal : that he is 
 so, is owing principally to the instinctive impulses of this 
 faculty ; for the intellectual faculties work only for the desires, 
 and work best for the strongest. Utility would have been 
 powerless without the propensity. " Nature was too wise to 
 trust to the theory of Bentham. She has made exertion for 
 man's preservation and ordinary duties, not merely a necessary 
 but a pleasure of his life ; knowing full well that by nothing 
 but an innate passion could she induce him to do what was 
 necessary for carrying on the machinery of human and social 
 existence."* This faculty is capable of taking all directions, 
 according to the feelings or intellectual faculties with which 
 it is combined. It has been used to save and to destroy. Its 
 most important use is the invention of machinery to act as the 
 servant of man ; to be at work supplying the wants of his 
 physical nature, while he shall be employed in the higher 
 objects of his moral and intellectual being. As Society is now 
 constituted, however, the majority of mankind have nothing 
 to exchange for everything they require, but labour ; and 
 machinery has been allowed to come into too close competition 
 in supplying that labour. 
 
 CAUTIOUSNESS. Delicately organized as man is, in both 
 body and mind, and understanding in part only the nature of 
 everything around him, caution is necessary to teach him to 
 shun that which has a tendency to injure him. Nature, 
 
 * Sartor Ilesartus, p. 40. t Sidney Smith, Priuciples of Phrenology, p. 126.
 
 SELF-ESTEEM. 161 
 
 careful of the frame upon which his existence and happiness 
 depend, has placed over him the most vigilant of all monitors 
 in the shape of pain, which warns him and makes him desist 
 from actions that have a tendency to injure himself or others. 
 To aid this monitor, which is not always attended to until too 
 late, the organ of Cautiousness is added, which gives rise to 
 fear, to the desire to shun danger and avoid pain. In a moral 
 point of view, it produces prudence and circumspection ; and 
 in abuse gives rise to cowardice, depression of spirits, and 
 indecision. 
 
 THE SELF-REGARDING. 
 
 SELF-ESTEEM. This is the individualizing faculty; it is 
 owing to its instinctive promptings that everything is judged 
 of with reference to self. It mainly conduces to the preserva- 
 tion and welfare of man, by inspiring him with that good 
 opinion of his own powers which is absolutely essential to 
 self-confidence and decision of character, without which 
 nothing good or great would be attempted. The opinion 
 entertained of self by no means depends upon qualities and 
 attainments, or upon situation and station in society, but upon 
 this feeling. The scholar of centuries past had as high an 
 opinion of himself and his attainments as he whose mind is 
 now stored with the registered experience of all previous ages; 
 and the cobbler and the king, each in his station, thinks 
 equally well of himself. The happiness resulting from this 
 faculty is incalculable, as it equalizes all states and conditions, 
 for 
 
 "Whatever nature has in worth denied, 
 She gives in large recruits of needful pride." 
 
 It is also owing to this faculty that 
 
 "Whate'er the passion, knowledge, fame or pelf, 
 Not one will change his neighbour with himself." 
 
 And also that we 
 
 "See some strange comfort every state attend, 
 And pride bestowed on all, a common friend." 
 
 W
 
 162 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 Its abuses are love of power and dominion, pride, self-conceit, 
 selfishness. 
 
 LOVE OF APPROBATION. This faculty desires the applause 
 and esteem of others, without any reference to the mode in 
 which they may be obtained ; that depends entirely upon other 
 faculties. It is useful in giving the wish to please our fellow- 
 creatures, but the direction it takes too generally depends 
 upon the "opinion" and moral atmosphere in which it is 
 placed. Present applause, or the applause of posterity, or of 
 another world, is thought a sufficiently worthy motive to all 
 action. In the present day it is too often satisfied with mere 
 outward show, it desires to appear, not to be. It usurps the 
 place of the right and the true, and is satisfied with mere 
 seeming. It praises others that it may be praised again ; it 
 dares even to "praise" the Deity that it may get favour in 
 return. Its high sounding titles are fame and glory, and yet 
 it is only the Mrs. Grundy of society. It will be a great aid 
 to virtue when the conscience will receive no praise but what 
 is just : when it is even prepared "to stand approved in sight of 
 God though worlds judge it perverse." Its great abuses now 
 are vanity and ambition, undirected by the wish to benefit our 
 fellow-creatures. 
 
 THE SOCIAL. 
 
 The SOCIAL PROPENSITIES are those which relate to a man's 
 own family and friends, thus : 
 
 AMATIVENESS produces the love between the sexes, and 
 has for its object the transmission of life to other frames, the 
 continuation of our species. After a certain time the succes- 
 sive changes upon which man's feelings and ideas depend, 
 produce in him, as we have seen in a previous chapter, that 
 state of body which is capable of entertaining but a very 
 limited degree of pleasurable sensation ; it is a wise and 
 benevolent provision, therefore, that the vital principle, which 
 in the course of time ceases to be of use to him, should be 
 transmitted to other frames, possessing all the capabilities of
 
 PHILOPROGENIT1VENESS. 163 
 
 enjoyment that at any time belonged to him. As our world 
 is constituted, much more enjoyment results from the living of 
 ten men, each seventy years, than from one man's existence 
 being extended to ten times that period, or to seven hundred 
 years ; and happiness seems to be better secured by the suc- 
 cession of new beings, than from the immortality of one; 
 because, resulting as it does from the strength and vividness 
 of impressions, it depends principally upon novelty, and 
 apparently upon the newness and consequent perfection of 
 the machine. This feeling being one of the strongest of our 
 nature, furnishes an admirable illustration of the extent to 
 which the feelings are capable of influencing the judgment, as 
 in the instance of a man in love. How differently is the object 
 of his passion regarded by himself and by every one else ; and 
 how completely the subjective in us is capable of domineering 
 over the objective. 
 
 PHILOPROGENITIVENESS. This function is what its name 
 implies the love of offspring; like every other feeling it 
 must have exercise, and in the absence of children, which are 
 its proper objects, it is capable of taking a variety of other 
 directions. The final cause of all the faculties is the happiness 
 they bestow in their exercise ; and though, as we have seen, 
 they may serve also another purpose, such purpose is second- 
 ary ; for the preservation of the individual, and of the race, 
 would not be desirable if happiness were not the result. For 
 instance : however necessary it may be, as human nature is 
 now constituted, that a strong instinctive feeling should exist 
 to induce the parent to undergo the incessant toil and fatigue 
 incumbent on the rearing of offspring, there is no doubt that 
 children might have been so framed as to render this toil and 
 fatigue unnecessary, in which case this powerful instinct might 
 have been dispensed with. But would any one, who has 
 experienced the intense enjoyments dependent upon the 
 exercise of this faculty, be willing to forego them on account 
 of the necessary evil ? We may consider, then, that the love 
 of offspring has not been given to us mainly to induce us to
 
 164 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES, 
 
 take proper care of children ; but that children have been made 
 to want that care, in order to bring into activity a faculty, 
 from the exercise of which so much happiness results. The 
 same may be said of other feelings : we might, perhaps, have 
 been made to do without eating and drinking ; but instead of 
 this being a blessing, we should thereby lose the only stimulant 
 strong enough in the majority to call the mental faculties into 
 action ; upon the action of which happiness alone depends. 
 
 ADHESIVENESS. It is this propensity that is the source of 
 attachment, of an affectionate disposition, of friendship, and 
 Society is said to result from it. Society as it is now con- 
 stituted, split into families and clans, may certainly be said to 
 result from it, but it must be founded upon a much broader 
 basis than such a feeling affords, to furnish all the advantages 
 derivable from the social state. 
 
 The domestic affections must certainly be classed among 
 the selfish feelings; for though they desire the happiness of 
 others, it is only of those others that are necessary to our own 
 happiness. They form a limited circle, and are directly 
 opposed to those sympathies that have for their object the 
 whole human family ; they not only are opposed, but they 
 usurp the place in public opinion that is due only to a more 
 enlarged affection. A man regards the interests of his own 
 family, or of his friends, and makes this an excuse for neg- 
 lecting the higher duties that belong to universal brotherhood. 
 The moral law, that he should love his neighbour, not merely 
 his friend, as himself, is disregarded, and public opinion is 
 satisfied, not knowing how, or caring, to distinguish between 
 selfish attachments and the higher feelings that induce sym- 
 pathy with the happiness of all that is created. 
 
 THE MORAL. 
 
 The feelings already considered are those that man has in 
 common with other animals ; they are strong desires, highly 
 pleasurable sensations, prompting him to act so as to preserve
 
 CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. 165 
 
 his own existence, and attaching him to his own particular 
 family, clan, and country. They supply the most pressing 
 wants of human nature, and their exercise is pleasurable in 
 proportion to the necessity of the actions to which they prompt. 
 Had man no other feelings, he would have remained a mere 
 animal, satisfying the wants of his animal nature, and, like 
 the brute creation, preying upon his weaker fellows ; restrained 
 from aggression only from fear of the immediate consequences. 
 But he has other feelings, which, in their joint action, con- 
 stitute peculiarly human nature : some of these are possessed 
 by other animals, but an accurate division, distinguishing those 
 that belong to man alone, has not yet been made. 
 
 CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. Had mankind been furnished with a 
 faculty that should inform them on all occasions what is right, 
 what is the path of duty, as some writers on the moral sense 
 affirm, such a faculty would have been useless and altogether 
 inoperative, unless accompanied by a desire to act in con- 
 formity to its dictates, for to know the right and choose the 
 wrong are by no means incompatible. But nature leaves it 
 to the office of the intellectual faculties to discover in what 
 our duty consists, and then induces us to discharge it by 
 making the performance of it highly pleasurable, through 
 means of the feeling of Conscientiousness. The object of the 
 faculty is to afford security to the rights of others, by pro- 
 ducing the disposition to do justice. The fact of the existence 
 of this faculty settles the long-disputed question ^respecting 
 man's possession of a moral sense. Some have argued that, 
 because they traced a faculty that gave a strong disposition to 
 do what was right, Nature had given to man a moral sense, 
 or faculty that decided what was right. Others, seeing that 
 men differed in all countries with reference to what they 
 considered right and wrong, according to the amount of 
 civilization and enlightenment possessed by each, denied not 
 only that nature had bestowed a faculty for deciding what was 
 the path of duty, but even that she had given any disposition 
 to act right when the path of duty was decided.* Both were 
 
 * Paley says " Upon the whole, it seems to me, either that there exist no 
 such instincts as compose what is called the moral sense, or that they are not
 
 166 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 right and both were wrong, and we shall find such to be the 
 case with reference to many of the leading differences of the 
 metaphysicians; from partial truths have been drawn wrong 
 inferences. 
 
 BENEVOLENCE. If we reason upon man merely as an 
 individual, we are led directly into error ; an error the fatal 
 source of much of the moral evil now in the world. He is 
 individual in the same sense only as the members of his own 
 body are individual ; for he is as intimately connected with 
 his family, his friends, and mankind at large, as those mem- 
 bers are to the body of which they form parts. Man, though 
 regarding himself as an identical individual, is only a part of 
 the great body of mankind, and his happiness is as much 
 dependent upon that body as upon his own. All relationships 
 are created and established in the mind, and whether it 
 sympathises with an injured limb, or with an injured member 
 of society, it is still in the mind only that such feeling exists. 
 Thus his mind is composed of feelings that have relation to 
 his own body, and if they are not gratified he suffers; of 
 domestic feelings that join him to his family and friends, and 
 if these are not gratified he also suffers ; and of moral feelings 
 which connect him no less intimately with the whole human 
 family, and if these are not gratified, great loss of the happiness 
 that he is made capable of enjoying is the consequence, as well 
 as, frequently, positive suffering. To disregard, therefore, 
 the strict relationship that exists between individual man and 
 society at large, in the framing of institutions and the conduct 
 of life, is as absurd as to attend to the wants of one part of the 
 
 now to be distinguished from prejudices and habits ; on which account they 
 cannot be depended upon in moral reasoning : I mean it is not a safe way of 
 arguing, to assume certain principles as so many dictates, impulses, and 
 instincts of nature, and then to draw conclusions from these principles, as 
 to the rectitude or wrongness of actions, independent of the tendency of such 
 actions, or of any other consideration whatever." To which Archbishop 
 Whately replies " Is it not plain that this singularly perspicacious writer was 
 labouring all along under the mistaken notion that, in showing that there are 
 no innate general maxims of morality, he was disproving the existence of 
 the moral faculty i"
 
 BENEVOLENCE. 167 
 
 bodily system and to neglect the others. It is the function of 
 Benevolence to produce a lively interest in the enjoyment of 
 all created beings ; it induces us to " rejoice with them that do 
 rejoice and to weep with them that weep ;" it is the law of 
 universal brotherhood written upon the heart, showing that 
 the injunction to " love our neighbour as ourselves " is to be 
 understood literally and not figuratively, for the object of its 
 desire is the happiness of others. It is the source of what 
 are called the disinterested feelings ; although why the term 
 disinterested should be applied to that class of feelings which 
 induces us to seek the happiness of others, whilst those exclu- 
 sively are called selfish which have reference to our own 
 personal good, is not clear ; it is clear, however, that such a 
 division leads, in the estimation of moral conduct, to a very 
 serious error, by inducing us to expect actions from insuffi- 
 cient motives. Man has as much interest in promoting the 
 welfare of others as in promoting his own. Nature has planted 
 within him two classes of faculties, the gratification of which, 
 when proportionally developed, is equally pleasurable ; one 
 has reference to his own welfare, the other to that of his 
 neighbours : why then is the one called selfish and the other 
 disinterested ? One induces him to do something for himself, 
 the other induces him to do something for another ; if equal 
 pleasure to himself is made to attend upon both actions, why 
 is one more selfish than the other? There may be many 
 actions that have no direct reference to self, but there never 
 was a strictly disinterested action ; the supposition is an 
 absurdity : it would be an effect without a cause ; an action 
 without a sufficient motive ; and it would be well to keep this 
 always in view ; for if the feeling of Benevolence is not 
 naturally strong, and the pleasure derivable from its exercise 
 is not powerful enough to prompt us to promote the general 
 good, the deficiency must be made up from other faculties, 
 from the sense of duty, that is, from the pleasure we have in 
 doing our duty, or the fear we have in neglecting it, or from 
 the operation of some other moral feeling, otherwise the end
 
 168 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 will not be effected. The knowledge of this would furnish to 
 the moral and religious instructor many very valuable practical 
 lessons, from the want of which his teachings are so generally 
 
 insufficient. 
 
 VENERATION produces a feeling of respect and reverence 
 for whatever we consider as great, good, and worthy of 
 honour. Its directions are very various, and no feeling 
 hitherto has been so much abused and so widely misdirected. 
 Its great use is the deference it induces us to pay towards our 
 fellow-creatures; this use is not very perceptible until we 
 observe the striking difference in the conduct and bearing of 
 those in whom the faculty is small, and where it is fully 
 manifested ; no other feeling seems capable of compensating 
 for its deficiency. It is decidedly conservative in its character, 
 inducino- us to look with respect upon whatever time has 
 consecrated, whether opinions, customs, or institutions. It 
 produces subservience to authority ; it is supposed also to 
 generate humility a sense of our own comparative unwor- 
 thiness in opposition to the dictates of self-esteem. It is the 
 source of the sentiment of awe entertained in all countries for 
 mysterious powers and unknown causes, and produces the 
 disposition to worship. When we are enjoined to love and 
 fear God, it is intended to call into action this faculty with 
 benevolence, not cautiousness and benevolence. The fear of 
 God, therefore, is to be produced not by representing him as 
 terrible, but as great, good, perfect, and worthy of homage. 
 
 HOPE. Cautiousness gives the tendency to look to the 
 gloomy or dark side of things, and when properly balanced 
 by other faculties it leads to circumspection and prudence : 
 Hope, on the contrary, presents everything in gay and bril- 
 liant colours, gives to all things a smiling aspect, and when 
 cautiousness is small, induces us to form immoderate expecta- 
 tions. It is the elastic principle of the mind ; as cautiousness 
 depresses, so this expands it. The disposition to look forward 
 to the future may depend upon other faculties ; but when we 
 do look forwards, Hope gives our anticipations a joyous
 
 WONDER. 169 
 
 complexion, producing a feeling of present happiness in the 
 prospect of that in store for us. 
 
 " Hope springs eternal in the human breast. 
 Man never is, but always to be blest." 
 
 Or rather, when Hope exists in full strength in the mind, man 
 always is blest in the anticipation of bliss. What the sun is 
 to the external world, Hope is to the world of mind. 
 
 WONDER. This faculty had been better called " Faith," 
 as that name much better expresses what appears to be its 
 function. Faith or belief is not the action of the perceptive 
 or reflective faculties, but is a feeling or sentiment consequent 
 upon such action, in many cases completely overcoming the 
 dictates of reason. The senses acting upon the intellectual 
 faculties produce certain sensations, to which we give the 
 names of substances, or individuals, possessing properties of 
 form, size, colour, &c. ; the instinctive feeling that we have, 
 that those sensations or ideas represent real objects that there 
 exists something besides the sensations of which we are con- 
 scious it is the function of this faculty to produce. This 
 association between mere mental ideas produced by the senses, 
 and our belief in an external world, is formed so early that it 
 is very difficult afterwards to separate them. For instance, 
 we have in our minds the idea of a table, and it is very 
 difficult for us to believe that that to which we give the name 
 table is only a sensation, and not a real existence out of our- 
 selves. The instinctive persuasion of its real existence is owing 
 to Wonder. The action of the mind appears to be as follows : 
 the perceptive faculties supply the ideas that it is their province 
 to furnish, that is, of an individual possessing properties and 
 relations which we call a table; and the reflective faculties 
 give the idea that in similar circumstances (the office of com- 
 parison to determine) the same effects upon ourselves and 
 others will ensue, and that our sensations have a cause, (the 
 office of causality.) The personification of this cause, the 
 belief in a real existence a table, is the feeling furnished by 
 this faculty. This must not be confounded with the function
 
 170 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 of causality, whose office it is to distinguish between real and 
 fictitious relations, that is, between variable and invariable 
 antecedence. The intellectual faculties give ideas, each after 
 its own peculiar mode or form of intelligence; but the practical 
 belief attending the action of such faculties is altogether a dif- 
 ferent thing. It is the base of what Kant calls "understanding" 
 as he distinguishes it from " reason," and of what Lewes calls 
 "intuitional reason" "or the process of the mind engaged 
 in transcendental inquiry." Without such a sentiment ideas 
 would pass over the mind like images over the surface of a 
 mirror, reason would be paralysed, and we should act, like the 
 brutes, only when impelled by instinct, and not from faith. 
 The excess of Hope produces immoderate expectations of 
 felicity not founded on reason ; and the excess of Wonder 
 produces credulity. The pleasure and wonder expressed by 
 children and adults who have a considerable development of 
 this faculty at the relation of marvellous stories, miraculous 
 and improbable fictions, proceeds from their extra power of 
 belief, from their giving to such tales a reality in their own 
 minds which to others they do not assume. lc I have met with 
 persons," says Mr. Combe, " excessively fond of news, which, 
 if extravagant, were the more acceptable ; prone to the expres- 
 sion of surprise and astonishment in ordinary discourse, 
 deeply affected by tales of wonder." May not this effect be 
 ascribed to their being able to believe more than others, in 
 consequence of the extra endowment of the faculty of Wonder 
 which they were said to possess ? All the facts that have been 
 observed of the manifestation of this faculty agree with this 
 analysis of its function. Gall was led to its discovery by 
 meeting with persons who saw visions and who believed in 
 apparitions. He says, " Some individuals believe themselves 
 to be visited by persons dead or absent ;" and he asks, " How 
 does it happen that men of considerable intellect often believe 
 in the reality of ghosts and visions ? Are they fools or im- 
 postors ? or is there a particular organization which imposes, in 
 this form, on the human understanding, and how are such
 
 WONDER. 171 
 
 visions to be explained ?" Mr. Combe also says,* " The 
 subject of visions is still attended with considerable difficulty ;" 
 and he gives an instance similar to some observed by Gall and 
 Spurzheim. " In the London Bedlam," he says, " I examined 
 the head of a patient whose insanity consisted in seeing phan- 
 toms, and being led to act as if they were realities ; although, 
 as he himself stated, he was convinced by his understanding at 
 the very time that they were mere illusions, but could not 
 regulate his conduct by this conviction." Now in what is this 
 case different from that which takes place in ourselves ? In 
 very little, I apprehend ; for the external world consists of 
 nothing else but phantoms phenomena. Certain impressions 
 made upon the senses from without, produce within us certain 
 sensations ; we mentally form these sensations into a whole 
 external world, and believe in its existence as thus represented. 
 " It is acknowledged on all hands," says Mill, " that we know 
 nothing of objects, but the sensations we have from them."f 
 In the case mentioned by Mr. Combe, the intellectual faculties 
 were active from internal causes, not external, and they pro- 
 duced phantoms, which the man in Bedlam could no more 
 practically disbelieve than we can disbelieve in an external 
 world. 
 
 A strong association is early established between the action 
 of the perceptive faculties and that of wonder, the perceptive 
 faculties always calling the latter into activity ; in some cases 
 where it is naturally strong, or in disease, this action of the 
 faculties is reversed, and wonder excites the perceptive faculties, 
 producing a picture or phantom which appears no less real than 
 if produced by an external object. 
 
 The difference in the cases is, that in the natural mode of 
 action, the reasoning powers inform us that in similar circum- 
 stances the like effects are produced upon others as well as 
 upon ourselves, and that they are always uniform ; but in the 
 case of the madman, there was the conviction that the appear- 
 
 * Combe's System of Phrenology, p. 374. 
 + Analysis of the Human Mind, vol. 1, p. 263.
 
 172 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 ance could not be produced in others besides himself, and, 
 therefore, that it was unreal ; at least, that the cause was in 
 himself. In this way reason corrects our belief all through our 
 lives, causality informing us whether the connexion of antece- 
 dence and consequence, as it exists in our minds, is invariable 
 and observed by others as well as ourselves. Considering that 
 all we know is, that there is a cause for the sensations to which 
 we give the name of objects, there is no great difference in 
 the grounds of belief in the two cases. All the feelings are 
 capable of carrying away, or overcoming the reasoning powers ; 
 and the seeing visions and apparitions is only an instance of the 
 kind, where, from the naturally large endowment, or diseased 
 state of the feeling of wonder, it has the power of calling the 
 intellectual faculties into spontaneous activity, and a belief in 
 the picture or phantom they produce is a necessary consequence. 
 Dr. Spurzheim says, "The preceding facts determined me for- 
 merly to designate this feeling by the name of Supernaturality ; 
 and it is certain that it is principally manifested by a BELIEF in 
 miraculous and supernatural circumstances, in the foundation of 
 religion by supernatural means, and in its dogmatical points." 
 This, however, is the abuse of the faculty, not its use ; and 
 Marvellousness, which he afterwards called it, is no more ex- 
 pressive of its function than is Wonder, the name given to it by 
 Mr. Combe. " Some individuals, in whom this organ is 
 large," observes the latter, " have informed me, that when any 
 marvellous circumstance is communicated to them, the tendency 
 of their mind is to believe it without examination; and that an 
 effort of philosophy is necessary to resist the belief, instead of 
 evidence being requisite to produce it."* 
 
 Thus the observations of both the abovs writers of the mode 
 of manifestation of this faculty, are confirmatory of the opinion 
 that its ultimate function is to give the sense of reality, the in- 
 stinctive feeling of belief. When more than ordinarily 
 developed, its tendency is to spiritualize all nature ; to delight 
 in creating imaginary beings, to people both this world and the 
 
 * System of Phrenology, vol. 1, p. 384.
 
 THE RELIGIOUS FEELINGS. 173 
 
 next ; and a philosophy of realities that would prove the non - 
 existence of such beings is, of all others, the most distasteful. 
 Such belief is generally admitted by persons of such a charac- 
 ter of mind, to be founded upon feeling, and not upon 
 reasoning; and the association between the creed and the 
 feeling must be broken, before a practical conviction can be 
 carried to the mind. 
 
 Among the Metaphysicians, Hume and his antagonist Reed 
 are both agreed on this subject. Hume says "that belief is 
 more properly an act of the sensitive than of the cogitative 
 part of our natures," (Human Nature, part 4, sec. 1, p. 250;) 
 and Reed, that as no reason can be given for our belief, it 
 must be referred to an original instinctive principle of our 
 constitution implanted in us for that express purpose. 
 
 Veneration, Hope, and Wonder or Faith, are usually 
 called the Religious feelings, as having relation to some future 
 state of being some world beyond the present, but as we have 
 seen, they have a direct relationship to our existence here, 
 being in daily and hourly use. The small relative development 
 of any one of them leaves a sad blank in the mind with respect 
 to usefulness and happiness in this world, and to give their 
 action, if it were possible, a direction entirely towards another 
 state of being, would be maiming ourselves in the present, for 
 the sake of some unknown future. Veneration is supposed to 
 have its highest and most legitimate direction in the worship of 
 God, but are the Gods that mankind have usually made for them- 
 selves worthy of worship ? The poor African has his fetish as 
 the emblem of his deity, which he flatters and praises, and 
 beats when things go wrong, and the Western nations have 
 their God, sitting upon a throne, surrounded by superior intelli- 
 gences, governing, loving, hating, requiring deference, praise, 
 and worship ; jealous of his authority, rewarding and punish- 
 ing, in fact, the very type of an Eastern Monarch, with 
 almighty rather than limited power, the produce of our lowest
 
 174 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 rather than of our highest feelings. Such a being is ordinarily 
 the object of fear, not of love or veneration. Man makes a 
 God in his own imagination, and thus prostrates his reason 
 and all his highest feelings at its shrine. He necessarily makes 
 God in his own image ; it is impossible he can go out of him- 
 self, beyond the boundaries of his own mind ; but it would 
 be much better that he should fully admit his ignorance in this 
 direction that the finite cannot contain the infinite he might 
 then worship excellence, wherever he found it, as the only type 
 of Deity with which he was capable of becoming acquainted 
 beauty, love and truth, abstractions which, as Plato shows, 
 " are the only permanent and therefore the only real existences." 
 Man is the highest intelligence really known to man, and he 
 should seek out the noblest specimens as the proper objects of 
 his love, veneration, and imitation. The world is " covered 
 with beauty as with a garment ;" the more we know of it, the 
 more we bow down in veneration of its Great Author 
 
 " At once the soul of each, and God of all." 
 
 We feel the instinctive promptings of the "Love of Life," 
 dreading annihilation, and aided by Hope and Faith, drawing 
 beautiful pictures of a world to come. We feel also the eleva- 
 ting impulses of Ideality, striving after perfection in ourselves 
 and in the world around, not in the selfish hope that we may 
 benefit by it in another world, but that we may leave this 
 world as much better for our existence, as it is was made better 
 for us by those who went before us. Religious people think 
 they sanctify their selfish feelings by transferring them to 
 another world, but let us give our hopes and aspirations an 
 unselfish direction here, and that will bring us the nearest to 
 heaven, whether that heaven be here or elsewhere whether 
 the " future state" be one of individuals or of the race.* 
 
 * I have been favoured, on special application, with the following account 
 of the Positivist Religion, or the " Religion of Humanity ;" I have no doubt 
 it will prove interesting to my readers, as it bears intimately on the subject 
 before us : 
 
 " Dear Sir, In the limits of a note, I cannot do more than state the con- 
 clusions of Positivism, its religious creed. 
 
 " Men in all times have created their own Gods. The FetichUt animates
 
 IDEALITY. 175 
 
 THE AESTHETIC. 
 
 IDEALITY. This faculty supplies the love of perfection. 
 Its tendency is to idealise and beautify all around it. It is 
 the soul of poetry, and by Dr. Gall was called the poetical 
 faculty. It puts out of sight all imperfection and sees things 
 only as it imagines they ought to be. It creates a Heaven 
 where all the fancied imperfections of this earth are left out, 
 and this yearning after perfection this constant desire for 
 something better, is regarded as internal evidence that some time 
 
 the forms of things around him, all the material objects he sees, with the feel- 
 ings and volitions of which he is conscious himself. The Polytheist forms 
 beings wholly in his own image, and places under their government all the 
 phenomena of the world without, and his own life and action. The Mono- 
 theist concentrates the Gods of Polytheism in cue, hut that one remains the 
 image of himself. Reflexion leads higher minds to get rid of the human 
 element, and to acquiesce in almost a negation of the human, a negative 
 rather than a positive idea. But this is never the religion of the majority. 
 Pure Monotheism undergoes in general a modification. Its vagueness dis- 
 appears ; it ceases to be itself really, whatever its strict theory may be. In 
 the worship of the Virgin and the Saints we see the Roman Catholic in the 
 triumph of the human element of the Christ we see the Protestant-modifica- 
 tion of Monotheism. 
 
 " Under the guardianship of these self-created, self-modified Gods men 
 have lived and are yet living. The observation of the different portions of 
 our race which coexist leads to the same conclusion as the study of its suc- 
 cessive generations. All the stages of religious existence are at the present 
 day as traceable, as they are ia the history of the past, in the African, the 
 Hindoo, the Jew, the Christian, and the Deist. All these several religions 
 have, under a wide variety of form, one common end. The profounder our 
 researches, either in succession or co-existence, the more steady our conviction 
 will be that the human race has iu all its forms had essentially the same 
 problem to solve. The Positivist revieVs the different solutions of this one 
 problem, in other words, the different religious of man. He accepts them 
 all as in their time true and useful. But he finds in their decay within them- 
 selves, and in their failure to become universal, a proof that they are none of 
 them fiual ; that some definitive and comprehensive solution is yet required. 
 To his view, if I may use the expression, the religions disappear Religion 
 remains. They in their variety have had one common aim. They have each 
 in its measure given an account to man of his existence his existence in 
 relation to the external world ; his existence in relation to other men and to 
 himself. They have aimed at the harmony of all his faculties ; they have 
 aimed at uniting him with a larger or smaller portion of his fellow-men. 
 Positivism accepts the same problem ; offers to man an account of his exist- 
 ence ; gives him iin object of faith ; explains the conditions under which he
 
 176 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 we are to attain to that perfection. Its use however is, to in- 
 duce us to strive after perfection for its own sake without refer- 
 ence to its bearing upon our own interest. When we come 
 into the world we find it much more perfect through the exer- 
 tions of those who have preceded us, than we could possibly 
 have made it by our own unaided efforts, and the object of this 
 faculty is, to enable us, by striving towards greater perfection, 
 to leave the world as much better for those who come after us, 
 
 lives and makes him lovingly accept them ; unites him in himself by love, and 
 binds him to his fellow-man in the threefold communion of faith, of worship, 
 and of action the two last the expressions of love. 
 
 " Unconsciously men have worshipped beings of their own creation. What 
 has been done unconsciously the Posiiivist would do consciously and syste- 
 matically. These beings have been in all cases equally but representatives of 
 Humanity. Their time is past. She of whom they have been the representa- 
 tion appears to claim iu her own right our worship directly for herself. 
 
 " We see in Space, the particular system of which the Earth is a con- 
 stituent member. With love and reverence we trace her course as she rolled 
 round the sun whilst in distant ages she was preparing herself for the habita- 
 tion of vegetable and animal life. We see those two forms of life richly 
 developed upon her when her preparation is complete. We see a number of 
 animal races, with one of superior organisation. We trace the growth of that 
 superior race, its gradual conquest of difficulties, its rise from its earlier to 
 its more mature form of existence. We see it in incessant labour and strife, 
 modifying the condition of things around it, securing itself against danger, 
 beautifying its home, organising itself socially on the basis of its primary 
 element, the family, in larger forms, tribes, cities, nations, churches; worshipping 
 itself under theocratic guidance ; singing itself and its actions by its earliest 
 poets when emancipated from that guidance ; seeking the reason of its exist- 
 ence and of the world in which it lived by the agency of its philosophical 
 organs ; gaining from the answers that they gave a more definite consciousness 
 of the laws under which it acted, physical laws at the outset, but arriving 
 finally at intellectual and moral laws, and learning from that consciousness at 
 once the lesson of more perfect submission, and that of greater certainty of 
 modification. 
 
 Natura non nisi parendo vincitur. 
 
 Thus we form our conception of the great organism Humanity. Of this 
 organism we are, as our fathers were, and our children will be, inseparable 
 parts. We enlarge the language of Aristotle, and we say that man, the indi- 
 vidual man, viewed apart from Humanity, ceases to be man ; that only in 
 relation to her can he be rightly viewed. As parts of a whole, we are nothing 
 if detached from that whole. From Humanity we have received all ; to her 
 we owe all. We are her servants and organs, whether the service be paid in 
 her own name or in the name of one of her representatives. She recognises 
 as parts of herself all who in all ages and under all forms have aided her in 
 hr work, be they men or animals : all who have not served themselves, but
 
 CONCENTRA.TIVENESS AND INHABITIVENESS. 177 
 
 as it was made for us by those who immediately preceded us. 
 Thus all are gainers in the progress of the race, and the happi- 
 ness that posterity gains from our efforts towards perfection, 
 we derive from the efforts of those that preceded us. The 
 faculty thus points to the happiness of a " future state," of the 
 race but not of individuals. Its abuse consists in its inducing 
 us to live too much in a world of our own creation, to the 
 neglect of the common duties of life ; and in begetting a fas- 
 tidious refinement which renders everything distasteful that 
 does not come up to the ideal standard. 
 
 CONCENTRATIVENESS and INHABITIVENESS. Both these 
 faculties have the same object, viz., the formation of habits. 
 The first gives the desire to retain present emotions and ideas ; 
 an instinctive pleasure in dwelling upon them until an associa- 
 tion is formed. The latter induces the same feeling with 
 
 o 
 
 respect to localities that the former does to mental states. It 
 is not single isolated thoughts and feelings that form the 
 individual ; man is a bundle of habits. tf It is not every act 
 of virtue," says Mackintosh, " but virtuous habits, dispositions, 
 and feelings, that produce the highest degree of happiness to 
 the individual." Hence the importance of these two faculties 
 
 have risen above themselves ; she rejects as unworthy all others. From this 
 conception we naturally and directly draw the great Positivist precept, Live 
 for others the summary of our practical religion. 
 
 " But Humanity works always by individual organs. This is but the con- 
 sequence of her organisation. She is an organism compounded of separable 
 organisms. These individual organs, well considered, require for their 
 worship more concrete representatives of the great Being they worship. As 
 the symbol of humanity we adopt with somewhat altered associations the 
 beautiful creation of the medieval mind the woman with the child in her 
 arms ; and to give life and vividness to this symbol, and to our worship in 
 general, each Positivist adopts as objects of his adoration his mother, his wife, 
 his daughter, allowing the principal place to the mother, but blending the 
 three into one compound influence representing to him Humanity in its past, 
 its present, and its future. 
 
 " Such, apart from all special forms, from all details of worship, of faith, 
 or of practice, is the general conception of the religion of Humanity. 
 
 " Faithfully yours, RICHARD CONCRETE." 
 Y
 
 178 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 which assist in the formation of these habits. They render 
 great aid to the social affections no less than to other feelings : 
 they beget a fondness for home.* Concentrativeness assists 
 also the intellectual faculties in continuing their action ; that 
 is, in producing the state called attention. Mr. Combe says, 
 " Concentrativeness gives the desire for permanence in place 
 and for permanence of emotions and ideas in the mind." The 
 abuses of these faculties are, the confining of the mind too 
 exclusively to one object or pursuit, to the neglect of more 
 general knowledge and utility ; the formation of habits and 
 associations which reason has taken no part in ; and the in- 
 disposition to go from home. 
 
 FIEMNESS. Nature seems to have made great provision 
 against sudden changes in man's purposes, pursuits, ways of 
 thinking, and institutions. Time is required for everything ; 
 no change, to be beneficial, can be sudden. New opinions 
 and thoughts can no more suddenly form a part of the mind, 
 than fresh aliment of the body : a long and tedious digestive 
 process is necessary. Bad institutions are better than those 
 that are always changing, that are never fixed and settled. 
 The seed in the ground must remain undisturbed, in order to 
 develop its vital energy : we may be nourished on poisons 
 by the power of custom. Concentrativeness, we have seen, 
 gives pleasure in dwelling upon the feelings and pursuits that 
 may at present occupy us : Inhabitiveness gives the same 
 feeling with respect to places : Veneration respects what utility, 
 or more often, what only time has consecrated : and Firmness 
 gives strength and efficiency to every virtue and quality of 
 mind, by giving the disposition or the power to maintain in 
 action the state of mind for the time predominating. It pro- 
 
 " As the appropriation of land was destined to produce such imporlant 
 effects in the progress of society, and in the habits and manners of mankind 
 in general, a provision was made for it in some of the most powerful feelings 
 of which our nature was susceptible. The desire of acquiring property in 
 the soil, the attachment to a home, and the love of the place of their nativity, 
 are among the strongest feelings of the human breast, and which, in the 
 progress of society, are the first to be developed." Alison oil Population, 
 vol. 2, p. 4.
 
 IMITATION. 179 
 
 duces perseverance and steadiness of purpose. It differs 
 considerably from Concentrativeness, as is evident by our 
 frequently finding persons who are occupied fully with one 
 idea, one pursuit, and altogether deficient in determination, 
 firmness, perseverance. Why it should have been placed by 
 phrenologists among the moral feelings, it is not easy to say, 
 as it assists the action of the mind, whether the faculties are 
 directed to good or evil, and at present is more frequently 
 found aiding the animal than the moral feelings. 
 
 IMITATION. Man was intended to live in society, and the 
 moral feelings were given to him to unite him mentally as 
 intimately to his fellow-creatures to the body of society, as 
 to his own body. Benevolence directly desires the happiness 
 of others, and induces a sympathy of feeling. The function 
 of Imitation produces a sympathy of action, and is intended 
 to make the members of the social body move harmoniously. 
 Imitation has so powerful an effect in forming the mind and 
 habits, that a man's characteristics in a great measure depend 
 upon the age or country in which he was born ; he, imper- 
 ceptibly to himself, imitates the manners and adopts the tone 
 of mind of the society to which he is accustomed. It is chiefly 
 through the influence of this faculty that each nation has its 
 peculiar external characteristics, so that a European and a 
 Chinese could scarcely be mistaken for one another. Powerful, 
 well furnished minds alone, are able to break the spell which 
 urges them to think, feel, and act with all around. 
 
 Since them mankind, and children especially, are so much 
 the creatures of Imitation, the examples to which they are 
 subjected and the circumstances in which they are placed are 
 most important ; for the direction of the feelings can scarcely 
 be said to depend more upon the intellectual faculties, than 
 upon the intuitive influences of this principle in our nature. 
 
 THE FEELING OF THE LUDICROUS. Phrenologists are divi- 
 ded with reference to the function of this faculty. It is said 
 to give the feeling of the ludicrous. It might perhaps be more 
 correctly said to give the perception of the ludicrous, or of
 
 180 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 differences and incongruities ; which perception may exist without 
 gaiety or mirthfulness. Great wit and humour, and a high 
 sense of incongruity, are sometimes found in the most lachry- 
 mose persons, who are never betrayed into the slightest dispo- 
 sition to mirthfulness. Those in whom it is but feebly developed 
 can never see when a joke is intended ; they take everything 
 seriously, and are constantly offended from translating literally 
 what others perceive immediately to be but jest. Ought not 
 this rather to be regarded, as it is by some phrenologists, as an 
 important intellectual faculty, essential, among other offices, 
 to the production of that combination of ideas upon which wit 
 depends ; whilst the feeling of the ludicrous, of gaiety, mirth- 
 fulness, hilarity, results from some other faculty or faculties, or 
 from the particular state or condition of the brain at large ? 
 
 We have thus furnished a list of all the Feelings yet acknow- 
 ledged by phrenologists. There are two others to which I 
 . would beg to call their attention, not as established, but as 
 suppositious, and I think more than probable ; so that con- 
 tinued observation may affirm or reject them. 
 
 MENTAL ACQUISITIVENESS. The part of the skull immedi- 
 ately behind Ideality and above and adjoining Acquisitiveness, 
 and marked in the phrenological busts with a cross as undeter- 
 mined, I believe to be the site of this organ. What Acquisi- 
 tiveness is to material products, this faculty is to mental. 
 It is fond of knowledge for its own sake, without reference to 
 its application. In its abuse it makes a book-worm. 
 
 MENTAL IMITATION. This organ lies immediately between 
 the organs of Comparison and Benevolence, and is very large 
 in the masks of Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott, and its 
 function is to give intuitive perception of character. Imitation 
 gives the disposition to imitate bodily actions and peculiarities ; 
 this faculty instinctively appreciates the mental states, and by 
 the aid of the intellect intuitively describes them, without any 
 knowledge of how it does so, or without proceeding upon any 
 system or principle. Each organ has its natural language
 
 MENTAL IMITATION. 181 
 
 outwardly expressed, and it is the function of this faculty to 
 read this language and to determine its relative action and 
 influence in the character. Neither Scott nor Shakspeare 
 knew why they were able to fathom so completely the depths 
 of human nature and to describe it so accurately. It certainly 
 was not from the study of character either in the world or 
 upon any principles of Mental Science. Our first or intuitive 
 judgments of character are often more correct than those 
 afterwards formed by the intellect. 
 
 It is not assumed that the list of faculties is complete, or 
 that the metaphysical analysis of the several functions is yet 
 perfect; but there are few principles in human nature that 
 may not be referred to one or other of the above feelings, or 
 to a combination of them. 
 
 We have seen that the primary function of each faculty 
 has reference either to man as an individual, to his family, to 
 society, or to the beauty and perfectibility of the world around 
 him. 
 
 Those feelings that have reference to the preservation of 
 the individual are the most numerous, and generally the 
 strongest ; and perhaps necessarily so, for if every one were 
 unmindful of himself and occupied only in taking care of 
 others, the race must soon come to an end. 
 
 Happiness, however, consists in the legitimate gratification 
 of all the faculties, and pain or unhappiness attends the denial 
 of their gratification : to insure his happiness, therefore, man 
 must not gratify one class of feelings at the expense of another, 
 but must attend to the interests of society and of his family as 
 well as to his own. But for the proper direction of the feel- 
 ings, in order to insure to him this largest amount of enjoy- 
 ment, he depends altogether upon another order of faculties. 
 The Sentiments as well as the Propensities must be regarded 
 as mere instincts, blind impulses, propelling him to action, or 
 restraining him from it, by the strong pleasure there is in their 
 gratification, or pain in their denial; but the Reason of man 
 can alone direct them properly to perform their various offices.
 
 182 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 In the brutes, the feelings or instincts direct them more or 
 less perfectly to the accomplishment of their object ; but as in 
 man they all are or ought to be directed by the intellect, a much 
 wider field of operation is open to him ; and hia pursuits are 
 infinitely varied, for in the gratification of one feeling many 
 others are called into action, and his pleasurable sensations are 
 superior in intensity as in variety. Thus the instinct of animals 
 prompts them to take but one or two particular kinds of food, 
 while man may please his palate in a thousand ways : the mother 
 of the brute creation is directed by instinct alone in the rearing 
 of her offspring, while the human parent can perform the 
 maternal duties properly only by the aid of reason, and by a 
 certain acquaintance with the physical laws ; but this very com- 
 plexity in her maternal offices is the means of call ing into action 
 numberless pleasurable feelings, besides the mere "love of 
 offspring " experienced by the brute. 
 
 Such considerations must impress us forcibly with the 
 conviction of the necessity for the cultivation of the reasoning 
 power, as without it we are worse provided for than the brutes, 
 our instincts requiring on all occasions its aid for their proper 
 gratification, and much misery resulting from their wrong 
 direction. Writers on Morals describe us as being guided by 
 a " moral sense," and we have seen that a love of justice and 
 respect for the rights of others, a desire to do that which is 
 right, is a strong feeling of our nature ; but it is necessary 
 that the intellect should first decide what is right, what is 
 justice, before this " moral sense" can be a fit guide. The 
 same may be said of the other moral feelings ; veneration 
 itself cannot decide what is a fit object of worship ; hope, 
 what is a reasonable expectation; faith, what is worthy of 
 belief; or benevolence, what will best promote the happiness 
 of others; they all require the direction of the intellectual 
 faculties to attain the ends they desire. These faculties then 
 will next come under consideration.
 
 INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES, 183 
 
 INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES. 
 
 The faculties given to man to enable him to acquire a 
 knowledge of himself and of the external world, and so to 
 direct his feelings to the proper attainment of their end, are 
 called the Intellectual Faculties. These are divided into the 
 External Senses, and the Perceptive and Reflective Faculties. 
 The following are the simple functions assigned to each, as 
 defined by phrenologists : 
 
 " Genus I. EXTERNAL SENSES. 
 
 " FBELING or TOUCH, "| Uses : To bring man into communication with 
 " TASTE, I external objects, and to enable him to enjoy them. 
 
 "SMELL, ^-Abuses: Excessive indulgence in the pleasures 
 
 " HEARING, arising from the senses, to tbe extent of impairing 
 
 " SIGHT. ) the organs and debilitating the mind. 
 
 " Genus II. INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES, which perceive existences. 
 " INDIVIDUALITY Takes cognizance of existence and simple facts. 
 " FORM Renders man observant of form. 
 
 " SIZE Renders man observant of dimensions, and aids perspective. 
 "WEIGHT Communicates the perception of momentum, weight, resist- 
 ance, and aids equilibrium. 
 
 " COLOURING Gives perception of colours. 
 
 " Genus III. INTELLECTUAL FACULTIES, which perceive the relations of 
 external objects. 
 
 " LOCALITY Gives the idea of space and relative position. 
 
 " NUMBER Gives the talent for calculation. 
 
 " ORDER Communicates the love of physical arrangement. 
 
 " EVENTUALITY Takes cognizance of occurrences and events. 
 
 " TIME Gives rise to the perception of duration. 
 
 " TUNE The sense of melody arises from it. 
 
 " LANGUAGE Gives a facility in acquiring a knowledge of arbitrary signs to 
 express thoughts, readiness in the use of them, and a power of inventing 
 them. 
 
 " Genus IV. REFLECTING FACULTIES, which compare, judge, and discriminate. 
 
 " COMPARISON Gives the power of discovering analogies, resemblances, 
 and differences. 
 
 "CAUSALITY Traces the dependencies of phenomena, and the relation of 
 cause and effect.' 1 * 
 
 * Combe's Constitution of Man.
 
 184 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 PERCEPTION, CONCEPTION, IMAGINATION, MEMORY, JUDG- 
 MENT, are not primitive or special faculties of the mind, but 
 mere modes of action of the primitive faculties ; thus " When 
 the knowing or reflecting organs are powerfully active from 
 internal excitement, whether by the will or from natural ac- 
 tivity, ideas are vividly and rapidly conceived ; and the art of 
 forming them is styled CONCEPTION : if the act amounts to a 
 very high degree of vivacity, it is called IMAGINATION. This 
 perception is the lowest degree of activity of any of these 
 faculties excited by an external object ; and conception and 
 imagination are higher degrees of activity depending on internal 
 causes, and without the interference of an external object. 
 Each faculty performs the act of conception in its own sphere. 
 Thus, if one person have a powerful organ of Tune, he is able 
 to conceive, or call up in his own mind, the notes of a tune, 
 when no instrument is sounding in his ears. If his organ of 
 Form be very small, he may not be able to bring shapes before 
 his mind with equal facility. Some persons read music like a 
 book, the written sign of a note being sufficient to enable them 
 to call up the impression of the note itself in their minds. This 
 is the result of a very high degree of activity of the faculties of 
 Form and Tune. Temperament has a great effect on activity ; 
 the lymphatic temperament needs external objects to rouse it 
 to vivid action, while the sanguine and nervous glow with 
 spontaneous and constitutional vivacity. Hence imagination, 
 which results from a high degree of activity, is rarely found 
 with a temperament purely lymphatic, but becomes exalted in 
 proportion to the approach of the temperament to the 
 nervous."* 
 
 According to the same authority, Memory, as a mode of 
 action of the knowing or reflecting faculties, differs from the 
 above actions of the mind in this manner, that whereas Con- 
 ception and Imagination form new combinations of ideas, not 
 only without regard to the time or order in which the elemen- 
 tary motions had previously existed, but even without any 
 * Combe's System of Phrenology, vol. 2, p. 607.
 
 JUDGMENT. 185 
 
 direct reference to their having existed at all ; Memory im- 
 plies a new conception of impressions received, attended with 
 the idea of past time, and consciousness of their former exist- 
 ence ; and generally recalls events in the order in which they 
 occurred. 
 
 " Each organ enables the mind to recall the impressions 
 which it served at first to receive. Thus, the organ of Tune 
 will recall notes formerly heard, and give the memory of 
 music. Form will recall figures previously observed, will 
 give the memory of persons, pictures, and crystals, and will 
 produce a talent for becoming learned in matters connected 
 with such objects. Individuality and Eventuality will confer 
 memory for facts, and render a person skilled in history, both 
 natural and civil. A person in whom Causality is powerful, 
 will possess a natural memory for metaphysics. Hence there 
 may be as many kinds of memory as there are knowing and 
 reflecting faculties ; and an individual may have great memory 
 for one class of ideas and very little for another."* 
 
 " JUDGMENT, in the metaphysical sense, belongs to the 
 reflecting faculties alone. The knowing faculties, however, 
 may also be said to judge ; the faculty of Tune, for example, 
 may be agreeably or disagreeably affected, and in this way 
 may judge of sounds; but judgment, in the proper acceptation 
 of the word, is a perception of adaptation, of relation, of 
 fitness, or of the connexion between means and an end, and 
 belongs entirely to the reflecting powers. These, as well as 
 the knowing faculties, have Perception, Memory, and Imagina- 
 tion. Causality, for example, perceives the relation of cause 
 and effect, and also remembers and imagines that relation, just 
 as Locality perceives, remembers, and imagines the relative 
 position of objects. Hence judgment is the decision of the 
 reflecting faculties upon the feelings furnished by the propensi- 
 ties and sentiments, and upon the ideas furnished by the whole 
 intellectual faculties.!" 
 
 Each of the knowing faculties, which all brutes possess, 
 
 * Combe's System of Phrenology, p. 627. t Ibid, p. 641. 
 Z
 
 186 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 thus possessing Judgment, according to the laws of its consti- 
 tution, sufficiently accounts for most of the apparently reason- 
 able actions of brutes, without supposing them to be gifted with 
 any degree of reasoning power. Reflection, however limited, 
 would unfit them for their place in creation, by enabling them 
 to look back to the past and forward to the future, and thus to 
 anticipate the time and mode of their death. A power of pro- 
 gression always attends Reflection. 
 
 EXTERNAL SENSES. According to the sense in which the 
 term sensation has been used in this treatise, viz., as including 
 every kind of feeling of which we are at any time conscious, 
 ideas resulting from the action of the intellectual faculties are 
 as much Sensations as any others. A right understanding of 
 this may help to throw some light upon several hitherto obscure 
 mental phenomena. 
 
 Sensations are very various in their character, and there 
 are several that cannot be correctly referred either to the 
 Senses, Propensities, Sentiments, or Intellectual Faculties : of 
 this sort principally are those that accompany the action of the 
 several muscles of the body, and those that are referred to the 
 alimentary canal. But of whatever kind they are, or to 
 whatever part of the body we are in the habit of referring them, 
 still they depend entirely on the brain, and are noticed by, and 
 form a part of the mind. 
 
 The kind of Sensations peculiar to the senses are obvious. 
 They consist of heat and cold, smoothness and roughness, and 
 the different kinds of smells, tastes, sounds, and sights : these 
 only have ordinarily been designated sensations. 
 
 The feelings peculiar to the Propensities and Sentiments 
 are of a different kind. The feeling resulting from each is 
 quite distinguishable from that proceeding from every other. 
 Each produces a particular tendency to action ; a particular 
 kind of emotion is also characteristic of most of them. 
 
 The action of the intellectual faculties is accompanied by 
 what are termed thoughts and ideas : but these thoughts and 
 ideas are only different kinds of feeling, of which each faculty
 
 EXTERNAL SENSES. 187 
 
 produces its characteristic one. Each faculty is accompanied 
 by a particular power, but can scarcely be said to have any 
 tendency to act, its tendency being dependent on the feelings ; 
 neither does any emotion attend its exercise, the sensation 
 being much less intense than that proceeding from the action 
 of a propensity or sentiment, and is derived, as might have 
 been expected, from a much less part of the brain : when, 
 however, the intellectual faculties are very predominant, they 
 have decided tendencies amounting almost to intellectual 
 passions. 
 
 The External Senses are instruments for the purpose of 
 bringing the brain into contact with the external world, and 
 for exciting it to that action which immediately precedes all 
 those various sensations upon which thoughts and ideas depend ; 
 and to which sensations, through the medium of language, we 
 give names, so as to excite in the minds of others similar ideas 
 to those that we have ourselves. 
 
 The senses are the medium of our communication with the 
 world, but their precise mode of action is not determined. 
 Do they act immediately in exciting that part of the brain 
 upon which our ideas of objects depend, or are they connected 
 with a part of the brain upon which the function of the 
 sense itself is dependent ; and does this part react upon the 
 organs of the perceptive faculties? The latter supposition 
 would appear to be the case, although in the ordinary action 
 of the senses we are by no means conscious of this link be- 
 tween, the instrumentality of the sense being combined with 
 and undistinguishable from that of the internal faculties of the 
 mind. Thus the anterior pair of the corpora quadrigemina are 
 connected with the sense of sight, and are absolutely essential 
 to the performance of its function, and yet we are conscious 
 of nothing but the ideas of form, size, colour, &c., as result- 
 ing from the action of that sense ; and it is only in particular 
 cases that a sensation of light, the function of the sense itself, 
 distinct from those ideas, is produced. The same may be said 
 of the sense of hearing ; sounds ordinarily produce particular
 
 188 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 ideas, but they are sometimes confined to the mere function of 
 the sense. Thus Spurzheim quotes from Darwin the case of 
 " an old man who had had a paralytic stroke and preserved 
 the senses of hearing and seeing untouched : he, however, 
 could only receive ideas by means of the latter ; when he was 
 told that it was nine o'clock and breakfast time, he repeated 
 the words distinctly, yet without gaining any information from 
 them ; but if a servant put a watch into his hand, and showed 
 him the hour gone by, he said, l Why, William, have I not 
 breakfasted ?' On almost [every occasion his servants could 
 only converse with him by means of visible objects, although 
 his hearing was perfect." 
 
 It is very desirable to determine the exact function of the 
 senses, for much error is propagated from misconception on 
 the subject. By one class of metaphysicians they are repre- 
 sented as the material organs which the immaterial mind 
 makes use of in its connection with this world, and necessary 
 here to its action : another class go so far as to assert that they 
 are useless appendages, confining and deceiving the mind, 
 which when free from them will be, consequently, much more 
 perfect in its mode of manifestation. Mr. Combe says " The 
 following appears to me to be a correct mode of ascertaining 
 the limits of the functions of the senses. Whatever percep- 
 tions or impressions received from external objects can be 
 renewed by an act of recollection, cannot depend exclusively 
 upon the senses ; because the organs of sense are not subject 
 to the will, and never produce the impressions which depend 
 upon their constitution except when excited by an external 
 cause. On the other hand, whatever impressions we are 
 unable to recall, must, for the same reason, depend on the 
 senses alone. 
 
 " Dr. Spurzheim observes on this head, that where the 
 same ideas are acquired by the instrumentality of two or more 
 senses, the ideas cannot possibly be formed by the senses, 
 because Nature, so far as man has discovered, never endows 
 different instruments with the same functions, in the same
 
 THE PERCEPTIVE FACULTIES. 189 
 
 individual. For example, we can acquire ideas of form by 
 the instrumentality of the sense of sight, and likewise by 
 means of touch. 
 
 " Now, from this circumstance alone, it is evident that the 
 conception of figure is formed, not by the eye or the nerves 
 of feeling, because this would be an instance of two separate 
 senses performing the same functions ; but by an internal 
 faculty which perceives figure, in consequence of impressions 
 made on either of these two different senses. The impressions 
 made upon the eye are totally different from those made upon 
 the nerves of touch, but the internal faculty is adapted by 
 nature to both; and hence the same perceptions are experienced 
 by means of the same faculty, although through the instru- 
 mentality of different media ; but the same function is not 
 performed by different senses." 41 
 
 The PERCEPTIVE FACULTIES. Whence comes our know- 
 ledge of the external world ? The usual answer is that we see 
 things, hear them, taste them, smell them, touch them ; but 
 this common mode of speaking is philosophically incorrect; 
 for in seeing, the light alone affects the eye ; in hearing, the 
 vibration of the air, the ear ; in smelling and in tasting it is 
 supposed that particles alone affect the nerve ; and as to touch, 
 it can be demonstrated that no bodies ever are in actual con- 
 tact, but are retained in their places by a balance between 
 attraction and repulsion, and that, therefore, we never do 
 touch anything. Whence then comes our knowledge of things? 
 All that we know is, that the senses are mere instruments 
 which have received a certain relation to external objects; 
 that they are affected in a certain way by them, and are the 
 means of acting upon the organs of the brain or mental 
 faculties as they themselves are acted upon, and thus produce 
 the knowledge we have of what are called external things, f 
 * Combe's System of Phrenology, p. 442. 
 
 + " In the smell three things are commonly distinguished. There is the 
 organ, there is the sensation, and there is the antecedent of the sensation, 
 the external object, as it is commonly denominated, to which the sensation 
 ia referred as an effect to its cause. These three distinguishable particulars 
 are common to all the five senses." Mill's Analysis of the Human Mind, 
 Tol. 1, p. 4.
 
 190 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 Of what character, then, are sensations and ideas thus 
 produced, and what relation have they to the objects causing 
 them ? Their character is the produce of the joint action of 
 the external cause or object, the sense, and the intellectual 
 faculty ; and an alteration in any of these would produce a 
 different result ; that is, a different sensation or idea. Of the 
 relation that the idea bears to the object, all that we know is, 
 that the sense has received a particular constitution, in con- 
 sequence of which it is affected in a certain way by the object ; 
 and that the brain or mental faculty again has received its own 
 particular constitution, and is affected in a similar manner by 
 the sense, and the sensation or idea resulting cannot be said 
 to belong exclusively to either the object, the sense, or 
 the mental faculty, but is the consequence of the beau- 
 tiful adaptation of each to the others. Thus the brain being 
 acted upon through the medium of sense, by some cause 
 which we intuitively suppose to be external, sensations are 
 produced, which it is customary to call properties of matter ; 
 but it would be quite as correct to call them qualities or pro- 
 perties of particular organs of the brain ; for all that we know 
 is the order in which things take place ; that which is evident 
 in the case being that the brain is so constituted as to give ideas 
 of extension, solidity, &c., when called into action by the senses. 
 On this subject ordinary language is incorrect, inasmuch as it 
 confounds the cause of our ideas with the ideas themselves, so 
 that in naming mere internal sensations we might be supposed 
 to be imparting real knowledge of the causes of such sensations, 
 or of things external, and yet such may be far from being the 
 case. Similar ideas sometimes occur without the instrumen- 
 tality of either the sense or the object that acts upon the sense; 
 as in certain affections of the faculty of wonder, to which we 
 have previously alluded ; in particular states of madness, in 
 dreaming, and in sleep- waking ; where the mere action of the 
 brain produces vivid scenes which ijje patient cannot distinguish 
 from real impressions from without. We may, in fact, con- 
 ceive of a being so constituted as that by some internal action,
 
 THE PERCEPTIVE FACULTIES. 191 
 
 a circulation of fluids, for instance, the brain should be excited 
 so as to produce all the variety of sensations of which we are 
 conscious, all the feelings and ideas of which we are the subjects 
 during the course of our lives. We cannot prove, therefore, 
 that anything exists external to ourselves, although we neces- 
 sarily believe it. We suppose that we prove the existence of 
 an external world when we find other beings in similar circum- 
 stances affected in the same way as ourselves ; but such other 
 beings may exist like all things else, only in the succession of 
 our thoughts. 
 
 But these speculations are somewhat irrelevant to our 
 present subject, for whether we can prove it or not, \ve suppose 
 that the Intellectual Faculties have received a definite consti- 
 tution, that they perform certain functions, to the proper 
 exercise of which the action of the external world upon them, 
 through the medium of the senses, is necessary. It is their 
 province to give that appearance to nature that shall best enable 
 man to direct his feelings to their proper objects, and thus to 
 carry out the purposes of his being in securing his happiness, 
 nor is it at all essential that he should know more of matter 
 than the mode in which it affects him. The real nature of 
 things is probably known to God only ; to all created intelli- 
 gences, however high in the scale of being, they are known 
 only as they act upon their particular kind of organization. 
 
 Dr. Thomas Brown says, "That we know matter only as 
 relative to our own susceptibility of being affected by it, does 
 not lessen the value of the knowledge of it which we are able 
 to acquire ; and indeed it is only as it is capable of affecting 
 us that the knowledge of it can be of any direct and immediate 
 utility. It would indeed be the very absurdity of contradiction 
 to suppose ourselves acquainted with qualities which cannot 
 affect us. But even though this were possible, how profitless 
 w r ould the knowledge be, compared with the knowledge of the 
 qualities which are capable of affecting us ; like the knowledge 
 of the seasons of the planet Saturn, or of the planets that re- 
 volve round the Dog Star for their sun, compared with the
 
 192 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 more important knowledge of the seasons of our own globe, 
 by which we have the comfort of anticipating in the labour of 
 Spring the abundance of Autumn, and gather in Autumn the 
 fruits, which, as products of vernal labour, are truly fruits of 
 the Spring."* 
 
 INDIVIDUALITY. The action of the intellectual faculties in 
 imparting knowledge, is much more simple in its character 
 than the infinite variety of our ideas would at first induce us 
 to suppose. Thus we perceive qualities of form, size, colour, 
 &c., and we attach these qualities to individual existences : we 
 perceive the number, arrangement, and relative position of such 
 existences, and conceive of them as existing in space; we have 
 ideas also of motion and of active phenomena, and thus con- 
 ceive of their existence in time: we trace also resemblances and 
 differences, and relations of antecedence and consequence, and 
 distinguish between invariable antecedents called causes, and 
 such as are not permanent. Now some of the faculties that pro- 
 duce this mental action have direct relation to external objects, 
 and others have relation only to the ideas furnished by them ; so 
 that part of our ideas only being furnished by external causes, 
 and part by the action of the mental faculties upon those ideas, 
 we cannot say that all our knowledge comes through the senses. 
 Certain impressions received from without are by the mind 
 itself worked up into a picture which we suppose to belong to 
 the external world, but which is, in fact, manufactured in the 
 mind, and exists only in minds similarly constituted. 
 
 As Form, Size, Weight, Colour, &c., give us the idea of 
 the qualities or attributes of matter, it is from Individuality 
 that our idea of matter or substance of noumena, is derived, 
 which is thus distinct from, although not independent of, its 
 qualities. It is said by metaphysicians that we have ideas only 
 of its properties of solidity, and extension ; but ideas of pro- 
 perties only would never give us the idea of individual exist- 
 ences, as we actually conceive of them ; for such properties 
 would, without the action of this faculty, be looked upon not 
 as attributes of another object, but as individuals themselves. 
 
 * Phil. Human Mind, Lecture 9.
 
 THE PERCEPTIVE FACULTIES. 193 
 
 Our belief in the existence of matter would seem, then, to 
 be founded upon the action of this faculty ; and it is the in- 
 tuitive evidence which it furnishes that is so strongly insisted 
 on by the Reid and Stewart school in opposition to the 
 reasonings of Berkeley and Hume. Brown says, " The 
 unity" (or individuality) " of the aggregate is no absolute 
 quality of the mass, but is truly relative to the observer's 
 power of distinguishing the component parts ; the mass being 
 one or many, as his senses are less or better able to distinguish 
 these. This whole globe of earth, with its oceans and rivers 
 and mountains and woods, and with all the separate multitudes 
 of its animated inhabitants, may seem to some being of another 
 species only one continuous and uniform mass ; as the masses 
 that seem to us uniform and continuous, may seem a whole 
 world of separate and varied parts to the insect population 
 that swarms upon its surface." 
 
 The faculties of Form, Size, Colour, Weight, furnish what 
 are called the properties of matter, viz., of solidity, extension, 
 and others. We allude to this merely to mention a curious 
 distinction that has been made by the metaphysicians, viz., 
 that the indications of the primary organs of form, size, and 
 weight, which principally give rise to the ideas of the solidity 
 and extension of matter, are real properties, existing in objects 
 themselves, whilst colour, equally dependent upon a primitive 
 faculty, is not a real property of matter, but exists in the mind 
 alone. That such a distinction into primary and secondary 
 properties is untenable, our knowledge now of the primitive 
 faculties on which such ideas depend puts beyond doubt ; but 
 however untenable the supposition that colour exists only in 
 the mind, and solidity and extension in matter, it tends to 
 illustrate what has been previously inculcated respecting the 
 nature of the mind, for, as that which we call colour is admitted 
 to be merely an affection of the mind and cannot reasonably 
 be said to exist in substances, so what we call solidity and 
 extension, which are ideas furnished by the organs of Form, 
 Size, Weight, and which are precisely of the same character 
 A A
 
 194 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 as those we derive from the organ of Colour, are not less 
 affections of the mind, and can no more reasonably be said to 
 belong to substances, to which, however, we are in the habit 
 of attaching them as real properties. Matter or substance may 
 be regarded as the cause of such ideas, and we know nothing 
 more. 
 
 The other intellectual faculties are those which are said to 
 perceive the relation of external objects, and must, therefore, 
 be dependent for their action upon those that first perceive 
 existence, for a relation has no existence in itself. If we had, 
 however, no other faculties but those that perceived existence, 
 the world would appear to us a number of detached beings, 
 and not as that great whole w r hich we call nature and in which 
 we at present believe. It is these superadded faculties that per- 
 ceive or rather create relations, which acting upon the ideas 
 they receive from the others, arrange them in classes, put them 
 in order, and give them all the symmetry that we ascribe to the 
 world without. Each faculty adds its part, the peculiar form 
 it is its province to create, to the picture, and a universe is 
 created within us which we perhaps erroneously suppose has its 
 type without us. 
 
 LOCALITY is said to give the idea of space and of relative 
 position. If solidity, extension, and colour are merely the 
 properties with which our own mental faculties invest the some- 
 thing external, the same must be said of space, as it would 
 appear to be nearly synonymous with extension. All of which 
 we can speak is of feelings or ideas, and what relation can they 
 have to space, supposing it to have a real existence ? The idea 
 would seem to be the result of the action of Locality upon the 
 ideas previously formed by Form, Size, Individuality.* 
 
 * " Nothing can act but where it is : with all my heart, only WHERE is IT ? 
 Be not the slave of words : is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and 
 long for it, and mourn for it, Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor 
 I stand on ? But that same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are from the 
 first the master-colours of our Dream-grotto ; say rather, the Canvas (the 
 warp and the woof thereof,) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are 
 painted. Nevertheless has not a deeper meditation taught certain of every 
 climate aud age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so mysteriously inseparable
 
 TIME. 195 
 
 With respect to TIME, " What we do is to take some well- 
 known case of successions, and to make that a standard by 
 which to ascertain the rest. We take, for example, the oscilla- 
 tions of a pendulum. So many minutes we call an hour. 
 These minutes and hours, then, are so many oscillations, that 
 is successions. We call them measures of time. But things 
 are measurable only by parts of themselves; extension by 
 extension, weight by weight, and so on. What is measured by 
 succession, therefore, is itself nothing but succession."* It is 
 easy to conceive that succession or time can have no real exist- 
 ence, but like other relations, is the creation of the mind, a 
 form of thought, a mode of existence. Had this function been 
 left out of our mental constitution there would have been to us 
 no past and future ; everything would have been conceived of 
 as present We should have been conscious of each train of 
 thought as it passed through the mind, but as it really is, so 
 would it have appeared to us, to be ever present only. There 
 would be no succession, no reference to past or future ; for 
 the idea, as it offered itself, whether of anticipation or retro- 
 spection, would belong only to the present, " now." " Time 
 and Space are not God, but creations of God ; with God 
 as it is a universal Here, so is it an Everlasting Now. * * 
 Know of a truth that only the time- shadows have perished or 
 are perishable ; that the real Being of whatever was, and 
 whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever. 
 This, should it unhappily seem new, thou mayst ponder, at 
 thy leisure ; for the next twenty years or the next twenty 
 centuries; believe it thou must; understand it thou canst notf" 
 
 from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought ; 
 that the Seer may discern them when they mount up out of the celestial 
 EVERYWHERE and FOREVER : have not all nations conceived their God as 
 Omnipotent and Eternal ; as existing in a universal HERB and everlasting 
 Now? Think well, thou too wilt find that Space is but a mode of our 
 human sense, so likewise Time ; there is no Space and no Time : We are 
 we know not what ; light-sparkles floating in the aether of Deity !" Sartor 
 Resartus, p. 53. 
 
 * Mill, p. 106. 
 
 t Sartor Resartus, p. 272.
 
 196 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 TUNE. It is much easier in this faculty than in those that 
 give rise to the ideas of Time and Space, to trace the character 
 of its functions, for we can scarcely conceive of Melody, the 
 sense of which it originates, as existing anywhere but in the 
 mind. We regard it at once as belonging to the mind and not 
 to the vibrations that cause it. There would appear to be no 
 necessary office in the human constitution that it has to per- 
 form ; it seems to tend directly and gratuitously to the 
 production of happiness. With regard to most of the other 
 faculties, happiness is the result, but not the end or object at 
 which they aim ; that object being to preserve man in exist- 
 ence, and in the due relation to his fellows. 
 
 LANGUAGE. The mental faculty that enables us to com- 
 municate our thoughts, and to express our ideas, has relation 
 to our own internal ideas and not to anything external. It 
 seems to give only the power of remembering sounds, or 
 audible signs, merely as such ; the understanding of them or 
 the connecting of them with ideas depends upon other faculties. 
 And yet is it most important, for had man been without this 
 power of comparing his invisible thoughts with those of his 
 fellow-men ; of handing down his experience first by oral and 
 then by written signs, he would have made but little progress 
 in all that now particularly distinguishes him as man. It is 
 wonderful, as observed by Dr. Arnott, that " an audible sign, 
 that is a passing sound, a fugitive breath, called by man a word, 
 should have the power of calling to our remembrance, ideas of 
 objects almost as vividly as the objects themselves, and that by 
 a succession of mere sounds so little naturally connected with 
 the thing signified, that they are totally different in different 
 countries, and are changing from age to age, any train of 
 thought may be made to pass through the minds of an audience 
 so as to excite and to leave impressions almost as strong as if 
 from realities." The arbitrary divisions or parts of speech, 
 nouns, verbs, participles, &c., as they are called, represent only 
 the natural language of the intellectual faculties. Language is 
 invented to express their action, and if there were any
 
 CAUSALITY. COMPARISON. 197 
 
 acknowledged part of speech, without a corresponding faculty 
 in the Phrenological system of mental philosophy, it would be 
 evidence of the incompleteness of that system. Thus the article, 
 noun, pronoun, represent principally the functions of Indi- 
 viduality, but Order, Number, and Time appear to be also 
 included in the article : the adjective represents the functions 
 of Form, Size, Weight, and Colour: the verb and adverb, 
 Eventuality : the preposition, Locality : and the conjunction 
 lias reference to both Individuality and Eventuality. 
 
 The REFLECTIVE, or REASONING FACULTIES. What is 
 reasoning ? What is the exact mental process that takes place 
 when we reason ? Having observed, by means of the Percep- 
 tive Faculties, substances, their qualities and relations, and the 
 order in which events follow one another, we are said to 
 reason when we anticipate those events, and regulate our con- 
 duct by suiting it to the known order of circumstances : we 
 regulate our conduct by what we expect will result from our 
 making use of the same causes to produce the same effects. 
 In reasoning, then, these two things are absolutely necessary ; 
 first, that we should observe the order in which events follow 
 one another, viz. the order of cause and effect, of antecedence 
 and consequence ; and next, that we should be able to distin- 
 guish one event, or cause, or antecedence, from another, so as 
 not to mistake one that only appears similar, for the real cause 
 of the effect, for the antecedent of the consequent. 
 
 Two mental powers are engaged in this service, CAUSALITY 
 and COMPARISON ; some phrenologists suppose that there are 
 three, including the organ called Wit, to which they ascribe 
 the power of perceiving differences, and of detecting the in- 
 trinsic properties of things, which power has hitherto been in- 
 cluded, by others, amongst those possessed by Comparison. 
 
 The knowing or perceptive faculties, as we have seen, give 
 the knowledge of things within their own particular province. 
 Eventuality notices simple events or phenomena : Causality 
 discerns the order in which such events follow one another, and 
 whether the connexion be variable or invariable ; it is not called
 
 198 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 into action by external things, but by the ideas of them that 
 the perceptive faculties have furnished. 
 
 The world is full of objects having various relations to each 
 other; the function of Causality is necessary to distinguish 
 between such as are related by mere contiguity of time or place, 
 and those that are connected as cause and effect: in those 
 persons who have not a considerable endowment of the faculty 
 the power of tracing such relations is weak. 
 
 Comparison, whose office it is to trace resemblances and 
 differences, aids Causality to discover what antecedents and 
 consequents are the same with, or only similar to, other 
 observed sequences, and thus gives the power of reasoning by 
 analogy. That this mode of reasoning, which is so commonly 
 adopted, is often a very erroneous one, is owing to Comparison 
 not being always sufficiently accurate in observing resem- 
 blances and differences, and therefore taking those relations 
 to be the same that are only like or similar. 
 
 With regard to the mere properties of bodies, the faculties 
 that perceive them are sufficient to judge of their resemblance 
 without any aid from Comparison : thus Form compares forms, 
 and Colour compares colours ; but there are a great variety of 
 circumstances and conditions of which the knowing faculties 
 take no cognizance, and here Comparison is needed. 
 
 So also with respect to Causality : something more than 
 the mere discrimination of invariable from variable sequence 
 would seem to belong to it. We perceive only properties, and 
 Individuality gives us an idea of the something, which we call 
 " matter," to which they pertain ; so Causality not only dis- 
 criminates cause and effect, but gives the idea of " force," or 
 a supposed "power" in each cause to produce its effect. 
 
 We know nothing more of either matter or force than this. 
 There may be, as some suppose, only force, and only one 
 force, but the evidence for the existence of both matter and 
 force is similar and equal, being based upon primary intuitions, 
 which constitute our fundamental truths and the base of all 
 belief.
 
 CAUSALITY. COMPARISON. 199 
 
 The more perfect becomes our analysis of the mental con- 
 stitution, and consequently, our knowledge of what it is 
 capable, the more we become struck with the truth of Lord 
 Bacon's celebrated aphorism, as the foundation of all reasoning, 
 that u Man can only understand and act in proportion as he 
 observes the order of nature." All reasoning is nothing more 
 than a simple relation of facts, of the order of nature, of what 
 causes have preceded, and will, therefore, precede certain 
 effects. Dr. Thomas Brown has put this beyond doubt, the 
 results of whose reasoning have been stated in the Introduction. 
 Drawing inferences is merely stating what will take place from 
 what has already been observed to take place. A rule is 
 founded upon the resemblance we have observed between 
 individual existences in their adaptation to one common effect. 
 For instance, bodies had been observed to approach towards 
 the earth and towards each other ; but it required a Newton 
 to trace the resemblance between these observed sequences and 
 those which held the planets in their spheres, and to give us 
 the rule or law which we call attraction. Since to reason is 
 merely to state the order of nature, it might appear to be an 
 easy process ; but such is not the case, as investigation and 
 analytical power are necessary for the correct perception of 
 this order. To be aware of the fact that an explosion from 
 gunpowder produces sound, is not to understand the order of 
 nature sufficiently to enable us to reason upon the phenomena ; 
 for in order to do this, each separate link in the chain of 
 sequence must be clearly perceived by the mind. To enable 
 us to reason accurately, therefore, it is necessary that the 
 knowing faculties should perform their offices properly, giving 
 us correct intimations of the properties of things : that Eventu- 
 ality should inform us truly concerning active phenomena : 
 that Causality should observe every link in the chain of 
 sequences, and Comparison discern what are similar causes 
 and what are similar effects, in order to establish a like rela- 
 tion, or sequence in other circumstances and under other 
 conditions.
 
 200 ANALYSIS OF THE FACULTIES. 
 
 If this view of the reasoning powers of man be a correct 
 one, it is evident and this it is important to observe that all 
 the knowledge that he can acquire by the unaided powers of 
 his mind, which can be of any service to him, may be TESTED 
 BY EXPERIENCE. Testimony is valuable only as showing what 
 may be from what has been ; and as man's reasoning power 
 and his progressive nature, and consequently his welfare and 
 safety, are dependent upon his observation of the order of 
 nature, it would seem to be not a presumptuous or unwarrant- 
 able conclusion that the all-wise Creator does not suffer that 
 order to be invaded by what is termed a special Providence ; 
 the interference of which would render his highest gift to man, 
 that which places him so far above all other creatures here, 
 valueless and inoperative. Cause and effect, the relation 
 having been once established, must be invariable ; and it is 
 man's duty to trace out their connection and to adapt his 
 conduct to it, rather than to petition the Deity to break such 
 connection for his own individual advantage ; a petition which, 
 if answered, must bring curses rather than blessings to all 
 around.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 IT is an acknowledged truism, " What can we reason but 
 from what we know ;" but had mankind given due weight and 
 importance to this mere truism and have settled the not unim- 
 portant question, " What can we really know ?" it would have 
 saved them from the endless controversies concerning the 
 nature of matter and of mind, materialism and immaterialism, 
 that have occupied metaphysicians from the remotest ages 
 until now. Had they seen the necessity of establishing first 
 principles in Metaphysics, as in Physics, and of laying down 
 a clear chart of the mental faculties, their powers, relations, 
 and modes of action, it would, even as the spirit upon the face 
 of the waters, have reduced the chaos of their systems to order 
 and utility. As Locke says, " Men, extending their inquiries 
 beyond their capacities, and letting their thoughts wander into 
 those depths where they can find no sure footing, it is no 
 wonder that they raise questions and multiply disputes ; which 
 never coming to any clear resolution, are proper only to 
 continue and increase their doubts and to confirm them at 
 last in perfect scepticism. Whereas, were the capacities of 
 our understanding well considered, the extent of our know- 
 ledge once discovered, and the horizon found, which sets the 
 bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things ; 
 between what is not comprehensible by us, men would per- 
 haps, with less scruple, acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of 
 the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more 
 advantage and satisfaction in the other." 
 
 Dugald Stewart describes the aim of Kant in his " Critique 
 of Pure Reason," to be " to lead reason to the true knowledge 
 of itself; to examine the titles upon which it founds the sup- 
 B B
 
 202 ON THE OKIGIN AND BOUNDS OP OUR KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 posed possession of its metaphysical knowledge, and by means 
 of this examination, to mark the true limit beyond which it 
 cannot venture to speculate without wandering into the empty 
 region of pure fancy."* 
 
 Such a chart, of the necessity for which Locke so forcibly 
 expressed his conviction, but which neither he nor any one of 
 those who have adopted his mode of investigation has been 
 able to supply, has been furnished by the new philosophy of 
 Phrenology, which has succeeded in pointing out the funda- 
 mental powers of the human mind, not by mere reflection on 
 consciousness, but by a method strictly inductive. 
 
 According to this system, then, we find that we have been 
 endowed with certain propensities and sentiments on which 
 our happiness has been made to depend, for their exercise is 
 attended with highly pleasurable sensations, the aggregate of 
 which constitutes happiness. These faculties or feelings bear 
 certain relations of love and antipathy to external things ; we 
 can trace no reason from the nature of things themselves why 
 one object should excite love or antipathy more than another ; 
 but such a relation has been established between us and them 
 to answer a certain purpose. Another set of faculties has been 
 added to these, bearing that relation to the external world 
 which shall best enable man to bring his feelings into activity, 
 direct them to their proper ends, and thus insure that happiness 
 which is the object of his being. 
 
 We can know nothing, therefore, but that which results 
 from the relation established between our intellectual faculties, 
 and what we intuitively believe to be an external world. 
 
 Each intellectual faculty has received a particular con- 
 stitution, in consequence of which it is susceptible of a form 
 of intelligence or mode of thought peculiar to itself; but there 
 is no reason that we can discover why it should produce one 
 kind of ideas more than another, except that it has been so 
 constituted with relation to its external cause for a particular 
 purpose. 
 
 * Dissertations, p. 189.
 
 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 203 
 
 The intellectual faculties are of two kinds, those which are 
 acted upon by external causes, through the medium of the 
 senses, and the ideas belonging to which, therefore, are modified 
 by the sense ; and those faculties that act upon these ideas when 
 so furnished by the first class. They have been very properly 
 divided into ideas of Simple and Relative Perception. 
 
 All the knowledge, therefore, that we acquire of an ex- 
 ternal world is of its action through the medium of the senses 
 upon only a few of the mental faculties, and which action of 
 the perceptive faculties alone would be quite insufficient to 
 give us the idea of nature as we now conceive of it. The 
 world, as it appears to us, is created in our own minds by the 
 action of the faculties of Relative Perception and of Reflection 
 upon the comparatively few ideas furnished by the faculties of 
 Simple Perception. 
 
 Our ideas of things result from the relation that has been 
 established between the object or cause, the sense, and the three 
 classes of intellectual faculties, and it has been the want of 
 knowledge of this fact, and of what belongs to each of these 
 departments, which has caused most of the differences, con- 
 troversies, and obscurities of metaphysicians. One class 
 has argued for the real existence of an external world exactly 
 as it appears to us ; another has maintained that the world 
 only exists in part as it appears to us ; and a third that it is 
 solely and entirely a creation of the mind. 
 
 Much has yet to be learned in this department of Psycho- 
 logy, but enough is already known to show what degree of 
 truth or error exists in the old systems, and it may not be unin- 
 teresting to examine briefly what light our more exact know- 
 ledge throws upon the Metaphysicians. 
 
 HOBBES tells us that the thoughts of man, singly, are a 
 representation or appearance of some quality or other accident 
 of a body without us which is commonly called an object. Which 
 object worketh on the eyes, ears, and other parts of a man's
 
 204 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of 
 appearance. 
 
 The original of them all is that which we call sense, for 
 there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first, 
 totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense. 
 The rest are derived from that original. 
 
 Ideas are but apparitions unto us of the motion, agitation, 
 or alteration which the object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or 
 some internal substance of the head. 
 
 Hobbes is the precursor or founder of the School which held 
 that to think is to feel. 
 
 There is nothing in the above to which the Phrenologist 
 can take exception. By the sense he evidently means sensa- 
 tion, and we do not see that he can be charged with holding 
 the dogma, " Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in 
 sensu," for he says that " there is no conception in a man's 
 mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten 
 upon the organs of sense ;" as the Phrenologist holds that 
 such conceptions are formed by the faculties of Reflection and 
 Relative Perception acting upon those of Simple Perception, 
 which are derived directly from the sense. He is said to have 
 confounded thought with feeling; but thought is feeling; an 
 idea is a feeling or sensation, slight or feeble in proportion to 
 the relatively small size of the portion of the brain with which 
 it is in connection. "When the intellectual faculties are very 
 large and much used, so great is the feeling of enjoyment in 
 their exercise, that it amounts almost to an intellectual passion. 
 Hobbes is also said to be a materialist, but we are not aware 
 that he confounded an idea with its cause or the object, and as 
 we know nothing of the essence of either, it is impossible to 
 say wherein they differ. 
 
 LOCKE held that ideas are derived from two sources, Sensa- 
 tion and Reflection; he might more properly have said that 
 most of our ideas are derived from five sources, the object, 
 the sense, and the three classes of mental faculties, Simple and 
 Relative Perception, and Reflection.
 
 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 205 
 
 He laid it down as a first principle, that the mind perceived 
 only forms and qualities, and that our idea of matter was deri- 
 ved from reflection, as we could not but conceive otherwise than 
 that there was a substratum or subject to which these qualities 
 belonged. Now we perceive substance as directly through 
 Individuality as we do its primary qualities of solidity, exten- 
 sion, &c. ; and we perceive its primary qualities no more directly 
 than we do what he calls its secondary of colour, &c. Locke 
 was opposed to the doctrine of innate ideas, that is, of truths 
 independent of experience, but by innate ideas in a phrenological 
 sense is meant not the mind's own ideas, but its own modes of 
 thought which it impresses upon the objects of our experience. 
 
 BERKELEY. " When Berkeley denied the existence of 
 matter, he meant by 'matter' that unknown substratum, the 
 existence of which Locke had declared to be a necessary infer- 
 ence from our knowledge of qualities, but the nature of which 
 must always be altogether hidden from us. Philosophers had 
 assumed the existence of Substance, i.e. of a noumenon lying 
 underneath all phenomena a substratum supporting all quali- 
 ties a something to which all accidents inhere. This unknown 
 substance Berkeley rejects. ( 1 am not for changing things 
 into ideas' he says, ' but rather ideas into things ; since those 
 immediate objects of perception, which according to you are only 
 appearances of things, I take to be the real things themselves." 
 " Berkeley therefore, in denying the existence of matter, sided 
 with common sense. He thought, with the vulgar, that matter 
 was that of which his senses informed him ; not an occult some- 
 thing of which he could have no information. The table he 
 saw before him certainly existed : it was hard, polished, coloured, 
 of a certain figure, and cost some guineas. But there was no 
 phantom table lying underneath the apparent table there was 
 no invisible substance supporting that table. What he perceived 
 was a table and nothing more ; what he perceived it to be, he 
 would believe it to be, and nothing more. His starting point 
 was thus what the plain dictates of his senses, and the senses of 
 all men, furnished."* 
 
 * Lewes's Bio. Hist, of Philosophy, 2nd edit., pp. 463 and 466.
 
 206 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Berkeley believed, in what we all necessarily believe, in the 
 ideas furnished by individuality, by which we as directly 
 perceive substance, as we do qualities by the faculties of form, 
 size, weight, colour, &c. Berkeley was right so far, but wrong 
 in the inferences he drew from his original induction. 
 
 IDEALISM. According to Locke the only reason for in- 
 ferring the existence of Matter is the necessity for some 
 synthesis of attributes. Berkeley assumed this synthesis to 
 be purely a mental one ; but as Individuality perceives matter 
 as directly as we perceive attributes, no such synthesis is 
 required, and both are wrong. " The objects of knowledge 
 are ideas ;" it is true we are only conscious or have knowledge 
 of ideas, but reflection on that consciousness tells us that the 
 ideas are not purely subjective, but are compounded equally 
 of the object or cause, the sense, and the subject or intellect. 
 We cannot resolve an idea so compounded into its elements ; 
 " it is God's synthesis, and man cannot undo it ;" but it is 
 only by assuming such idea to be simple or purely subjective, 
 and thus confounding it with its cause the objective with the 
 subjective, the ego with the non-ego that Idealism can exist. 
 Ideas are found without any immediate cause without our- 
 selves, as in dreams, visions, &c., and are therefore said to be 
 purely subjective, but such ideas, however vividly repeated, 
 must have been received originally from without. Now 
 although ideas can only be known to us in this compound 
 state, and although we have no power to analyse them, yet it 
 is very possible to conceive that both subjective and objective 
 may exist separately. We cannot but suppose that the causes 
 of our ideas, whatever they may be, may continue to exist 
 without our perceiving them. Ideas, based upon our forms 
 of intelligence, may cease to exist, but the world may continue 
 and create an entirely different set of ideas in the minds of 
 beings differently constituted. Appearances may be the pro- 
 duction of the mind to which they appear, ( Idealism,) or they 
 may be the pure presentation of the things themselves (Realism); 
 we have no faculties that tell us anything of the purely sub-
 
 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 207 
 
 jective or the purely objective, and the supposed differences 
 
 between Realism and Idealism are vain distinctions, based 
 
 ,. 
 upon pure_ assumptions. 
 
 HUME. " Locke had shown that all our knowledge was 
 dependent upon experience. Berkeley had shown that we had <rx * 
 no experience of an external world, independent of perception ; 
 
 ^x/*X^r** - l-'O-^ 
 
 nor could we have any such experience. He pronounced 
 matter to be a figment. Hume took up the line where 
 Berkeley had cast it, and flung it once more into the deep sea, 
 endeavouring to fathom the mysteries of being. Probing 
 deeper in the direction Berkeley had taken, he found that not 
 only was Matter a figment, Mind was a figment also. If the 
 occult substratum, which men had inferred to explain material 
 phenomena, could be denied, because not founded on experience ; 
 so also, said Hume, must we deny the occult substratum (mind) 
 which men have inferred to explain mental phenomena. All 
 that we have any experience of, is impressions and ideas. The 
 substance of which these are said to be impressions, is occult 
 is a mere inference ; the substance in which these impressions 
 are supposed to be, is equally occult is a mere inference. 
 Matter is but a collection of impressions. Mind is but a suc- 
 cession of impressions and ideas." Bio. Hist. Philo. p. 480. 
 
 As we have seen, we have a mental faculty whose function 
 it is to give us our idea of matter ; but we have none that I am 
 aware of which gives us the idea of mind as distinct from " the 
 succession of impressions and ideas." We are conscious of 
 perceptions; the external cause of them we call matter, the 
 internal or subjective, we call mind; the aggregate of the ex- 
 ternal we call the world, the aggregate of the internal the mind. 
 The form of thought peculiar to Individuality probably origi- 
 nates the belief in the individuality of both, but whether in 
 reality it belongs to either we do not know. Individuality may 
 no more belong to mind, composed as it is of separate ideas 
 and sensations, than to what we call the world ; or it may 
 belong to each only in the same sense ; each separate simple 
 idea or sensation, and each separate simple substance being
 
 208 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 alone individual. Whatever we may be supposed to know 
 of matter in consequence of our direct perception of it through 
 Individuality and of its qualities through the other perceptive 
 faculties, we certainly know nothing of mind, but as the aggre- 
 gate of all our ideas and sensations; and as Hume says " mind 
 is but a succession of impressions and ideas." Hume held that 
 there is not, in any single instance of cause and effect, anything 
 which can suggest the idea of power or necessary connection. 
 Our belief in power he ascribes to habit. Now precisely as 
 Individuality gives the idea of substance does Causality give 
 the idea of power. Eventuality takes cognizance of the suc- 
 cession of phenomena of mere antecedence and sequence ; but 
 consequence, or our perception of power in every causation, is 
 derived from Causality. Our faculties thus tell us of substance 
 and of power ; whether they tell us truly or not we cannot say, 
 but we necessarily believe them. We have treated of this 
 belief and of power more at large farther on. 
 
 KANT. Knowledge derived from objects or causes without 
 us we call knowledge derived from experience. Kant affirmed 
 that besides this experience we had innate ideas not derived 
 from without, which were necessarily true, because we could 
 not conceive them otherwise. These ideas he held to be supe- 
 rior to those derived from experience because they were un- 
 usual and necessary, while those derived from experience were 
 contingent ; but as he believed the realities of things to trans- 
 cend or to be above the range of our faculties, his philosophy 
 was called Transcendental. 
 
 We conceive that he has not succeeded in proving that Ave 
 have any ideas not derived from the sources we have already 
 indicated, or if he has he certainly has failed to show that such 
 " intentions" are absolutely or even necessarily more true than 
 the truths derived from experience. 
 
 Time, Space, and Causality, Kant holds to be innate ideas, 
 and to have no objective reality : we have already shown 
 whence such ideas are derived. The celebrated categories are 
 Kant's mode of arriving by Reflection on consciousness at the
 
 ON THE OKIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 209 
 
 list of Intellectual Faculties or modes of thought which Gall 
 arrived at by observation, and they correspond to his faculties 
 of Simple and Relative Perception and Reasoning Powers. 
 Kant's distinction between the Understanding or Judgment, 
 and Reason, we have seen that phrenology confirms. Each 
 faculty judges of its own objects, as form of form, colour of 
 colour, &c., and in this sense animals have judgment, which is 
 sometimes mistaken for reason : but reason is a higher power 
 and generalizes such judgments, and traces the laws of cause 
 and effect. 
 
 11 God, the Soul, and the World, Kant holds to be the three 
 ideas of Reason, the laws of its operation, the pure forms of 
 its existence. They are to it what space and time are to Sen- 
 sibility, and what the categories are to Understanding." These 
 ideas are considered to be wholly independent of experience, 
 and we have still to show that this is a'n error, and to trace 
 their derivation to the source of all our other ideas experience. 
 Kant also holds that all belief, that is, all fundamental belief on 
 which all reasoning is necessarily founded is instinctive or 
 intuitive. In this he was quite right, as we shall hereafter make 
 evident. The system of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are open 
 to similar criticisms, but as substantially such criticisms would 
 be a mere repetition of what we have already laid down, it is 
 needless to go into them. 
 
 The great question at issue was, and still is, Have we, or 
 have we not any ideas which are absolutely, objectively true ? 
 It is generally supposed and affirmed that " nothing is known 
 to us as it is," that is, per se, but only as it appears to us, or as 
 it affects us; but if we cannot know noumena, only phe- 
 nomena if we do not know what things really are in them- 
 selves, is it not equally unphilosophical to deny, as to affirm, any- 
 thing with respect to them? Whether, therefore our faculties 
 give us real knowledge and things are in reality what they seem 
 to us ; whether their intimations are absolutely as well as rela- 
 tively true as far as they go, and appear the same to all intelli- 
 gences, and the same to creature as Creator, is what we really 
 c c
 
 210 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 know nothing about. Absolute truth like Eternity may belong 
 only to the One, and may be even impossible to all finite intelli- 
 gence. Lewes says in his examination of the " Common 
 Sense" philosophy, " No one doubts that we believe in the 
 existence of an external world. Idealism never questions the 
 fact. The only doubt is, whether that belief be objectively as 
 well as subjectively true. To say that the belief in objective 
 existence is a Fundamental Law, is simply saying that we are 
 so constituted that we are forced to attribute external reality 
 to our sensations. As well say we are so constituted that 
 fire applied to our bodies will give us pain. We are so 
 constituted. What then? Does this advance us one step? 
 Not one. We have still to seek some proof of the laws of 
 our constitution being the measure of the laws of other exist- 
 ences still to seek how what is true of the subjective must 
 necessarily be true of the objective." Bio. Hist, of Philo., 2nd 
 Edit. p. 522. 
 
 But after all, this difference between objective and subjective 
 may be a delusion a riddle which in the nature of things is 
 insoluble ; for what is truth ? What is real knowledge ? Must 
 not the idea of a thing and the thing itself be always something 
 distinct? Can any intelligence, however high, know more 
 than how it is affected by things external ? It is true we can 
 give no "positive" answers to these questions, and we must rest 
 satisfied with probabilities only, and it certainly does seem 
 most probable that things really are what they seem to us. 
 That our knowledge, at least as far as it goes, is necessary and 
 universal. That there is such a thing as space, that there is a 
 universe of suns and systems and a world in which are real 
 rivers and trees, and light and shade, and men and animals, 
 and all that constitutes beauty and utility ; and in fact, we will 
 not say that what is subjectively true is objectively true also, 
 but that subjective and objective are indissoluble.* But fortu- 
 
 * " One may say that the creation grows conscious of itself in man. What 
 a glaring and absurd contradiction do our Byronic poets fall into, when they 
 praise nature at the expense of man ! What is nature till man is there to 
 feel and understand ? What are suns and stars, mountains and the ocean,
 
 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 211 
 
 nately our real interests are not left dependent upon proba- 
 bilities. It is of little consequence to us how other beings may 
 be affected by their world or by ours. Man's intellectual 
 faculties may supply him only with relative truth, but he 
 has his own field of absolute truth and that is the region not of 
 ideas, but of pleasures and pains. Absolute certainty is attain- 
 able here, for no " Intelligence," high or low, can confound 
 one with the other, and our intellectual faculties are sufficient 
 to guide us in the pursuit of one and the avoidance of the 
 other, and that is all in which they could be useful to us, and 
 possibly, therefore, all for which they were ever intended. 
 Locke, who appears to us the most sensible of all our meta- 
 physicians, seems fully to comprehend this, and in his re- 
 searches stops here He says, "How short soever our know- 
 ledge may be of a universal or perfect comprehension of what- 
 ever is, it yet secures our great concernments, that we have 
 light enough to lead us to the knowledge of our Maker and the 
 sight of our own duties." And again, " as to myself, I think 
 God has given me assurance enough as to the existence of 
 things without me; since by their different application I can 
 produce in myself both pleasure and pain, which is one great 
 concernment of my present state." He continues, " for our 
 faculties, being not suited to the full extent of being, nor to a 
 perfect, clear, comprehensive knowledge of things free from 
 all doubt and scruple, but to the preservation of us, in whom 
 they are, and accommodated to the use of life ; they serve our 
 purpose well enough, if they will but give us certain notice of 
 those things which are convenient to us." If then our faculties 
 
 without the human eye ? What that is that lies behind the eye marvellous 
 brain, or something more I do not precisely know ; but I know this, that it 
 both receives from the eye and gives to the eye. What if I am indeed no 
 other than this fine bodily instrument made sensitive to a thousand impulses 
 what if I am indeed this ' living lyre, 1 swept over by every wind, and tremulous 
 to every ray of light living lyre conscious of its own melody ? I am still 
 nothing less than that wondrous instrument that has converted motion into 
 melody the thing into a thought. Or, to change my metaphor, I am that 
 sensitive mirror in which the reflected world becomes a conscious world, and 
 knows itself as the creation of God." Thorndale on the Conflict of Opin- 
 ions, p. 359.
 
 212 ON THE ORIGIN AND BOUNDS OF OUR KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 furnish us with all such knowledge as can be useful to us, we 
 can afford to remain sceptical as to their correctness or power 
 in departments in which they could be of no use. Pleasure 
 and Pain are to voluntary motion what attraction and repulsion 
 are to inorganic matter, and the Science of Morality is to the 
 analysis of Pleasure and Pain what the Science of Chemistry 
 is to the different substances that compose this globe.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 BELIEF. 
 
 a All belief, it is evident, must be either direct or indirect. 
 It is direct when a proposition, without regard to any former 
 proposition expressed or understood, is admitted as soon as it 
 is expressed in words, or as soon as it rises silently in the mind. 
 Such are all the order of truths which have been denominated, 
 on this account, first truths. The belief is indirect when the 
 force of the proposition, to which assent is given, is admitted 
 only in consequence of the previous admission of some former 
 proposition with which it is felt to be intimately connected, and 
 the statement in words, or the internal development of these 
 relative propositions in the order in which their relation to the 
 primary proposition is felt, is all that constitutes reasoning. 
 The indirect belief which attends the result of reasoning, even 
 in the proudest demonstration, is thus only another form of 
 some first truth which was believed directly and independently 
 of reasoning ; and, without this primary and intuitive assent, 
 the demonstration itself in all its beautiful precision and regu- 
 larity would be as powerless and futile as the most incoherent 
 verbal wrangling." 
 
 " Without some principles of immediate belief, then, it is 
 manifest, that we could have no belief whatever ; for we believe 
 one proposition, because we discover its relation to some other 
 proposition, which is itself, perhaps, related, in like manner, to 
 some other proposition formerly admitted, but which, carried 
 back as far as it may, through the longest series of ratiocination, 
 must ultimately come to some primary proposition, which we 
 admit from the evidence contained in itself, or, to speak more 
 accurately, which we believe from the mere impossibility of
 
 214 BELIEF. 
 
 disbelieving it. All reasoning, then, tlie most sceptical, be it 
 remarked, as well as the most dogmatical, must proceed 
 on some principles which are taken for granted, not because 
 we infer them by logical deduction, for this very inference 
 must then itself be founded on some other principle, assumed 
 without proof, but because the admission of these first principles 
 is a necessary part of our intellectual constitution."* 
 
 That belief or faith is something more than a mere intel- 
 lectual perception there can be little doubt, and I have pre- 
 viously endeavoured to point out the particular part of the 
 mental constitution to which it belongs. It must be regarded 
 not as a mere perception, but as a sentiment dependent for its 
 direction, like conscientiousness or benevolence, upon the 
 intellectual faculties. Like the other feelings, it is a blind in- 
 stinct, and as conscientiousness, or the disposition to do right, 
 cannot of itself dictate what is right, so the instinctive tendency 
 to believe, equally requires the guiding and restraining hand 
 of reason. Faith, Hope, and Charity, are virtues only when 
 properly directed, the first to truth, the second to reasonable 
 expectation, and the third to the real interests of mankind. 
 
 But what are these first truths which Dr. Brown says are 
 believed directly and independently of reason, and from which 
 all other belief results. We find little difference in opinion 
 between mathematicians, and it is because they first agree upon 
 the grounds of reasoning ; they lay down certain principles or 
 axioms founded upon their own definitions, and these stand 
 with them in the place of first truths. For instance, "A point 
 is that which hath no parts, or which hath no magnitude." 
 " A line is length without breadth."f " Let it be granted," 
 says the mathematician, "that a straight line may be drawn from 
 any one point to any other point," that is, from that which has 
 
 * Brown's Phil, of the Human Mind, Lecture 13, p. 78. 
 
 f Elements of Euclid. 
 
 " The whole is greater than a part : how exceedingly true ! Nature abhors 
 a vacuum ! How exceedingly false and calumnious !" Again, "Nothing can 
 act but where it is : with all my heart ; but where is it ? " Sartor 
 Reaartua, p. 52.
 
 BELIEF. 215 
 
 no parts and no magnitude, to that which has no parts and no 
 magnitude ; now we may readily grant this when it has been 
 discovered where that is. Proceeding in this way, any kind of 
 propositions may be proved. And yet, as Dr. Brown shows, 
 it is the only way in which we can reason at all. From the 
 want of such amditted grounds of reasoning in mental science, 
 metaphysicians have, invariably, arrived at different con- 
 clusions. 
 
 The Phrenologists have discovered the connexion between 
 the primitive faculties of the mind and certain parts of the 
 brain, and by constantly repeated observations, have pointed 
 out the relation between external objects and certain organs, 
 and between other organs and these, so that the exact mode of 
 manifestation of most of the fundamental powers of the mind 
 is now known. The indications that such faculties give us, the 
 modes of thought or intelligence peculiar to each, whether real 
 or ideal, must be received as first truths, upon which all 
 reasoning is founded. 
 
 Belief attends the action of each faculty, and cannot be 
 separated from it. The most sceptical, if they express doubt 
 in words, express belief in practice. 
 
 Thus, an object is presented to the senses, a tree, for 
 example ; we are impressed with ideas of its form, size, colour, 
 and impenetrability, or power of resistance, and we believe it 
 to possess all these qualities; and Individuality gives them 
 unity and substance ; so that we believe not in a separate form, 
 size, colour, &c., but in an individual tree to which all these 
 qualities are attached. The idea of substance, including that 
 of extension and relative position, gives us the idea of space, 
 and we believe that space exists, although our reasoning 
 faculties tell us that that to which we have given the name is 
 only an idea, a sensation, a kind of feeling. 
 
 Again, Eventuality notices the circulation of the sap in the 
 tree, the budding forth of the leaves, the ripening of the fruit, 
 and so on, and time gives the idea of succession in such phe- 
 nomena ; and we believe in both action and time. Causality
 
 216 BELIEF. 
 
 notices the connexion of the sap with the root, and of the root 
 with the earth, and we believe that there is a real dependence 
 and connexion, one upon the other a real power in the earth 
 to sustain the tree. If we possessed only the knowing faculties, 
 we should perceive the earth and the tree and believe in them 
 as existences, but Causality gives the idea of something more, 
 of the relation that they bear to one another, and we believe 
 that the tree could not exist without the earth, or, at least, that 
 the earth causes the growth of the tree. 
 
 Comparison observes the situation necessary for the growth 
 of the tree ; that if the tree be placed in the earth, without the 
 root, it will not grow ; and takes note of all other conditions 
 necessary to the continuance of its being, so as to be able to 
 apply such knowledge to other situations ; and we believe that 
 the differences and resemblances, of which Comparison gives 
 us the ideas, exist. 
 
 Causality also traces the connexion between these ideas and 
 the brain, between the brain and the external sense, and 
 between the sense and something acting upon it, and we cannot 
 but believe that a real connexion exists between these sequences, 
 one producing another ; hence we believe in the actual exist- 
 ence of a something external, which something we call a tree. 
 The idea of a tree, its properties and relations, are associated 
 together in one idea in the mind, so that we are never conscious 
 of it without the belief that it has a cause, that cause being the 
 last link that we trace in the chain of sequences, and regarded 
 consequently as an external existence. 
 
 Our reason is sufficient to show us that the greater part of 
 those things in which we believe, are the produce of our own 
 minds only : thus, number, space, time, action, motion, rela- 
 tion, the ideas of which are not formed by the senses, may be 
 no more the real properties of substances than the names by 
 which we designate them, which names themselves are sup- 
 posed by the ignorant to be as much inherent parts of the 
 substance named, as we are apt to suppose its relations to be.
 
 BELIEF. 217 
 
 So we believe in substance as perceived by Individuality, 
 and in power as perceived by causality. With respect to the 
 latter, seeing that one event always follows another, we 
 regard the latter as the cause of the former. As, also, we find 
 nothing existing by itself, but everything in the relation of 
 antecedent and consequent, we become impressed with the 
 belief that this relation is a necessary one, and invariably look 
 for an antecedent or cause. 
 
 Dr. Brown says, " We see in nature one event followed by 
 another. The fall of a spark on gunpowder, for example, fol- 
 lowed by the deflagration of the gunpowder, and by a peculiar 
 tendency of our constitution, which we must take for granted, 
 whatever be our theory of power, we believe, that, as long as- 
 all the circumstances continue the same, the sequence of events 
 will continue the same ; that the deflagration of gunpowder, 
 for example, will be the invariable consequence of the fall of a 
 spark on it, in other words, we believe the gunpowder to 
 be susceptible of deflagration on the application of a spark, 
 and a spark to have the power of deflagrating gunpowder." 
 
 " Power is significant not of anything different from the 
 invariable antecedent itself, but of the mere invariableness of 
 the order of its appearance in reference to some invariable con- 
 sequent ; the invariable antecedent being denominated a cause, 
 the invariable consequent an effect. To say that water has the 
 power of dissolving salt, and to say that salt will always melt 
 when water is poured upon it, is to say precisely the same 
 thing ; there is nothing in one proposition which is not exactly, 
 and to the same extent, enumerated in the other. 
 
 fs To know the powers of nature, is, then, nothing more 
 than to know what antecedents are and will be invariably 
 followed by what consequents ; for this invariableness, and not 
 any distinct existence, is ah 1 that the shorter term, power, in 
 in any case expresses." 51 
 
 It is true that this is all that we know of the powers of 
 nature, but it is not all that we believe, for from the action of 
 
 * Philosophy of the Human Mind, Lecture 6. 
 D D
 
 218 BELIEF. 
 
 the primitive power of the mind, causality, an idea of force or 
 power is derived, and we believe, and must believe, as implicitly 
 in its existence as in the reality of anything the idea of which 
 we receive through the senses. Thus, Mr. Combe says, " If 
 a cannon be fired, and the shot knock down a wall, Indi- 
 viduality and some other perceptive faculties observe only the 
 existence of the powder. Eventuality perceives the fire applied 
 to it, the explosion, the fall of the building, as events following 
 in succession ; but it forms no idea of power in the gunpowder, 
 when ignited, to produce the effect. When Causality, on the 
 other hand, is joined with Eventuality in contemplating these 
 phenomena, the impression of power or efficiency in the explod- 
 ing gunpowder, to produce the effect, arises spontaneously in 
 the mind, and Causality produces an intuitive belief in the 
 existence of this efficiency, just because it is constituted to do 
 so." 
 
 It is true Causality gives the impression of power or 
 efficiency, but without another mental faculty no belief would 
 attend it. Wonder, as we have endeavoured to show before, 
 creates belief, as it invests all our ideas with a feeling of reality. 
 It does more ; it gives to this idea of power a personality ; it 
 dresses it in all the clothing that the other faculties furnish ; 
 adds to it unity, infinity, ascribes to it the tendency or design 
 of all causation, and transforms it into a God, infinite in power 
 and goodness. 
 
 Thus DIEECT BELIEF, that is "where a proposition, with- 
 out regard to any former proposition expressed or understood, 
 is admitted as soon as it is expressed in words, or as soon as it 
 rises silently into the mind," is founded and must attend upon 
 the action of each of the primitive intellectual faculties ; the in- 
 dications that they give of the existence and relations of the 
 external world, being the First Truths upon which all reasoning 
 must be based. 
 
 Belief in Testimonjr is merely belief in ideas furnished by 
 Causality, that is, the action of the primitive faculty of Caus- 
 ality gives us a perception of a relation existing in a train of
 
 BELIEF. 219 
 
 sequences, and our belief is in proportion, as that relation seems 
 sustained and unbroken. "For what is Testimony? It is 
 itself an event. When we believe anything, then, in conse- 
 quence of testimony, we only believe one event in consequence 
 of another. But this is the general account of our belief in 
 events. It is the union of the ideas of an antecedent and a 
 consequent by a strong association."* v 
 
 Belief in Propositions, or indirect belief, is founded upon a 
 perception of relation between such propositions, and the know- 
 ledge previously furnished by the primitive faculties of the 
 mind upon which direct belief depends. Such is the belief in 
 God.t 
 
 Mill, vol. 1, p. 290. 
 
 f Mr. Herbert Spencer, writing on the Universal Postulate and its Corollaries, 
 appears to agree mainly with Dr. Thomas Brown. He says, " We have seen 
 first, that the existence of belief is, in so far as our reasoning faculties are con- 
 cerned, the fundamental fact ; next, that beliefs that invariably exist are those 
 which, both logically and of necessity, we must adopt; further, that those are in- 
 variably existent beliefs, of which we cannot conceive the negations ; and, 
 lastly, that whether belief having this warrant be infallible or not, it must 
 equally happen that the fewer times we assume the validity of such warrant 
 in reaching any conclusion, the more certain must that conclusion be. These 
 positions being granted ; it inevitably results, as we have found, that the cur- 
 rent belief in objects as external independent entities, has a higher guarantee 
 than any other belief whatever that our cognition of existence considered as 
 noumenal, has a certainty which no cognition of existence considered as 
 phenomenal, can ever approach ; or, in other words that, judged logically as 
 well as instinctively, Realism is the only rational creed ; and that all adverse 
 creeds are self-destructive." Principles of Psychology, p. 59. We agree with 
 Mr. Spencer " that beliefs that invariably exist are those which, both logically 
 and of necessity, we must adopt, but that these beliefs are tested, as he sup- 
 poses, by our "inability to conceive their negations," we do not think is borne 
 out by facts. Belief, as we have seen, attends the action of each primitive 
 faculty, and cannot be separated from it ; and we have seen also that we may 
 have a speculative unbelief in the action of our faculties, that is " conceive 
 their negations," but cannot have a practical one. Thus although we practically 
 believe in the consciousness or form of thought supplied by each faculty, 
 reflection on consciousness, or our reasoning powers, are quite capable of 
 examining both the cause and grounds of our belief, and they show us that it in 
 ft blind instinct, and that the belief in Realism is only more probable than the 
 belief in Idealism ; for notwithstanding all that we may believe, we really 
 "know only how we are affected by things without ourselves. That we can con- 
 ceive the negation of all our fundamental beliefs ia evidenced by the denial of
 
 220 BELIEF. 
 
 TRUTH. Truth to man, is merely the record of his feelings 
 and impressions. But what is the proof that this is true? 
 There is no proof: we must take it for granted : we intuitively 
 believe it, and we cannot for any practical purpose, believe other- 
 wise. The present condition of self is all of which we can 
 speak with absolute certainty. The existence of an external 
 world, with its properties, connexions and dependencies : with 
 everything relating to past, present, or future; and conse- 
 quently our own identity, must all be taken for granted ; the 
 only evidence of their truth being that we feel with reference 
 to them as we say that we do. 
 
 the very existence of matter, space, time, &c., a sensation or idea is certainly 
 the negation of all these, and we may conceive that beings may be so consti- 
 tuted as to receive the very opposite impressions from the same external 
 causes that affect us. We necessarily believe in the ''intuitions of sense," 
 but reason is quite competent to inquire into the causes of this belief and thus 
 carry " the order of nature" the sequence of events, which is all we know, 
 several steps beyond or in advance of our intuitions. The " cognitions of 
 external realities, immediately reached through the senses," have thus not a 
 higher validity than any cognitions immediately reached by reasoning. Mr. 
 Spencer says, " Though the Universal Postulate endorses our belief in an outer 
 world and in personal existence in Matter, Force, Space, Time, Change, 
 Motion, Extension, Form, and the so called primitive attributes of things it 
 does not indorse our beliefs in colour, scent, sound, and the attributes classed 
 as secondary for while our beliefs in the first are of the kind whose negations 
 are inconceivable, we can, after a little analysis, very readily conceive the 
 negation of our ideas in the last." In our special analysis of the faculties, we 
 have already shown that we can make no distinction between what have been 
 called primary and secondary attributes, that the evidence for one rests upon 
 precisely the same evidence as the other, and that we really know nothing 
 with respect to either one or the other of what is "inherent in things," but 
 as effects produced by things upon us, that is, upon our primitive mental 
 faculties : Colour being as directly derived from a primitive faculty as Form, 
 and it being quite as possible to conceive the negation of one as the other. 
 " Whilst it may ever remain impossible for us to think of them (external attri- 
 butes as we believe in them) as otherwise," yet they may be otherwise. Mr. 
 Spencer regards this as the last refuge of Scepticism, and says, " this position 
 we shall find to be as logically inadmissible as it is practically unthinkable." 
 " A higher knowledge," I think, enables us to see that this is neither one nor 
 the other, for it shows us that the reason why we cannot possibly think of 
 them as otherwise is owing to the peculiar constitution of our mental faculties 
 our forms of thought, the alteration of any one of which might enable us 
 to think of things differently ; and that although it is probable that things are 
 what we believe them to be, it is quite possible they may be otherwise.
 
 BELIEF. 221 
 
 The evidence of Truth will, therefore, be different to every 
 individual mind ; neither can that which is truth to one mind 
 be strictly said to be truth to any other ; as no two minds are 
 exactly organized alike, and no two minds are ever, therefore, 
 affected exactly in the same way. We have seen that our ideas 
 depend equally upon the object or cause, the sense, and the 
 subject or intellectual faculty ; and although the object and 
 sense may be the same, yet the intellectual faculties differing, 
 as they do more or less in all men, the perception of the object 
 differs. We may readily conceive of an intelligence, with 
 faculties so differently constituted from our own, that all which 
 we call truth should to it appear falsehood. Matter might 
 appear to such a mind to have different properties, different 
 relations, different dependencies.* In minds constituted in 
 other respects like our own, the addition of a single faculty 
 might be sufficient to alter the whole appearance of nature. It 
 is unphilosophical, therefore, to suppose that the causes of ideas 
 in us are necessarily what they appear to be ; all that we can 
 affirm respecting them is that they affect us in a certain manner; 
 and the description of the mode in which we are affected is that 
 which constitutes truth to us."f 
 
 * " To beings capable of perceiving and distinguishing the different parti- 
 cles that form by their aggregation those small masses, which after the 
 minutest mechanical division of which we are capable, appear atoms to us, the 
 pride which we feel, in our chemical analysis, must seem as ludicrous, as to us 
 would seem the pride of the bliud, if one, who had never enjoyed the oppor- 
 tunity of beholding the suu, were to boast of having discovered, by a nice 
 comparison of the changing temperature of bodies, that, during certain hours of 
 the day there passed over our earth some great source of heat. The addition 
 of one new sense to us, who have already the inestimable advantages which 
 vision affords, might probably, in a few hours communicate more instruction, 
 with respect to matter, than all which is ever to repay aud consummate the 
 physical labours of mankind ; giving, perhaps, to a single glance, those slow 
 revelations of nature which, one by one, at intervals of many centuries, are to 
 immortalize the future sages of our race." Brown's Philosophy of the Human 
 Mind, Lecture 5. 
 
 + " la all German systems since the time of Kant, it ia the fundamental 
 principle to deny the existence of Matter ; rather, we should say, to believe 
 it in a radically different sense from that in which the Scotch Philosopher 
 strives to demonstrate it, and the English Unphilosopher believes it without
 
 222 BELIEF. 
 
 The " first truths" or fundamental principles upon which 
 all reasoning is 'based being different in all men, our surprise 
 need not be excited when we find that the line of argument 
 that appears irresistible to one, utterly fails to convince another ; 
 and that two individuals seldom arrive exactly at the same con- 
 clusions. Thus, one sees only coincidence where another traces 
 
 demonstration. To any of our readers who has dipped never so slightly into 
 metaphysical reading, this Idealism will be no inconceivable thing. Indeed it 
 is singular how widely diffused and under what different aspects we meet with 
 it among the most dissimilar classes of mankind. Our Bishop Berkeley seems 
 to have adopted it from religious inducements : Father Boscovich was led to 
 a very cognate result, in his Theoria Philosophies Naturalis, from merely 
 mathematical considerations. Of the ancient Pyrrho or the modern Hume we 
 do not speak : but in the opposite end of the Earth, as Sir W. Jones informs 
 us, a similar theory, of immemorial age, prevails among the theologians of 
 Hindostan. Nay, Professor Stewart has declared his opinion, that whoever at 
 some time of his life has not entertained this theory, may reckon that he has yet 
 shown no talent for metaphysical research. Neither is it any argument 
 against the Idealist to say that, since he denies the absolute existence of Matter, 
 he ought in conscience likewise to deny its relative existence ; and plunge over 
 precipices, and run himself through with swords, by way of recreation, since 
 these, like all other material things, are only phantasms and spectra, and there- 
 fore of no consequence. If a man, corporeally taken, is but a phantasm and 
 spectrum himself, all this will ultimately amount to much the same as it did 
 before. Yet herein lies Dr. Reid's grand triumph over the Skeptics, which is 
 as good as no triumph whatever. For as to the argument which he and his 
 followers insist on, under all possible variety of figures, it amounts only to 
 this very plain consideration, that 'men naturally, and without reasoning, 
 lelieve in the existence of Matter ;' and seems, philosophically speaking, not to 
 have any value; nay, the introduction of it into philosophy may be con- 
 sidered as an act of suicide on the part of that science, the life and business of 
 which, that of ' interpreting appearances,' is hereby at an end. Curious it ia, 
 moreover, to observe how these common-sense Philosophers, men who brag 
 chiefly of their irrefragable logic, and keep watch and ward, as if this were 
 their special trade, against ' Mysticism' and ' Visionary Theories,' are themselves 
 obliged to base their whole system on Mysticism, and a Theory, on Faith, in 
 short, and that of a very comprehensive kind ; the Faith, namely, either that 
 man's Senses are themselves Divine, or that they afford not only an honest, 
 but a literal representation of the woikings of some Divinity. So true is it 
 that for these men also, all knowledge of the visible rests on belief of the 
 invisible, and derives its first meaning and certainty therefrom ! 
 
 " The Idealist again boasts that his philosophy is Transcendental, that is, 
 ' ascending beyond the senses ;' which, he asserts, all Philosophy, properly so 
 called, by its nature is, and must be : and in this way he is led to various un- 
 expected conclusions. To a Transcendental'st, Matter has an existence but 
 only as a Phenomenon ; were we not there, neither would it be there ; it is a
 
 BELIEF. 223 
 
 causation, and is enabled to employ the same causes to pro- 
 duce the same effects in different circumstances. And yet is 
 it not the commonly received opinion that all men naturally are 
 equally capable of judging ; and are not men frequently the 
 most dogmatical on those subjects that they are the least capa- 
 ble of understanding, and the most eager to refute those argu- 
 ments the force of which nature has given them no faculties to 
 appreciate ? This may be accounted for by the fact that each 
 person instinctively believes that which he himself perceives, 
 whether his perceptions be correct or not : and the greater part 
 of such belief is formed at a period during which our percep- 
 
 rnere Relation, or rather the result of a Relation between our living Souls and 
 t!ie f>reat First Cause ; and depends for its apparent qualities on our bodily and 
 mental organs ; liaving itself no intrinsic qualities, being, in the common sense 
 of that word, Nothing. The tree is green and hard, not of its own natural 
 virtue, but simply because my eye and my hand are fashioned so as to discern 
 such and such appearances under such and such conditions. Nay, as an 
 Idealist might say, even on the most popular grounds, must it not be so ? 
 Bring a sentient being, with eyes little different, with fingers ten times 
 harder than mine ; and to him that Thing which I call Tree shall be yellow 
 and soft, as truly as to me it is green and hard. From his nervous-structure 
 in all points the reverse of mine, and this same tree shall not be combustible, 
 or heat producing, but dissoluble and coil-producing, not high and convex, 
 but deep and concave ; shall simply have all properties exactly the reverse of 
 those I attribute to it. ' There is, in fact,' says Fichte, 'no Tree there, but 
 only a manifestation of Power from something that is not /.' The same is true 
 of material Nature at large, of the whole visible universe, with all its move- 
 ments, figures, accidents and qualities ; all are impressions produced on me by 
 something different from me. This, we suppose, may be the foundation of what 
 Fichte means by his far-famed Ich and Nicht-Ich ( I and Not-I ;) words, which 
 taking lodging, ( to use the Hudibraatic phrase) in certain ' heads that were to 
 be let unfurnished,' occasioned a hollow echo, as of Laughter from the empty 
 apartments; though the words are, in themselves, quite harmless, and my 
 represent the basis of a metaphysical Philosophy as fitly as any other words. 
 But farther, and what is still stranger than such Idealism, according to these 
 Kantean systems, the organs of the mind too, what is called the Understanding, 
 are of a no less arbitrary, and, as it were, accidental character than those of the 
 Body. Time and Space themselves are not external but internal entities : 
 they have no outward existence, there is no time and no space out of the mind ; 
 they are mere forms of man's spiritual being, laws under which his thinking 
 nature is constituted to act. This seems the hardest conclusion of all; but 
 it is an important one with Kant ; and is not given forth as a dogma, but care- 
 fully deduced in his Critik der Reinen Vernunft with great precision, and the 
 trictest form of argument." Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. 2, p. 106.
 
 224 BELIEF. 
 
 tions are likely to be incorrect from their incompleteness. 
 Belief also being instinctive, is as readily extended to the ideal 
 as to the real, to fancied relations of cause and effect as to true 
 ones. Thus, when the judgment is not sufficiently strong to 
 examine correctly the grounds upon which belief is founded, 
 prejudice will come to its aid and cause a man to maintain his 
 point in spite of reason, and even contrary to it. But since all 
 men think and feel and believe differently, what is to be the 
 test of truth ? We can have no other than experience. The 
 record of the mode in which the majority of men are affected 
 by the external world must be considered truth with respect to 
 it. That which appears blue to the majority, must be said to 
 be blue, although to some few who possess a peculiar develop- 
 ment of the faculty that perceives colour, it may appear to be 
 green or pink. 
 
 With regard to the truth of those propositions upon which 
 experience does not directly bear, the existence of a Deity, 
 for example, the only test can be the relation of such pro- 
 positions to those of which experience does inform us. And 
 here it is that mankind fall into controversy and error; for 
 while all agree with respect to those truths of which direct 
 experience affords everyday proof, the evidence for those truths 
 which require to be searched out by the reasoning powers, must 
 appear valid or otherwise, as those reasoning powers are more 
 or less efficient ; so that what seems indubitably true to one 
 may be considered improbable or even absurd by another who 
 is more capable of sifting evidence. To all thus acquainted 
 with the diversified powers of the mind, dogmatism is not only 
 wrong, but exceedingly absurd. All that the philosopher can 
 do is to say what he sees, and invite other people to look 
 and see if they can see it also. 
 
 That which Mr. Combe relates of a few individuals, will be 
 found to apply to all mankind, viz., " That there is a tendency 
 to believe without examination ; and that an effort of philosophy 
 is necessary to resist belief, instead of evidence being requisite 
 to produce it." The natural tendency of all minds is to credu-
 
 BELIEF. 225 
 
 lity and not to scepticism, and it is necessary that it should be 
 so, for " faith removes mountains." Ignorance believes, but 
 philosophy doubts and examines. Of that which constitutes 
 the belief of the great mass of mankind, one half at least may 
 be shown to be erroneous. They believe in things and beings 
 for the existence of which there is not the slightest evidence, 
 and their minds are filled with imaginary relations of cause 
 and effect, which the experience of a life is insufficient to dis- 
 prove or correct.* 
 
 To searchers after truth, then, it is absolutely necessary that 
 nothing be admitted which is not either a first truth, or founded 
 upon a first truth. A single proposition believed without 
 sufficient evidence, is dangerous to all truth ; it becomes with 
 us a first truth, upon which we build all kinds of erroneous 
 conclusions. If we attempt to go beyond that to which our 
 faculties are limited, if we attempt to reason independently of 
 those first truths which it is the province of each faculty to 
 furnish, we immediately fall into absurdities and contradic- 
 tions. 
 
 For instance, the term " infinite," used so much by theo- 
 logians, is usually employed to designate that which is unlimited, 
 boundless, to which nothing can be added or taken away. But 
 this definition consists of words without meaning, for our 
 
 * In contemplating the character of the eminent persons who appeared 
 about this era, nothing is more interesting and instructive thau to remark the 
 astonishing combination, in the same minds, of the highest intellectual endow- 
 ment, with the most deplorable aberrations of the understanding ; and even, 
 in numberless instances, with the most childish superstitions of the multi- 
 tude. Of this apparent inconsistency, Bodinus does not furnish a solitary 
 example. The same remark may be extended in a greater or less degree, 
 to most of the other celebrated names hitherto mentioned. llelancthou, 
 as appears from his letters, was an interpreter of dreams, and a caster 
 of nativities ; and Luther seems to have seriously believed that he had 
 himself frequently seen the arch enemy face to face, and held arguments with 
 him on points of theology. Nor was the study of the severe sciences, on all 
 occasions, an effectual remedy against such illusions of the imagination. The 
 sagacious Kepler was an astrologer and a visionary ; and his friend Tycho 
 Brahe, the Prince of Astronomers, kept an idiot in his service, to whose pro- 
 phecies he listened as revelations from above." Stewart's Dissertation*, 
 Encyc. Brit., p. 29. 
 E E
 
 226 BELIEF. 
 
 faculties give us no knowledge of that which is boundless ; and 
 in reasoning upon it we necessarily plunge into obscurity. 
 Thus, concerning " infinite" space, if this planetary system 
 were to be deducted from the universe, we cannot suppose that 
 the universe would be less infinite than it was before ; therefore, 
 a part is as great as the whole. 
 
 So of Infinite Duration or Immortality, as applied to beings 
 who have begun to be : in consequence of this beginning of 
 existence they can never be said to live for more than half an 
 Eternity: therefore that which is infinite is capable of being 
 halved. 
 
 Again, the doctrine of Infinite Divisibility implies the same 
 absurdity and contradiction. " Everything," as Hume says, 
 " capable of being infinitely divided contains an infinite num- 
 ber of parts ; otherwise the division would be stopped short by 
 the indivisible parts, which we should immediately arrive at. 
 Finite extension must, in this case, suppose an infinite number 
 of parts."* 
 
 * Upon this verbal quibble, or rather misuse of words, is based the 
 celebrated Achilles puzzle, as given in " Mill's Logic," (2nd vol., p. 453.) It is 
 said let Achilles run ten times as fast as a tortoise, yet, if the tortoise has the 
 start, Achilles will never overtake him ; for, suppose them to be first sepa- 
 rated by an interval of a thousand feet ; when Achilles has run these 
 thousand feet the tortoise will have run a hundred, and when Achilles has 
 run those hundred, the tortoise will have run on ten, and so on for ever : 
 therefore Achilles may run on for ever without overtaking the tortoise. 
 Now, says Mill, the " for ever " in the conclusion means, for any length of 
 time that can be supposed ; but in the premises " for ever" does not mean 
 any length of time, it means any number of subdivisions of time. It means 
 that we may divide a thousand feet by ten, and that quotient again by ten, 
 and so on as often as we please ; that there never need be an end to the sub- 
 divisions of the distance, nor, consequently, to those of the time in which 
 it is performed. But an unlimited number of subdivisions may be made of 
 that which is itself limited. The argument proves no other infinity of dura- 
 tion than may be embraced within five minutes. As long as the five minutes 
 are not expired, what remains of them may be divided by ten, and again by 
 ten, as often as you like, which is perfectly compatible with there being only 
 five minutes altogether. It proves, in short, that to pass through this finite 
 epace requires a time that is infinitely divisible, but not an infinite time ; the 
 confounding of which distinction Hobbes had already seen to be the gist of 
 the fallacy.
 
 BELIEF. 227 
 
 Upon speculative points like these, theory upon theory has 
 been formed, and mankind have been engaged in perpetual 
 controversy, and will be so to the end of time, unless, by a 
 close analysis of the powers of the mind, showing the relation 
 that has been established between us and the external world, 
 the boundary of our possible knowledge be determined. With 
 the help of an analysis like this, which will acquaint us with 
 each intellectual faculty and its function, we shall be in no 
 danger of wasting our powers in the vain attempt to overstep 
 this boundary : we shall possess a standard by which first truths 
 may be determined the want of which has led to the unwise 
 extension of them by one party, and the equally unwise limi- 
 tation of them by others, producing thereby endless errors and 
 uncertainty respecting that science which of all others ought 
 to be the most certain, as in it are involved the highest interests 
 of mankind. 
 
 BELIEF IN DEITY. The belief in supreme power we find 
 nearly universal in all countries yet known to us; and this 
 power has been " in every clime adored" as far back as written 
 records extend. In the first ages of the world the powers of 
 nature were deified and worshipped under every variety of 
 form, with attributes borrowed always from man's own nature, 
 fashioned according to the laws of his own intelligence and the 
 degree of civilization then prevailing. Every cause that was 
 hidden, every antecedence not evident to the senses, a spiritual 
 Being was created to supply ; the earth was peopled with fairies 
 and genii, and there were gods of the winds, of the sea, and 
 of the air. As man increased in intelligence, his gods dimin- 
 ished in number, and as his knowledge enabled him to gene- 
 ralise the powers of nature, he attached them to one supreme 
 source, the Great Cause of all. 
 
 This is only in accordance with the laws of the human mind; 
 Wonder or Faith gives the sense of reality ; and wherever this 
 sense of reality exists, there is an irresistible tendency to invest 
 it with the forms of our own intelligence. In this manner our 
 sensations and ideas are to us realities, and although they are
 
 228 BELIEF. 
 
 known to us as a train of separate thoughts only, yet we in- 
 vest them with the form of intelligence peculiar to Individu- 
 ality, and we have the idea and speak of the mind of man as 
 simple and indivisible as one individual mind. We even indi- 
 vidualize all things that exist, and call it the universe. So we 
 individualize the separate impressions of power or efficiency 
 derivable from every separate cause, and thus form the idea of 
 God as one, as a personality. But it is evident that this is to 
 invest the Great Cause of all with an attribute derived from 
 our particular form of intelligence, and we may as much err in 
 ascribing to Him unity or personality as if we were to depict 
 Him under our own particular bodily shape. 
 
 But if it be irrational to measure the infinite by powers 
 that have relation only to the finite ; to invest the Deity with 
 our own forms of thought, our own modes of intelligence ; it 
 is, if anything, more inconsistent to ascribe to Him feelings 
 which belong to man, and have been given to enable him to 
 perform his part upon this earth. Necessarily believing in a 
 God however, we have formed Him after our own image, not 
 unfrequently ascribing to Him some of the lowest of our 
 feelings in their greatest abuse. We have no faculties that can 
 make us acquainted with God as He is, or with his mode of 
 existence, and we only degrade Him by reducing Him to our 
 level. 
 
 What then do we know ? Almost nothing : for " who 
 by searching can find out God?" It is a great mystery before 
 which we must be content to bow down in awe and reverence. 
 The " forces" or powers of nature we have seen to be indes- 
 tructible, they are transmitted, they may change their form, 
 and all the varied effects we see may be, and probably are, the 
 result of one original force set in motion at the beginning. 
 But when we speak of beginnings, we immediately feel that we 
 are out of our depth. " There is no efficient cause, or any- 
 thing that exerts an agency in the dominion of nature. A 
 cause is a thing uncaused ; if produced, it must resign its title, 
 and be ranked as an effect; consequently there cannot be a
 
 BELIEF. 229 
 
 string of causes in nature : one only is so, and all the rest are 
 only passive results." Rev. J. W. Mailler, p. 39. It is im- 
 possible to get away from this reasoning. Man's powers, 
 mental, as well as bodily, are derived. The one only cause we 
 call God.* But the "force" in nature is not a blind force, it 
 is intelligent. The proof of intelligence is that it moves 
 towards a given end or purpose ; we judge of the nature 
 of that intelligence by the object or worthiness of that purpose ; 
 the object of morality is universal happiness or good, and in 
 proportion as the intelligence in nature tends towards that end 
 do we say it is a moral intelligence and not a mere primum 
 mobile. 
 
 We see a man working towards definite aims and we infer 
 individual intelligence like our own, which on examination we 
 find to be ruled by general laws ; we see also all nature working 
 towards definite aims, and we quite as logically infer general 
 intelligence acting on the body of the universe, as our intelli- 
 gence does on our bodies, and governing by general laws, if 
 not like men governed by them. 
 
 Hume, Kant, Shelly, and Holyoake, have each shown that 
 a Great First Cause is an assumption, and they hold it to be 
 quite as logical and reasonable to suppose that causes have 
 always had their efficiency as that they ever had a beginning. 
 It may be so, for we know nothing about beginnings, but that 
 there is a presiding Intelligence it is very difficult to doubt. 
 The Atheist, however, does not think so ; he assumes that there 
 is an inherent power in each cause which has always existed 
 
 * "Sweep away the illusion of time ; glance, if thou have eyes, from the 
 near moving cause to its far distant Mover. The stroke that came transmitted 
 through a whole galaxy of elastic balls, was it less a stroke than if the last ball 
 only had been struck and sent flying ? Oh, could I, ( with the time-annihi- 
 lating Hat,) transport thee direct from the beginnings to the endings, how 
 were thy eyesight unsealed, and thy heart set flaming in the light-sea of 
 celestial wonder ! Then sawest thou that this fair universe, were it in the 
 meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star domed City of God ; that 
 through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every living 
 soul, the glory of a present God still beams : But Nature, which is the Time- 
 vesture of God, and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish." 
 Sartor Resartus, p. 274.
 
 230 BELIEF. 
 
 and that in the infinite concourse and commingling of atoms in 
 infinite time and space, the present order of things has arisen ; 
 everything inharmonious having a natural and necessary ten- 
 dency to destroy itself, and only that which is good and harmo- 
 nious being permanent or having power to continue in exist- 
 ence at all. 
 
 But we have something besides power, we have beauty 
 the garment of God ; how do we account for this ? It is true 
 the great forces in nature are the aggregate of infinitely small 
 ones ; it is the animalcules, the corals, the imperceptible power 
 that raises the waters from the deep, that work the great 
 changes in the world ; but whence come the flowers? " Me- 
 thinks, if there were no other proofs of God's goodness, the 
 flowers would supply them in abundance. Answer it to thy- 
 self, poor soul that doubtest of his love. * * Why has he 
 made these flowers ? Why does he send to thee these little 
 joys, as gentle and unnoticed often as a mother's kiss upon a 
 sleeping child? There is not, it would seem, a conceivable 
 reason to be given for the existence of flowers, (at least for 
 their beauty and perfume), other than the intention to provide 
 for man a pure and most delicate pleasure. Geologists tell us that 
 in the epochs there are few traces of flowers ; such as there were 
 being small and probably of the secondary colours, mere ves- 
 sels for the ripening of the seeds. Only when the human era 
 approached, the order of the rosacoe appeared, the fruit trees 
 with their luxurious burdens, and all our brightest and sweetest 
 flowers, till the wilderness rejoiced and blossomed as the rose. 
 Thus as the coal and the iron, and the stone, were laid up in 
 the dawn of time for our use to-day, so the flowers sprout up 
 over the earth for our delight, and to deck the cradle God had 
 prepared for his child." Miss F. B. Cobbe, Fraser, 1861. 
 This is very prettily put, but it contains the old leaven of man's 
 supremacy at the expense of the rest of creation. If in the 
 epochs there were no flowers, so were there no insects. 
 Flowers seem more by right to belong to the insect world, than 
 to man.* 
 
 * It is singular how the a posteriori reasoning on Deity agrees with 
 . the a priori of Spiuoza and others. According to Spinoza " There is but one
 
 BELIEF. 231 
 
 BELIEF IN REVELATION. We have shown that each man's 
 own judgment is, and must be to himself, the standard of 
 
 infinite Substance, and that is God. Whatever is, is in God; and without 
 Him nothing can be conceived. He is the universal Being of which all 
 things are the manifestations. He is the sole Substance, Mode caunot exist. 
 God, viewed under the attributes of Infinite Substance, is the natura naturans 
 viewed as a manifestation, as the M jcles under which his attributes appear, 
 He is the natura naturata. He is the cause of all things, and that imina- 
 nently, but not transiently. He has two infinite attributes Extension and 
 Thought. Extension is visible Thought ; and Thought is invisible Extension : 
 they are the Objective and Subjective of which God is the Identity. Every 
 thing is a mode of God's attribute of Extension; every thought, wish, or 
 feeling, a mode of his attribute of Thought. That Extension and Thought 
 are not Substances, as Descartes maintained, is obvious from this : that they 
 are not conceived per se, but per aliud. Something is extended : what is ? 
 Not the extension itself, but something prior to it, viz., Substance. Sub- 
 atauce is uncreated, but creates by the internal necessity of its nature. 
 There may be many existing things, but only one existence ; many forms, 
 but only one Substance. God is the ' idea immanens' the One and All. 
 * * * God is not the material universe, but the uuiverse is one or part 
 of His infinite Attribute of Extension : He is the identity of the natura 
 Daturas and the natura naturata." 
 
 It is a mere verbal resemblance, therefore, this of Spinozaism to Atheism ; 
 but the history of Philosophy shows too many instances of the errors of 
 language created into errors of fact, to astonish any reader. It was our place 
 to point out the error, which we trust we have done ; and the following paper 
 from Schelling'& Philosophtsche Schriften, accurately draws the distinction 
 between Pantheism and Atheism : "God is that which exists in itself, and is 
 comprehended from itself alone ; the finite is that which is necessarily in 
 another, and can only be comprehended from that other. Things therefore 
 are not only in degree, or through their limitations different from God, but 
 toto genera. Whatever their relation to God on other points, they are abso- 
 lutely divided from him on this : that they exist in another and he is self- 
 existent or original. From this difference it is manifest that all individual 
 finite things taken together cannot constitute God, since that which is in its 
 nature derived, cannot be one with its original, any more than the single 
 points of a circumference taken together can constitute the circumference, 
 which as a whole, is of necessity prior to them in idea." Lewes's History of 
 Philosophy, vol. 3, p. 146. Schelliug also says, " These are but the innume- 
 rable individual eyes with which the Infinite World Spirit beholds himself." 
 Ibid, p. 189. 
 
 Schiller says " Nature is an infinitely divided God," and again " The 
 Divine One has dispersed itself into numberless sensible substances, as a white 
 beam of light is decomposed by the prism into seven coloured rays. And a 
 divine being would be evolved from the union of all those substances, as the 
 seven coloured rays dissolve again into the clear light-beam. The existing 
 form of Nature is the optic glass, and all the activities of spirit are only an 
 infinite colour-play of that simple divine ray. Should it ever please the
 
 232 BELIEF. 
 
 truth ; that what appears to him to be true, is, for the time at 
 least, truth to him. This is simply making reason the test of 
 
 Almighty to shatter this prism, then the barrier betwixt himself and the 
 world would fall to ruin ; all spirits would disappear into one infinite spirit, 
 all accords would melt into one harmony, all streams would rest in one 
 ocean. The attraction of the elements gave to nature its material form. 
 The attraction of spirits, multiplied and continued to infinity, must finally 
 lead to the abolition of the separation, or ( may I utter it) create God. Such 
 an attraction is Love." Philosophical Letter, p. 40. 
 
 Fichte says, all " appearance" whatsoever we see in the world is but as a 
 vesture of the "Divine Idea of the world," for " that which lies at the bottom 
 of appearing." 
 
 Emerson in his Essay on Compensation says, " Everything in nature con- 
 tains all the powers of nature ; everything is made of one hidden stuff. The 
 true doctrine of Omnipresence is, that God reappears with all his parts in 
 every moss and cobweb ; thus the universe is alive." 
 
 The Rev. J. Whyte Mailler, M.A., says, " When we view the world as 
 one universal effect, we are at once led to the contemplation of a universal 
 Divine Agency. Does not the infinite act on every atom? It is only by so 
 doing that He upholds and governs the mighty fabric of the world. In what 
 manner His immensity comes into contact with matter, cannot be discovered. 
 But the truth is obvious, that whether mediately or immediately, He guides 
 and directs all things, and is the sole source of power. We are deceived if we 
 suppose that the properties of substances have any inherent activity ; as they 
 depend on the In6nite not only for their fixed qualities but for their existence. 
 Does man, therefore, make use of the power of God when he makes experi- 
 ments with substances ? In one respect he does, and that as often as he moves 
 his arm. ' In Him we live and move and have our being.' * * * God 
 never delegates His power ; He cannot transfer divinity to a substance : there ia 
 no power, therefore, separated from Himself. In Him all things have their 
 being." The Philosophy of the Bible, pp. 35-40. 
 
 We are unable to see in what this view differs from Emerson's, although 
 its author says Emerson's is Pantheistic and therefore Atheistic. "Matter," 
 he says, " by Emerson, is esteemed an Almighty Being, animated with inherent 
 life and power, and furnished with all the faculties of an intelligent existence :" 
 but when Emerson says " everything in nature contains all the power of 
 nature," he certainly does not mean separately and independently of Omni- 
 present Deity any more than the Rev. Mr. Mailler does. 
 
 In one thing only all the most advanced minds agree viz., that it is as 
 impossible to disconnect God from the material living universe, as it is to dis- 
 connect the Soul from the corporeal living body ; still w know nothing 
 " Positively ;" the great mystery is still veiled. A very clever writer on the 
 Nebular Hypothesis, in the Westminster, ( July, 1858,) observes, "It remains 
 only to point out that while the genesis of the solar system, and of countless 
 other systems like it, is thus rendered comprehensible, the ultimate mystery 
 continues as great as ever. The problem of existence is not solved : it is sim- 
 ply removed farther back. The nebular hypothesis throws no light upon the 
 origin of diffused matter ; and diffused matter as much needs accounting foe
 
 BELIEF. 233 
 
 all truth, and it may be interesting to inquire whether we have, 
 or can have, any higher standard. There are many who say 
 " the revealed word of God " is the standard of truth, and we 
 are called upon to " submit our reason to revelation." But 
 this fundamental principle of priestcraft is an error, and we 
 never are or can be called upon to submit our reason to anyone 
 or anything. Reason was given to man for his guidance, and 
 it must be supreme in everything. Admitting fully that " the 
 revealed declarations of God" are the highest standard of 
 
 o 
 
 truth, it is " reason " that has to determine where such 
 
 as concrete matter. The genesis of an atom is not easier to conceive than the 
 genesis of a planet. Nay, indeed, so far from making the Universe less 
 wonderful than before, it makes it more wonderful. Creation by manufacture 
 is a much lower thing than creation by evolution. A man can put together 
 a machine ; but he cannot make a machine develop itself. The ingenious 
 artizan, able as some have been, so far to imitate vitality as to produce 
 a mechanical pianoforte-player, may in some sort conceive how, by greater 
 skill, a complete man might be artificially produced; but he is totally 
 unable to conceive how such a complex organism gradually arises out of 
 a minute structureless germ. That our harmonious universe once existed 
 potentially as formless diffused matter, and has slowly grown into ita 
 present organized state, is a far more astonishing fact than would have 
 been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed. The 
 nebular hypothesis implies a First Cause, as much transcending ' the 
 mechanical God of Paley,' as this does the fetish of the savage." The doc- 
 trine of the later Stoics was that the entire body of matter unfolded itself, 
 from a principle of life as inherent in its constitution as the property of 
 vegetation in the seed : it advanced from inorganic to organic, and thence 
 through a series of ages to the highest intelligence in man. We cannot say 
 we see how this theory differs from the above, or from the modern "theory of 
 Development," and although it certainly appears most in accordance with all 
 modern discoveries in Geological science, yet we cannot say with the writer in 
 the Westminster, that it appears to us to show more power, or to excite more 
 wonder that intelligence should be millions of years evolving than days in 
 creating ; the same general laws of Deity, and the same direct operation would 
 appear to be at work in both cases. Anaxagorag says, ( 500, B.C.) "In the 
 beginning there was the Infinite, composed of homceomerioe, or elementary 
 seeds of infinite variety. But the mass of elements were as yet unmixed. 
 What was to mix them ? What power caused them to become arranged in one 
 harmonious all-embracing system ? This power he declared to be Intelligence, 
 the moving force of the universe. He, on the one hand, had rejected Fate, 
 as an empty name; on the other, he rejected Chance, as being no more than 
 the Cause unperceived by human reasoning." (Biographical History of 
 Philosophy, p. 66 ) The most advanced theories of the present day appear 
 to go little beyond this guess of Anaxagoras's more than 2,000 years ago. 
 
 F F
 
 234 BELIEF. 
 
 " revealed declarations " are to be found, and not only so, but 
 to interpret them afterwards, and there is no possible means of 
 determining that to be Revelation which is opposed to reason. 
 There has been much useless discussion as to the possibility of 
 working miracles, for granting to the fullest extent their possi- 
 bility, what do they prove? It has usually been considered 
 sufficient evidence that men were " sent of God" if they had this 
 power of working miracles. But supernatural power contains 
 no evidence in itself of whence such power is derived. There 
 may be a hundred sources from which such powers might be 
 derived besides the One Supreme. There may be a hundred 
 intelligences between us and Deity, with power little short of 
 the highest, and such may not necessarily wish our good or have 
 no interest in deceiving us. The fact is, we have no means 
 whatever of discriminating between the power of God and the 
 devil, but by the tendency of such power ; that is, the purpose 
 for which it is used, and our reason is the only means of deter- 
 mining this tendency. The Jews accused Christ of working 
 miracles by the aid of Beelzebub, and if we know it was not so, 
 it is from the tendency of that teaching which the miracles 
 were wrought to confirm. Baxter says all creeds come directly 
 from the devil. How are we to discriminate between angels of 
 light and darkness, supposing the wings and the horns and hoof 
 are myths ? Who is to say what are the powers and intelli- 
 gence of either ? and if the existence of such " principalities 
 and powers" be admitted, who is to say what " revelations," 
 let them be accompanied by whatever signs and wonders they 
 may, necessarily come from God? Can we be too cautious 
 not to accept anything, from whatever apparent source derived, 
 that may appear to derogate from His character? and have 
 we not the right to say in all such cases to all imknown powers 
 and intelligences, " Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are 
 ye?" No, there can be no sufficient external evidence of a 
 Revelation ; it must be internal; as Christ says " If any man will 
 do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God," 
 and this is the only test. Power is and can be no evidence of
 
 BELIEF. 235 
 
 anything but itself, and each separate fact can only be proved by 
 its own evidence. Experience, that is, conformity to the " order 
 of nature," is the only test of truth. Mankind have always wor- 
 shipped power and they still continue to do so, but there is no 
 necessary connection between power and truth, or between power 
 and goodness, and as we know nothing of the moral tendencies of 
 created intelligences not of this world, we are called upon all the 
 more to be true to the light of reason which our Creator has im- 
 planted within us. If the powers of Good and Evil we speak 
 with all reverence are as equally divided as the common belief 
 supposes, how is it possible to distinguish between them other- 
 wise? It is quite impossible to accept any power, or revelation, 
 or inspiration, as coming from God that is not in harmony with 
 His creation, and with our highest feelings, for those were im- 
 implanted in us by our Maker. New acts of really divine 
 power must always be in harmony with the old, for it is 
 impossible that any authority can establish anything at 
 variance with natural truth ; that is, with the laws of God 
 as inscribed in the Book of Nature. Consequently we find 
 enlightened Protestants of the present day quietly aban- 
 doning whatever 'may run counter to this reason and moral 
 sentiment, to the established facts of science, or to the daily 
 experience of human nature, just as the infallibility of the Pope 
 was given up ages ago. It follows, that no miracle, or super- 
 natural power merely, could prove the doctrine of a future 
 state, for, as we have said, the doctrine could be proved only by 
 its own evidence, viz., experience that people do live again after 
 this life ; and the only miraculous attestation of such a doc- 
 trine that could be accepted as proof ', would be to introduce us 
 to those who have gone before us. Mere power then, in any 
 shape, cannot attest a Revelation; after all it must be the 
 accordance of such Revelation with the known order of God's 
 providence, and reason only can show what that order is. 
 Reason also can alone test the various claims to " Inspiration" 
 which are advanced for the sacred writings of all nations, and 
 Revelation and Inspiration being recognized, reason only can
 
 230 BELIEF. 
 
 interpret them and determine their true meaning.* Reason is 
 thus the supreme arbiter here as in everything else, and the 
 Protestant principle of the right of private judgment requires 
 to be carried much farther than it has hitherto been, and if we 
 are not called upon to surrender our judgment to anything on 
 earth, still less are we called upon to do so for anything beyond 
 the earth, because we are still less able to determine its claim 
 upon our faith. God has not left us without a sufficient test of 
 what may come from Himself, but this test is and can only be 
 the too often much despised Reason. 
 
 * " How do you know, it may be asked, that so and so is declared in the 
 Bible ? You will say, ' I so understand the words :' but it may be answered, 
 ' Lean not to thine own understanding : how do you know that the Bible itself 
 contains the revelation of God's will : or that there is a God at all ? You 
 think you have good reason for the belief; your Reason leads you to that 
 conclusion : but your Reason is imperfect, fallible, and impaired ; and is 
 therefore 'an utterly incompetent tribunal.' Your argument therefore is 
 Completely suicidal; it leaves you no ground to stand on, no just assurance for 
 believing anything at all." Paley'a Moral Philosophy, with Annotations by 
 Archbishop Whately, p. 90.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 MATERIALISM, CONSCIOUSNESS, IDENTITY, ASSOCIATION. 
 
 WITH reference to the truths called "first truths," although 
 we must agree with Reid and Brown in placing them at the 
 foundation of all practical reasoning and belief, they are merely 
 instinctive indications given us for our guidance under the cir- 
 cumstances in which we are placed upon this earth, informing 
 us of the temporal relation between external things and beings 
 possessing our particular organization : and as we have 
 faculties that test the evidence of the senses, so the evidence 
 of one intellectual faculty, or class of faculties, may be tested 
 by others in the same mind, proving that " Pure Reason" and 
 " Practical Reason," are sometimes at variance. 
 
 MATERIALISM. Matter is known to us only as the cause of 
 certain sensations which we call by various names, as solidity, 
 extension, &c., but whether this cause be material or imma- 
 terial, substance or mere force, we have no means of deter- 
 mining.* 
 
 The Soul is the principle of sensation, dependent upon 
 the nervous system ; the nervous system depending upon life, 
 and life upon organization. 
 
 The Mind, as we have previously stated, is only the aggre- 
 gate of all the sensations of which a being is conscious ; indi- 
 viduality and unity being given to it by a form of our own 
 
 * " Matter" is a term also used to designate the cause of certain changes 
 in our states of consciousness, which changes are due, as we have seen, to the 
 action of the physical forces upon those tissues in and by which the organism 
 is developed into a conscious state of existence. * * Hence when used iu 
 this sense, the term Matter is synonymous with its forces, and not with inert 
 substance. Mind and Brain, Dr. Laycock, vol. 1, p. 326.
 
 238 CONSCIOUSNESS. 
 
 intelligence. What we term Perception, Conception, Memory, 
 Imagination, Judgment, are only diversified sensations, different 
 in their degree of intensity and in their character to the feelings 
 resulting from the action of the Propensities and Sentiments, 
 but still mere sensations. We are not justified in designating 
 the mind as the cause of sensations ; for of cause we know 
 nothing but as the invariable antecedent, and the invariable 
 antecedent of these sensations is, as far as we have yet dis- 
 covered, the action of the brain. Nor are we justified in 
 saying that the Mind is material, because that would be equi- 
 valent to saying that Sensation is material, which would be to 
 make the cause and effect the same. All facts, however, 
 justify us in saying that Sensation is caused by that which we 
 call material, in the only sense in which we can use the term 
 cause. 
 
 The fact that the properties of Matter are conceived of by 
 different individuals, according to their own particular organi- 
 zation or internal forms of thought, and that the connexion 
 between the mind and the real constitution of objects, is one of 
 mere relation, shows that the question of Materialism is an idle 
 question, and one of mere words ; as it is impossible for man 
 to separate the qualities really belonging to an object, from 
 such qualities as modified by the forms and modes of his own 
 intelligence. 
 
 CONSCIOUSNESS, as the term is used by one class of writers, 
 the metaphysicians, means nothing more than the ordinary 
 succession of our present feelings and ideas ; to feel a sensa- 
 tion and to be conscious of it, being, according to them, 
 synonymous. " There are not," Dr. Thomas Brown observes, 
 "sensations, thoughts, passions, and also consciousness, any 
 more than there is quadruped or animal as a separate being, to 
 be added to the wolves, tigers, elephants, and other living 
 creatures, which we include under these terms." 
 
 Again, Mill says, " It was of great importance for the pur- 
 pose of naming, that we should not only have names to distin-
 
 CONSCIOUSNESS. 239 
 
 guisli the different classes of our feelings, but also a name 
 applicable equally to all those classes. This purpose is 
 answered by the concrete term Conscious ; and the abstract of 
 it, Consciousness. Thus if we are in any way sentient ; that 
 is, have any of the feelings whatever of a living creature ; the 
 word Conscious is applicable to the feeler, and Consciousness 
 to the feeling : that is to say, the words are generical marks, 
 under which all the names of the subordinate classes of the 
 feelings of a sentient creature are included. When I smell a 
 rose, I am conscious ; when I have the idea of a fire, I am 
 conscious ; when I remember, I am conscious ; when I reason 
 and when I believe, I am conscious ; but believing and being 
 conscious of belief, are not two things, they are the same thing; 
 though this same thing I can name, at one time without the aid 
 of the generical mark, while at another time it suits me to em- 
 ploy the generical mark." 51 
 
 In the sense in which the term Consciousness is used by 
 these writers, it is evidently common to all sensitive existence, 
 and is in fact equivalent to that which we have hitherto denomi- 
 nated Sensation or Sensibility. 
 
 But this signification is not the one that the generality of 
 mankind attach to the term, when they say that they are con- 
 scious of the operations of their own minds. With them, to 
 have an idea, and to be conscious of the idea, are different 
 things ; such kind of consciousness implying reflection, and 
 being the action of one part of the mind upon the other. 
 
 The phrenological definition of this term, would appear, 
 therefore, to be the most correct. " Consciousness," says Mr. 
 Combe, " means the knowledge which the mind has of its own 
 existence and operations."! In this sense, Consciousness 
 belongs to man alone ; for though the brutes possess feelings 
 and ideas though they are endowed with perception, con- 
 ception, memory, and a kind of judgment, yet there is not the 
 slightest evidence that they are conscious of such states of 
 
 * Mill's Analysis, vol. 1, p. 172. 
 t System of Phrenology, p. 647.
 
 240 IDENTITY. 
 
 mind ; they seem to experience mere trains of sensations, and 
 to be impelled by them to action, without having any idea of 
 their existence. 
 
 The question has often and naturally arisen, how is it that 
 with a plurality of organs, and each of them double, Conscious- 
 ness is invariably single; so that we are never conscious of 
 more than one feeling or idea at the same time ? 
 
 The answer is simple, viz., that however great may be the 
 variety of feelings and ideas occurring in the mind simulta- 
 neously, they make but one sensation. A compound sensation 
 it may be called, because composed of other sensations which 
 may be distinguished separately when occurring consecutively, 
 but not the less a simple and indivisible sensation at the 
 moment of our being conscious of it; in the same way that a 
 musical chord is not the less a single sound, because the notes 
 of which it is composed may be struck successively, each produ- 
 cing a separate sound. 
 
 But it has been objected, that the mind has, in fact, the 
 power of taking cognizance at the same moment, of the com- 
 ponent parts of its compound sensations; for instance, that 
 when, in a band of music, the different instruments combined 
 make but one sound, a practised ear will listen to two or three 
 of the instruments separately ; but if this process of listening 
 be carefully analysed, it will be found that the ear merely fol- 
 lows the different instruments one after another, so rapidly, 
 that the idea of succession is lost, and the separate acts of 
 attention appear simultaneous. 
 
 The notion of the simplicity and indivisibility of the mind 
 itself seems to have originated from the observation of this law 
 of our nature, viz. , that more than one feeling or idea cannot 
 exist simultaneously in the same mind, but, of whatever organs 
 they may be the produce, they blend and make but one 
 sensation. 
 
 IDENTITY. It has been previously explained that all our 
 knowledge must be derived from the instinctive indications of
 
 IDENTITY. 241 
 
 our Intellectual Faculties, which indications must be admitted 
 as first truths in reasoning on all practical subjects, although 
 they may not be intended to inform us of the real nature of 
 things, but merely of the relation established between ourselves 
 and the external world. Some of our faculties, our reasoning 
 powers, for instance, are capable of passing judgment upon the 
 other organs as to whether their indications be correct or not, 
 and they suffice, in several instances, to show that what some 
 of our faculties would represent to us as real existences, have 
 no place but in our own minds. 
 
 It seems to be necessary to our present mode of existence, 
 not only that we should have the power of individualizing, but 
 that we should be able to attach a certain idea of sameness to 
 individual existences, so that what appeared to be an indi- 
 vidual yesterday seems to be that self-same individual, and no 
 other, to-day, and will continue to be so. Without this sense 
 of Identity, the world would seem but an assemblage of flitting 
 phantoms, and all would be confusion and chaos ; but that it is 
 merely a feeling given to us for wise purposes, there being 
 nothing answering to it in reality, our reasoning powers would 
 render probable. Philosophically speaking, nothing with which 
 we are acquainted remains the same for two seconds together. 
 The same river flows on for ever, yet the same water never 
 passes the same spot, and no one has ever really been 
 twice on the same stream. The atoms of which bodies are 
 composed are in strict union with the atmosphere, and are con- 
 tinually blending their particles with everything around them. 
 Organized bodies are perpetually changing their structure by 
 the vital processes of waste and reproduction ; and if the mind 
 continued the same for any perceptible time, we should lose 
 all consciousness of its existence; for it is only by its successive 
 changes that it is cognizable to us at all. No idea or feeling 
 of the mind can ever be said really to be repeated, for whatever 
 may be the character of memory, it never presents ideas, in 
 every respect, as they at first occurred ; either they differ in 
 intensity or in their association with other ideas. So that, in 
 G G
 
 242 IDENTITY. 
 
 fact, at no two perceptible periods of an individual's existence 
 is the mind strictly tlie same. 
 
 What is it that constitutes the sameness between the infant 
 and the old man between a person when possessing sound 
 health and vigorous intellect, and when weakened in mind and 
 body by disease ? How is it, that although we perceive the 
 process of change cortinually going on in ourselves throughout 
 our whole system, so that from one important period of our 
 lives to another we seem to be altered beings ; yet still the 
 feeling of Identity clings to us ? Whence we know not 
 unless we believe it to proceed from a principle of our nature ; 
 to be the result of an intuitive or instinctive action of faculties, 
 indications of which must always be admitted as the grounds 
 of all practical reasoning, and taken for granted as they cannot 
 be tested. 
 
 The belief that we are the same persons throughout our 
 whole existence is commonly adduced as an evidence of the 
 fact, and much ingenuity has been displayed in its explanation. 
 Brown says that atoms are truly identical, and all the change 
 that takes place is change of state ; and that this analogy may 
 be carried to the mind, the mind being like ultimate atoms, 
 simple and indivisible. But both these propositions are mere 
 assumptions, as we have no faculties that can inform us con- 
 cerning atoms in their ultimate state, or even whether such 
 atoms have any existence ; and with reference to the mind's 
 being simple and indivisible, the arguments that would prove 
 it to be so, would also prove each separate thought and feeling 
 to be simple and indivisible, and consequently indestructible. 
 For it is quite true, as Brown says, that " if the mind of man 
 and all the changes that take place in it, from the first feeling 
 with which life commenced, to the last with which it closes, 
 could be made visible to any other thinking being, a certain 
 series of feelings alone that is to say, a certain number of 
 successive states of mind would be distinguishable in it, 
 forming indeed, a variety of sensations, and thoughts, and 
 passions, as momentary states of the mind, but all of them
 
 ASSOCIATION. 243 
 
 existing individually, and successively to each other.*' 
 Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. 1, p. 245f 
 Edit. 1820. 
 
 It is clear, however, that whatever our reasoning powers 
 may tell us with respect to the instinctive action of our faculties, 
 we still must put implicit faith in their indications, and since it 
 is necessary for us to believe that there are individual existences, 
 and that they possess identity, it is not put within the power 
 of the strongest intellect to shake this belief in practice, what- 
 ever it may do in theory. 
 
 ASSOCIATION. Much has been commonly attributed to 
 Association, which an intimate knowledge of the primitive 
 faculties of the mind proves, in no way, to belong to it. Feel- 
 ings Propensities and Sentiments have been supposed to be 
 formed by it. The observation of the fact that the Intellectual 
 Faculties are necessary for the guidance of the feelings, for 
 their direction in action, may have generated this error. Our 
 thoughts have also been supposed to follow each other in an 
 established order, and metaphysicians have endeavoured to base 
 education upon general laws of such associations. But so 
 great is the diversity in minds that such general laws 
 may never be discovered, and the causes that determine a 
 train of thought, a succession of ideas in one individual, can 
 seldom, if ever, be applicable to another. But though the im- 
 portance of the principle of Association has been, in some 
 cases, misunderstood, it cannot be over-estimated. We have 
 seen that it is upon a very narrow stratum of ideas that the ex- 
 ternal world, as it appears to us, ia built ; the ideas derived 
 directly from the senses, such as sounds, smells, tastes, and 
 touch, and from the organs of some of the perceptive faculties, 
 are probably all that the other mental faculties have to act 
 upon to create within us the whole order and beauty of nature, 
 or the whole picture of the world as it appears to us. Any 
 defect in the power of association of ideas would disturb the 
 whole of this harmony.
 
 244 ASSOCIATION. 
 
 But it is the association of feelings with ideas to which the 
 highest importance attaches. The propensities and sentiments 
 being mere blind impulses, and depending upon the intellectual 
 faculties for their proper direction, every variety of erroneous 
 association between the intellect and feelings is formed in 
 early life, before the reason has been taught, or is capable of 
 judging for itself of the correctness of the connexion. Such 
 associations are common to all the feelings, and until they can 
 be broken, tend on all occasions to mislead the judgment. 
 One of the most common illustrations, and one familiar to 
 every one, is the association so frequently formed between 
 darkness and danger. Stories of ghosts and other frightful 
 absurdities, are related to children, until they fear to be left 
 alone in the dark. As they grow older they may reason very 
 correctly upon the groundlessness of such fears, but darkness 
 does not the less excite their feeling of Cautiousness. So 
 strong is the association in some cases, that there are instances 
 on record of physically and morally brave persons who, after 
 being in twenty battles without being conscious of fear, have 
 yet dreaded to be left in the dark. There is a great variety of 
 objects to which the same feeling may be as erroneously 
 attached, and there are few persons that have not some 
 antipathies, compounded of hatred and fear, that have no 
 better foundation. " Some persons have what is called an 
 antipathy to a spider, a toad, or a cat. These feelings gene- 
 rally originate in some early fright. The idea of danger has 
 been, on some occasions, intensely excited along with the 
 touch or sight of the animal, and hence the association so 
 strongly formed that it cannot be dissolved. The sensation, 
 in spite of them, excites the idea and produces the uneasiness 
 which the idea imparts."* 
 
 False associations with the feeling of Conscientiousness 
 are still more injurious in their tendency. This feeling, as we 
 * Mill, vol. l, p. 75. 
 
 There can bfe little doubt that such erroneous associations do not always 
 originate with the individual, but that the state of the brain, on which they 
 deped, is transmissible to offspring.
 
 ASSOCIATION. 245 
 
 have seen, gives us no knowledge of what is right or wrong, 
 but merely approves the right, and gives the disposition to act 
 in accordance, when it is known to us what is right. In early 
 childhood, before the judgment is active, it must be associated 
 with what the tone of society approves ; and whether the 
 standard of morality be high or low, it is not the less difficult 
 to break the association in after-life, and to make us feel that 
 to be wrong, which we have been early taught to regard as 
 right. 
 
 This law of the mind has been the great prop of super- 
 stition in all countries and ages ; for the religious feelings, 
 like all the others, are capable of any direction. The feeling 
 of Veneration, which gives the disposition to venerate and 
 respect, to worship and adore whatever we may be taught to 
 consider worthy of such sentiments, may be associated equally 
 in the infant mind, with a wooden idol, the sun, the moon, 
 an animal, a prophet, a saint, a crucifix, or the God of the 
 universe. Accordingly, there is scarcely anything that some 
 superstition has not made to usurp the place of the Most High 
 in the minds of the ignorant and deluded. " He in whom 
 Veneration is powerful," says Mr. Combe, " and to whom the 
 image of a saint has been from infancy presented as an object 
 to be venerated, experiences an instantaneous and involuntary 
 emotion of veneration every time the image is presented to 
 him, or a conception of it formed ; because it is now the sign 
 which excites in him that emotion, altogether independently 
 of reflection. Until we can break this association, and pre- 
 vent the conception of the image from operating as a sign to 
 excite the faculty of Veneration, we shall never succeed in 
 bringing his understanding to examine the real attributes of 
 the object itself, and to perceive its want of every quality that 
 ought justly to be venerated." The same law applying, not 
 only to the image of a saint, but to all creeds and dogmas, 
 each sect of religionists have always shown themselves anxious 
 to take advantage of it, by impressing the minds of the young 
 with the doctrines of their particular persuasion, and associat-
 
 246 ASSOCIATION. 
 
 ing their religious feelings with them, before the feebly- 
 developed reasoning power is capable of forming a judgment 
 for itself. Veneration, Hope, and Wonder, jointly compose 
 the religious feelings, and in this way, may be made to take 
 any direction ; that is, a child may be taught to worship 
 anything, however unworthy ; to hope for anything, however 
 unreasonable ; and to believe anything, however monstrously 
 absurd. Such associations, once formed, are not easily broken, 
 and until they are, a person is disqualified from forming a 
 philosophical examination of the grounds of his belief. Who 
 does not see that such is the mode in which religious belief is 
 generally propagated in all countries ; that people are made to 
 feel and not to reason upon the subject, and that such feelings 
 constitute with each nation, whether Chinese, Hindoo, 
 Mahometan, or Christian, the internal evidence for each par- 
 ticular religion, whether true or false ? Feeling, therefore, 
 can never be adduced as a proof of the truth of any religion ; 
 since this internal evidence is professed alike by the advocates 
 of each nation's particular creed. 
 
 The law of association also explains another mental 
 phenomenon, viz., sudden conversion, as it commonly takes 
 place. A strong religious impression has been produced in 
 childhood ; the religious feelings, with Cautiousness, have 
 been associated with particular creeds, with particular inter- 
 pretations and passages of Scripture, but circumstances have, 
 for a time, overcome those impressions, and such feelings have 
 given place to others. The animal propensities have probably 
 assumed the ascendancy ; but the early association has not 
 been broken, any more than the association of fear with dark- 
 ness is broken because forgotten in the day-time. An allusion 
 to the formerly-cherished creed-^a passage of Scripture a 
 single word is often sufficient to bring back these early 
 impressions with redoubled force ; and alternate fits of sorrow 
 and remorse for former backslidings, and of joy from the 
 natural rebound of the feelings from a state of deep depression, 
 are the consequence. In most cases, however, the discarded
 
 ASSOCIATION. 247 
 
 worldly propensities will at times regain the ascendancy, which 
 accounts for the frequent sinning and repenting during such 
 states of feeling.' 
 
 They who are ignorant of the natural mode of action of 
 the mental powers, suppose that there is something super- 
 natural in such phenomena ; but it will be found, upon inves- 
 tigation, that all cases of " conversion " and " religious 
 experiences," are strictly in accordance with the general laws 
 of mind, and have no title to be classed amongst things 
 miraculous. This knowledge of the mental constitution seems 
 to be absolutely necessary to rescue some minds, and those, 
 too, naturally strong ones, from the depths of superstition, 
 and to dispossess them of the belief that they are the instru- 
 ments of divine and spiritual influences. Thus, in cases where 
 the religious feelings have been cultivated to the exclusion of 
 others, and where means have been taken to keep them pre- 
 dominant by the continued and invariable repetition of 
 devotional exercises, by " coming out of the world," and by 
 constant attendance upon public religious services the judg- 
 ment, meanwhile, being systematically excluded from having 
 any share in their regulation the high enjoyment resulting 
 from the natural exercise of such feelings is imagined to be of 
 a supernatural character. And when these feelings, proceed- 
 ing principally from Veneration, Hope, and Wonder, are 
 internally active, without any apparent external stimulant ; 
 when strong faith, brilliant hopes of eternal felicity, and a 
 feeling of self-abasement take possession of the mind, it is not 
 to be wondered at that the conviction is irresistible that such 
 aspirations proceed from more than natural causes, and that 
 the Spirit of the Most High possesses the heart. And so, in 
 truth, it does, and ever does ; but God " acts not by partial, 
 but by general laws." 
 
 It is thus that each religion has its " internal evidences," 
 which, being planted in the inmost recesses of the heart, 
 render any external evidence unnecessary; and, in fact, are
 
 248 ASSOCIATION. 
 
 capable of resisting it, and of supporting any amount of 
 positive contradictions and absurdities.* 
 
 * " The name given to the intellectual ideas which enter into the composition 
 of religion is THEOLOGY. It means the notions which we form concerning 
 the Being to whom, or the objects to which, our reverential and devotional 
 emotions should be directed. 
 
 ' Lo the poor Indian ! whose untutored mind 
 Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind.' 
 
 This is the theology of the Indian. The Hindoos and Mahommedans have 
 embodied their theology in other words, their notions concerning the 
 objects to be reverenced and worshipped in books. The emotional faculties 
 of the people being trained to reverence, as Divine revelations, the narratives 
 and dogmas which these books contain, the compound becomes in their minds 
 religion. Hence, an individual may be highly religious, and know nothing 
 of theology beyond the narratives and dogmas which have been entwined 
 with his religious emotions from his infancy ; while another may be a pro- 
 found theologian, acquainted with the original languages of Scripture, skilled 
 in all the controversies which have taken place concerning the authors by 
 whom its different parts were written, the time and order of their appear- 
 ance, their title to the attribute of inspiration, and the true meaning of their 
 texts, yet not be religious. lu point of fact, experience shows that, in many 
 instances, the more an individual knows of these subjects, the less religious, 
 in the common acceptation of the word, he becomes i.e., his reverence for 
 the special dogmas and observances, which in his youth he was trained to 
 regard with religious awe, diminishes. 
 
 " The difference between religion and theology, which I have here en- 
 deavoured to indicate, may be farther illustrated by comparing them to the 
 warp and woof of a web. The weaver fixes in his loom, first, long threads 
 stretching out directly from his own position, and these are called the warp. 
 Then he puts thread upon a shuttle, which he ever and anon casts between 
 the long threads, and these cross threads are called the woof. The web or 
 cloth is composed of the two series of threads closely pressed together. Now, 
 in our present problem, the native sentiment of reverence and devotion may 
 be likened to the warp. It is the foundation or first element of the web. 
 The theological ideas may be considered as the cross thread or woof. As the 
 shuttle adds the woof to the warp to make the cloth, the intellect adds 
 theology, or particular notions about God, to the emotion, and the two com- 
 bined constitute what we commonly call religion. The Hindoo religion is the 
 primitive pure emotion, with such intellectual ideas as the priests of the 
 country have been able to weave into it. The Mahommedan and Christian 
 religions may be described in similar terms ; and thus it is that the composite 
 web of reverential emotion and intellectual ideas which each nation has 
 formed for itself, is called its religion. The compound nature of this web is 
 not usually perceived by its votaries. The Hindoo regards his sacred web as 
 altogether pure religion ; and the Mahommedan, and the Christian, of what- 
 ever sect, do the same.
 
 ASSOCIATION. 249 
 
 " The primitive emotion, when energetic and excited, is no overpowering, 
 that it carries the whole rnind captive. When it acts blindly, it dethrones 
 reason, stifles conscience, and enlists every passion to vindicate the honour 
 and glory of the Being whom it has been trained to reverence. When 
 the woof of error has been added in infancy, and the web of superstition 
 formed, every thread that is to say, every notion concerning Qod, and his 
 priests, and man's duty to both becomes sacred in the eyes of the devotee, 
 and stirs the emotion into a glow of rapture if gratified, and of pain, accom- 
 panied by indignation and fury, if offended. In this state of mind, barbarous 
 nations plunder and slay in honour and to the glory of their gods. 
 
 " In Christian nations, analogous phenomena appear. We all profess to 
 draw our religion from the Bible ; but in Scotland, one woof is woven into 
 the warp, in England another, in Ireland a third, in Germany a fourth, in 
 Russia a fifth, and so on." Science and Religion, by 0. Combe, p. 18. 
 
 H H
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ON THE CONNEXION OF THE MIND WITH OKGANIZATION. 
 
 MANY important deductions result from our knowledge of 
 the connexion between the Mind and Brain ; and many facts 
 there are now on record that point to general principles yet to 
 be discovered, that, in all probability, are of equal, if not 
 of much greater moment than those with which we are now 
 
 O 
 
 acquainted. 
 
 One of the most important of the practical principles deri- 
 vable from the knowledge of this connexion is, that all the 
 physical laws that tend to increase the health of the body gene- 
 rally, and of the brain as a part of its organization, must tend 
 also to increase the health and strength of the mind. It is found, 
 by experience, that, as the muscles of the body become larger 
 and stronger by use, so the brain increases in activity and size 
 by judicious exercise and with it the mental powers. The 
 brain also grows or acquires firmness, health or strength, un- 
 consciously, that is without conscious exercise, both in sleep and 
 when awake, and the processes of thought in which we have 
 been previously engaged unconsciously attain clearness and 
 strength, and when after rest when a subject even has been 
 laid aside for weeks or even months, we find ourselves ad- 
 vanced in it and thinking easier.* So also the feelings take a 
 
 * l: It has often happened to me," says Sir Benjamin Brodie, " to have been 
 occupied by a particular subject of inquiry to have accumulated a store of 
 facts connected with it, but to have been able to proceed no further. Then, 
 after an interval of time, without any addition to my stock of knowledge, 
 I have found the obscurity and confusion in which the subject was originally 
 enveloped to have cleared away, the facts seemed all to have settled them- 
 selves in their right places, and their mutual relations to have been apparent, 
 although I have not been sensible of having made any distinct effort for that 
 purpose." Psychological Inquiries, by Sir B. C. Brodie.
 
 CONNEXION OF MIND WITH ORGANIZATION. 251 
 
 bent or direction not known until new circumstances call into 
 conscious manifestation the new condition the organ has 
 acquired.* 
 
 Peculiar dispositions, aptitudes, and tendencies of the mind, 
 as well as general bodily constitution, are also transmitted from 
 parents to offspring. 
 
 It is also known that activity and power of mind depend 
 greatly upon quality of brain. Some are capable of great 
 mental endurance, whilst others sink under the slightest exer- 
 tion ; some are active, others slow : all of which differences are 
 dependent, not so much upon organization, as upon quality of 
 brain. It has not yet been discovered what it is that causes 
 these varieties. 
 
 Of the action of the mind upon the body, and the body 
 upon the mind, and of the causes and modes of this mutual 
 influence, many very curious facts have been registered, but 
 our present knowledge is insufficient to enable us to generalize 
 them and turn them to much practical account, 
 
 * "That our feelings towards persons and objects may undergo most im- 
 portant changes without our being in the least degree aware, until we have 
 our attention directed to our own mental state, of the alteration which has 
 taken place in them, a very common but very characteristic example of this 
 kind of action is afforded by the powerful attachment which often grows up 
 between individuals of opposite sexes, without either being aware of the fact ; 
 the full strength of this attachment being only revealed to the consciousness 
 of each when circumstances threaten a separation, and when each becomes 
 cognizant of the feelings entertained by the other. * * We continually 
 speak of the ' feelings' which we unconsciously entertain towards another, and 
 of our not becoming aware of them until some circumstances call them into 
 activity ; so that it would seem as if the material organ of these feelings tends 
 to form itself in accordance with the impressions which are habitually made 
 upon it, and that we are as completely unaware of the changes which may 
 have taken place in it, as we are of those by which passing events are regis- 
 tered in our minds (in the memory), until some circumstance calls forth the 
 conscious manifestation, which is the ' reflex* of the new condition which the 
 organ has acquired." Dr. Carpenter's Human Physiology, pp. 609-10, 5th edit. 
 
 " As a general rule, the exceptions to which are probably apparent rather 
 than real, it is eaid that a man's brain ' grows to' the kind of activity most 
 habitual to it, -whether sensational or intellectual, and a tendency to the 
 character thus impressed upon it is transmitted, in some measure, to his 
 offspring." Transactions of the Social Science Association. Physiological 
 Influences of certain Methods of Teaching, by K. B. Carter, p. 223.
 
 252 CONNEXION OF MIND 
 
 The following are some of these facts ; detailed, not for the 
 purpose of drawing inferences from them, or as being neces- 
 sarily connected, but because they appear to point to some 
 important principles yet to be discovered. 
 
 " Professor Ehrenberg asserts that by means of the micro- 
 scope he has discovered the fibres of the encephalon, spinal 
 chord, and nerves, to be tubular, (i.e.) that they do not consist 
 of solid fibres, but of parallel or fasciculated tubes, dilated at 
 intervals, or jointed, and from to ^ of a line in diameter. 
 Also, that they contain a perfectly transparent tenacious fluid, 
 never visibly globular, the liquor nervens, which differs from 
 the nervens medulla as the chyle does from blood. "* 
 
 " When the pneumo-gastric or chief nerve of the stomach 
 is tied or cut through, and its end separated so as to interrupt 
 the flow of nervous energy towards that organ, digestion is 
 either entirely arrested or greatly impaired. As, 
 
 however, the direction of a current of galvanism to the cut end 
 of the nerve, next the stomach, suffices to re-establish digestion 
 after that process has been suspended by the interruption of 
 the nervous influence consequent on its division, we may 
 reasonably infer that, in the healthy state, the nerve merely 
 transmits to the stomach a stimulus or energy generated for the 
 purpose either in the brain or in the spinal marrow and ganglia 
 that the nerve, in short, acts only as a conductor, and does 
 not originate the influence which it evidently imparts, "f 
 
 This nervous energy, however generated, or from whatever 
 source derived, seems equally essential to thinking and feeling 
 as to digestion ; for whenever it is drawn off to assist in 
 digestion, or other mere bodily offices, the power of thinking 
 and feeling is proportionally decreased. Deep study and 
 digestion mutually impede each other. So, if the nervous 
 energy is spent in bodily exercise, great mental activity is im- 
 possible. A certain portion only of nervous fluid, or whatever 
 else it is, is generated, and if used in one direction cannot be 
 used in another. 
 
 * Dr. Elliotson's Human Physiology, p. 466. 
 t Dr. A. Combe on Digestion and Dietetics, pp. 77, 79.
 
 WITH ORGANIZATION. 253 
 
 Tims the activity of one mental organ is quieted by calling 
 another into exercise ; so also deep study or great activity of 
 the anterior lobe of the brain decreases the energy of that por- 
 tion of it connected with the feelings, and the undue indul- 
 gence of a propensity weakens and frequently prevents the 
 proper predominance of the moral feelings. 
 
 'There are cases in which this nervous energy appears to be 
 deranged, as in epilepsy ; or in which it seems to be increased 
 almost without limit, as in the paroxysms of passion or mad- 
 ness, or in the temporary excitement occasioned by the use of 
 stimulating drinks ; during which time persons naturally weak, 
 seem to acquire a supernatural strength, so as often to require 
 the force of several strong men to restrain them. 
 
 Each organ of Propensity and Sentiment appears to exer- 
 cise its peculiar influence upon the body, and to have its 
 particular set of muscles attached to it. This influence pro- 
 duces what is called the natural language of the faculty; 
 appearing when it is strongly marked, not only on the coun- 
 tenance, but throughout the whole person. Who is not more 
 or less acquainted with the impress of Benevolence, of Vene- 
 ration, Firmness, Conscientiousness, Hope, Wonder, Self- 
 Esteem, Love of Approbation, Combativeness, Cautiousness ? 
 This natural language of the faculties gives rise to a great 
 variety of important mental phenomena ; for each feeling has 
 not only a strong influence over most of the bodily functions, 
 but is also, when manifested in this way, intelligible to others, 
 and has the power of calling into activity the same feeling in 
 them : thus harshness produces harshness, and kindness kind- 
 ness ; it is in this way that good or bad feelings may be stimu- 
 lated, and this kind of sympathy become an important element 
 in moral training. There is a manifest difference in the influ- 
 ence of the speaker who feels forcibly what he is expressing, and 
 who therefore throws the natural language of that feeling into 
 his manner, and the one who delivers the same speech heart- 
 lessly, and without feeling his subject.
 
 254 CONNEXION OF MIND 
 
 " True sympathy," says Mr. Combe, " arises from the 
 natural language of any active feeling exciting the same feeling 
 in another, antecedently to any knowledge of what excited it in 
 the person principally concerned ; and this is sufficient to account 
 for the origin of panics in battles and in mobs, and for the 
 electric rapidity with which passions of every kind pervade and 
 agitate the minds of assembled multitudes." The epidemical 
 mental diseases that sometimes pervade particular countries 
 and districts, manifesting themselves by suicide, tumults, riots, 
 acts of violence, and fanaticism, may be accounted for partly 
 in this way and partly by nervous disease, bordering on mad- 
 ness, caused by mental excitement and religious emotion. 
 Imitation, Mental Imitation, Veneration, Hope, Wonder, 
 Cautiousness, when called into violent and continued action 
 under abnormal conditions, produce the most unlocked for and 
 extraordinary effects. Thus we have the Crusades, and more 
 extraordinary still, the Children's Crusade in 1212. The 
 Plague or Black Death, which between the years 1347 and 1350, 
 carried ejff in Europe full 25,000,000 of people, produced the 
 Brotherhood of Flagellants; in Germany, the St. Vitus's 
 Dancing Mania ; and in Italy the same effect was said to have 
 been produced by the bite of the tarantula, a large spider. The 
 St. Vitus's Dance was attended by a religious element ; in the 
 tarantism this element was w r holly wanting. This mania con- 
 tinued through the 15th and into the early part of the 16th 
 century, and we are told that it frequently happened (like 
 sceptical spiritualists of the present day) that unconcerned and 
 mocking spectators were drawn into the vortex by an irresisti- 
 ble impulse, and also that a Bishop of Foligno allowed himself 
 to be bitten by a tarantula, professing himself utterly scepti- 
 cal, but that the usual symptoms soon began to show them- 
 selves, and he, like the others, was obliged to dance to obtain 
 relief; so also were many others of the clergy, who altogether 
 disapproved of dancing ; music and dancing being the sole 
 means of cure. The Revivals in America and Ireland are 
 similar phenomena, and the Shakers, Jumpers, Barkers,
 
 WITH ORGANIZATION. 255 
 
 Spiritualists are no doubt, in some degree aided more or less 
 by imposture, similarly affected. Women, from their more 
 excitable temperaments, are the soonest affected, and the 
 mania always increases with the accession of numbers.* 
 
 The nerves connected with the brain are everywhere dis- 
 tributed over the body with the minutest care, and are also 
 intimately connected with each other throughout the whole 
 system. Every impression occurring at the extremity of the 
 system is instantaneously propagated to its centre ; and for 
 every action of the mind there is a corresponding action out- 
 wards in the organ intended to administer to its gratification. 
 If this intimate connexion and communication be interfered 
 with, either by being checked or suspended, some particular 
 form of disease is the consequence. It is with respect to these 
 kinds of diseases that miraculous cures are often said to be per- 
 formed; for any strong mental emotion that shall send the 
 nervous current through the system with more than ordinary 
 force, will frequently restore the nervous communication that 
 has been impeded, and cure the disease consequent upon it. 
 Implicit belief, or faith, itself a strong feeling, is necessary to 
 call the other faculties into the simultaneous action required to 
 
 * A writer in " Fraser," writing on Mental Epidemics, says " Fanaticism, 
 credulity, fear, sympathy, have combined to spread the infection ; the element 
 of imposture has seldom been wholly wanting. From the united operation 
 of these agents disease has extensively resulted ; disease, partly physical, 
 partly mental, depriving the patient, for a time at least, of all power of self- 
 control, and propagating itself by the very sight of its symptoms. Hysteria, 
 aud the kindred affections, are as certainly present in the most recent of these 
 demonstrations as in the most ancient. Physiological laws have undergone 
 no change. Dr. Hecker remarks ' Demonomaniacs' convulsions, somnam- 
 bulism, catalepsy, emotional disorders of every kind, are manifested at the 
 present day in all places where fanatical sects pursue their practices, with 
 quite as much importance as at any other times, only in more limited circles. 
 In these cases it is easy to observe that in the great majority of the lookers-ou, 
 nearly the same excitement is evinced as in any previous century ; and those 
 morbid phenomena are very commonly regarded as the revelations of a most 
 hallowed inspiration, and even as miracles, when they are often nothing more 
 than the physical consequences of a nervous irritant. Practical psychology 
 seems in many circles not yet to have got out of its infancy.' Especially it 
 may be added, the pathology of religious emotions deserves deeper study 
 than it has perhaps ever yet received." Fraser, April, 1862, p. 500.
 
 256 CONNEXION OF MIND 
 
 produce a strong mental emotion; faith, therefore, is the first 
 thing necessary ; nothing can be done, in such cases, without 
 it. If we observe even the ordinary effects of the mind upon 
 the body, we must feel convinced that the combined action of 
 some of our strongest feelings, in such extraordinary cases, is 
 sufficient to produce the so-called miraculous cures on record. 
 We see how readily tears or blushing are produced by the 
 slightest mental emotion : we witness the ordinary effects of 
 grief in deranging the system, and the opposite effect of joy 
 and a happy state of mind in promoting a cure. In fact, no 
 emotion takes place in the mind without some temporary effect 
 upon the bodily system ; which ordinarily passes unobserved 
 from the want of the recognition of the strict communication 
 that exists between the mind and the body. 
 
 Amongst the most extraordinary of the phenomena connected 
 with this subject are undoubtedly " sleep- waking" and " sleep- 
 walking." Under the influence of somnambulism, people are 
 said to read and write with their eyes shut, and in the dark, and 
 to do other wonderful things. This is accounted for on the sup- 
 position that one sense, under particular circumstances, may be 
 so excited and become so exalted, as to supply the place of 
 another. Thus Dr. Carpenter, speaking of what Mr. Braid 
 calls hypnotism, says : " The exaltation of the muscular sense, 
 by which various actions that ordinarily require the guidance 
 of vision, are directed independently of it, is a phenomenon 
 common to the mesmeric, with various other forms of artificial 
 as well as natural somnambulism." He has repeatedly seen, he 
 says, Mr. Braid's hypnotized subjects write with the most per- 
 fect regularity, when an opaque screen was interposed between 
 their eyes and the paper, the lines being equidistant and 
 parallel ; and it is not uncommon for the writer to carry back 
 his pencil or pen to dot an i, or cross a , or make some other 
 correction in a letter or word. Mr. B. had one patient, who 
 would thus go back and correct with accuracy the writing on 
 the whole sheet of note paper ; but if the paper was moved 
 from the position it had previously occupied on the table, all
 
 WITH ORGANIZATION. 257 
 
 the corrections were on the wrong points of the paper as regards 
 the actual place of the writing, though on the right points as 
 regarded its previous place. Sometimes, however, he would 
 take a fresh departure, by feeling for the upper left-hand cor- 
 ner of the paper ; and all his corrections were then made in their 
 proper positions, notwithstanding the displacement of the paper. 
 
 In the phenomena classed under the head of electro-biology, 
 the will of one person appears to become completely under the 
 control of another. 
 
 Many of the phenomena of Animal Magnetism, or Mes- 
 merism, are attested by such high authority as to leave no 
 room for doubt as to their general truth. We quote the 
 following passage from Dr. Elliotson : "'Among all the 
 phenomena,' says Professor Dugald Stewart, Ho which the 
 subject of imitation has led our attention, none are, perhaps, 
 so wonderful as those which have been recently brought to 
 light, in consequence of the philosophical inquiries occasioned 
 by the medical pretensions of Mesmer and his associates. 
 That these pretensions involved much of ignorance, or of 
 imposture, or both, in their author, has, I think, been 
 fully demonstrated in the very able report of the French 
 academicians ; but does it follow from this that the facts wit- 
 nessed and authenticated by those academicians should share 
 in the disgrace incurred by the empirics who disguised or 
 misrepresented them ? For my own part, it appears to me 
 that the general conclusions established by Mesmer's practice, 
 with respect to the physical effects of the principle of imagi- 
 nation, (more particularly in cases where they co-operated 
 together,) are incomparably more curious than if he had 
 actually demonstrated the existence of his boasted science : nor 
 can I see any good reason why a physician, who admits the 
 efficacy of the moral agents employed by Mesmer, should, in 
 the exercise of his profession, scruple to copy whatever pro- 
 cesses are necessary, for subjecting* them to his command, any 
 more than he should hesitate about employing a new physical 
 agent, such as electricity or galvanism.' " 
 I i
 
 258 CONNEXION OF MIND 
 
 " The result of Gall's investigation was this : 'Neither we, 
 nor any other dispassionate observers, who have been present 
 at the famous experiments of which such wonderful accounts 
 have been given, have witnessed anything supernatural or con- 
 trary to nature : we ought therefore to abandon the belief of 
 the metamorphosis of nerves, (the performance of the function 
 of one nerve by another,) to those who are better organised for 
 the marvellous than ourselves. How often 
 
 in intoxication, hysterical and hypochondriacal attacks, con- 
 vulsions, fever, insanity, under violent emotions, after long 
 fasting, through the effect of such poisons as opium, hemlock, 
 bella-donna, are we not, in some measure, transformed into per- 
 fectly different beings, for instance, into poets, actors, &c. ?' 
 ' Just as in dreaming, the thoughts frequently have more deli- 
 cacy, and the sensations are more acute, and we can hear and 
 answer; just as in ordinary somnambulism we can rise, walk, 
 see with our eyes open, touch with the hands, &c.' 'We ac- 
 knowledge a fluid which has an especial affinity with the ner- 
 vous system, which can emanate from an individual, pass into 
 another, and accumulate, in virtue of particular affinities, more 
 in certain parts than in others.' ' We admit the existence of a 
 fluid, the subtraction of which lessens, and the accumulation 
 augments, the power of the nerves ; which places one part 
 of the nervous system in repose, and heightens the activity 
 of another ; which, therefore, may produce an artificial som- 
 nambulism.' ' 
 
 " A rigid mathematician, La Place, observes, that l of all 
 the instruments which we can employ, in order to enable us to 
 discover the imperceptible agents of nature, the nerves are the 
 most sensible, especially when their sensibility is exalted by 
 particular causes. It is by means of them that we have dis- 
 covered the slight electricity which is developed by the contact 
 of two heterogeneous metals. The singular phenomena which 
 result from the extreme sensibility of the nerves in particular 
 individuals have given birth to various opinions relative to the 
 existence of a new agent, which has been denominated animal
 
 \VITH ORGANIZATION. 259 
 
 magnetism, to the action of the common magnetism, to the 
 influence of the sun and moon in some nervous affections, and, 
 lastly, to the impressions which may be experienced from the 
 proximity of the metals, or of a running water. It is natural 
 to suppose that the action of these causes is very feeble, and 
 that it may easily be disturbed by accidental circumstances ; 
 but because, in some cases, it has not been manifested at all, 
 we are not to conclude it has no existence. We are so far 
 from being acquainted with all the agents of nature, and their 
 different modes of action, that it would be quite unphilosophical 
 to deny the existence of the phenomena, merely because they 
 are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge.' ' 
 
 II Cuvier fully admits Mesmerism : ' We must confess that 
 it is very difficult, in the experiments which have for their 
 object the action which the nervous system of two different 
 individuals can exercise, one upon another, to distinguish the 
 effect of the imagination of the individual, upon whom the ex- 
 periment is tried, from the physical result produced by the 
 person who acts upon him. The effects, however, on persons 
 ignorant of the agency, and upon individuals whom the opera- 
 ration itself has deprived of consciousness, and those which 
 animals present, do not permit us to doubt that the proximity 
 of two animated bodies in certain positions, combined with 
 certain movements, have a real effect, independently of all 
 participation of the fancy. It appears also clearly that these 
 effects arise from some nervous communication which is estab- 
 lished between their nervous systems.' ' 
 
 II 1 have no hesitation in declaring my conviction that the 
 facts of Mesmerism which I admit, because they are not con- 
 trary to established morbid phenomena, result from a specific 
 power. Even if they are sometimes unreal and feigned, and, 
 when real, are sometimes the result of emotion, of imagina- 
 tion, to use common language ; but that they may be real and 
 independent of all imagination, I have seen quite sufficient to 
 convince me. * * * * To ascribe the phenomena which I 
 have witnessed to emotion and fancy, to suppose collusion and
 
 260 CONNEXION OF MIND 
 
 deception would be absurd. They must be ascribed to a pecu- 
 liar power ; to a power acting, I have no doubt, constantly in 
 all living things, vegetable and animal, but shown in a peculiar 
 manner by the processes of Mesmerism. I have witnessed its 
 power at least three times a week for two months ; and should 
 despise myself if I hesitated to declare my decided conviction 
 of the truth of Mesmerism. I am willing to believe that a 
 sleep-waker may prophesy morbid changes in himself with 
 accuracy, as the boy mentioned by Gall predicted the termi- 
 nation of his fit if his friends would lead him into the garden, 
 and the girl mentioned by Lord Monboddo, predicted the 
 cessation of her disease with equal accuracy. * * * But I have 
 never witnessed more than what, it is certain, takes place in 
 health and disease. I have seen persons sent to sleep, I have 
 felt and heard others declare they had tingling, and heard some 
 declare they had various other sensations and pains, I have seen 
 twitchings, convulsions, and spastic contractions of muscles, 
 loss of power of muscle, and the most profound coma ; and I 
 have seen these evidently and instantly removed by the process. 
 I have seen one sense restored in the coma by the process, so 
 that the person was insensible in taste, smell, sight, and yet 
 heard and answered questions well. I have seen paroxysms of 
 sleep-waking and ecstatic delirium, which had been originally 
 induced by its disturbance of a system already epileptic, put an 
 end to evidently, and in general quickly, by Mesmerism. But 
 I have not witnessed persons seeing through walls or paste- 
 board, nor tasting or smelling with the epigastrium or fingers ; 
 nor speaking or understanding languages they had never 
 learnt ; nor telling the circumstances past, present, and to 
 come, of persons they had never heard of before. * * * No 
 marvel has yet presented itself in my experience : nor has any 
 good been yet effected in the diseases of my patients ; but the 
 perfect coma induced in some of them would be an inestimable 
 blessing in the case of a surgical operation, which I am positive 
 might have been performed without the slightest sensation on 
 some of the female patients, exactly as took place at the
 
 WITH ORGANIZATION. 261 
 
 Hotel-Dieu, where a cancerous breast was removed in Mes- 
 meric coma from a poor woman, without her knowledge. I 
 have no doubt that I shall in time see all the established phe- 
 nomena of sleep-waking, writing, reading, and doing endless 
 things, even better than in the waking state. But, before I 
 see, I cannot believe more."*f 
 
 Most physiologists are now prepared to admit with Dr. 
 Carpenter, 1st, A state of complete insensibility, during 
 which severe surgical operations may be performed without 
 the consciousness of the patient. 2nd. Artificial somnambu- 
 lism, with manifestation of the ordinary power of mind, but 
 with no recollection in the waking state of what has passed. 
 3rd. Exaltation of the senses during such somnambulism, so 
 that the somnambule perceives what in his natural condition 
 he could not. 4th. Action during such somnambulism, on the 
 muscular apparatus, so as to produce, for example, artificial 
 catalepsy ; and 5th. Curative effects. Dr. Carpenter, how- 
 ever, has not yet seen sufficient evidence for belief in the higher 
 phenomena of clairvoyance. Others, however, go much far- 
 ther; thus, Walther, the Professor at Landshut, quoted by 
 Gall, " for a description of the stages of Mesmerism, in the 
 highest of which (clairvoyance,) time and space no longer 
 present obstacles to the penetration of the magnetised,' * who 
 sees as distinctly into the interior of the magnetiser's body as 
 into his own,' the reason of which is, that, ' all the nervous 
 system is an identity and a totality a pure transparence with- 
 out cloud, an infinite expansion without bounds or obstacles, 
 such is universal sense ;' and as, ' in the waking state the soul 
 is more closely and intimately united with the body;' and 
 f natural sleep is a more intimate communication of our soul 
 with the universal soul of the world ; so in magnetic sleep 
 our soul is united in the most intimate manner with the soul 
 
 * Human Physiology, p. 677, et seq. 
 
 f In a later edition of the Physiology Dr. Elliotson, I believe, professes 
 his belief in Clairvoyance, he having witnessed uumistakeable proof of it. 
 Also Hospitals for the cure of disease by Mesmerism have been established 
 under his guidance and direction.
 
 262 CONNEXION OF MIND 
 
 of the world and with the body, and with the latter not by 
 means of the nervous system only, but immediately in all its 
 parts and members, so that life is no longer a particularity, 
 but original life.' ' 
 
 Dr. W. Gregory thus summarizes his belief in his Letters 
 on Animal Magnetism : " I think we may regard it as estab- 
 lished; first, that one individual may exercise a certain 
 influence on another, even at a distance ; secondly, that one 
 individual may acquire a control over the motions, sensations, 
 memory, emotions, and volition of another, both by suggestion, 
 in the conscious, impressible state, and in the magnetic sleep, 
 with or without suggestion ; thirdly, that the magnetic sleep 
 is a very peculiar state, with a distinct and separate conscious- 
 ness ; fourthly, that in this state the subject often possesses a 
 new power of perception, the nature of which is unknown, but 
 by means of which he can see objects or persons, near or 
 distant, without the use of the external organs of vision ; 
 fifthly, that he very often possesses a very high degree of 
 sympathy with others, so as to be able to read their thoughts ; 
 sixthly, that by these powers of clairvoyance and sympathy, he 
 can sometimes perceive and describe, not only present, but 
 past, and even future events ; seventhly, that he can often 
 perceive and describe the bodily state of himself or others ; 
 eighthly, that he may fall into trance and extasis, the period 
 of which he often predicts accurately ; ninthly, that every one 
 of these phenomena has occurred, and frequently occurs, 
 spontaneously, which I hold to be the fundamental fact of the 
 whole enquiry, Somnambulism, Clairvoyance, Sympathy, 
 Trance, Extasis, Insensibility to pain, and Prevision, having 
 often been recorded as natural occurrences. Tenthly, that not 
 only the human body, but inanimate objects, such as magnets, 
 crystals, metals, &c., &c., exert on sensitive persons an influ- 
 ence, identical, so far as it is known, with that which produces 
 Animal Magnetism ; that such an influence really exists, 
 because it may act without a shadow of suggestion, and may 
 * Elliotson's Human Physiology, p. 674.
 
 WITH ORGANIZATION. 263 
 
 be transferred to water and other bodies ; and lastly, that it is 
 only by studying the character of this influence, as we should 
 those of any other, such as Electricity or Light, that we can 
 hope to throw light on these obscure subjects." 
 
 The last proposition refers to the discoveries of Baron 
 Reichenbach, who has shown by a great number of experi- 
 ments, that there exists in all bodies, and throughout the 
 universe, a peculiar principle, analogous to magnetism, elec- 
 tricity, light, and heat, yet distinct from them all, to which he 
 gives the name of odyle. It is most manifest in powerful 
 magnets ; next in crj-stals, and exists in the human body, the 
 sun, moon, stars, heat, electricity, chemical action, and, in 
 fact, the whole material universe. Those who are most sensi- 
 tive to this influence are persons of feeble health, especially 
 somnambulists ', but it is found that about one-third of indi- 
 viduals, taken promiscuously, and many in good health, are 
 sensible of it ; and it was by a series of observations on persons 
 of all classes and conditions for years, that the facts have been 
 elicited. 
 
 Baron Reichenbach says, " There is nothing in these obser- 
 vations," which he had just detailed, " that, after the contents 
 of the preceding treatises, can surprise us ; but they are cer- 
 tainly a fine additional confirmation of what has been stated 
 in regard to the sun and moon, and also of the fact that the 
 whole material universe, even beyond our earth, acts on us 
 with the very same kind of influence which resides in all 
 terrestrial objects ; and lastly, it shows that we stand in a 
 connection of mutual influence, hitherto unsuspected, with the 
 universe ; so that in fact the stars are not altogether devoid of 
 action on our sublunary, perhaps even on our practical world, 
 and on the mental processes of some heads." 
 
 That Mesmerism may be true in all its stages, we think can 
 scarcely be disputed by those who have followed us in our 
 investigation into the present extent of our knowledge of both 
 mind and matter. The phenomena alluded to in this chapter, 
 relating both to [animal magnetism and to sympathy, in its
 
 264 CONNEXION OF MIND 
 
 various modes of manifestation, seem all to emanate from one 
 source, and to point to some nervous agent, some general 
 power or force, or perhaps some fluid, which, if it exist at all, 
 must perform a most important part in the human constitution ; 
 the discovery of which will be a vast step gained towards the 
 knowledge of all the influences that affect and rule over the 
 mind of man. 
 
 If we allow ourselves to enter the field of speculation there 
 is much to be said. I have heard of great wonders, upon testi- 
 mony the most respectable, but I have witnessed nothing more 
 than what may be accounted for from the heightened action of 
 the sense, or of the mental faculty ; sight and hearing greatly 
 increased, and the abnormal, not the normal condition of the 
 mind in action. We do not know of what the natural faculties 
 are capable, if greatly enlarged or greatly excited. The large 
 size of the organ of number will enable an idiot to calculate 
 mentally what another can scarcely do with the slate, and the 
 large size of the mathematical faculties in Sir Isaac Newton 
 enabled him to anticipate results that took hours to work out 
 in the regular way. The building instinct of animals seems to 
 result from some peculiar constitution of the organ of con- 
 structiveness. Cats and dogs can find their way home 
 across hundreds of miles of country, without any assistance 
 from the finger posts, being able to do so apparently from the 
 peculiar or exceptional action of the same organ of Locality, 
 which enables man to find his way with facility in proportion 
 to the size of the organ. There is nothing probably more 
 wonderful in Mesmerism than the faculty manifested by the 
 carrier pigeon ; it is taken hundreds of miles away, and then 
 released ; it ascends into the air, makes two or three turns, 
 and then flies straight home again. Some of the phenomena 
 of Mesmerism, if true, would seem to annihilate the ordinary 
 modes of thought in time and space, enabling us to know the 
 past, and bringing us into an immediate contiguity with the 
 absent as with the present. Might not this be through the 
 action of some rudimentary organ, intended for service in some
 
 WITH ORGANIZATION. 265 
 
 very advanced state of the world's civilization, and which being 
 more largely developed in some individuals than in others, is 
 abnormally excited by the aid of Mesmerism, and casts its 
 shadow before : or, might it not be by the odylic force, which 
 makes what we call solid matter, perfectly transparent to sensi- 
 tives ? As the heavenly bodies in their immeasurable distance 
 act upon our brains, not only through the force of light, but 
 through the odylic force, may not our brains also act, and be 
 acted upon, by other brains at a distance ? Electricity unites 
 two batteries, and almost as quick as thought carries a message 
 across the Atlantic. Why may not the more subtle force of odyle 
 unite two brains ? The .electric battery of the brain carries its 
 mandates instantaneously through the nerve wires to all parts 
 of the body, why should they stop there ? I believe there are 
 many facts to show that they do not, but they want general- 
 izing. The American Davis, the Pough-keepsie Seer, and 
 similar cases, would seem to indicate that the partition- 
 wall of individuality, which separates the mind of man from 
 that of mankind, can be broken down, and we may become 
 all-knowing and intelligent, as regards all that has ever formed 
 part of the knowledge of the race. But these, for the present, 
 must be regarded as mere speculations. 
 
 As to the phenomena of what is called " Spiritualism," 
 people of well-known character and undoubted powers of 
 intelligence and habits of philosophical observation, tell us that 
 after six or eight years' careful investigation in private families, 
 and after sitting in many hundreds of " circles," they are 
 obliged to come to the conviction that the phenomena are 
 genuine, and that there are both forces and intelligences which 
 do not come at present within any recognised law. Of course, 
 there is much deception, and still more self-delusion, mixed up 
 with the subject ; but we think it is almost impossible not to 
 come to the conclusion that there is a residue of truth. The 
 question then is, whence come these phenomena? From 
 whom, or what, are they derived? Here there is great differ- 
 ence of opinion, the great majority, as has ever been the case 
 K K
 
 266 CONNEXION OF MIND 
 
 since the world began, where the causes are hidden, ascribing 
 them to spiritual agency. We are supposed to prove, every 
 time when by an act of the will we move a limb, that spirit 
 moves matter. Now, we know nothing of the nature or essence 
 of " force," and we may call it " spirit," if we like ; but we do 
 know that precisely the same force that moves the steam-engine, 
 moves the body, and this force is generated in precisely the 
 same way, by the union of carbon and oxygen and the conse- 
 quent evolution of heat. (See Note, p. 135). Whatever 
 may have been the origin of all motion, this force is unattended 
 with intelligence ; but late investigations have proved that vital 
 forces are correlated from physical, and mental from vital ; 
 and further investigation of the correlation of forces may show 
 whence the particular force is derived, that is displayed in these 
 so-called spiritual manifestations. As we have seen, all " force" 
 is as indestructible as matter ; it may change its form, but it 
 cannot be destroyed ; and, as Mr. Herbert Spencer says, " That 
 no idea or feeling arises, save as a result of some physical force 
 expended in producing it, is fast becoming a common-place of 
 science," and also, " each manifestation of force can be inter- 
 preted only as the effect of some antecedent force : no matter 
 whether it be an inorganic action, an animal movement, a 
 thought, or a feeling. Either this must be conceded or else it 
 must be asserted that our successive states of consciousness are 
 self-created. Either mental energies, as well as bodily ones, 
 are quantitatively correlated to certain energies expended in 
 their production, and to certain other energies which they 
 initiate ; or else nothing must become something, or something 
 must become nothing." It is probably to this correlation that 
 we must look for the force displayed in these extraordinary 
 phenomena; but whence the intelligence? This, further in- 
 vestigation, I think, will prove to be merely the reflex and 
 reflection of our own embodied intelligence : as manifested in 
 the abnormal conditions of mind to which I have alluded in 
 this chapter. The conditions requisite for its manifestation are 
 precisely those attending the preter-natural states of mind
 
 WITH ORGANIZATION. 267 
 
 attending mesmeric action, such as clairvoyance, electro- 
 biology, &c. &c. : given constitutions and temperaments are 
 necessary, and the failures consequently are more numerous 
 than the successes. The mind acts through the brain, and the 
 senses ordinarily are necessary to set the brain in motion ; 
 but that it may be acted upon directly by some other force, 
 and without the aid of the senses, we believe is now an estab- 
 lished fact ; also, the nervous force, not generated but elimi- 
 nated by the brain, and guided by the will, moves the body ; 
 but of what nature is this force ? We know it is the correlate 
 of physical forces, but what other " form" it may take, or how 
 far and to what extent it can act upon other things and other 
 brains, and consequently other intelligences, outside the body, 
 is not yet known ; but that it has such power to act, I think is 
 more than probable. The discoveries of Baron Reichenbach 
 and others prove that very much lies beyond the ken of ordi- 
 nary sense and vision, and that our five senses are rather 
 clumsy instruments to deal with the imponderables. The 
 microscope shows a material world within them, and a sensi- 
 tive nervous system not only sees what is not apparent to 
 ordinary sense, but appears even, as we have said, to break 
 down the boundary of sense, and to reveal a world beyond. 
 
 There is quite a new world lying open for our investigation 
 in this direction, and its pursuit is not calculated, ultimately, to 
 lead us back into the bonds of superstition, but forward in the 
 path of Cerebral Physiology and the true Science of Mind. 
 
 It might fairly have been expected that the light of Science 
 and general Education would have dispelled for ever the dark- 
 ness of superstition and fanaticism, but this cannot take place 
 till the Science of Mind is much advanced, so as to lay bare 
 the true causes of the "spiritual emotions" which generate, 
 or lie at the root of, such states of mind.
 
 PART III, 
 
 SOCIAL SCIENCE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON THE PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. . 
 
 WE have examined the Constitution of Man, and the laws 
 of his Physical, Moral, and Intellectual Being : and we 
 have observed that the laws of Mind are equally fixed with 
 those of Matter. 
 
 Morality we have denned to be the science which teaches 
 men the means by which they may live together in the most 
 happy manner possible, the fundamental moral law being the 
 production of the largest sum of enjoyment to all ; and we 
 have shown that man must necessarily obey such laws, when 
 he discovers the connexion between them and his own well- 
 being, as it is the law of his existence to follow that which will 
 
 O/ 
 
 produce the greatest happiness. 
 
 The province of Moral Science is thus to teach us what our 
 duties are, and it is the province of Social Science to place us 
 in circumstances that will best enable us to perform them. 
 
 We have first, therefore, to examine the present condition 
 of Society, in order to ascertain how far it is in accordance 
 with those principles which have been shown to be essential to 
 the production of the greatest amount of happiness. As the 
 Working Classes are by far the most numerous part of the 
 population in all countries, their condition must constitute the 
 principal object of regard. Hitherto the Working Classes have 
 seldom been viewed in so important a light ; they have been 
 looked upon (too much by Political Economists, and their
 
 PEESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 269 
 
 Rulers,) as means only to the production of the largest amount 
 of wealth, not as means to the largest amount of happiness. 
 Political Economy is without a moral sense ; it has no con- 
 science, and its calculations are based upon the supposition that 
 each man as necessarily seeks his own individual interest as 
 that a stone falls to the ground, but Trades Unions and Co- 
 operative Societies show that the Working Classes are gradually 
 coming to the conviction that there is a higher law, which will 
 not allow us to pursue our interests separately, and which makes 
 it imperative that we should do as we would be done by, and 
 seek the good of our neighbour as well as our own. When 
 this conviction becomes general Political Economy will require 
 to be re-written. Athens, in the time of Pericles, contained 
 30,000 free citizens and 400,000 slaves : what these slaves 
 were to the free state of antiquity, have the working classes 
 been to us ; for necessity has been and is now, a harder task- 
 master than any mere instrument of human tyranny. But the 
 time for their emancipation must come, when the steam-engine 
 shall take the place of the slaves, and do the drudgery of 
 Society, and when all the higher and nobler parts of their 
 nature, that peculiarly distinguish them as men, shall have full 
 scope, and they shall no longer be regarded as the mere hewers 
 of wood and drawers of water. 
 
 SECTION I. 
 
 DENSITY OF THE POPULATION. NUMBERS. WEALTH. OCCUPATION. 
 HEALTH. GENERAL CONDITION. 
 
 DENSITY OF THE POPULATION. With a single exception, 
 England is the most densely peopled country in Europe. On 
 good authority we have 
 
 England, Area 50,153 16,921,880 = 337 persons to 1 sq. mile. 
 
 Wales, do 8,167 1,005,721 = 123 
 
 Islands in British Seas 394 143,126 = 363 
 
 Scotland, do. 31,324 2,888,742 = 92 
 
 Ireland, do. 32,512 6,515,794 = 200
 
 270 PKESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 Without going minutely into detail with other countries, we 
 learn that Belgium has 382 inhabitants to the square mile; 
 Saxony 328 ; Holland 242 ; Italy 208 ; Germany and Prussia 
 188 ; France 171 ; Austria 145 ; all Europe 82 ; Spain 81 ; 
 Turkey 71 ; Russia 27 ; Norway and Sweden 16. 
 
 NUMBERS. In absolute numbers, the population of Great 
 Britain and the islands in the British seas, was on the 31st 
 March, 1851, 21,121,967; and of the United Kingdoms 
 27,637,761. As to the rate of growth, it has been calculated 
 that the population of the same countries was, in 
 
 1651 6,378.000 
 
 1751 7,392,000 = 1,014,000 increase in the century. 
 
 1851 21,185,000 = 13,793,000 
 
 The course of events, during the last fifty years, is well 
 worthy of attention. The numbers of the people were, in 
 
 1801 10,917,433 
 
 1811 12,424,122 
 
 1821 14,402,643 
 
 1831 16,564,138 
 
 1841 18,813,786 
 
 1851 21,121,867 
 
 Thus, within the half century there has been an addition of 
 ten millions of people, which nearly equals the produce of the 
 preceding eighteen centuries. 
 
 Between 1841 and 1851, 27 counties in England and 
 Wales showed sensible diminution, which extended itself more 
 or less over the greater part of Ireland, the north of Scotland, 
 the north of Wales, and the west of England.* 
 
 * For the above facts, and for several others in this section, we are indebted 
 to a paper by Jno. Gates, Esq., F.R.G.S., read before the British Association, 
 " on our National Strength," and published in the Journal of the Statistical 
 Society, December, 1855. The Census, for 1861, has not yet been published 
 in detail, but we learn that the population in 1861 was in England and Wales, 
 and the Islands in the British seas, 20,205,762, (exclusive of the Army, Navy, 
 and Merchant Seamen abroad, estimated at 162,021 ) ; the number of males 
 being 9,825,504, and females 10,380,258. The increase since 1851 was 
 2,169,576. The total population of Scotland was 3,061,251, the number of 
 males being 1,446,982, and females 1,614,269. The increase since 1851 was 
 172,509. This low rate of increase is owing chiefly to emigration. The total 
 population of Ireland was 5,764,543 less by 787,842 than it was in 1851. 
 The Commissioners ascribe the decrease to emigration. The total Census for 
 the United Kingdom gives the number of souk as 29,193,319. Thus there
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 271 
 
 <{ Above a third of the population of England and Wales 
 resided in 1851, in towns, having a population of 20,000 and 
 upwards. In 1851, the Population of Towns in Great Britain, 
 was 10,556,388. In the Villages and detached dwellings in 
 the country, 10,403,109. In England and Wales there were 
 5*5 individuals to a house ; while in the great towns there were 
 6*5, and in the Metropolis there were nearly 8 individuals to 
 every house." M'Culloch. 
 
 WEALTH. Sir Archibald Alison, in his Principles of Popu- 
 lation, vol. 2, p. 48, tells us that " the returns of the Income 
 Tax, in 1812, showed in Great Britain 
 
 127,000 persons with an income from 50 to 200 
 
 20,000 200 to 1,000 
 
 3,000 1,000 to 5,000 
 
 600 above 5,000; 
 
 152,600 persons in all, possessing an income of above 
 50 a-year ; or 600,000 souls dependent upon persons in that 
 situation. To so small a number is the immense wealth of 
 Britain confined." The number is now, he says, greatly in- 
 creased, but probably does not exceed 300,000. On the 
 other hand, there are 3,440,000 heads of families, and 
 16,800,000 persons, living on their daily labour. "These 
 facts," says Sir Archibald, "are deserving the most serious 
 consideration. They indicate a state of society which is, to say 
 the least, extremely alarming, and which, in ancient times, 
 would have been the sure forerunner of national decline." 
 
 was a net increase of 1,681,457 persons in the ten years. 2,249,355 emigrants 
 sailed from the ports of the United Kingdom between the Census of 1851 and 
 1861; of whom about 194,532 were foreigners, 640,210 English, 183,627 
 Scotch, and 1,230,986 Irish. In the decennial period between 1841 and 1851 
 the total number was 1,692,063 ; and between 1831 and 1841 it was 717,913, 
 showing an enormous increase of late years. The number of inhabited houses 
 in England and Wales in 1861 was 3,745,463, against 3,278,039 in 1851, being 
 an increase of 467,424 ; uninhabited houses in 1861, 182,325, against 153,494 
 in 1851, an increase of 28,831 ; houses building in 1861, 27,580, against 26,571 
 in 1851, an increase of 1,009.
 
 272 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 From a Parliamentary paper, issued in 1823, we get the 
 particulars of the Property Tax ending April, 1815. 
 
 Representing Property 
 
 Schedule the value of 
 
 A. Houses, manors, tithes, canals, mines, . . 
 
 and ironworks -. 5,923,486 69,138,330 
 
 B. Profits of Occupancy 2,734,451 38,396,144 
 
 C. Dividends on Public Securities, Annui- 
 ties, &c., estimated at 2,885,505 30,000,000 
 
 D. Profits of Trade, &c 3,831,088 38,310.935 
 
 E. Salaries, Pensions, &o 1,174,456 11,744,557 
 
 178,589,966 
 The Property and Income Tax ending April, 1855-6, was 
 
 Income ou which 
 it is charged. 
 
 A. Land, &c 6,963,178 104,447,670 
 
 B. Occupation 860,571 12,908,565 
 
 C. Funds 1,627,157 24,407,355 
 
 D. Trade and Profession 4,802,943 74,551,046 
 
 E.- Profits of Office 1,007,673 16,082,655 
 
 232,397,291 
 
 Schedule A is here charged upon occupiers, who deduct it 
 from their rent. It is for the most part charged at the highest 
 rate of Is. 4d. in the pound ; and if the landlord's income is 
 below 1 50 a-year, he has to apply to have it returned ; but 
 this, we are told, occurs but in few cases. Still, a portion of 
 this sum must be assessed at the lower rate of ll^d., and as we 
 have calculated it all at Is. 4d., the nett amount must be larger 
 than we have stated. This is evident, as in 1851 the real 
 property assessed to the Property and Income Tax, under 
 Schedule A, was 105,524,491. Personal property under 
 Schedule D has increased even more rapidly than real, but 
 part of this income is assessed twice over, as the income of 
 the Professions and Retailers is derived from the other sources 
 which have been taxed already. The difference may perhaps 
 make up what is deficient under Schedule A. 
 
 There are two rates of assessment, ll^d. on 100 to 150, 
 and Is. 4d. on all above ; there are two rates also under Sche- 
 dule B and C. We have calculated the whole at Is. 4d., having 
 no means of separating the two portions. Schedules D and E
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 273 
 
 are from a Parliamentary return, and are correctly given, and 
 there the portion of income under 150, and rated at ll^d., 
 is about one-sixth under D, and a fourth under E. From this 
 paper we learn that there are under Schedule D 
 
 139,709 persons with an income from 100 to 150 ; 
 
 95,022 
 
 12,985 
 
 7,989 
 
 701 
 
 445 
 
 40 with 50,000 and upwards ; 
 
 150 to 
 
 500 to 
 
 1,000 to 
 
 5,000 to 
 
 10,000 to 
 
 500; 
 
 1,000; 
 
 5,000 ; 
 10,000 ; 
 50,000; 
 
 256,891 in all. 
 
 A Return has been just issued (August, 18G2,) showing the 
 number of persons charged to the Income Tax for the year 
 ending on the 5th day of April, 1861, under Schedules D 
 and E : 
 
 SCHEDULE D. 
 
 
 
 Amount of 
 
 Number of 
 
 Amount of Tar 
 
 CLASSES. 
 
 
 Income charged 
 
 Persons 
 
 charged 
 
 
 
 with Tax. 
 
 in each Class. 
 
 upon each Class. 
 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 . 
 
 Under 100 a year 
 
 
 1,128,815 
 
 17,702 
 
 32,923 
 
 100 and under 150 ... 
 
 
 13,073305 
 
 132,903 
 
 446,288 
 
 150 200 ... 
 
 
 6,630,423 
 
 41,872 
 
 276,268 
 
 200 300 ... 
 
 
 8.072,733 
 
 36,247 
 
 336,364 
 
 300 400 ... 
 
 
 5,270,600 
 
 16,568 
 
 219,608 
 
 400 500 ... 
 
 
 3,407,738 
 
 8,112 
 
 141,989 
 
 500 600 ... 
 
 
 3,136,489 
 
 6,006 
 
 130,687 
 
 600 700 .., 
 
 
 2,128,662 
 
 3,449 
 
 , 88,694 
 
 700 800 ... 
 
 
 1,674,291 
 
 2,314 
 
 69,762 
 
 800 900 ... 
 
 
 1,596,671 
 
 1,946 
 
 66,528 
 
 900 1,000 ... 
 
 
 814,157 
 
 889 
 
 33,923 
 
 1,000 2,000 ... 
 
 
 7,688,421 
 
 6,020 
 
 320,351 
 
 2,000 3,000 ... 
 
 
 4,044,638 
 
 1,761 
 
 168,526 
 
 3,000 4,000 ... 
 
 
 2,902,963 
 
 895 
 
 120,957 
 
 4,000 5,000 ... 
 
 
 2,116,221 
 
 493 
 
 88,176 
 
 5,000 10,000 ... 
 
 
 5,996,353 
 
 897 
 
 249,848 
 
 10,000 50,000 ... 
 
 
 10.094,248 
 
 530 
 
 420,594 
 
 50,000 and upwards 
 
 
 5,224,537 
 
 59 
 
 217,689 
 
 
 
 85,001,265 
 
 278,723 
 
 3,429,175 
 
 L L
 
 274 
 
 PEESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 SCHEDULE E. 
 
 1 
 
 Amount of 
 
 Number of Amount of Tax 
 
 CLASSES. 
 
 Income charged 
 
 Persons in each 
 
 charged 
 
 
 with Tax. 
 
 Class. 
 
 upon each Class. 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 . 
 
 Under 100 a year 
 
 
 
 1,553,864 
 
 22,763 
 
 45,321 
 
 100 and under 150 
 
 
 
 3,888,096 
 
 39,551 
 
 131,486 
 
 150 200 
 
 
 
 2 168,390 
 
 13353 
 
 90,350 
 
 200 300 
 
 
 
 2,858,800 
 
 12,129 
 
 119,117 
 
 300 400 
 
 
 
 1,767,812 
 
 5,317 
 
 73,659 
 
 400 500 
 
 
 
 1,070,246 
 
 2,495 
 
 44,594 
 
 500 600 
 
 
 
 775,451 
 
 1,441 
 
 32,310 
 
 600 700 
 
 
 
 467,578 
 
 746 
 
 19,482 
 
 700 800 
 
 
 
 380,805 
 
 516 
 
 15,867 
 
 800 900 
 
 
 
 330,774 
 
 403 
 
 13,782 
 
 900 1,000 
 
 
 
 230,706 
 
 245 
 
 9,613 
 
 1,000 2,000 
 
 
 
 1,615,326 
 
 1,367 
 
 67,305 
 
 2,000 3,000 
 
 
 
 355,341 
 
 157 
 
 14,806 
 
 3,000 4,000 
 
 
 
 189225 
 
 56 
 
 7,884 
 
 4,000 5,000 
 
 
 
 87,536 
 
 20 
 
 3,647 
 
 5,000 and upwards 
 
 
 
 520,411 
 
 69 
 
 21,684 
 
 
 18,260,361 
 
 100,628 
 
 710,907 
 
 As the occupier pays the tax, it is impossible to arrive at 
 the number of persons assessed under A and B ; but from a 
 Parliamentary paper issued (1857) we learn that the num- 
 ber of county voters in Great Britain is 556,391, and that of 
 the county voters in England and Wales 163,785 are registered 
 for property situate within the limit of boroughs. The county 
 voters must include all who pay tax under Schedules A and B, 
 and a great many more, as it includes all the 40s. freeholders, 
 irrespective of the property in boroughs, and which are doubt- 
 less included under Schedule D. Porter, in his " Progress of 
 the Nation," gave the occupiers of land, employing and not 
 employing labourers, at 409,260 ; but this would include many 
 with incomes under 100 a-year. If, therefore, we allow for 
 a considerable increase, and give 400,000 as the number taxed 
 under Schedules A and B, we believe it will exceed rather than 
 fall short of the mark. Schedules C and E are paid out of 
 National Revenue, and are paid, therefore, in part out of the 
 income of A, B, and D ; and the income assessed to the Income 
 Tax, (1855-6) viz., 232,39J,291, may be said to be assessed 
 upon 256,891 under Schedule D, and 400,000 under Schedules
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 275 
 
 A and B; in all 656,891 persons, representing, inclusive of C 
 and E, less than 3,000,000 of the population. As 21,000,000 
 was then the population of Great Britain, deducting the 
 3,000,000, it leaves 18,000,000 of people dependent upon the 
 incomes of less than 100 a-year. Mr. M'Culloch estimates 
 the whole income of the Kingdom at 370,000,000. Deduct- 
 ing the 232,000,000 assessed to the Income Tax from this, 
 it leaves 138,000,000 as the share of the 18,000,000. This 
 amount of population must include many retailers and 
 master-men in all departments of handicraft, and it would 
 certainly not leave to the operatives and labourers dependent 
 upon wages a third of the annual income or produce. 
 
 With reference to the mode in which the Annual Income is 
 distributed, from the best sources of information at my com- 
 mand I come to the conclusion that one-seventh of the popula- 
 tion take rather more than three-fifths, that one-third take two- 
 thirds, and that thus for the use of land, machinery, capital, 
 for superintendence and liberty to work, for distribution and 
 protection, the working man gives eight hours' labour out of 
 every twelve. He appears to give to the landowner and capi- 
 talist half or six hours ; to the retailer one hour, and to Govern- 
 ment one ; that is, supposing he pays half the taxes Govern- 
 ment expenses being about one-sixth of the whole annual 
 income. I presume the annual income of the Kingdom and 
 the annual produce mean the same thing ; and that for 
 all we receive from abroad we give an equivalent in our 
 produce in exchange. Commerce, then, merely means ex- 
 change, and exchange, although it facilitates production, 
 really adds nothing to it ; neither does trade, which is distri- 
 bution. The actual producers bear a- smaller proportion to the 
 whole population of the Kingdom than is generally supposed, 
 although the actual number as shown by the last census (1861) 
 is not yet at my command. 
 
 "The wealth of England has been estimated, but it must 
 only be taken as an approximation to the true amount. The 
 value of the cultivated soil, that is, the labour and wealth that
 
 276 PKESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 is in the soil, is estimated at 1,700,000,000; mines, at 
 120,000,000 ; roads, canals, and other means of communi- 
 cation, at 500,000,000; dwellings, factories, and kindred 
 erections, at 550,000,000 ; annual agricultural produce in 
 land, the surplus of former years, and agricultural implements, 
 at 230,000,000 ; horses, cattle, sheep, and other live stock, 
 at 242,000,000; manufactured goods, new and in use, at 
 200,000,000 ; mercantile shipping, at 40,000,000 ; foreign 
 merchandize paid for, at 50,000,000; fisheries, foreign 
 and domestic, at 5,000,000 ; being a total of nearly 
 3,700,000,000. Now this is a sum of which few persons 
 understand the extent. But suppose it was before us in sove- 
 reigns, and that we could count twenty in a minute for twelve 
 hours in the day, it would take about 800 years to get through 
 them. This immense sum, however, does not include the coin 
 which is in circulation in the British Isles. The gold and silver 
 is nearly 40,000,000, besides copper, bank notes, bills, and 
 other mediums of circulation. The gol(J, also, which is in the 
 coffers of the Bank of England is not included. The amount 
 of this fluctuates, but it is seldom less than 15,000,000. Now 
 this 40,000,000 of gold and silver, which is in actual circula- 
 tion, and the 15,000,000 in the Bank of England, and other 
 sums similarly situated, will amount to nearly 60,000,000 more. 
 Here, then, we have a realized capital of 3,760,000,000 
 of productive property in the British Isles. This amazing sum 
 is all at work in the three kingdoms, and forms our capital in 
 trade. But besides this, we have an enormous sum in what 
 may be called unproductive property. This may be enumera- 
 ted as follows : Waste land, public buildings, churches, chapels, 
 hospitals, prisons, arsenals, forts, military stores, dockyards, 
 ships of war, &c. All this is estimated at being equal to the 
 national debt, about 750 millions. It may, therefore, be said 
 that, notwithstanding our enormous debt, which we must 
 remember is not owing to foreigners, but to Englishmen, we 
 have the entire of our productive capital of three billions seven 
 hundred and sixty millions clear, independently of what other
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 277 
 
 nations owe to us. Now this large sum, which represents 
 everything that is useful and agreeable, and which affords sub- 
 sistence and comfort to twenty-eight millions of people, is the 
 result of labour. In other words, it is the difference between 
 a desolate country, such as this once was, and its present 
 condition. What mine, therefore, was ever so rich in. gold, as 
 the mine of industry? England has maintained all her inhabi- 
 tants, supported all her wars, repaired all her disasters, and, 
 after all, has a clear property of 3,760,000,000 in hand, or 
 134 sterling per head for every man, woman, and child, in 
 the three kingdoms, besides her foreign property. It is also 
 supposed that Great Britain and Ireland are saving, upon an 
 average, about 60,000,000 every year."* 
 
 OCCUPATIONS. Occupations in Great Britain, and number 
 of Persons engaged in them (arranged in the order of the 
 Numbers), from the Census in 1851. 
 
 Occupations. 
 
 Persons. 
 
 Occupations. 
 
 Persons. 
 
 Agricultural labourer 
 
 Farm servant, shepherd... 
 
 Domestic servant 
 
 Cotton, calico manufac- ) 
 
 ture, printing & dyeing ) 
 Labourer (branch undefined) 
 
 Farmer, grazier 
 
 Boot and shoe-maker 
 
 Milliner, dress-maker 
 
 Coal-miner 
 
 Carpenter, joiner 
 
 Army and Navy 
 
 Tailor 
 
 Washerwoman, mangier, 
 
 laundry-keeper 
 
 Woollen cloth manufacture 
 
 Silk manufacture 
 
 Blacksmith 
 
 Worsted man ufacture 
 
 Mason, pavior 
 
 Messenger, porter, and 
 
 errand boy 
 
 Linen, flax manufacture 
 
 Seamen, (mrchtser.) ashore ) 
 
 or in British ports J 
 
 Grocer .. 
 
 1,460,896 
 
 1,038,791 
 
 501,465 
 
 376,551 
 306,767 
 274,451 
 267,791 
 219.015 
 182,696 
 H78.773 
 152,672 
 
 146,091 
 
 137,814 
 114,570 
 112.776 
 104,061 
 101,442 
 
 101,425 
 98,860 
 89,206 
 85,913 
 
 Nail manufacture 
 
 Iron miner 
 
 Printer 
 
 Nurse (not domestic servant) 
 Shipwright, ship-builder 
 
 Stone quarrier 
 
 Lodging house keeper . 
 
 Lead-miner 
 
 Copper-miner 
 
 Straw hat aud bonnet-maker 
 
 Cooper 
 
 Watch and clock-maker 
 
 Brewer 
 
 Dock labourer, dock and 
 
 harbour service 
 
 Clergyman of Established 
 
 Church 
 
 Protestant dissentg minister 
 
 Po'ice 
 
 Plasterer 
 
 Warehouse man, woman ... 
 
 Saddler, harness-maker 
 
 Hatter, bat manufacture 
 Coachman, (not domestic ) 
 
 servant,) guard, postboy J 
 Law clerk... 
 
 28,533 
 28.088 
 26,024 
 25.518 
 25,201 
 23,489 
 23,089 
 22,530 
 22,386 
 21.902 
 20,245 
 19,159 
 18,620 
 
 18,462 
 
 18,587 
 
 9,644 
 18.343 
 17,980 
 17.861 
 17,583 
 16,975 
 
 16,836 
 16,626 
 
 * This estimate is taken from a note signed " R. Edleston," in the paper 
 before alluded to " On our National Strength." It was made ten years ago, 
 aud the amount must now be greatly increased. 
 
 t This is the Army and Navy of the United Kingdom, exclusive of the Indian 
 Army and Navy.
 
 278 
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 Occupations. 
 
 Persons. 
 
 Occupations. 
 
 Persons. 
 
 
 80,946 
 80,032 
 
 75,721 
 
 73,068 
 67,989 
 67,691 
 65,499 
 65,376 
 63.660 
 62,808 
 62,472 
 
 56,981 
 
 55,423 
 49,184 
 48,082 
 43,760 
 40,897 
 40,575 
 38,294 
 37,683 
 37,268 
 36,512 
 35,443 
 34,306 
 32,062 
 31,168 
 30,963 
 30,553 
 30,244 
 29,882 
 29,800 
 
 29,408 
 
 Coach-maker 
 
 16,590 
 16 526 
 15,966 
 15,643 
 15,16a 
 15,050 
 14,501 
 14,426 
 14,320 
 14,098 
 13,865 
 
 13,770 
 13.699 1 
 13,256 
 
 12,964 
 12,920 
 12,818- 
 12,805 
 12,173 
 12,092 
 12,005 
 11,457 
 11,242 
 
 11,230 
 11,150 
 10,948 
 
 10,953 
 10,923 
 10,467 
 10,439 
 10,256 
 10,074 
 
 Iron manufacture, mould- ) 
 
 Cow-keeper, milk-seller 
 Rope-maker 
 
 Inn-keeper, licensed victu- ) 
 aller, beersbop-keeper... f 
 Seamstress, shirt-maker 
 
 Druggist .. 
 
 Surgeon, apothecary ........ 
 
 Tin -miner 
 
 Paper- man ufacture 
 
 Butcher, meat-salesman 
 Hose,(stocking) manufacture 
 School master, mistress ... 
 
 Coalheaver, coal labourer ... 
 Greengrocer, fruiterer 
 Muslin manufacture 
 
 Confectioner 
 
 Plumber, painter, glazier ... 
 
 Tinman, tinker, tin plate ) 
 
 Carman, carrier, carter, t 
 
 Stay-maker 
 
 Solicitor, attorney, writer ) 
 to the Signet J 
 
 
 Draper (linen and woollen)... 
 Engine and machine-ranker 
 
 Dyer, scourer, calenderer .. 
 Currier 
 
 Builder 
 
 Cabinet-maker, upholsterer 
 Teacher (various), governess 
 Fisherman, womau 
 
 Farm bailiff 
 
 Hair dresser, wig- maker ... 
 Coal merchant, dealer 
 Glass manufacture 
 
 Boat, barge, man, woman ... 
 Miller 
 
 Carpet and rug manufacture 
 Goldsmith, silversmith 
 Brass founder, moulder, ) 
 manufacturer ( 
 
 Earthenware manufacture... 
 
 
 Straw plait manufacture .. 
 Brick-maker, dealer 
 
 Maltster 
 
 Railway officer, clerk, sta- ) 
 tion-master j 
 
 Government civil service ... 
 
 Bookbinder 
 
 Wheelwright 
 
 Road labourer 
 
 Glover 
 
 Wine aud spirit merchant... 
 Fishmonger 
 
 Shopkeeper, brnch undefined 
 Horsekeeker, groom (not ~| 
 domestic) jockey / 
 
 Merchant 
 
 Ribbon manufacture 
 
 
 In the various branches of business some curiosities occur. 
 The milliners and dress-makers, for one sex only we may pre- 
 sume, nearly equal the boot and shoemakers for both sexes. 
 In time of peace the carpenters and joiners outnumbered the 
 forces both by land and sea. The tailors outnumbered the 
 butchers, bakers, and brewers, taken collectively. The laun- 
 dresses nearly equal the tailors, and, according to Dr. Lyon 
 Playfair, the washerwoman's interest in a dozen shirts amounts 
 to 7. 16s., or more than double that of the producer, the 
 cotton-spinner, and the shirt-maker. Messengers, porters, and 
 errand-boys, are 101,425. For every inn-keeper, licensed 
 victualler, or beershop-keeper, there seems to be a poor seams- 
 tress or shirt-maker. The coopers are rather more than the
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 279 
 
 clock and watch-makers (20,245 and 19,159). Medical men 
 and their assistants are 18,728. The brewers are 18,620. ^The 
 clergy of the Established Church 18,587. The police 18,348. 
 Lawyers 16,763. The druggists and the surgeons differ little 
 in numbers, but there are rather more drug-vendors than milk- 
 sellers. 
 
 HEALTH. The probable lifetime of a male at birth, is nearly 
 45 years. The mean lifetime, or the average number of years 
 that males live, after birth, in England, is rather more than 40 
 years (40*36 years). (Hence the majority of us live only 
 about two-fifths of the years others attain to, (100) or, may we 
 not rightly say, two-fifths of our appointed time?) The 
 average duration of life is 45 years in Surrey, but 25 only in 
 Manchester and Liverpool. Thus, one individual in the former 
 place is equal nearly to two in either of the latter.* 
 
 Great as is our infant mortality and sickness, yet the pro- 
 portion of children constantly ill is not by one-third so great 
 as it was a century ago. M'Culloch, vol. 2, p. 542. The 
 children dying under five years, in London, in 1730, were 
 74-5; in 1830, 31-8. p. 543. 
 
 " Relative vigour will not increase in the same ratio as 
 population, in consequence of sickly children reared. 
 
 " There are on an average 2-5 years of sickness to every 
 death, or, 2 - 5 persons constantly ill, to one annual death: and 
 in a population of 17,000,000 in 1846, there must have been 
 744,600, ^th part persons down with sickness. One million 
 and a quarter, in the United Kingdom. The mortality in the 
 Metropolitan Workhouses, was 29 1 per 1,000 ; in the country, 
 18 per 1,000. 
 
 * Mr. Cowper, in his defence of the General Board of Health, in Parliament, 
 said, '' he had a list of 45 towns in which sanitary works had been completed, 
 and it appeared from that list that there was a great decrease in the rate of 
 mortality, since the completion of those sanitary works, In Coventry, the 
 mortality had fallen from 27 to 24 per thousand ; in Darlington, from 28 in 
 1852, to 23 ; in Derby, from 28 to 23 ; in Swansea, from 22 to 19, and so on. 
 The Registrar-General, in his Report, said that the effects of the sanitary mea- 
 sures which had been recently taken were beginning to be apparent, and 
 that the mortality in 1,000 had fallen from the average of 23, iu the ten years 
 between 1846 and 1855, to 21 in 1856. "
 
 280 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY* 
 
 "The physiological changes in the human body intimate that 
 it was framed to continue in healthy action for 70 or 80 years : 
 yet owing to hereditary .weakness, or a vicious tendency, and 
 the imperfect adaptation of parts of the external world to its 
 organization, a certain number of every generation fall sick, 
 and of these a certain number die at all ages ; in such a ratio, 
 however, that from birth to the age of puberty, the sickness 
 and mortality decline ; while from puberty they increase slowly, 
 in a geometrical progression, up to the 50th or 60th year, and 
 then more rapidly to the end. 
 
 "In 1841, the mean annual mortality, per cent., was, in 
 Manchester, 3*6; Liverpool, 3-5; London, 2'7 ; Kent, 2'0 ; 
 Surrey, 1'8. One male in 27 died annually in Manchester; 
 1 in 54 in Surrey. The mean duration of life, in Manchester, 
 was 25 years ; in Surrey, more than 45 years. While 48 boys 
 under 5 years of age, die in Surrey, and 57 in Kent, 144 die 
 in Liverpool, and 148 in Manchester. While 1 in every 37 
 die in Lancashire, only 1 in 55 die in Sussex, Surrey, and 
 North Wales. The average of the Kingdom in six years, 
 ending 1846, being 1 in 46." M'Culloch. 
 
 Dr. Farr calculates that there are, every year, over 
 100,000 premature or avoidable deaths in England, and more 
 than 1,000,000 persons who suffer from serious illness, also the 
 direct result of neglecting the laws of health. In the extra- 
 metropolitan portion of Surrey, less than 18 persons in 1,000 
 die annually, while in certain manufacturing districts, the death 
 rate is twice as high, or about 36 in 1,000 ; and throughout the 
 whole of England, it is now, on an average, 22 in 1,000. In 
 comparing the districts in which the death-rate is low with those 
 in which it is high, some particular form of disease has been 
 found to characterize the latter. In certain districts in Eng- 
 land six times more people die from diseases of the lungs than 
 in others, owing principally to want of proper ventilation, and 
 to the action of certain work and manufactures upon the lungs. 
 In many cases, now, this has been partially remedied.
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 281 
 
 Mr. W. H. Porter has an excellent paper on this subject in 
 the Assurance Magazine, vol. 9, p. 12. From this we learn, 
 that it is Dr. Farr's opinion that phthisis, or consumption, is 
 "the greatest, the most constant, and the most dreadful of the 
 diseases that afflict mankind, and that it is the cause of nearly 
 half the deaths between the ages of 15 and 35." The total 
 number of deaths registered in the year 1857, under this head, 
 was 50,106 ; if we add to these the deaths from all other diseases 
 of the lungs, the number amounts to 124,082, or 30 per cent, 
 of the whole number of deaths. This fearful mortality from 
 one disease Mr. Porter ascribes to the following causes : 
 
 1. The unhealthy nature of certain employments. 
 
 2. The bad arrangements, as respects ventilation, in manu- 
 factures and works of all kinds in which large bodies of the 
 labouring classes are employed. 
 
 3. The quantity of drink taken by this class of people. 
 
 4. The apathy shown to the position in which they are 
 placed as to sanitary matters, and the prejudices on the part of 
 the operatives generally against all suggestions for the removal 
 of the causes of the evils that injure them, in many conditions 
 of life, particularly in the case of printers, millers, stone- 
 masons, and persons employed in the manufacture of metals. 
 
 5. The defective sanitary arrangements as regards the 
 Army. 
 
 6. The propagation of the disease by the marriage of those 
 hereditarily affected with phthisis. 
 
 Compositors we are told frequently fall victims to phthisis 
 at the early age of 30, and probably 40 would be too high a 
 mean age to assign to them as a body. 
 
 Dr. Knight, of Sheffield, has shown that the grinding and 
 polishing of steel causes phthisis in an unusually short period ; 
 and that out of 250 workmen engaged in the occupation of 
 polishing steel, 154 suffered from affections of the chest ; and 
 that there was no case of a person engaged in polishing forks 
 reaching his 36th year magnets, wire masks, currents of air, 
 and moisture, having been successively tried for the purpose of 
 M M
 
 282 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 arresting the passage of the metallic particles to the lungs, but 
 without diminishing the mortality. 
 
 To give an idea of the excessive mortality among the opera- 
 tives employed in the Sheffield grinding trade, I may mention 
 that, in the fork-grinding branch which is stated to be the 
 most destructive Dr. Holland found that, out of 1,000 deaths 
 occurring among persons between the ages of 20 and 30, while 
 the proportion in England and Wales was 160, among the Shef- 
 field fork-grinders it was 475. In the next decade of ages, 30 
 to 40, a similar disparity was observed, the proportion in Eng- 
 land and Wales being 136, among the fork-grinders 410. The 
 mortality in this branch of the trade was, therefore, very nearly 
 three times as great as that among the general population of 
 the country ; the death-rate from pulmonary affections, per 
 100,000 males, being, for England and Wales, 569, while for 
 Sheffield it was as high as 839, and nearly the same for Birm- 
 ingham, viz., 838. 
 
 The Registrar seems to consider that the great mortality 
 among butchers may be owing to what he states to be the most 
 probable cause, viz., the element of decaying matter by which 
 they are surrounded in the slaughter-house and its vicinity. 
 About this, however, there seems some difference of opinion. 
 The Registrar also observes, that the red injected face of the 
 butcher is an indication of disease to the ordinary observer 
 this might be an indication of robust health. Similarly with 
 respect to brewers' draymen ; their appearance would indicate 
 that they were blessed with strong constitutions ; this is not, 
 however, the case. 
 
 The workmen employed in flour mills are grievous suffer- 
 ers from a spasmodic affection of the lungs, caused by the in- 
 halation of minute particles of dust with which the atmosphere 
 of most flour mills, as usually constructed, is impregnated. 
 
 Hugh Miller, himself originally, I believe, a stonemason, 
 states that few of the Edinburgh stone-cutters pass their 40th 
 year unscathed, and not one out of every 50 ever reach their 
 45th year. It is considered, however, that there is scarcely any
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 283 
 
 employment where proper precaution would not very much re- 
 duce the present evil consequences, and that ignorance greatly 
 increases the excessive mortality. The Registrar comes to the 
 conclusion that " the ignorant evidently intermarry by choice 
 and the force of circumstances to a much greater extent than 
 would be inferred from their numbers," and that 24 in every 
 100 families are without the advantage of having either father 
 or mother able to write. From the 20th Report, published in 
 1857, it appears that the number of persons signing the mar- 
 riage register with marks was no less than 105,778 the pro- 
 portions per cent, being of the men 72, and of the women 61 
 only, who were able to write their names. The per centage has 
 doubtless greatly increased 'during the last 5 years; still the 
 ignorance was dense enough to make Mr. Close, the Dean of 
 Carlisle, declare that, in his opinion, the education of the 
 children of the working classes should be made compulsory. 
 He says, u slowly and reluctantly, and after struggling against 
 this necessity for nearly 40 years, I am an absolute convert to 
 this necessity." This opinion has doubtless long been shared 
 by many other sensible men. 
 
 Mr. Porter says, however, " Notwithstanding the evident un- 
 necessary sacrifice of life in this country, there is no doubt that a 
 gradual progressive increase in the mean duration of life has 
 been maintained for some centuries past with one exception, 
 the 17th century but it is probably only within our own time 
 that any considerable increase in the longevity of the mass of 
 the population will be apparent ; and this will be owing as well 
 to the improved habits of life of the people as to the reform in 
 sanitary matters to the improvements in the dwellings of the 
 labouring classes the greater attention that is now being paid 
 to drainage the abolition of intramural interment the es- 
 tablishment of baths and wash-houses to the shorter hours of 
 labour that are becoming daily more general, owing in a great 
 measure to the exertions of the " Early Closing Association," 
 and of the Secretary of the Society, Mr. Lilwall to the 
 establishment of national play-grounds, and the encouragement
 
 284 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 to indulge in manly exercises, of which the shorter hours of 
 labour now more readily admit and to the greater care that is 
 now devoted generally to the promotion of the well-being of 
 that large section of the community which the labouring 
 classes form, a duty which those above them in the social 
 scale have heretofore too much neglected, to the consequent 
 undue increase of the deaths recorded in the Registrar- 
 General's annual returns, and the filling of our Prisons and 
 Reformatories." To this increasing health, no doubt the 
 admirable Reports by Dr. Simon, the Medical Officer of the 
 Privy Council, and the careful researches of Dr. Greenhow, 
 in our great towns, have greatly contributed. 
 
 GENERAL CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASSES. M'Cul- 
 loch says that "the labouring classes have been the principal 
 gainers (by the improvements in the arts and sciences), as well 
 by the large numbers of them who have succeeded in advancing 
 themselves to a superior station, as by the extraordinary addi- 
 tional comforts that now fall to the share even of the poorest 
 families." That they have been large gainers there can be no 
 doubt, and that the poor can now obtain many things that were 
 considered, fifty years since, as luxuries, even by the rich, and 
 which even kings could not two centuries ago command, can- 
 not be denied ; still the classes above them have undoubtedly 
 had the largest share of the enormous wealth that has been 
 created in England from the commencement of the century. 
 The condition of the working classes, however, has very much 
 improved during the last twenty years, since the publication . 
 of the first edition of this work, and a higher standard of 
 living and comfort has been permanently established among 
 a great many of them. They are better clothed, fed, lodged, 
 and have increased habits of providence and forethought. 
 
 By the working classes I mean those who are dependent 
 upon wages, and the difference in their condition among them- 
 selves, is as various almost as in the classes above them. This 
 depends principally upon the nature of the occupation. Un-
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 285 
 
 skilled labour, and the occupations which admit of the employ- 
 ment of women and children, are the worst paid. Mr. J. S. 
 Mill truly says, "those trades are by far the worst paid in 
 which the wife and children of the artisan aid the work. The 
 income which the habits of the class demand, and down to 
 which they are almost sure to multiply, is made up, in those 
 trades, by the earnings of the whole family, while in others 
 the same income must be obtained by the labour of the man 
 alone. It is even probable that the collective earnings will 
 amount to a smaller sum than those of the man alone in other 
 trades ; because the prudential restraint on marriage is un- 
 usually weak when the only consequence immediately felt is 
 an improvement of circumstances, the joint earnings of the 
 two going further in their domestic economy after marriage 
 than before. Such accordingly is the fact in the case of hand- 
 loom weavers. In most kinds of weaving, women can and do 
 earn as much as men, and children may be and are employed 
 at a very early age ; but the aggregate earnings of a family 
 are lower than almost any other kind of industry, and the 
 marriages earlier." 
 
 These facts are strikingly exemplified in Coventry, where 
 the population is divided between the Watch and Ribbon Trades. 
 In the former women are not employed, and are generally to be 
 found at home in attendance upon their families and husbands ; 
 children also are not employed, except as apprentices ; in the 
 latter women and children are both employed, and at a very 
 early age. Both work in factories, but in the watch trade men 
 only are employed; in the ribbon trade men, women, and 
 children are indiscriminately mixed together. Early mar- 
 riages are the rule, and young children are left at home in 
 charge of a child or old woman, and a fearful infant mortality 
 is the consequence.* If a girl of 14 or 15 disapproves of the 
 
 * Speaking of these children Dr. Greenhow says, children left by their 
 mothers during so great a part of the day are fed iu their absence on artificial 
 food, which is for the most part unsuited to their digestive powers. The 
 children are thus almost entirely spoon fed, the mother being able to nurae 
 them only at night and early in the morning. To remedy the illness caused by
 
 286 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 conduct of her parents, from their not being sufficiently toler- 
 ant of the morals of the young gentlemen with whom she keeps 
 company, or from other causes, she will leave home and take 
 lodgings, sometimes even next door. The 8s. to 12s. a- week 
 which she earns makes her thus early independent. If it is 
 the latter sum she earns, she will probably spend 8s. a- week 
 in board and lodging, and 4s. in dress and nightly dissipa- 
 tion ; if the former sum, the additional income may perhaps 
 be derived from some other source not always moral. But 
 there is a great improvement going on even in this class ; for 
 as the provident operative watchmaker soon becomes a small 
 master ; so the most respectable weavers save, purchase their 
 own machinery, leave the factories, and bring up their families 
 most respectably. 
 
 The Agricultural Labourers are put down at 1,460,896, 
 and it is calculated that 26 per cent, of the men and 8 of the 
 women, twenty years of age and upwards, with 8 per cent, of 
 the boys and 3 per cent, nearly of the girls, under twenty 
 years of age, are employed in agricultural pursuits. To these 
 may be added the 376,551 who call themselves labourers only. 
 Since the large influx of the Irish has ceased, and emigration 
 has been more systematically carried on, the condition of this 
 class has much improved, still we do not hear that an able- 
 bodied man gets more than 12s. 6d. per week, (except at har- 
 vest times,) and not that all the year round, as the days during 
 which he is unemployed must considerably reduce the annual 
 
 mismanagement, various domestic medicines are administered, more particularly 
 Borne kind of opiate, such as Godfrey's Cordial, or laudanum. From a return 
 procured by the Mayor, at Dr. Greenhow's request, it was ascertained that 
 twelve retail druggists, in Coventry, sold at least ten gallons of Godfrey's 
 Cordial weekly ; equal to 12,000 doses. Coventry is probably no exception to 
 other manufacturing towns. In what country then does infanticide prevail to 
 a greater extent than here, for I understand lhat half the children die before 
 the age of 5 years ? Think also of the weakened constitutions of the children 
 who do survive ! No wonder that our manufacturing population grow up 
 feeble, sickly, and small iu stature ; there is enough in this cause alone to 
 counteract all our improved sanitary arrangements, so that if we have an 
 average longer life, we have a deteriorated race in the factory districts. The 
 spread of hereditary constitutional diseases through cow-pox matter may also 
 tend to this result iu the country generally.
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 287 
 
 average. National Schools, the influence of the Clergy, Clubs, 
 Clothing Societies, &c., are acting very beneficially on this 
 class, and the children, at least, are growing up a different race. 
 
 The most numerous class of operatives is that employed in 
 the manufacture of clothing of all sorts, cotton, silk, ribbons, 
 trimming, cloth, hose, linen, lace, milliners, and dressmakers, 
 and when the factory system and factory operatives are spoken 
 of, it is to this class the terms are usually applied. 
 
 The Domestic Servants as long as they continue servants 
 are comparatively well off, as they [are at least well lodged, 
 clothed, and fed, ( and it is from this source the funds in the 
 Savings' Banks are principally dei'ived,) but they seem to value 
 liberty more than these mere material benefits, and there is a 
 very general desire to escape to the millinery and dressmaking, 
 or some trade, or to enter the estate of matrimony. Servants 
 who marry, having been accustomed to the comforts and luxu- 
 ries of the higher class, and not having been brought up to any 
 trade, are frequently worse off than their fellow operatives. 
 Still we do not live by bread alone, and there are children, and 
 independence, and a home of their own, to put against mere 
 good living. 
 
 Seven per cent, of the 5,458,815 men above, of the age of 
 20 and upwards, are engaged in the construction of houses, 
 and as this calling requires both strength and skill, and women 
 are not employed, it is the best paid of all, and a man, if he is 
 steady, usually earns enough to keep his wife and home com- 
 fortable, and to educate his children. A man knows exactly 
 what he can earn, and what therefore he has to depend upon, 
 and he is more provident and thrifty than those whose "comings 
 in" are attended with greater uncertainty. This class consti- 
 tutes the flower of our working-classes. 
 
 It is the Agricultural Labourers and Factory Operatives 
 whose condition appears to be much the worst, still the following 
 statements, descriptive of the condition of these classes princi- 
 pally, and of the effects of the incessant toil to which they are
 
 288 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 reduced, in the deterioration of the race in both bodily and 
 mental constitution, were made by Dr. John Conolly, of Han- 
 well, in a course of lectures on Education, delivered at the 
 Philosophical Institution, Birmingham, in the spring of 1839,* 
 and their interest and value principally depend upon their being 
 founded on personal experience, derived from long practice 
 amongst the poor in both town and country. The enlightened 
 and philanthropic lecturer defined the end of Education to be 
 the improving and perfecting of every human being, in every 
 bodily and mental faculty; and his object in the following 
 quotations was to show the counteracting circumstances which 
 make education in this sense quite unattainable by the mass of 
 the people. 
 
 "The large manufactories of Lancashire, and some parts of Scot- 
 land, present a combination of all the evils incidental to the condition 
 of a working man, and on a large scale. 
 
 " Too early employment too long employment too much fatigue 
 no time for relaxation no time for mental improvement no time 
 for the care of health exhaustion intemperance indifferent food 
 sickness premature decay a large mortality." 
 
 "There is every reason to believe the frame of body and rnind of 
 persons employed iu manufactories, where they are on their feet all the 
 day, in a heated atmosphere, and living on poor diet, becomes so feeble 
 and irritable, as to lead, as a matter of course, to intemperance and 
 disorderly passions, and to aii actual degeneration of the species ; so 
 that the mortality becomes very great, and the sickly and imperfect 
 state of a great proportion of the children who are reared, is such that a 
 greater and greater deterioration in each generation is inevitable. The 
 visitor to the large manufactories sees little of the misery they entail. 
 The sick aud feeble are at home ; in miserable houses or in cellars. 
 Those who are present are interested by the coming of strangers, and 
 their general appearance, it is only fair to state, bespeaks animation and 
 pretty good health. The visitor sees them for half-an-hour, but he can- 
 not forget that as he sees them on their feet, and in continual, although 
 not perhaps, laborious exertion, they remain during the whole of every 
 day except Sunday. For the consequences he must go to their homes ; 
 
 * These lectures were never published, and I am considerably indebted to 
 their author for haviug allowed me to use them so extensively. I have re- 
 tained the account here given in my 2nd edition because, although undoubt- 
 edly great improvements have taken place both in factories and among the 
 country labourers, yet too much of it is still true, and it shows the condition 
 of things from which we started less than a quarter of a century ago.
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 289 
 
 he must inspect their food ; their lodging, accommodations ; he must 
 observe what are their relaxations, and, if they can so be called, their 
 pleasures. Still more he must examine their children, and particularly 
 when all the causes acting upon them have brought them into the public 
 Charitable Institutions ; and then he will see what neglect and over- 
 work can do for an industrious, and even an intelligent class of people. 
 
 "He will find these children, for the most part, not deficient in in- 
 telligence ; but also for the most part, sickly. The remarkable thing, 
 indeed, if the poorest children are looked at, in the workhouses and 
 asylums, (the children of parents reduced to indigence, or gone to an 
 early grave, entirely worn out,) the remarkable fact is, that there is 
 an universal appearance of sickliuess among them ; a healthy face and 
 figure is an exception : the spectator is surrounded with pale blue, 
 flabby faces, inflamed eyes, diseases of the scalp. Many little creatures 
 sit over the fire, with faces of old people ; shrivelled, wasted, wretched 
 objects, with slender limbs, a dry, harsh, loose, coarse skin ; large joints, 
 prominent eyes and jaws : these little creatures are cold and feeble and 
 fretful, and utter plaintive cries like a suffering animal. Ask the medi- 
 cal officers concerning these circumstances, and you will learn that the 
 children are well fed, well lodged, well clothed, and allowed proper exer- 
 cise in the open air, and the older children are instructed in a school. 
 Education, physical and moral, is not neglected ; but it is working on 
 materials too imperfect to be much improved. The organization is frail 
 and incomplete : the stock of life is barely sufficient for a few years. 
 If the children are attacked with acute illness, they can neither bear the 
 disease nor the remedies : the loss of a little blood is fatal to them. 
 Chronic affections cling to them. Curative processes cannot be set up. 
 The medicating power of Nature is not active in their frames. The 
 tissues of their bodies are all unfinished pieces of Nature's workmanship, 
 and prone to disease ; their hearts are feeble, and blood is not vigor- 
 ously circulated, nay, it is not healthily elaborated in their bodies ; and 
 the regulating nervous system is as faulty as the rest of their economy. 
 Herded together, without parental care, and the thousand little offices 
 comforting to early childhood, their affections have a small range, and 
 their countenances are blank and melancholy. They are even the 
 victims of diseases never seen amongst the comfortable classes of 
 society. Every common disorder leaves consequences not to be got rid 
 of measles and smallpox leaving opthalmia and blindness. 
 
 " All this is distressing, but not wonderful. In many a region, 
 misery and exposure produce a marked physical degeneration, and 
 even create diseases scarcely known in other circumstances. 
 
 " It might lead me away from my immediate subject, if I were to 
 state how often epidemics of all kinds prevail among the poor alone. 
 Yet you cannot be too often reminded that as such diseases find a 
 reception in miserable courts and alleys, and from thence spread over 
 the more happily circumstanced families, so also the moral infirmities 
 
 N N
 
 290 PBESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 allowed to grow among any part of a population, spread their infectious 
 influence all around. There is, however, another, and a very large 
 portion of our community, whose state, although often boasted of, is 
 not, in my opinion, more favourable to the preservation of perfect life 
 of body and mind than that of the manufacturing poor. I mean the 
 labouring poor of agricultural districts. What I say concerning these 
 poor people is the result of much observation of them, and I consider 
 it a duty to lift the veil from a subject surrounded by many respectable 
 prejudices. I know that they are kindly visited and assisted by the 
 wealthier classes living in the country, and charity waits upon them 
 in every shape, in sickness, or for the education and clothing of their 
 children. Indeed but for this charity and often, but for the boundless 
 charity of the clergyman alone the people would be utterly lost. But 
 their extreme poverty, and their constant labour, so influence them, 
 that the majority I am sure I speak within bounds have never the 
 enjoyment of health after forty years of age. A thousand times in the 
 course of dispensary practice, I have felt the mockery of prescribing 
 medicines for the various stomach complaints to which they are so 
 liable, and which are the product of bad food insufficient clothing 
 wearing toil and the absence of all hope of anything better in this 
 world." 
 
 "The peasant's home is not the abode of joy or even of comfort. 
 No 'children run to lisp their sire's return, or climb his knees the 
 envied kiss to share.' The children are felt to be a burden, ill-fed, 
 ill-clothed, and lying on beds worse than the lower animals ; they are 
 ragged or clothed by charity ; untaught or taught by charitj' ; if sick, 
 cured by charity ; if not starved, fed by proud charity ; of which they 
 bear the marks in the fantastic uniformity of their dress, or in the 
 prison-look imparted by the general order under which they live, that 
 their clustering hair shall be cut close to their heads, lest they should 
 grow up fond of admiration. Observe their look of humility, of dis- 
 content, their abject curtseys. In such a habitation in the poor- 
 house is it possible to apply Physical and Mental Education ? Its 
 very elements are repelled from such a place. Dulness of the mental 
 faculties, obtuseness of the moral feelings, and sickly bodies, can 
 alone be formed." * * * " In agricultural districts, boys are very 
 early employed in the fields ; and their minds become utterly vacant. 
 The scenes in which they live have no charms for them. They toil 
 early and late in certain services ; never live well ; are condemned to 
 poverty if they marry. For them also physical and mental education 
 is quite out of the question. 
 
 " The girls are no better off many of them work laboriously ; and 
 marry the poor labourers we have spoken of. Others become servants. 
 Servants in underground or back kitchens no out-of-door exercise 
 no friends no followers no visits to others no mental or other 
 variety yet every virtue expected from them, and a good humour
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 291 
 
 which not even the inconsideration and injustice and caprice of others 
 can ruffle." 
 
 ' ' In the case of the manufacturing labourer, the necessary poverty 
 is, I presume, by no means so pressing : their wages are better ; they 
 buy provisions in. towns, at better advantage ; but their exhaustion 
 from over work, and their living surrounded by temptations to sensual 
 gratifications, and particularly to intemperance, conspire to make them 
 as destitute as the agricultural labourer. The latter, excluded from, 
 many temptations, never receives enough to support a family ; his food 
 is just sufficient to prevent divorce of soul and body for the best years 
 of his sad life ; if sickness assail him or his children he has no hope 
 but the poor-house ; and after toiling until he is old, the yawning 
 poor-house still awaits him. On the brink of that gulf he has ever 
 been, and he sinks into it at last." 
 
 " I lately accompanied a friend over a large and well-conducted 
 Union Workhouse in an agricultural district. The persons whom I saw 
 there were of two kinds ; aged and helpless men who had toiled with 
 the certain prospect of pauperism before them all their lives long ; 
 and younger men, who appeared to be deficient in intellect. Of the 
 women, several also were old and helpless ; a few were young, and of 
 these, several, I am inclined to think more than half, were idiotic. 
 There were nurseries and schools for the boys and the girls. In the 
 nurseries I was shocked with the spectacle of little laughing idiots, the 
 children of idiotic mothers ; but in the older children, with a few 
 exceptions so striking that one felt surprised to see them there, the 
 children presented coarse features ; their heads were singularly low and 
 broad, as if they had a broad shallow brain ; and in several instances 
 the upper dimensions of the head were so evidently defective, that no 
 one could help observing it. Every physiologist, nay, every ordinary 
 observer, would say, of such a shaped head, that it was associated with 
 very small intellectual power ; and the figure of the head, taken with 
 the faculties and expression of the face, was too manifestly such as every 
 observer would say prophesied ill for the future character of the 
 individual. Great care might possibly do much ; but when you consider 
 these evils of birth, and the unavoidable privations and neglect to 
 which these human beings must be exposed as they grow up, the awful 
 c msidoration presents itself that they are pre-doomed, from childhhood, 
 from birth before birth to ignorance and helplessness, or to crime ; 
 to the lowest toil to want to premature death, or to pauperism in age* 
 "As in the agricultural workhouse, we find the human brain 
 brought to a very low state of development, and the faculties of the 
 mind very limited, so in the manufacturing workhouse we find the 
 results of causes of degeneracy acting on a population whose faculties 
 are kept in greater activity, but whose bodies are deteriorated, and 
 whose offspring are prone to every evil that belongs to an imperfect 
 structure of every tissue of the body, and to the imperfect action of the
 
 292 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 organs which circulate the blood, or which elaborate the chyle, or -which 
 should renew and repair the perpetual waste ; so that, even in them the 
 brain cannot long continue healthy and efficient. If the children in the 
 agricultural workhouse were taken out and brought up ever so care- 
 fully, I believe that a very small proportion of them would exhibit a 
 capacity of much mental improvement. If the children in the manu- 
 facturing workhouse were separated, and brought up in families where 
 every article of diet and regimen was very carefully attended to, many 
 of them would be found incapable of continued life beyond a few 
 years. They might escape some of the worst forms of disease which 
 now carry them off in infancy, but a considerable portion would 
 eventually perish of some form or other of tuberculous disease con- 
 sumption or disease of the mesenteric glands. With these, then, you 
 see how limited must be the effects of the best physical and moral 
 education that could be devised, even if it could be at once and in every 
 case applied. And so long as these classes remain in this state, disease 
 and premature death, and many moral evils which disfigure life, must 
 be perpetuated. Of both these classes of the poor a proportion will still 
 live to be thirty or forty, and become, unhappily, the parents of 
 children who will inherit their infirmities of mind and body, and their 
 tendencies to disease ; until, by the gradual augmentation of the evil, 
 successive families are extinguished. Less time is required for their 
 total extinction than is commonly supposed. Sir A. Carlisle says, that 
 where the father and mother are both town-bred, the family ends with 
 the third generation. 
 
 "I am unwilling to accumulate painful images ; it may be enough 
 to quote the words of a very able writer on Medical Statistics, which 
 point at several instances of human deterioration. ' Life and death, 
 then,' says Dr. Bissett Hawkins, ' mainly depend on the prosperity of 
 the circumstances which surround us ; physical prosperity and moral 
 happiness, which often depend and re-act upon each other, present a 
 safeguard at every crisis of existence, both to individuals and to 
 nations. We may often judge with tolerable accuracy of the mortality 
 which is likely to exist in any given country, town, or hospital, from 
 the degree in which poverty or wealth, knowledge or ignorance, mis- 
 fortune or success, are seen to prevail. Wherever want or misery 
 prevails, there the mother is more likely to die in labour, there still- 
 births will be more frequent, there the deaths during infancy will be 
 more numerous, there epidemics will rage with more violence, there 
 the recoveries from sickness will be more tedious, and the fatal termi- 
 nation of it more probable ; and there, also, will death usually 
 approach at an earlier period of life than in happier situations.' 
 
 " My reason for dwelling on these points is, that I would fain show 
 the mockery of expecting, by anything which philanthropy can devise, 
 the production of mental power, or even of virtue, any more than of 
 healthy bodies, in the children of a very considerable portion of all the
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 293 
 
 most civilized communities of Europe, in their present condition ; and 
 that until this condition is so modified that the human economy can be 
 healthily exercised, no physical education no general instruction no 
 scheme of benevolence can train these children into healthy adults. 
 You cannot engraft virtue on physical misery. To hope to plant 
 Temperance, Forethought, Chastity, Content, in a soil where the body 
 and soul are corrupting, where the materials of the body are advanced 
 towards death, and incapable of the full actions of vitality, is the 
 dream of benevolence. You must secure good food, clothing, lodging 
 and cheerful mental stimulus to all classes, before you can raise them 
 above that condition in which they will be glad to forget their misery 
 in any sensual gratification that offers. Until then, they must continue 
 feeble and sickly, discontented and fretful, and prone to fly for consola- 
 tion to stimulants ; and, becoming parents, their children will inherit 
 their imperfections, some dying early, and others living in such a state 
 that at length, perhaps, the intolerable magnitude of the physical and 
 moral evil may suggest a remedy, and the means of effecting that first 
 object of education, the formation of a healthy and virtuous people. 
 
 " It seems scarcely credible that in an age which, compared with 
 feudal days, appears civilized, thousands of children are every year 
 born only to be the prey and victims of disease, of early death or of 
 public punishment ; their parents not able to support the life they have 
 created, and the wretched progeny being consigned, one may almost 
 say, before birth, to fill the hospitals and jails ; to be swept away by 
 diseases from which all the comfortable classes are comparatively pro- 
 tected, or to linger out a wretched age in the poorhouse. There is no 
 physiologist who, contemplating these things, can complacently con- 
 clude, that it is not possible to do something better for the health and 
 life of every child that is born into the world. 
 
 " I anxiously wish to avoid being betrayed into exaggeration on 
 these points ; and I would say, generally, that there are not many 
 occupations which would be in themselves unwholesome, if it were not 
 for the number of hours in which it is requisite for those to be em- 
 ployed who live by the labour of their hands, or even by the exercise 
 of their minds, in business. The merchant's desk, the professional 
 man's study, the author's library, the artist's studio, the manufactory, 
 the shop, possess nothing deadly to mankind, if human beings are not 
 too long in them at one time ; or too laboriously exercised whilst there, 
 or not exposed to fatigue at too early an age. It seems a sad result for 
 an honest and industrious house-painter, that his hands and feet should 
 become paralyzed, and that he should be liable to attacks of excruci- 
 ating pain and delirium. It would seem cruel to consign a youth to 
 such a business, but with care and cleanliness these results are, gene- 
 rally speaking, avoidable ; and if time be allowed in which good air 
 may be breathed ; the working clothes laid aside ; they may be alto- 
 gether escaped. Scarcely any of the evils arising from trades and
 
 294 PKESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 occupations are unavoidable in themselves. The circumstance, there- 
 fore, that constitutes the hardness of life of the working classes, is not 
 BO much the nature of their work ; for in this, and the muscular or 
 mental exertion required for it, there is actual benefit to the health, 
 and pleasure to the sensations, and recreation to the mind ; but it is 
 the absorption of life itself into labour, so that the body and the mind 
 are no longer educated, no longer heeded, when life's toil has fairly 
 begun, and the health of both must be sacrificed, and men must die to 
 live." 
 
 "It would occupy too much time to take even the most passing 
 view of the poor of large cities not employed in manufactures. Dr. 
 Bateman, who wrote so much and so well on the diseases of London, 
 tells us, what we may well believe, that in hot weather their houses 
 are so heated and ill-ventilated, as to produce a state of faintness, de- 
 pression of spirits, languor, pains in the back and limbs resembling 
 those from fatigue, a fluttering in the region of the stomach, vertigo, 
 tremors, cold perspirations, and various symptoms of indigestion ; with 
 a feeble pulse. Impure air, fatigue and anxiety, contribute, he says, 
 to produce these effects ; which they chiefly do in woman. How these 
 must influence the temper, affections, and habits, and how interfere 
 with the proper care of their children's bodies and minds, I am sure 
 you will readily imagine. 
 
 " Visit the same poor people in winter ; you will find every cranny 
 closed, arid fever carrying off its victims in great numbers. 
 
 " Often, very often doubtless, moral evils flow from hence to the 
 better quarters of the town, and poison the peace of happy families : 
 often, very often, the infection of fevers there cherished, floats over 
 the luxurious parts of the capital, and awakens the great and wealthy 
 to the sense of the common lot of humanity. 
 
 " Nor can we from these evils ever be free until all receive the bene- 
 fits of physical, and moral, and mental education, which they cannot 
 do so long as they are steeped to the lips in poverty. 
 
 " You must give them the poor citizen the manufacturer the 
 agriculturist leisure for instruction, and comforts which will prevent 
 their being reckless ; and then fear not that they will refuse to be com- 
 fortable. Then they will become provident, careful of their health, 
 prudent as to marriages, temperate, content in short, reflecting crea- 
 tures, exercising that now dormant brain, that capability and god-like 
 reason, which their good Creator gave them, not to rust in them unused." 
 
 " From the observations I have made, yon will gather that I do not 
 believe the world to be so constituted that a large portion of mankind 
 must, from the very necessity of nature, be consigned to constant 
 poverty, ignorance, suffering, disease, vice, and premature death. 
 
 "I even confess, that I am shocked when I hear the sacred writings 
 quoted with comfortable satisfaction over ' good men's feasts,' as afford- 
 ing assurance that there must ever be ' hewers of wood and drawers of
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 295 
 
 water ;' for without at all denying the necessity of these services, I 
 have never found any reason to believe that hewers of wood and draw- 
 ers of water must, as a matter of course, be starved, and sickly, and 
 vicious, and limited in this life to half of the allotted years of men. I 
 fear we dishonour the Great unseen Father of all his creatures by sup- 
 positions of this kind ; and wrest the words of Scriptures to some pur- 
 poses which He is far from approving. 
 
 "Valueless, indeed, in my opinion, woiild all our own advantages 
 be, if we could still cherish the selfish belief that for us and for our 
 children alone such gracious advantages were conferred. 
 
 " There is nothing in the structure and capacities of any portion of 
 mankind to sustain the notion that the same Deity who endowed them 
 with feelings, affections, appetites, sensations, and intellect : the 
 same Being who accorded to rich and poor alike the gifts of light and 
 air, has still ordained, that to any one class, and for ever, are to be 
 denied the power to enjoy, not mere physical life alone, exempt from 
 many miseries now incidental to their share of it, but also those plea- 
 sures of contemplation and reflection, those upliftings of the mind to 
 Him, and all that intellectual and spiritual life, which alone gives 
 mere physical life any solid value to us. Feeling, that for us the de- 
 lights of existence are increased a thousand-fold by the possession of 
 health and by opportunities of instruction, whereby are developed 
 countless sources of pure and elevated enjoyment, we must not we 
 cannot ungratefully turn round and say that, except for a small 
 number, the blessings of good air, good food and clothing, immunity 
 from epidemic diseases, leisure and freedom of heart, healthy and 
 peaceful old age, and a disposition to seek after immortal good, are for 
 ever and absolutely denied." 
 
 As a sample of our large towns sprung up during the last 
 half century, we give that of Glasgow : 
 
 " The city of Glasgow exhibits so extraordinary an example, dur- 
 ing the last fifty years, of the progress of population, opulence, and 
 all the external symptoms of prosperity, and at the same time of the 
 utter inadequacy of all these resources to keep pace either with the 
 moral or spiritual wants of the people, or provide adequate funds for 
 the alleviation of their distresses, that it it deserving of particular 
 consideration. 
 
 " It appears from Dr. Acland's admirable Statistics of Glasgow, 
 that Population, Custom-House Duties, Harbour-Dues, and Post- 
 Office Revenue of the City, have stood, in the undermentioned years, 
 as follows : 
 
 Years. 
 
 Population. 
 
 Custom-House Duties. 
 
 Harbour Dues. 
 
 Post-Office. 
 
 1770 
 
 31,000 
 
 
 149 10 
 
 33,771 
 
 1801 
 
 83,769 
 
 3,124 in 1812 
 
 3,319 16 I 
 
 23,328 
 
 1831 
 
 202,426 
 
 72,053 17 4 
 
 20,296 18 5 
 
 35,642 
 
 1839 
 
 290,000 
 
 468,974 12 2 
 
 45,287 16 10 
 
 47,527
 
 296 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 " This prodigious increase is probably unprecedented in any other 
 country in Europe during the same or perhaps any other period, and a 
 parallel to it is only to be found in the transatlantic provinces. It is a 
 fact well worthy of observation, that the progress of population in 
 New York from 1820 to 1830, was as nearly as possible the same as 
 that of Glasgow from 1830 to 1840 ; both cities at the commencement 
 of the respective periods having 200,000 inhabitants, and having in- 
 creased to 290,000 at their close. (Chevalier's America.) Here then, if 
 anywhere, was to be found an example where, in consequence of the 
 prodigious and unprecedented prosperity of the place, ample scope was 
 afforded for the voluntary system, whether in religious instruction or 
 temporal relief. And that the merchants of Glasgow are at least equal 
 to any in Europe, in the benevolence and liberality with which, on all 
 important occasions, they come forward for the relief of the distress by 
 which they are surrounded, or for any purpose of public charity or 
 munificence, is amply proved by the following list of subscriptions 
 made by them annually, or for the last seven years : 
 
 For Church Extension 42,300 
 
 House of Refuge for young Criminals 14,800 
 
 Female House of Refuge 4,800 
 
 Normal School 4,900 
 
 Infirmary, annually, 4,500 in seven years 31,500 
 
 Welliugton Testimonial 9,500 
 
 Relief of Poor in 1837 7,000 
 
 In seven years 114,800 
 
 " Nevertheless, so far are these splendid subscriptions from being 
 able to keep pace with the progress of destitution and suffering in 
 Glasgow, that, as already mentioned, there are no less than 80,000 
 persons for whom there is no accommodation whatever for attending 
 any place of religious worship, of whatever persuasion, in the city and 
 suburbs. About 20,000 a-year are levied for the support of the poor 
 in the city and suburbs, in addition to innumerable private charities, 
 and much individual beneficence. Yet in spite of all this munificence 
 the following is the account given of the state of the most destitute 
 part of the community, by two most competent observers, whose 
 valuable works, well known to the public, have gained for them both 
 an extensive and well-earned reputation. ' Glasgow exhibits,' says the 
 able and indefatigable Dr. Cowan, * a frightful state of mortality, un- 
 equalled, perhaps, in any city in Britain. The prevalence of fever 
 presents obstacles to the promotion of social improvement among the 
 lower classes, and is productive of an amount of human misery 
 credible only to those who have witnessed it. (Cowan's Vital Statistics 
 of Glasgow, p. 14.) The extraordinary progress of mortality which 
 has, as already shown, declined from 1 in 41 in 1823, to 1 in 24 in
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 297 
 
 1837, while the annual average mortality of London is about 1 in 36, 
 and over all England 1 in 51, affords too melancholy a confirmation 
 of this observation. And the following is the account given of the 
 Glasgow poor by a very intelligent observer, Mr. Symonds, the Govern- 
 ment Commissioner for examining into the condition of the hand-loom 
 weavers : ' The wynds iu Glasgow comprise a fluctuating population of 
 from 15,000 to 30,000 persons. This quarter consists of a labyrinth 
 of lanes, out of which numberless entrances lead into small square 
 courts, each with a dunghill reeking in the centre. Revolting as was 
 the outward appearance of these places, I was little prepared for the 
 filth and destitution within. In some of these lodging-rooms, (visited 
 at night,) we found a whole lair of human beings littered along the 
 floor, sometimes fifteen or twenty, some clothed and some naked ; 
 men, women, and children, huddled promiscuously together. Their 
 bed consisted of a layer of musty straw intermixed with rags. There 
 was generally little or no furniture in theso places ; the sole article of 
 comfort was a fire. Thieving and prostitution constitute the main 
 sources of the revenue of this population. No pains seem to be taken 
 to purge this Augean pandemonium ; this nucleus of crime, filth, and 
 pestilence, existing in the centre of the second city of the empire. 
 These wynds constitute the St. Giles of Glasgow ; but I owe an 
 apology to the metropolitan pandemonium for the comparison. A very 
 extensive inspection of the lowest districts of other places, both here 
 and on the Continent, never presented anything one-half so bad, either 
 in intensity of pestilence, physical and moral, or in extent pro- 
 portioned to the population.' Arts and Artizans at Home and 
 Abroad, p. 116."* 
 
 " Of all the effects which the progress of civilization produces, there 
 is none so deplorable as the degradation of the human character which 
 arises from the habits of the manufacturing classes. The assemblage 
 of large bodies of men in one place ; the close confinement to which 
 they are subjected ; the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes at an 
 early period of life ; and the debasement of intellect which arises from 
 uniformity of occupation, all conspire to degrade and corrupt mankind. 
 Persons unacquainted with the manners of the lower orders in the 
 great manufacturing cities of Britain, can form no adequate conception 
 of the habits which prevail among them. In Glasgow, at this moment, 
 (1840,) there are 3,000 public-houses among 290,000 persons included in 
 58,000 families ; being nearly one public-house for every 20 families. 
 The number of inhabited houses is about 30.000, so that every tenth 
 house is appropriated to the sale of spirits : a proportion unexampled, 
 it is believed, in any other city of the globe. This number has risen 
 from 1,600 since the year 1821, though not more than 140,000 souls 
 have been, during the same period, added to the population. Seasons 
 of adversity lead to no improvement in the habits of these workmen ; 
 * Sir Archibald Alison's Principles of Population, vol. 2, p. 87. 
 O O
 
 298 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. - 
 
 the recurrence of prosperity brings with it the usual attendants of 
 profligacy and intemperance. Ten or twenty thousand (?) workmen are 
 more or less intoxicated every Saturday, and for the most of Sunday ; 
 every farthing which can be spared is too often converted into ardent 
 spirits. The same individuals who, a year before, were reduced to 
 pawn their last shreds of furniture to procure subsistence, recklessly 
 throw away the surplus earnings of more prosperous times in the 
 lowest debauchery. The warnings of religion, the dictates of prudence, 
 the means of instruction, the lessons of adversity, are alike over- 
 whelmed by the passion for momentary gratification. It seems the 
 peculiar effect of such debasing employments, to render the condition 
 of men precarious at the same time that it makes their habits irregular : 
 to subject them at once to the most trying fluctuations of condition, and 
 the most fatal improvidence of character. 
 
 "The prevalance of such habits is in the highest degree dangerous 
 to the increase of mankind. Nothing more ruinous to public welfare 
 can be imagined than the existence of a large body of men in the State, 
 whose employment is uncertain, while their passions are uncontrolled : 
 whose increase, like that of the lower animals, is wholly uninfluenced 
 by the dictates of reason, and who are steady in nothing but the 
 indulgence of desire. Experience has proved accordingly, that the pro- 
 portion of marriages in these classes is much greater than in the 
 agricultural districts ; and the increase of population is still more rapid, 
 as the dissolution of manners has multiplied to an incredible degree 
 the number of bastards." Ibid, vol. 1, p. 190. 
 
 "It has been the well-known policy of Great Britain for the last 
 century and a-half to encourage, by every means in its power, the 
 manufacturing industry of its people, and this policy ably and steadily 
 pursued, and accompanied with the advantages of our cool, insular 
 situation, and free constitution, have produced the immense results over 
 which, in one view, we have reason to exult, and in another to lament. 
 It is utterly impossible that this unparalleled growth of our manufac- 
 turing industry can co-exist with the firm foundation of public pros- 
 perity. Its obvious tendency is to create immense wealth in one part 
 of the population, and increased numbers in another ; to coin gold for 
 the master manufacturer, and multiply children in his cotton mills ; to 
 exhibit a flattering increase in the exports and imports of the empire, 
 and an augmentation as appalling in its paupers, its depravity, and its 
 crimes." Ibid, p. 519. 
 
 But from a report issued by Dr. John Strang, City Cham- 
 berlain, on " The Vital and Economic Conditions of Glasgow," 
 it appears that Glasgow, like most other places, is improving. 
 He estimates the population in 1856 at 380,000; in 1851,
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 299 
 
 according to the Census, it was 329,096. In 1856, the 
 
 Births were 15,447; 1 in 24.6, or 4 per cent. 
 Deaths, ... 10,297 ; 1 in 36.9, or 2.7 
 Marriages ... 3,517, or 1 in 109.3. 
 
 Compared, he says, with the last year's births, deaths, and 
 marriages, we find the result to be favourable to the progress, 
 health, and well-being of the City : the births in 1855 being 
 1 in 27.1 ; the deaths 1 in 34.3 ; and the marriages 1 in 119.5. 
 Of the 10,280 deaths, 5,443, or 52.9 per cent, were under 5 
 years. It is worthy of notice that while the deaths in High 
 Church District were 1 in 28.5 ; in Blytheswood, they were 
 only 1 in 59.3. The High Church includes the Infirmary, but 
 it is said this by no means accounts for the great difference. 
 
 The number of persons buried at the public expense within 
 the boundary during the year 1853-4 were 1,512 ; in 1854-5, 
 904 ; in 1855-6, only 655. Thus we have a great increase in 
 births and marriages, and a marked decrease in deaths, 
 coupled with a striking diminution in pauper-burials. 
 
 The Police cases were diminished in the course of 3 years 
 of males, to the extent of 4,380 ; and of females, 1,345, not- 
 withstanding a greatly-increased population. 
 
 The condition of the people in other countries varies con- 
 siderably from our own as their industrial system differs. It 
 approaches neither extreme of either comparative wealth or 
 poverty. It is much more equitable and much less stirring. 
 The changes of condition are less fluctuating : there is little 
 change from father to son ; consequently, although there is less 
 material comfort than in England, there is more forethought 
 and providence. In Norway and Sweden, the peasantry live 
 a great deal in the families of their employers, and cannot and 
 do not marry until a house falls to them in the course of nature 
 through the death of the previous occupier. In Germany, 
 people are prevented from marrying early by the necessity of 
 serving for three years as soldiers, and in many States by law, 
 until the parties wishing to marry can show a reasonable 
 expectation of the means of subsistence for their offspring.
 
 300 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETT. 
 
 Von "W. H. Reihl tells us that many vicissitudes have 
 lately changed the dull current of German peasant life, and 
 that " many disintegrating forces have been at work on the 
 peasant character, and degeneration is unhappily going on at 
 a greater pace than development. In the wine districts es- 
 pecially, the inability of the small proprietor to bear up under 
 the vicissitudes of the market, or to insure a high quality of 
 wine by running the risks of a late vintage, and the competition 
 of beer and cider with the inferior wines, have tended to 
 introduce that uncertainty of gain which, with the peasant, is 
 the inevitable cause of demoralization." With the German 
 peasant he says, "Custom holds the place of sentiment, of 
 theory, and in many cases of affection." But he says, "The 
 more deeply we penetrate into the knowledge of society in its 
 details, the more thoroughly shall we be convinced that a 
 universal social polity has no validity except on paper, and can 
 never be carried into successful practice. The conditions of 
 German society are altogether different from those of French, 
 of English, or of Italian society, and we cannot apply the 
 same social theory to these nations indiscriminately." 
 
 In France, Mill tells us the peasant proprietors, of which, 
 including their families, there are some 21 millions, know 
 exactly what inheritance they have to leave their children; 
 "the peasant knows that the law will divide it equally among 
 them ; he sees the limit beyond which this division would make 
 them descend from the rank which he has himself filled, and a 
 just family pride, common to the peasant and to the noble- 
 man, makes him abstain from summoning into life children 
 for whom he cannot properly provide. If more are born, at 
 least they do not marry, as they agree among themselves 
 which of several brothers shall perpetuate the family." 
 
 In Switzerland, a similar prudential check prevails. 
 
 The working classes in America are generally very well off, 
 as unskilled labour is much in demand, and, therefore, highly 
 paid ; but there is a great mass of squalid poverty in New 
 York and other large cities of the Union, and the best of our
 
 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 301 
 
 working men and cleverest operatives who go out there often 
 return. It is not the rate of wages, but what can be purchased 
 with them, that is the criterion of well-being. 
 
 Of the mere material condition of the poor of other 
 countries, however, Sir A. Alison says 
 
 " It has been observed that the paupers of England are better fed 
 than the labouring poor of the Continental States ; it may be safely 
 affirmed that, in every gradation of rank above the workhouse, the 
 difference is still more remarkable. Mr. Youug observes that ' the 
 labouring classes in France are 76 per cent, worse clothed, fed, and 
 lodged, than their brethren in this country ; and it is a remarkable fact, 
 that, with the increase of agricultural wealth in the former country 
 since the Revolution, a corresponding change in the diet of the peasantry 
 has taken place. Notwithstanding this change, however, it is calculated 
 by the latest political writer in the two countries, that the quantity of 
 butcher-meat, butter, and cheese consumed in Britain is 50 per cent, 
 greater than in France. A comparison of the food of the poorer classes 
 in Poland, where the peasantry live entirely on inferior grain, while 
 their splendid harvests of wheat are transported untouched to the Lon- 
 don market, with that which is consumed by the same classes in Sweden 
 and Switzerland, where ages of comparative freedom have diffused 
 opulence through the rural population ; or of that daily in use among 
 the Irish poor, with that which for ages has subsisted among the 
 opulent yeomanry of England, is sufficient to demonstrate the truth of 
 these observations.' " 
 
 "'Traversing the country South of Moscow,' says Clarke, 'it 'is 
 as the garden of Eden, a fine soil, covered with corn, and apparently 
 smiling in plenty. Enter the cottage of the labourer, and you find 
 him, though surrounded with these riches, often in want of the 
 necessaries of life. Extensive pastures often furnish no milk to him ; 
 in autumn the harvest affords no bread to his children ; every road is 
 covered with caravans bringing the produce of the soil to the lords of 
 Petersburgh and Moscow, while the cultivators who raised it are in 
 want of the necessaries of life.' " 
 
 u In the rich and fertile plain of Lorabardy, where three crops 
 annually repay the labour of the husbandman, and the means of 
 perpetual irrigation are afforded by the streams that descend from the 
 adjoining mountains, want and indigence generally prevail among the 
 peasantry. Inhabiting a country which abounds in wine, it is seldom 
 they drink anything but water ; their clothing is scanty and wretched ; 
 their dwellings destitute of all the comforts of life. On the public 
 roads, in the villages, in the cities, the traveller is assailed by multi- 
 tudes of beggars, whose squalid looks and urgent importunity attest 
 but too strongly the abject distress to which they are reduced. On the
 
 302 PEESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 mountains, as on the plains, he perceives the traces of a numerous 
 population, and the benignity of the climate clothes the wooded slopes 
 with innumerable villages, whose white walls and elegant spires give a 
 peculiar charni to Italian landscape ; but within their walls he finds the 
 well-known features of public misery, and the voice of distress sup- 
 plicating for relief, in scenes which, at a distance, appear only to teein 
 with human happiness." 
 
 " Provisions are incomparably cheaper in Poland and in Russia 
 than in this country ; but are the Polish or Russian peasants half as 
 comfortably fed, lodged, or clothed, as the corresponding classes in this 
 country ? Every one knows that, so far from being so, or obtaining 
 any benefit whatever from the cheap price of provisions in their own 
 country, they are in truth the most miserable labourers in Europe, and 
 feed upon scanty meals of rye bread, in the midst of the splendid 
 wheat crops, which they raise for the more opulent consumers in this 
 country. In the Southern provinces of Russia, wheat is often only ten 
 shillings a-quarter, from the total want of any market. But what is 
 the consequence 1 Why, that wages are so low that the Cossack horse- 
 man gets only eight shillings and sixpence a-year of pay from Govern- 
 ment. Wheat and provisions of all sorts are much cheaper in Ireland 
 than in Great Britain ; but nevertheless, the Irish labourers do not 
 enjoy one-half of the comforts or necessaries of life which fall to the 
 lot of their brethren on this side of the Channel." 
 
 ' ' The mere necessaries of life are sold almost for nothing in 
 Hindostan and China; but, so far from obtaining any benefit from 
 that low rate of prices, the labouring classes are so poor as to taste 
 hardly anything but rice and water ; and wages are so low, seldom 
 exceeding two- pence a-day, that every sepoy, foot-soldier, and horse- 
 man has two, and every native, three, attendants to wait upon his 
 person."* 
 
 * Alison, vol. 1, pp. 202, 200, 435,454; vol. 2, 419, 420.
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 WAGES, AND THE LAWS WHICH REGULATE THEM ; AND THE 
 CAUSES OF THE POVERTY OF THE WORKING CLASSES. 
 
 THUS we see that the majority of the people in all countries, 
 with differences dependent upon local situation, government, 
 laws, and institutions, is everywhere the same they are 
 everywhere poor, ignorant, and overworked ; although a great 
 improvement has taken place in their condition during the 
 last quarter of a century. 
 
 We have seen that in this country the working man gives 
 for the use of land, machinery, capital, for superintendence 
 and liberty to work, for distribution and protection, eight 
 hours' labour out of every twelve. 
 
 Society, at least in this country, is divided into Capitalist 
 and Labourer into those who possess everything, and into 
 those who possess, comparatively, nothing. When the poor 
 man comes into the world, he finds it already occupied ; every 
 part of it, except uncultivated regions inaccessible to him, is 
 already appropriated. All the means by which labour is made 
 available to production are private property, and all that is left 
 to him is the strength of his body, the use of his limbs. His 
 labour, therefore, is all that he has to exchange for the means 
 of subsistence, for lodging, food, and clothing ; what he shall 
 receive for it, will depend upon the bargain he shall be able to 
 make with those who possess the means of setting him to work. 
 This bargain will be more or less in his favour as his labour 
 may be more or less wanted. But should the capitalist have 
 no need of labour, should he already have as many things as 
 he wants, or as many for the time as he can profitably dispose
 
 304 PKESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 of, he who has only labour to give in exchange for food, must 
 starve, or depend upon charity for support, although, if set to 
 work, he could produce many times as much as he can 
 consume. 
 
 No one would cultivate a field if another might reap what 
 he had sown, and the fruits of the earth would scarcely be 
 allowed to come to maturity, if no one were interested in 
 preserving them to their full time. 
 
 Man has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, 
 and labour is in all cases necessary to production. Without 
 the labour of cultivation, the earth would support very few 
 inhabitants. However abundant the raw materials for clothing 
 and lodging, labour must fit them for the purposes required. 
 There must also be capital, land, houses, implements, and 
 machinery, to make this labour available to further production. 
 There must also be an accumulation of capital, that is, more 
 than enough to meet the wants of existing individuals ; for the 
 rising generation, the young unable to produce for their own 
 support, must be provided for. 
 
 The object of the institution of the present law of property 
 was, therefore, to provide for this accumulation, and it is a very 
 clumsy instrument for this purpose, and, as we have seen, a 
 very unequal division of the produce of labour takes place 
 under it. 
 
 Now what is the law by which this division takes place ? 
 The Political Economists tell us. Mr. James Mill says 
 
 " In the greater number of cases, especially in the more improved 
 stages of society, the labourer is one person, the owner of the capital 
 another. The labourer has neither raw material nor tools. These 
 requisites are provided for him by the capitalist. For making this 
 provision the capitalist of course expects a reward. As the commodily, 
 which was produced by the shoemaker, when the capital was his own, 
 belonged wholly to himself, and constituted the whole of his reward, 
 both as labourer and capitalist, so, in this case, the commodity belongs 
 to the labourer and capitalist together. When prepared, the commodity, 
 or the value of it, is to be shared between them. The reward to both 
 must be derived from the commodity, and the reward of both makes up 
 the whole of the commodity. Instead, however, of waiting till the
 
 WAGES, AND THE LAWS WHICH REGULATE THEM. 305 
 
 commodity is produced, and abiding all the delay and uncertainties of 
 the market in which the value of it is realized, it has been found to 
 suit much better the convenience of the labourers to receive their share 
 in advance. The shape under which it has been most convenient for all 
 parties that they should receive it, is that of wages. When that share 
 of the commodity which belongs to the labourer has been all received 
 in the shape of wages, the commodity itself belongs to the capitalist, 
 he having in reality, bought the share of the labourer and paid for it in 
 advance." 
 
 This at once shows very plainly the source of the power of 
 the capitalist ; for why does it suit the convenience of the 
 labourer to receive his share in advance? Simply because 
 having nothing but the fruits of his labour to live upon, he 
 must starve if he does not, and like Esau, rather than starve, 
 he sells his birthright for a mess of pottage. 
 
 But what determines the share of the labourer, that is, the 
 wages he shall receive ? The demand for labour, and the sup- 
 ply that is, the work to be done, and the number of hands 
 to do it. 
 
 "Let us begin by supposing," says Mill, "that there is a certain 
 number of capitalists, with a certain quantity of food, raw material, 
 and instruments, or machinery ; that there is also a certain number of 
 labourers : and that the proportion in which the commodities produced 
 are divided between them, has fixed itself at some particular point. 
 
 " Let us next suppose, that the labourers have increased in number 
 one-half, without any increase iu the quantity of capital. There is the 
 same quantity of the requisites for the employment of labour ; that is 
 of food, tools, and materials, as there was before ; but for every 100 
 labourers, there are now 150. There will be 50 men, therefore, in 
 danger of being left out of employment. To prevent their being left 
 out of employment they have but one resource ; they must endeavour 
 to supplant those who have forestalled the employment ; that is, they 
 must offer to work for a smaller reward wages, therefore, decline. 
 
 "If we suppose, on the other hand, that the quantity of capital 
 has increased while the number of labourers remains the same, the 
 effect will be reversed. The capitalists have a greater quantity than 
 before of the means of employment ; of capital, in short ; from which 
 they wish to derive advantage. To derive this advantage, they must 
 have more labourers. To obtain them, they have but one resource, 
 to offer higher wages. But the masters by whom the labourers are now 
 employed are in the same predicament, and will of course offer higher 
 P P
 
 306 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 to induce them to remain. This competition is unavoidable, and the 
 necessary effect of it is a rise of wages." 
 
 " From this law, clearly understood, it is easy to trace the circum- 
 stances which, in any country, determine the condition of the great 
 body of the people. If that condition is easy and comfortable, all that 
 is necessary to keep it so is to make capital increase as fast as popula- 
 tion ; or on the other hand, to prevent population from increasing faster 
 than capital. If that condition is not easy and comfortable, it can only 
 be made so by one of two methods ; either by quickening the rate at 
 which capital increases, or retarding the rate at which population in- 
 creases ; augmenting, in short, the ratio which the means of employing 
 the people bear to the number of people. 
 
 "If it were the natural tendency of capital to increase faster than 
 population, there would be no difficulty in preserving a prosperous con- 
 dition of the people. If, on the other hand, it were the natural ten- 
 dency of population to increase faster than capital, the difficulty would 
 be very great ; there would be a perpetual tendency in wages to fall ; 
 the progressive fall of wages would produce a greater and a greater de- 
 gree of poverty among the people, attended with its inevitable conse- 
 quences, misery and vice. As poverty and its consequent misery 
 increased, mortality would also increase. Of a numerous family born, 
 a certain number only, from want of the means of well-being, would 
 be reared. By whatever the proportion the population tended to in- 
 crease faster than capital, such a proportion of those that were born 
 would die : the ratio of increase in capital and population would then 
 remain the same, and the fall of wages would proceed no farther. 
 
 "That population has a tendency to increase faster than, in most 
 cases, capital has actually increased, is proved, incontestably, by the 
 condition of the people in most parts of the globe. In almost all 
 countries, the condition of the great body of the people is poor and 
 miserable. This would have been impossible if capital had increased 
 faster than population. In that case wages must have risen ; and high 
 wages would have placed the labourer above the miseries of want. 
 
 " This general misery of mankind is a fact, which can be accounted 
 for, upon one only of two suppositions : either that there is a natural 
 tendency in population to increase faster than capital, or that capital 
 has, by some means, been prevented from increasing so fast as it has a 
 tendency to increase. This, therefore, is an inquiry of the highest 
 importance." Mill, p. 43. 
 
 The natural rate of increase in a population is about 3 per 
 cent,, at which rate it is doubled in 24 years. The actual 
 increase in our population has been 1.329 per cent, annually 
 for the 50 years 1801-1851, and it has doubled in 52 years. 
 The question is, has capital increased as fast ? The value of
 
 WAGES, AND THE LAWS WHICH REGULATE THEM. 307 
 
 real property assessed to the property and income tax for Great 
 Britain was, in 1851, 105,524,491; in 1814-15 it was 
 60,138,323 ; so that it has at least doubled in 50 years, the 
 same time that population has, for personal property has 
 increased in about the same proportion or perhaps a little 
 faster than real. At 3 per cent, per annum, compound 
 interest, the value of capital is doubled in 24 years, so that 
 while 100 people have become 200 in 53 years, 100 invested 
 and allowed to accumulate at 3 per cent, would become 479. 
 " If we take this indication," says the report of the Census 
 Commissioners, as quoted by Mr. Yeats, "the means of 
 subsistence have increased faster than the numbers of the 
 population." We cannot say that we see what indication this 
 furnishes, as it gives no data as to how much of the capital of 
 the country was allowed to accumulate or how much was con- 
 sumed ; it only tells how much it would be if allowed to 
 accumulate. The increase of capital depends upon what is 
 saved, and it is scarcely likely that 3 per cent, of the whole 
 income of the country would be saved ; about half that seems 
 to accord with actual fact. But population has not increased 
 at half the rate it has a natural tendency to do, and it has 
 probably therefore been kept down by its pressure on the 
 means of subsistence. That capital has increased as fast as 
 population has actually increased, is no proof to the contrary. 
 Political economists are probably right, then, when they say 
 that the cause of the poverty of the working classes and the 
 general misery consequent upon such poverty is owing to " the 
 natural tendency in population to increase faster than capital," 
 and which natural tendency therefore requires to be checked 
 and to be brought, like all our other natural propensities, 
 within the bounds of reason ; but " that capital has, by some 
 means, been prevented from increasing so fast as it has a 
 tendency to increase" is also true, and the impediments to this 
 increase require to be removed. 
 
 But there is a third cause of the poverty of the Working 
 Classes to which at present little attention has been drawn by
 
 308 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 Political Economists or by any class of Reformers, we mean 
 the unequal division of the produce of labour between the 
 Capitalist and the Labourer ; the working man getting only 
 one-third of the joint produce. As we have previously shown, 
 for the use of land, machinery, capital, distribution, and for 
 government protection, he gives eight hours' labour out of 
 every twelve. As Mill says, " The labourer has neither raw 
 material nor tools. These requisites are provided for him by 
 the capitalist. For making this provision the capitalist of 
 course expects a reward." Of course he does, but what 
 reward? " When prepared," says Mill, " the commodity, or 
 the value of it, is to be shared between them." True, but 
 in what proportion? He does not tell us ; he only says, " It 
 has been found to suit much better the convenience of the 
 labourers to receive their share in advance," and also " the 
 shape under which it has been most convenient for all parties, 
 that they should receive it, is that of wages," and that when 
 such wages are paid, the capitalist " has bought the share of 
 the labourer and paid for it in advance." But has he paid a 
 just price for the labourer's share ? That is the question that 
 is now beginning to be asked. No doubt this arrangement is 
 found to suit the convenience of the capitalist, but why has it 
 been found to suit also the convenience of the labourer? 
 Because he cannot wait till the "joint property" is realised, 
 and he is obliged therefore to take whatever the capitalist, who 
 can wait, chooses to offer, and if he did not so plentiful 
 ordinarily is the supply of labour another would. The whole 
 of the annual income of the kingdom is the produce of labour, 
 for a money income is of course only valuable as it can be 
 turned into produce, and the labourers are six times as nume- 
 rous as the capitalists, and yet at present it " suits the con- 
 venience" of the labourers to take only one-third of such 
 annual income. Surely there is a wide margin here for the 
 improvement of the condition of the working men when it 
 may suit their convenience to take a little more. 
 
 The consequence of this mode of distribution is that the
 
 WAGES, AND THE LAWS WHICH REGULATE THEM. 309 
 
 working classes are always kept so near the borders of poverty 
 that causes are constantly arising to push them over, and we 
 have seen the evils to which this poverty gives rise ; and on 
 the other side we have all the luxury, the folly and extrava- 
 gance and waste which enormous wealth produces in the 
 classes above them. 
 
 There are two ways by which it is thought a more just 
 division of the produce of labour may be brought about. The 
 one recommended by the Political Economists is, so to raise 
 the condition of the operatives that they may feel all the 
 advantages of their improved condition and resolve to main- 
 tain it by provident marriages and providence in all other 
 departments. By thus checking the increase of their own 
 numbers, labour will become scarce, and they can make 
 better terms, if not their own terms, with the capitalist. This 
 plan is not at present popular with the workmen. The other 
 plan is that the working classes should possess themselves of 
 land, capital, and machinery, either by clubbing their joint 
 means or borrowing at interest, and then dividing the joint 
 produce of their labour either equally or in proportion to 
 capability and earnings. This last plan is the much-dreaded 
 Communism and Socialism, and it has attained a firm footing 
 in the imagination of the operatives both here and abroad. It 
 might be thought that there was a third course an appeal to 
 the justice of the employers of labour themselves ; but there 
 is little hope in this direction. Employers look upon the 
 present order of things as the natural and proper order of 
 Providence, and if the case is put to the consciences of any 
 of them they talk of the competition to which they themselves 
 are subjected, the severity of their head work, their risks and 
 additional anxiety, &c., &c.* Besides, there is much truth 
 
 * As an illustration of the effects of a rise in wages, we may mention 
 that a halfpenny a-yard upon a ribbon is Is. 6d. per piece, and as a weaver 
 makes about 10 pieces a-week of broad ribbon, if this halfpenny a-yard were 
 added to his wages, it would be 15s. per week about double his present 
 income. This would soon be again given to the public by the large looms 
 which are now being introduced, and which will enable a workman to make 
 15 pieces where before he made 10.
 
 310 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 in what they say, that if the working classes at present had 
 all their earnings, and they worked half the time and had 
 double pay, they would be spent in idleness and dissipation. 
 So far as this is true it shows that, besides the root of the evil, 
 the soil in which the root is placed is of equal consequence, and 
 that the working classes must work out their own salvation, 
 and in the process they will be fitted for maintaining any more 
 elevated position to which they may attain. We shall now 
 proceed to consider such other measures for the amelioration 
 of the condition of the people as have been proposed, and 
 which are more popular, as well as to examine these more in 
 detail.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ON THE MEASURES PROPOSED FOR THE AMELIORATION OF THE 
 CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE. 
 
 WE cannot now complain that the interests and condition 
 of the people are neglected ; but an immense amount of 
 philanthropy is thrown away from being misdirected. The 
 evils we have pointed out are now forcing themselves into 
 general recognition, and all parties have their pet schemes for 
 their amelioration, in Political or Social Reforms, in Emigra- 
 tion, Education, and Religion. 
 
 POLITICS. The people have lost their faith in Reformed 
 Parliaments, and there is a very general feeling that Govern- 
 ment can do little more than it has done, and that the people 
 must take their affairs into their own hands. They see that in 
 all countries the condition of the great body of the people of 
 the working classes, is, with slight differences, the same. In 
 all, the wages of labour are relatively to what each produces, 
 and to what such wages will purchase, equally low : and yet 
 some of the countries to which we have before alluded possess 
 all for which politicians of the Liberal school are contending. 
 If wages are higher in America than in the old world, it is 
 owing, not to their liberal institutions, or to anything in which 
 their Government may differ from ours, but to the scarcity 
 of labour in proportion to the vast tracts of half-cultivated and 
 uncultivated land. But the lower wages in England will pur- 
 chase there more of all that is best worth living for than the 
 higher wages of America will in that country. Our political 
 agitators and first-class workmen are quite aware of this, and 
 refuse to go.
 
 312 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 CHARTISM. Consequently, we hear very little now of the 
 Charter. The late Union, however, of the working men for 
 the purpose of obtaining what is called the Charter, the chief 
 object of which is an extended suffrage, demonstrated how 
 utterly incapable this class was of undertaking the manage- 
 ment of its own affairs. Whatever may be the opinion with 
 respect to the desirableness of placing political power in the 
 hands of the majority, it cannot be doubted, that in the hands 
 of a majority such as our working classes in their present con- 
 dition constitute, it would tend more to their injury than 
 benefit. Whatever exception may be made in favour of some 
 few amongst them who have far outstripped their brethren in 
 reason and intelligence, it may be asserted that, as a class, 
 they have no knowledge of the foundations upon which society 
 is built ; of the steps by which we have arrived at our present 
 stage in civilization ; of the original necessity to the advance- 
 ment of the race, of that which now strikes them as a glaring 
 abuse ; of the mutual sacrifice of our natural liberty which is 
 hourly called for, to ensure to us the advantages of living in 
 society at all. They have no knowledge of the causes of the 
 evils that oppress them, and where, therefore, the remedy 
 should be sought. Scarcely any two among them agree as to 
 what should be done, had they the necessaiy power. It is 
 quite impossible, as society is now constituted, that they, with 
 their limited means of acquiring information, and the incessant 
 toil to which they are subjected, can acquire sufficient know- 
 ledge for their own governance, or perhaps even to choose 
 those who are qualified. Legislation requires more knowledge 
 than any other profession. A legislator ought to be intimately 
 acquainted with the constitution of human nature ; the con- 
 stitution of society; the history of civilization; with the 
 particular character of the people, and of the institutions of 
 the country for which he would legislate. This is a knowledge 
 to be acquired only by long and arduous study, the time for 
 which is denied to the multitude. Universal suffrage, including 
 all that can make that suffrage available, will be excellent and
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 3lB 
 
 necessary, when the people know how to use it ; but a great 
 improvement in their physical condition must take place before 
 this can be the case. Changes brought about by the representa- 
 tives of the people in ignorance of the causes of oppression, 
 would only make things worse, by affecting the order, tran- 
 quillity, and security necessary to the spread of knowledge, 
 and to the improvement which can be based only upon such 
 knowledge.* 
 
 A judicious extension of the suffrage is certainly called for, 
 and would make the legislating class more dependent upon the 
 people and therefore more solicitous to educate them and to 
 attend to their interests ; but this extension ought by no means 
 to be overwhelming in its influence, swamping all other classes 
 in mere numbers, or ignorance and prejudice would rule 
 instead of knowledge. 
 
 Is not this, therefore, evidence of some fallacy in the views 
 of this party, if indeed the object of their measures be to 
 raise the condition of the people? In questioning, however, 
 whether the measures of what is called a liberal and en- 
 lightened policy do often or always conduce to this end, and 
 in endeavouring to show their exact bearing upon the condition 
 of the people, we would not wish to appear to condemn such 
 measures, or to represent them as containing no good. It is 
 impossible not to be aware of, and to appreciate, the benefits 
 that have been and will be conferred by them upon all posses- 
 
 * " The most common error in the present day consists in supposing that 
 the people in general are to be influenced, even in regard to contemporaneous 
 events, by their reason ; whereas they are entirely governed in their opinions 
 on such topics, by their interests, their prejudices, or their passions. The 
 Girondists, in the Legislative Assembly of France, confidently expected that 
 by the force of their arguments, they would soon bear down the efforts of the 
 Jacobins ; but events soon proved that where popular passions are roused, the 
 force of demonstration itself is speedily destroyed by the contests of faction. 
 This consideration furnishes an unanswerable argument against the extension 
 of the elective franchise to the great body of the people. It has no occasion 
 to be illustrated by argument; experience every where demonstrates its truth; 
 and mankind will in the end be generally convinced, that to subject the Legis- 
 lature to the direct influence of the multitude, is to subject them in periods 
 of tranquillity to the contentions of interest, and in moments of agitation to 
 the storms of passion." Alison, vol. 2, p. 286. 
 
 Q Q
 
 314 PHESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 sino- property; it is obvious also that increased production 
 must reflectively, and in a minor degree, benefit those who 
 have no property, but who live by the wages of labour ; and 
 that it will raise many of the latter class into the former ; but 
 that such policy will not materially ameliorate the condition of 
 the majority, may, we think, be demonstrated. 
 
 First among the remedies of this class to which the people 
 are taught to look for relief, is the lessening of Taxation, 
 Cheap Government, and the taking oif the duties on every- 
 thing that the working man finds necessary for the support of 
 his family. The national debt and our heavy taxation, it is 
 said, press down our people into the dust. But in those 
 countries where there is no national debt, and where taxation 
 is light, is the condition of the people better ? It appears a 
 hard thing that the working man should have to pay 3s. 6d. of 
 every pound that he earns, in direct or indirect taxation, and 
 out of an income of 50, to pay 8 towards the government 
 of his country, and the interest of its national debt. And yet, 
 supposing the same rate of taxation to affect the capitalist, and 
 that his income is 1,000 a-year, he pays only 166, leaving 
 in the one instance 42 a-year, and in the other 834 ; thus 
 reducing one party to the point of starvation, and leaving the 
 other with every means of luxury. Bat were the working 
 classes relieved from all taxation, and were those who are so 
 much better able to bear the burden made so to do, how would 
 it affect the former ? At first, and for some time, the opera- 
 tive would find that his pound per week would go much farther 
 in supplying his wants ; it would not only yield necessaries, 
 but comforts. But soon the inevitable fluctuations in trade, a 
 lessened demand for labour, or the increase of his own num- 
 bers, would throw him out of employment, and in order 
 to obtain his share of the work that remained, he would 
 ofter his labour for less and less remuneration, until 
 within a short period his wages would again be reduced 
 to the lower rate, as we find to be the case in other countries 
 where the necessaries of life are cheap. " The money rate of
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 315 
 
 wages, wholly independent of the price of provisions from 
 year to year, is entirely regulated by it, other things being 
 equal, from ten years to ten years."* 
 
 One advantage he would derive but that would also be 
 fleeting, although, perhaps, not equally so the demand for his 
 labour would be more steady in consequence of additional 
 markets abroad being opened to his employer. This, however, 
 in many cases, would throw people out of employment else- 
 where, or if their wages admitted of any reduction, would 
 grind them down to meet this additional competition. 
 
 Under the present system the working classes are merely 
 the instruments of production, and to relieve them of taxation 
 would have exactly the same effect upon production as im- 
 provements in machinery ; as they would be able to live for 
 less, they would be enabled to produce for less. This would 
 lead to increased demand, depending, of course, upon the 
 cheapness of the produce. No increase, therefore, of wages 
 would take place, but a great increase of population, similar 
 to that which has taken place in Manchester, Glasgow, Leeds, 
 and other large towns, where improvements in machinery, and 
 our consequent power of producing cheaply, have enabled us 
 to command extensive markets. But in a short time population 
 would be upon a par with this increased demand, and foreign 
 competition, over-speculation, fluctuating currencies, and all 
 the various causes that disturb our commercial atmosphere, 
 would again throw the people out of employment, and produce 
 the results for which we now seek a remedy. 
 
 The great political questions of the day are questions con- 
 cerning more or less representation more or less taxation 
 whether this or that section of the aristocracy shall have power 
 and patronage ; but they are not questions that tend ultimately 
 to raise the condition of the people ; the utmost that we can 
 expect from the satisfactory solution of them is, that by 
 enabling us to produce more cheaply, increased demand may 
 give employment to the working classes for a time, when other- 
 
 * Alison, vol. 2, p. 413.
 
 316 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 wise there would be none, and thus afford leisure to introduce 
 gradually and securely other measures which can alone be 
 effectual to the desired end. 
 
 THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT. There is much discus- 
 sion in the present day regarding the proper sphere of Govern- 
 ment, and there are those who seek to confine its functions 
 simply to the protection of life, limb, and property. They 
 would have the people govern themselves in their municipalities, 
 as they did in olden times, and they live in great dread of the 
 foreign system of centralization and government by Bureaucracy 
 and Functionaryism. But surely we are as much self-governed 
 in this country by the Central Government as we should be by 
 our local Municipal Council ; and the same people who elect 
 the Municipal Representative, elect the Parliamentary one : and 
 no abuse now escapes the eyes of party or the press. The 
 foreign system no doubt is wrong, and it would be better that 
 men should govern themselves badly, than have everything 
 done for them, as it is on the Continent. In America, we 
 have the opposite extreme, and the lower minds rule and give 
 the tone to society. But it would be impossible to introduce 
 the Continental system into this country ; our circumstances 
 are so widely different. There is no attempt here to take the 
 government of the people out of their own hands, only to 
 systematize and direct it, and to lay down principles based 
 upon science and a large experience, which they are invited, 
 not forced, to carry out. Perhaps the last place in which 
 reforms are likely to emanate, are the localities in which they 
 are most needed ; the people are born in and are used to their 
 condition, and like grubs see little beyond the leaf on which 
 they feed, and rarely dream of the " butterfly" life to come. 
 Government, aided by the first talent, should inspect, inquire, 
 and lay down principles ; it should be the head, the localities 
 the hands the head should think and originate, the hands 
 should administer, and, in this sense, where the Government 
 is elected by and under the control of the people's Representa-
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 317 
 
 tlves, Centralization seems to be a thing much needed in this 
 country; for \ve want knowledge, order, system, science, as 
 opposed to prejudice, ignorance, and short-sighted selfishness 
 and jobbery. We have no fear for the liberties of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race ; we fear more lest the liberty of every man, as in 
 America, should run to excess. Those who advocate fall- 
 ing back upon our ancient Municipal liberties seem to forget 
 that the Railway, Steam, and the Electric Telegraph have made 
 the nation what the Municipality used to be, and the civilised 
 world what the nation used to be. Whatever tendency there 
 may be towards Co-operative industry, the tendency of the 
 age is towards the Individuality of the Individual^ and the disin- 
 tegration of the old forms of society ; and where this has been 
 completely attained, and each atom (or person) in society has 
 been relieved from its former attractions and repulsions, it will 
 again form new combinations it will crystalize in new and 
 more healthful shapes. Voluntaryism is no doubt the right 
 principle. A MAN should be allowed to do as he pleases con- 
 sistently with the same liberty to others, but it is the duty of 
 Government to see that there are no impediments in the way of 
 his becoming a man. The protection of children and young 
 persons, therefore, properly belongs to Government, and it 
 ought to be held responsible for the public health and education, 
 and whatever else is required to develope its subjects into 
 healthy bodily and mental manhood. To Government also be- 
 longs the protection of animals and lunatics. In the recognised 
 departments of Government, in the protection of life and pro- 
 perty, much requires to be done. Our Law r s want simplifying, 
 codifying, and amending, and if that were properly done, half 
 the lawyers' offices in the kingdom might be shut up. The 
 lawyers have proverbially been the conservators of " old and 
 barbarous usages," but this " vested interest" must be relin- 
 quished. 
 
 FREE TRADE. The one thing with which Government has 
 certainly no right to interfere, and with which it can only
 
 318 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 interfere injuriously, is the freedom of trade. To make at 
 home what we can buy cheaper abroad is a waste of labour, 
 and to be obliged by law to buy the dearer article is an injustice. 
 All monopolies, bounties, and prohibitions, therefore, should 
 be abolished, and trade allowed to flow into its natural channels j 
 each country furnishing that for which nature has best quali- 
 fied it, and which costs, therefore, the least labour to produce. 
 We should not be obliged to grow wheat upon land unfitted for 
 it, any more than we should attempt to grow grapes and 
 oranges in our Northern latitudes. 
 
 We must bear in mind, however, that the principal eco- 
 nomic advantages to be derived from free trade are increased 
 cheapness and increased demand from extended markets. Now 
 Manchester possessed all the advantages in this respect that 
 free trade could possibly give to any town or country. Im- 
 provements in machinery by Watt and Arkwright, and pecu- 
 liar advantages of situation, opened to it the markets of almost 
 the whole world. It was enabled to import its raw material 
 from India, to manufacture it, to send it back again, and yet 
 undersell the Indian who works for twopence per day, in his 
 own market. In this department of cotton-spinning, the im- 
 provements in machinery enabled one man to do the work that 
 it required 200 men to do before ; and here one would think 
 that if the extra produce were divided fairly between the capi- 
 talist, or owner of the machine, and the operative, there was 
 plenty of room for the improvement of his condition. But did 
 it increase his leisure ? No. Were his wages increased for 
 doing 200 times more than he did before ? But very little ; 
 for the competition for employment of those who were at first 
 thrown out of work by the extra productiveness of the ma- 
 chine, obliged him to work the same number of hours, and to 
 be satisfied with nearly the same rate of wages as before. 
 Where then was the advantage ? The extra number of pieces 
 produced went to the warehouse of the capitalist, and by reduc- 
 ing them in price, he forced them over all the markets of the 
 world. The reduced price occasioned a greatly increased de-
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 319 
 
 mand ; capital flowed in that direction ; manufacturers and 
 merchants multiplied and grew rich ; and the number of hands 
 employed, instead of being ultimately decreased, was increased 
 until it reached the number of about 1,200,000,* with whose 
 condition Parliamentary enquiries have made us but toa well 
 acquainted. 
 
 The greatest advocates for freedom of trade can scarcely 
 expect that it can do more for the country at large, than im- 
 provements in machinery and other peculiar local advantages 
 have already done for Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, and some 
 other of our large manufacturing towns, and hitherto it has 
 only had the effect of increasing the numbers of the people, 
 without much improving their moral state ; they have not 
 maintained their advanced position they have only peopled up 
 to it. But the economical advantages of free trade are daily 
 becoming greater, and year by year a large number of the 
 operative class either become masters or are otherwise perma- 
 nently raised in the scale of society. Free commerce, and in- 
 creased facilities of transport on the iron way, now put the 
 whole world under requisition for the house, clothing, and food of 
 all classes even the poorest. It is true that with it comes " un- 
 limited competition," but with that also comes increased cheap- 
 ness, so that the same money rate of wages goes much farther. 
 The great drawback is, that one country may become depend- 
 ent upon another for the raw material, upon the making up of 
 which its very bread depends. As long as the highways of the 
 world or its productive power are liable to be stopped by 
 passion or prejudice or misrule, this will always be a difficulty. 
 The cotton famine, consequent on the American war,f has left 
 * M'Culloch, vol. 1, p. 658. 
 
 + The Times, writing on this subject, says " The world is now in the 
 most critical of conditions one which, if it were likely to be long-lived, 
 might inspire serious fears for the welfare of a large part of the human race. 
 We are all commercially united, but we are politically severed, and eveu 
 opposed. The old natioual traditions, national animosities, and national mode 
 of settling disputes by war remain, and are consecrated by an international 
 law framed inevitably by the jurists of the most pugnacious States of the world. 
 The consequence is that millions in each of the industrial countries in Europe
 
 320 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 whole districts in this country and on the Continent without the 
 means of subsistence. But relations based on slavery could not 
 be expected to be permanent. Whole districts also, by present 
 arrangements, are made dependent upon the caprices of fashion, 
 the effects of which no prudence or forethought can obviate. 
 But notwithstanding those drawbacks, the world gains greatly 
 by freedom of trade, and the moral advantages derived from 
 
 are always in danger of ruin from the acts of other populations over which 
 they have no control. Two obscure Powers may by a war between themselves 
 shut up a passage which is necessary to au important branch of the world's 
 traffic, and, as in the case of the Northern and Southern States of America, 
 the staple on which a whole population depends for subsistence may be shut 
 up or driven out of cultivation by a war against which no 'foreign nation,' as 
 we who buy all the cotton are called, has a right even to protest. 
 
 " It is to be hoped that the mighty evils which one war spreads over the 
 earth will tend to the discouragement of strife by uniting the nations in 
 reprobation of it, and that when the calamities cease to be local there will be 
 an effort to avoid them altogether. But for the present we are suffering from 
 the state of transition. The right of each community to do as it pleases, and 
 enforce on the world acquiescence in its feuds with its neighbours or among 
 its own citizens, has descended into an age which doubts the justice of the 
 claim, but does not see how it can be denied. This restless and painful in- 
 activity is just now weighing on the British people. The greatest industry 
 that the world has ever seen is paralyzed and almost dead. The intelligent 
 and, for the most part, independent and high-spirited artisans of Lancashire 
 and Glasgow are sinking daily into the gulf of hopeless poverty. The distress is 
 so general that there is not, as in most times, a family which has a little by 
 the side of every family that has nothing. The proverbial kindness of the 
 poor to each other can do but little when all are in want, or know that the 
 dreadful time is coming with rapid steps. Let auy one who wishes to learn 
 the state of the country consequent on the American War take the Return of 
 Pauperism which has just been made to the House of Commons. 
 
 "But it would be a mistake to suppose either that the loss to the nation 
 is confined to the cost of keeping these poor people in the workhouse or of 
 distributing bread and soup among them ab its doors. The pauperizing of so 
 large a mass of people is a social evil which will not be obliterated when they 
 again get wages enough to buy themselves meat and drink. * * To our 
 mind the most unhappy part of the present calamity is the deterioration of 
 character which is caused among the belter classes of workpeople by sudden 
 and complete poverty. When the workman whose pleasure it has been for 
 years to bring togpther little conveniences aud ornaments in his home, when 
 the woman who had pride in her dress or her furniture, sees everything go 
 piece by piece to the pawnbroker's, until there remains nothing but to eat the 
 dole of bread and soup amid the squalour of a desolated dwelling, then we 
 feel that something more than the cost of maintenance is paid by the nation 
 and that au element of public morality is inevitably destroyed."
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 321 
 
 it are greater still, for as even the despotic monarch Henry 
 VIII. could not go to war with Holland because in his time it 
 was our best customer ; so all the nations of the earth must ulti- 
 mately, by free trade, have their interests so intimately blended 
 that they cannot go to war without starving each other. War 
 must thus become more and more impossible. So also many 
 things must become possibilities in the way of Universal 
 Brotherhood and moral relationship : " Mountains intervened 
 will no longer make enemies of nations, which like kindred 
 drops will mingle into one."* 
 
 TRADE UNIONS. These associations are benefit societies, 
 to give assistance in cases of sickness and death ; they have 
 also for their object the protection of labour generally, and it 
 is in this character that they are best known to the world, and 
 in which they have earned rather an unenviable notoriety. The 
 object of Free Trade is to cheapen commodities, by allowing 
 everything to be produced where from natural or adventitious 
 advantages it can be produced best and with the least labour ; 
 also by putting the workman in competition with the whole 
 world it cheapens labour, the workman's only commodity, 
 for a workman lives as much by the sale of his labour as the 
 manufacturer by the sale of his goods. Trade Unions are 
 intended to counteract the tendency of this unlimited com- 
 petition to the undue cheapening of labour. Workmen justly 
 
 * ''Finally, commerce first taught nations to see with good will the wealth 
 and prosperity of oue another. Before, the patriot wished all countries weak, 
 poor, and ill-governed, but his own : he now sees in their wealth and progress 
 a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. It was in vain to 
 inculcate feelings of brotherhood among mankind by moral influences alone, 
 unless a sense of community of interest could also be established ; and that 
 sense we owe to commerce. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war 
 obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in 
 natural opposition to it. And since war is now almost the only event, not 
 highly improbable, which could throw back for any length of time the pro- 
 gress of human improvement, it may be said without exaggeration that the 
 great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal 
 guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the 
 uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the 
 human race." J. S. Mill, vol. 2, p. 122. 
 R R
 
 322 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 say that the individual workman is at disadvantage with the 
 capitalist, who can always in any trade dispute starve him 
 into compliance with his demands, but united the masters do 
 not always find so easy a victory. In this country " Strikes" 
 have been too frequently the rough way in which it has been 
 attempted to settle these disputes. These Strikes ordinarily 
 involve great pecuniary loss to all parties concerned. There 
 is generally about an equal amount of exaggeration and false 
 statement on both sides ; still the workmen have more fre- 
 quently been wrong ; but on his side it must also be allowed 
 that it as frequently happens that he has been driven to this 
 expedient as a last and only resource by the overbearing 
 conduct or want of sympathy on the part of employers. The 
 economical aspect of Strikes, and their mere pecuniary loss, 
 is not conclusive against them, as we all value, and ought to 
 
 o f / cj 
 
 value, " the right" above any sacrifice. The question is how 
 to find out the right, and the tone and mental and moral 
 atmosphere of Strikes are almost the last medium in which to 
 look for it. The master falls back upon his might and dignity, 
 and the men too frequently upon violence. Under these cir- 
 cumstances it is of little use quoting general maxims, as to how 
 the rate of wages always depends upon supply and demand, 
 and demand upon Capital, which the Strike is wasting, 
 &c. These things are not listened to ; the men want the par- 
 ticular application of these principles to the case in dispute, 
 and they want still more the tone of mind or state of feeling 
 that shall be able to judge such an exposition dispassionately. 
 In the disagreements that so often arise, the discussions of the 
 separate, but really mutual interests of master and men, go 
 on separately, and an antagonistic position is assumed on both 
 sides, which a little friendly discussion together would often 
 prevent. The masters do not like a demand; the men like to 
 be consulted ; and a face-to-face interchange of opinion would 
 nip many a disagreement in the bud, which would otherwise 
 develop into serious feuds and ultimate Strikes. The best 
 way in which this desirable intercourse could take place would
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 323 
 
 probably be through what are called Councils of Conciliation 
 and Arbitration. Such Local Councils of Trade (called Con- 
 seils des Prud'hommes) have existed in France since 1806, 
 and from the mode in which they have worked, they are now 
 among the most popular institutions of the country, and few 
 institutions have in reality greater claims to regard. They 
 were established by Buonaparte, and were charged with the 
 discussion and settlement of all questions connected with the 
 manufacturing interests of the country, and they exist at this 
 time in all the great manufacturing towns. In 1861 there 
 were 156 trades under their jurisdiction.* 
 
 * At Lyons, in the silk trade, the Council is composed of nine master 
 manufacturers and eight weavers. 
 
 The decisions of this body are enforced by law. 
 
 There is no appeal for any sum under lOOf. or 4 ; above that sum there 
 is an appeal to the Tribunal of Commerce. 
 
 All questions between masters and men are settled by the members of this 
 Council. 
 
 Their primary business is conciliation, the second, arbitration. 
 
 They always examine the parties themselves, and they have the power of 
 summoning witnesses and compelling attendance. 
 
 They have no power over wages, except in cases of dispute. They have 
 also the power to preserve the copyright in patterns. 
 
 The number of members is not fixed, but varies according to the size of 
 the town. 
 
 The President is chosen by a simple majority ; is their organ and chief ; 
 takes the votes, expresses the will, and signs all the documents in the name of 
 the Council. A Vice-President is also elected, and a Secretary ; the latter not 
 necessarily from amongst themselves. 
 
 The Secretary has to keep a register of the deliberations, acts, and judg- 
 ments of the Council, take care of all the papers deposited with it, make out 
 its warrants and orders, and attend to all those duties which naturally belong 
 to his office. 
 
 The Council is renewed from time to time by members going out in 
 rotation, who are always eligible for re-election. 
 
 The Secretary is a paid officer. 
 
 The Council appoints a Sub-Committee of two members, a manufacturer 
 and weaver. Their function is to reconcile parties applying to them ; if un- 
 successful, they are sent to the general sitting, which is held once a-week at 
 least, and requires to be composed of at least two-thirds of the members of 
 the Council. All decisions are by simple votes of the majority present. 
 
 A manufacturer desiring to secure a pattern or design, must put it, folded 
 in an envelope, sealed with his seal, into the hands of the Secretary. In casg 
 of dispute, the Council shall break the seal and give a certificate of priority of
 
 324 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 Legislation has also been attempted on this subject in this 
 country. So long ago as 1824 an Act was passed enabling 
 Justices of the Peace, on the application of employers and 
 workmen who had differences on various matters, such as, 
 amount of wages due, measurement of work, &c., to appoint 
 arbitrators to hear and determine the questions ; the awards of 
 these referees to be final, and to be enforced by Magistrates' 
 warrants; but owing to the necessity of commencing this 
 arbitration by appearing before a Magistrate, which, in the 
 minds of the men, is associated with criminal procedure, this 
 mode of determining disputes has been very little resorted to. 
 
 Mr. Mackinnon's Bill of last Session proposed, that work- 
 men and employers in a trade in any town, county, or district, 
 should be authorised to petition the Secretary of State for a 
 license to elect a Council of Conciliation and Arbitration, the 
 granting of which was to be in the Minister's discretion. The 
 license being granted, the petitioners were to be authorised to 
 elect a Council, to consist of from two to three masters and an 
 
 date. When a pattern is brought to the Council, the owner states the time 
 for which he wishes to secure it, and he pays Od., 2s. 6d., 4s., or 8s. for the 
 deposit, according as he may wish to have the exclusive use of the pattern 
 for one, three, five years, or iu perpetuity. If for a limited period, at the 
 expiration the sample is sent to the nearest collection of objects connected 
 with art and manufactures. 
 
 Should any party appearing before the private or general meeting of the 
 Council, indulge in the repetition of insulting or abusive language, after 
 having been seriously admonished, he may be fined, or imprisoned not more 
 than three days, and the judgment publicly notified at his expense. 
 
 If a party who is cited refuse to appear before the private Committee of 
 the Council for reconciliation, he shall be cited to appear before the next 
 general meeting of the Council, when the affair shall be decided in an open 
 Bitting. Should he not then appear, judgment goes by default. 
 
 Each party challenging a Prud'bomme, has to do it in writing, stating his 
 reasons, and a copy is sent immediately to the member in question. 
 
 In two days the member has to signify iu writing upon the challenge, 
 whether he- acquiesces or not ; if not, he assigns his reasons, which are then 
 sent to the Chamber of Commerce, which decides the case within eight days 
 without calling the parties before them. 
 
 Such is a brief account of an institution which our neighbours, both in 
 Prance and Belgium, have found to act so well among them that strikes are 
 altogether unknown ; and the question is, Low far it ie applicable to the genius 
 wad taste of this country ?
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 325 
 
 equal number of workmen. The Council to appoint a Chair- 
 man, Clerk, &c., and to continue in office until the first of 
 November following its appointment, when a fresh election was 
 to take place, every employer or workman in the district, who 
 has resided there for six months, and been in the trade for 
 seven years, to be entitled to vote. The Council to be em- 
 powered to hear and decide in the same class of disputes as at 
 present between employer and men, and also, if it think 
 proper, to appoint arbitrators for that purpose. 
 
 Mr. Mackinnon's Bill was referred to a Select Committee 
 to take into consideration the best means of settling disputes 
 between masters and operatives : that Committee had power to 
 send for persons, papers, and records ; and on May 15th, 1860, 
 they reported as follows : 
 
 " From the evidence taken before them, in which both 
 masters and operatives were examined, and also after referring 
 to the evidence taken before the Committee appointed in 1856, 
 your Committee have come to the unanimous opinion that the 
 voluntary formation of equitable Councils of Conciliation 
 would tend to promote a more friendly understanding between 
 the employers and employed, to soften any irritation that 
 might arise, and in most cases to prevent the growth of such 
 a spirit of antagonism as too often leads to a strike. 
 
 " Your Committee concur in the opinion expressed in the 
 Report of 1856, that, ' From the evidence before them, they 
 cannot but arrive at the conclusion that the formation of Courts 
 of Conciliation in the country, more especially in the manu- 
 facturing, commercial, and mining districts, would be bene- 
 ficial ; that by these means both the masters and operatives 
 would be enabled, each from their own class or calling, to 
 appoint referees, an equal number by each party, having the 
 power to elect a Chairman.' 
 
 " Your Committee have considered the Bill which has been 
 referred to them by the House, and are unanimously of opinion 
 that if the Bill, with certain alterations which they have 
 suggested, passes into a law, it will promote the welfare and
 
 326 PKESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 good understanding between masters and operatives, and be 
 advantageous to the country. 
 
 " Your Committee, in conclusion, add, that there is nothing 
 in the Bill that gives power to any Council to regulate the rate 
 of wages in any prospective manner whatever." 
 
 The constitution of such Courts seems to be the great 
 difficulty, if we may judge from the Parliamentary discus- 
 sions ; particularly as to the mode in which their decisions 
 shall be enforced. But would it not be better at first that there 
 should be nothing compulsory about them, but all perfectly 
 voluntary, and the decisions left to be enforced by the public 
 opinion of the district?* 
 
 Judging from their primary results, Strikes have almost 
 always injured the workmen ; but as they have inflicted equal 
 injury on masters, the fear of them has doubtless had the effect 
 of keeping up the rate of wages. Still it is to be regretted that 
 they should ever be resorted to, and if Trade Unions were pro- 
 perly conducted perhaps they never need be. Trade Unions 
 might instil thrift and prudence into the workmen, assist them 
 and their families in cases of sickness and death, teach co- 
 operation and thoughtfulness for others, and, as Associations 
 for the Protection of Labour, there is certainly much that may 
 and must be done by them. They might ascertain the peculiar 
 circumstances and conditions of labour in all parts of the world, 
 and help to distribute it so as to equalise supply and demand, 
 and thus make strikes impossiblej because so evidently use- 
 less. Such Associations must educate themselves by the 
 repeated consequences of these failures, and when properly 
 informed there is much to be done. Certainly steam and 
 machinery were intended to do the work of the world, to 
 
 * Dr. John Watts proposes " That such a Court should be honorary, each 
 party in the dispute naming an equal number of Jurymen, the County Court 
 Judge for the district being appointed umpire, and from this Court he thinks 
 it would be desirable to exclude lawyers. The parties would be equally 
 balanced, the umpire would be perfectly disinterested, and legal expenses 
 would be avoided. I am advised, he says, that this plan would not be objected 
 to by working men if power were given to carry a case to an adjoining dis- 
 trict to avoid a prejudiced umpire." Essay on Strikes.
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 327 
 
 shorten the hours of labour, and thus to release the higher 
 attributes of the soul. At present labour is as incessant as 
 ever and more wearing, and although it has greatly increased 
 the produce of the earth, this produce has been so unequally 
 divided, that it is really doubtful whether it has not damaged 
 rather than benefitted all parties concerned. 
 
 LAND ALLOTMENTS, AND THE UNION OF AGRICULTURE AND 
 MANUFACTURES. The great evil of the manufacturing system 
 is to create a large population solely dependent upon the wages 
 of labour, and liable to all the vicissitudes which the fluctuating 
 demand for that labour entails. This is not a state of things 
 for a great nation to rest contented with. With all the enor- 
 mous tax-paying power of Great Britain, capital, and manu- 
 facturing supremacy, she might well afford to exchange her 
 social position for that of countries which she now looks down 
 upon. " If," says Laing, " instead of 800,000 or a million of 
 persons employed in manufacturing for the foreign market, we 
 had eight millions depending upon a demand which every petty 
 political misunderstanding among the European powers might 
 obstruct, would this be, morally or politically, an advantageous 
 position? Would it be wise policy to call into existence a 
 labouring population equal to that now supported by the con- 
 sumption of their labour in the home market, to be depending 
 entirely upon the still more precarious foreign market?" Mr. 
 Alison says " that it is utterly impossible that this unparalleled 
 growth of our manufacturing industry can co-exist with the 
 firm foundation of public prosperity." Now what is the con- 
 dition of our neighbours ; I do not mean of America, which 
 is a young State but of our Continental neighbours, who are 
 at about the same period of growth as ourselves ? The survey 
 may perhaps furnish a lesson. " The whole number of pro- 
 prietors who live on the fruits of the soil in Great Britain and 
 Ireland at this moment, notwithstanding the prodigious in- 
 crease of wealth, probably does not amount to 300,000 ; while 
 above 3,000,000 heads of families, or 15,000,000 of persons
 
 328 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 dependent on their labour, subsist on wages alone,"* while the 
 composition of the French population is as follows : 
 
 "Agricultural proprietors and their families. . . 13,059,000 
 Proprietors not agricultural and their fami- 
 lies 710,000 
 
 Proprietors partly living on wages, and their 
 
 families 710,000 
 
 Total proprietors 14,479,000 
 
 Agricultural labourers living on wages, and 
 
 their families 4,941,000 
 
 Industrial labourers living on wages, and 
 
 their families 9,579,000 
 
 14,520,000 
 
 " In other words, the class of proprietors in France is more 
 numerous than that which subsists on wages ; while in England 
 it is only a sixtieth part of their amount."f 
 
 Mr. Alison, although, with many other eminent Political 
 Economists, prognosticating ultimate evil from such a state of 
 things in France, yet remarks, " It is impossible to travel 
 through Switzerland, Tyrol, Norway, Sweden, Biscay, and 
 other parts of Europe, where the peasantry are proprietors of 
 the land they cultivate, without being convinced of the great 
 effect of such a state of things in ameliorating the condition of 
 the lower orders, and promoting the development of those 
 habits of comfort and artificial wants which form the true 
 regulator of the principle of increase. The aspect of France 
 since the Revolution, when compared with what it was before 
 that event, abundantly proves that its labouring poor have 
 experienced the benefit of this change, and that if it had not 
 been brought about by injustice, its fruits would have been 
 highly beneficial,"! 
 
 * Alison's History of Europe, vol. 1, p. 57. t Alison on Population, 
 
 vol. 2, p. 48. J Alison's History of Europe, vol. 1, p. 342.
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 329 
 
 Mr. Laing, in speaking of the opinions of Political Econo- 
 mists upon the social condition of France, says, " They set out 
 in their speculations, with a false axiom. They admit that a 
 certainty of subsistence food, fuel, clothing, and lodging, 
 being all comprehended under this term, subsistence is the 
 first and greatest good in the physical condition of an individual 
 or of a society ; and they assume it as an axiom, that those 
 parts of a social body, those individuals or classes, who are 
 employed in producing articles of general use or desire among 
 men, to put the case in the strongest light, say blacksmiths, 
 tailors, shoemakers, and such classes as produce articles which 
 every individual in the community requires and uses, are as 
 near to this first and greatest good of a certain subsistence by 
 their work, as those immediately emplo} r ed in its production by 
 husbandry. Now this may be true, where husbandry is a 
 manufacture, as with us in Britain, for producing by hired 
 labourers the greatest quantity possible of grain, meat, and 
 other products out of the soil, to be exchanged against the pro- 
 ducts of other branches of industry : it may be true that the 
 hired labourers of the manufacturer of corn from land are no 
 nearer to a certainty of subsistence than the hired labourers of 
 the manufacturer of cloth or leather. But it is not true, where 
 husbandry is followed as m France, and in the countries 
 divided among a small proprietary, for the sake of sub- 
 sisting the husbandman himself, the actual labourer on 
 the land, as its first object ; and where the exchanging its pro- 
 ducts for other articles even of general use and necessit} r , is 
 but a secondary object. A man will not give up his needful 
 food, fuel, clothing, or lodging, to gratify even his real and 
 most pressing wants of iron-work, leather-work, or cloth-work. 
 His surplus only will be applied to acquiring thos secondary 
 necessaries of life : and those who live by making them are, 
 consequently, far from being so near to that first good in social 
 condition, a certain subsistence, as he is. But if two-thirds of 
 the population of a country be in the situation of this individual, 
 who has his certain subsistence out of his own surplus for his 
 s s
 
 330 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 own needful food, fuel, clothing, and lodging, I take that to be 
 a good state of society, a better arrangement of the social 
 structure, than where needful subsistence is not certain to the 
 great majority of its numbers. It carries, moreover, within 
 itself, a check upon over-population and the consequent 
 deterioration of the social condition, and which is totally want- 
 ing in the other social system. In even the most useful and 
 necessary arts and manufactures, the demand for labourers is 
 not a seen, known, steady, and appreciable demand ; but it is 
 so in husbandry under this social construction. The labour to 
 be done, the subsistence that labour will produce out of his 
 portion of land, are seen and known elements in a man's 
 calculation upon his means of subsistence. Can his square of 
 land, or can it not, subsist a family ? Can he marry or not ? 
 are questions which every man can answer without delay, doubt, 
 or speculation. It is the depending on chance, where judg- 
 ment has nothing clearly set before it, that causes reckless, 
 improvident marriages in the lower, as in the higher classes, 
 and produces among us the evils of over-population ; and 
 chance necessarily enters into every man's calculations, when 
 certainty is removed altogether, as it is where certain subsist- 
 ence is, by our distribution of property, the lot of but a small 
 portion, instead of about two-thirds of the people."* 
 
 " The German League comprehends above twenty-six 
 millions of people ; and if we only look at the numbers and at 
 the extent and fertility of the soil they occupy, they should be 
 buyers in their home market of manufacturing industry, one 
 would suppose, as extensively at least as our British twenty- 
 four millions. But here we see the immense difference pro- 
 duced by a different social economy. These twenty-six 
 millions consume less of each other's industry, employ less, 
 buy less, sell less, than four millions of our population. In our 
 social system every man buys all he uses, and sells all he pro- 
 
 * Confirmatory of Mr. Laing's opinion with respect to such a state of things 
 furnishing a check upon population, is Dupin's statement, " that the popula- 
 tion of Prussia is now doubling itself in 26 years, Britain in 42, Austria in 
 69, Russia in 66, France in 105 years."
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 331 
 
 duces ; there is a perpetual exchange of industry for industry. 
 A home-spun and home- woven shirt, jacket, and trowsers, 
 would certainly not be found with us upon the body of one 
 labouring man in forty thousand. All he wears, all he eats, 
 all he drinks, must be produced for him by the industry of 
 others, and bought by the price of his own industry. The very 
 bread of our labourers in husbandry is often bought at the 
 manufacturer's shop. In Germany the economy of society is 
 directly the reverse ; not one labouring man, fanner, or trades- 
 man pretty high up even in the middle class of the small towns, 
 uses in clothing, food, furniture, what is not produced at home 
 by his own family. In the centre even of German manufacturing 
 industry in the provinces on the Rhine, you will not see among 
 twenty labouring people the value of twenty shillings altogether 
 in clothing articles not produced at home by the application of 
 their own time, labour, and industry. They are not badly 
 clothed, but on the contrary, as well, if not better, than our 
 own labourers in very good shirts, good jackets, trowsers, 
 stockings, shoes, and caps; but all home-made, or at the 
 utmost, village-made not made by a class of manufacturers 
 doing no other work, and bought with the wearer's money. 
 These are not consumers for whose demands the operative 
 labours, and the master manufacturer and mechanician invent, 
 calculate, and combine. Tobacco, coffee, sugar, wine and 
 spirits, cotton yarns for home weaving, and dye-stuffs for 
 home-made cloth, take a large proportion of what these 
 twenty-six millions of people have to expend in foreign 
 articles. It is little, comparatively, they have to expend, 
 because much of their time and labour is applied to the direct 
 production and manufacturing of what they use ; much, a 
 great deal more than with us, goes in eating, drinking, social 
 enjoyment, and in fuel preparing, and such small household 
 work in which there are no earnings or reproduction ; and 
 above all, much of the workman's means of earning, much of 
 his time, labour, and productiveness, is taken by the Govern- 
 ment, in the shape of military and other duties, from the work-
 
 382 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 ing man. The small proprietors occupying and living upon the 
 land have no surplus earnings to lay out in products of manu- 
 facturing industry. Having the rude necessaries of life very 
 much within themselves, they are not forced into the market 
 by any necessity ; and being bred in the rough simplicity of 
 the common soldier's life at the age when a man's tastes and 
 habits are forming, they have no very refined indulgences or 
 tastes to gratify, no habits or usages of a mode of living 
 requiring the aid of much manufacturing industry. It is more 
 difficult, perhaps, to bring a nation to consume, than to pro- 
 duce."* And again, " On the Continent every family, even 
 in towns not inconsiderable, manufactures for itself, buys 
 little or nothing, compared with families of the same class in 
 England. The Metayer family has its own raw material of 
 clothing, viz., flax, hemp, w r ool, hides, raised by itself; has 
 house-room and time idle time in winter to work them up, 
 not indeed into very fine, but into very wearable stuff, by their 
 own and their domestics' work : and no amount of capital thrown 
 into their hands as the price of their corn could change those 
 habits of a population which are almost produced by, or at 
 least very closely connected with, their climate, husbandry, 
 mode of existence, and whole social economy. The whole 
 agricultural population, if not manufacturing in some way, 
 spinning, weaving, making household goods, working in iron, 
 wood, or cloth, for their own use, during the winter months, 
 would be totally idle all the winter half-year. It is a saving of 
 time with us to buy all, make nothing at home. It would be 
 a waste of time on the Continent not to make at home all that 
 can be made."f Such, with differences rather in their favour, 
 is also the social condition of Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, 
 Tuscany, Venice, and something approaching this was the con- 
 dition once in England, but it has been exchanged for the 
 superior benefits, as some think, of the manufacturing system. 
 Laing says, " In England, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, 
 as now in Germany, every family in the middle or lower 
 * Notes of a Traveller, p. 142. f Ibid, p. 286.
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 333 
 
 classes was employed in spinning, weaving, manufacturing for 
 itself, baking, brewing, pickling, preserving, for its own con- 
 sumption. It lias taken three centuries to bring the British 
 population to that social economy in which every man exchanges 
 industry for industry, and a vast home market exists for all 
 production. It may be doubted, however much England lias 
 gained in national or individual wealth, whether her population 
 has gained in well-being and social happiness by the change. 
 Her operative manufacturing population called into existence 
 by it, although only one-fifth of the numbers are supposed to 
 be employed in supplying the foreign market, are plunged 
 sufficiently often into the greatest distress, by the ordinary 
 vicissitudes of the home market, to make reflecting men pause, 
 and ask if this be prosperity ? If national wealth, or the 
 power of a State in its financial means ; if the individual 
 enjoyment of the luxuries and gratifications which this wealth 
 bestows on one rich class, be worth the amount of human 
 misery and vice accompanying it ?" 
 
 We need not, however, go back to Elizabeth's time ; the 
 great changes that have taken place in our system have mostly 
 occurred since 1790. At that time manufactures were chiefly 
 confined to the home market : the labouring population derived 
 their principal subsistence from the soil, by their own labour 
 applied to it. Spinning-wheels and hand-looms were in every 
 cottage, and their cloths, sheets, linen, were ordinarily of their 
 own manufacture. Mr. M'Culloch and other writers represent 
 the working classes as being the principal gainers by the im- 
 provements in manufacturing that have since taken place ; but 
 they appear to have lost in one direction almost as much as 
 they have gained in another, and we regard the operative 
 abroad as in a sounder and safer social position than our own. 
 Both conditions, however, have their advantages. We have 
 Infant Schools and National Schools, and Mechanics' Institu- 
 tions ; we have a penny-post, newspapers, and facilities for 
 travelling ; singing and literature for the million, and many of 
 our operatives are, in consequence, highly intelligent. Many
 
 334 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 are, also, well lodged and well clothed ; for a week's wages of 
 an industrious family in good times, will furnish as much 
 clothing as a whole winter's home-manufacture in 1760. But 
 on the other hand, they are crowded together in large cities, 
 and kept for many hours a day at a dull, monotonous employ- 
 ment ; and the effects of such confinement, the want of proper 
 house-room, and the employment of women and children, are 
 felt in the degradation of both their physical and moral con- 
 dition. The joint effect of the want of country air and exercise 
 and of solid food, is the predominance of the nervous system 
 at the expense of the muscular energies, which begets mental 
 disorder and the necessity for constant excitement, found 
 generally at the gin and beer shops, and leading, with the 
 precarious nature of their employment, to the improvidence 
 which characterises so many of the class. This degeneration 
 of the great body of our manufacturing operatives has now 
 proceeded very far, and for that, among other things, we must 
 seek a remedy. The foreign operative, although inferior in 
 position to our English workman in many respects, has this 
 advantage over him, that he is not solely dependent upon the 
 sale his of labour for a livelihood, but has the means of using 
 his labour to furnish himself with everything necessary to his 
 physical well-being. His labour will always supply him with 
 the necessaries of life, often with its comforts, and even a 
 surplus to exchange for foreign luxuries. There is no doubt 
 that he is in want of many things which our operatives possess, 
 but he is not subject to the same fluctuations of income, and 
 can therefore calculate better his own resources, and there is 
 little question but that upon the whole he is a more contented 
 and happy being. The result of the circumstances in which 
 he is placed, upon his constitution, is just the reverse of the 
 case with our operative, viz., physical predominance over the 
 mental constitution. Now if we could unite the two states or 
 conditions, one would so correct the other, that we should have 
 all the advantages of both without the evils which each engen- 
 ders separately. Our labourers and artizans have been divorced
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 335 
 
 from the soil and made solely dependent upon the sale of their 
 labour, the demand for which is dependent upon fluctuating 
 causes, and will therefore frequently not furnish them with the 
 necessaries of life. So far let us return to the old system, as 
 to put them back upon the land. Let us endeavour to unite 
 the advantages which the rapid progress of civilization and 
 improved machinery have already brought to the operative, 
 with the advantages of country residence and the health of 
 mind and body derivable from agricultural labour. Machinery 
 is daily displacing the adult operative, and his labour will soon 
 be too expensive a material to work into manufactures : let him 
 therefore, be employed in the garden cultivation of the land to 
 supply his family with the necessaries of life, and let only his 
 own surplus time and that of his family be employed in 
 watching power-looms to furnish comforts and luxuries. 
 Agriculture and manufactures never ought to have been di- 
 vorced. Employment solely in the one department, injures 
 the mind ; in the other the body. There is not now, if there 
 ever has been, the necessity for it. Machinery has been 
 invented, and can be invented, to do all for which skilled 
 labour is required. When a nation becomes a nation of manu- 
 facturers and dependent upon other nations for its agricultural 
 produce, it gives up more than it can ever receive in return, 
 viz., the health and strength of body acquired from out-door 
 labour. If the people of the Continental States, during the 
 six months they are obliged to work in-doors, were to abandon 
 their primitive mode of manufacturing, and by the aid of a 
 factory in each district, were to make use of steam and our 
 improved machinery, might not their condition be prosperous 
 in the extreme ? For, the same amount- of labour they now 
 employ might produce a large surplus to exchange for every 
 foreign article required ; whereas, almost all that they can now 
 purchase after supplying themselves with the needful allowance 
 of their own manufactures, is tobacco, tea, coffee, and sugar. 
 If our own population, now dependent upon wages alone, could 
 be supplied with allotments of land, either by purchase or upon
 
 330 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 lease, so that by a spade cultivation their labour should always 
 furnish the first necessaries of life, they would then have some- 
 thing to fall back upon during the fluctuations to which trade is, 
 and always must be, liable. Secure of the means of support- 
 ing life, and of making it not only endurable but pleasant, 
 they would have less to fear from the freaks of fashion, from 
 the closing of this or that market, from this monetary crisis, 
 or that war. In order to make the great extension of our 
 foreign trade, implied in the Free Trade principles, safe, and 
 to the ultimate interest of the majority, all whether by this 
 means or any other that can be suggested should be made 
 independent of foreign markets, so far as the first necessaries of 
 life are concerned.* 
 
 To the thorough Free Trader this may appear to be a retro- 
 grade movement and perfectly chimerical. To carry it out 
 immediately, to the extent contemplated, may be impossible 
 and undesirable, and we would wish rather to point to it as an 
 
 * The Times, July 31, 1862, writing on the debate in the Commons on the 
 Lancashire distress, says; "Let us not deceive ourselves by talking of the 
 Cotton Famine and the Civil War in America. What we now behold we have 
 several times seen before, and shall see again. The more numerous the people 
 engaged in the cotton manufacture, the better the machinery, the greater the 
 enterprise, the more overflowing the prosperily under favourable circum- 
 stances, the greater will be the reaction certain to follow soon or late. Nor is 
 there any surety that the next season of agricultural distress, whatever the 
 titne, the cause, or the name, will be one whit less serious, shorter, or less 
 extensive than what we now witness. It is time, therefore, to consider what 
 remedies are to be applied to a recurrent calamity beyond the resources and 
 the arrangements of our Poor Laws. It is the case of an employment fluctu- 
 ating between very great prosperity and equal collapse, between enormous 
 profits and enormous losses, between wages at least twice the agricultural 
 scale and no employment at all. The object is to make the good years help 
 the bad years, and it is far better the good years should do this by anticipation 
 than by making up arrears, inasmuch as savings are better than debts. From 
 all accounts, the Lancashire operatives have been provident, but, not provident 
 enough for a calamity beyond their expectation. But it is the aggregate 
 industry that must be made to insure itself against such reverses. How is 
 that to be done ? The problem has hardly been touched in the debate, which 
 has run on the Cotton Famine.; but it is one which we shall undoubtedly have 
 to meet."
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 337 
 
 object towards which our policy should be directed for the 
 future. To the master manufacturer, who wishes always to 
 keep the supply of labour above the demand, and by that 
 means to keep the operatives wholly dependent on him greater 
 slaves to the necessity of living than any we have lately emanci- 
 pated in the West Indies the plan may appear objectionable 
 altogether, as interfering with the supply of labour, and con- 
 sequently with our manufacturing supremacy. We do not 
 anticipate, however, that the effect would be to raise the price 
 of labour; because, having other means of subsistence, the 
 operative could afford to sell his manufacturing skill for less. 
 But even should the objection be admissible, we think with Mr. 
 Laing, that " there may be a greater national good than the 
 cheapness, excellence, and extension of a manufacture. The 
 wealth of a nation, that is, of its State or Government, may 
 depend much upon productive labour well applied, and upon 
 great accumulations of manufacturing capital to apply it ; the 
 happy condition and well-being of a people seem to depend 
 more on the wide distribution of employment over the face of 
 a country by small but numerous masses of capital."* 
 
 Let our steam factories be uniformly built in the open 
 country, as is now very generally done in Lancashire, and let 
 cottages for the artizans be also built in an airy situation, 
 around the factory, with land attached to each. Most of the 
 evils attendant upon the extension of the factory system might 
 thus be avoided, and a high state of external prosperity and 
 internal order, intelligence, .ind morality be introduced. 
 Employment would thus be found for the male adults, forty or 
 fifty thousand of whom, trained from early childhood to factory 
 labour, are yearly turned adrift, and whom machinery every 
 day tends more and more to supplant. Let this employment 
 be principally upon the land, and the father of his family may 
 still be its head, and enabled to supply its members with the 
 necessaries and comforts of life, without its being essential to 
 their subsistence or England's supremacy that his daughters 
 
 * Residence iu Norway, p. 299. 
 T T
 
 338 .PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 under 18 and young children should work ten and a-half hours 
 per day at the mill. We may then perhaps discover that our 
 national existence does not depend upon our selling manu- 
 factured cotton at a farthing per ell cheaper than any other 
 people. As Carlyle says, " a most narrow stand for a free 
 nation to base itself on a stand which, with all the corn-law 
 abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of 
 enduring." The factories at Lowell, in the State of Massa- 
 chusetts, United States, are worked principally by the daughters 
 of farmers in the surrounding States, of the age of from 17 to 
 24, and they exhibit a high state of prosperity, morality, and 
 intelligence. Our own Greggs, Strutts, and Ashworths, have 
 also set a noble example of what may be done towards im- 
 proving the condition of the factory operatives under their 
 charge. In the ameliorated condition of their workpeople the 
 manufacturers will find their own interest, and they will never 
 have reason to regret any degree of pains and attention directed 
 towards the increase of their physical comforts and the im- 
 provement of their minds. The strength and welfare of a 
 State is best based upon a contented and happy peasantry ; the 
 condition of our own labouring classes would indicate that, 
 notwithstanding our apparent prosperity, we have still much 
 to fear. We have made mention chiefly of the manufacturing 
 poor, not because we are unaware that the condition of the 
 agricultural poor is even less prosperous, but because we con- 
 sider that our proposed remedy is equally applicable to the 
 amelioration of the condition of all who are dependent upon 
 wages. Instead of the children of the agricultural labourer 
 going into the town to be exposed to all its moral and physical 
 deteriorations, the factory, or the steam power to each dwel- 
 ling, might be brought to them. It is quite true that more 
 perfect freedom of trade, and increased facilities of intercourse 
 between nations, render the fluctuations in trade less and less 
 frequent ; still employment upon the land the Union of 
 Agriculture and Manufactures, is not the less desirable. Most 
 of the physical and moral diseases, induced by a perverted
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 339 
 
 civilization among our factory population in the large towns, 
 are consequent upon their divorce from the land, and the best 
 remedy, if not the only one, will be found in the return to it, 
 either at home or by emigration to our colonies. 
 
 Sir A. Alison says, " As the division of land is thus the 
 great step in the progress of improvement, so its distribution 
 among the lower orders, in civilized society, is essential to 
 maintain that elevation of mind which the separation of em- 
 ployments has a tendency to depress. It is too frequently the 
 melancholy effect of the division of labour, which takes place 
 in the progress of opulence, to degrade the individual charac- 
 ter among the poor ; to reduce men to mere machines, and pre- 
 vent the development of those powers and faculties which, in 
 earlier times, are called forth by the difficulties and dangers 
 with which men are then compelled to struggle. It is hence 
 that the wise and the good have been so often led to deplore the 
 degrading effect of national civilization : that the vast fabric of 
 society has been regarded as concealing only the weakness and 
 debasement of the great body by whom it has been erected ; 
 and that the eye of the philanthropist turns from the view of 
 national grandeur and private degradation, to scenes where a 
 nobler spirit is nursed, amid the freedom of the desert or the 
 solitude of the forest." 
 
 " Manufacturing employment, however, is not in itself 
 fatal to habits of frugality ; on the contrary, it tends to en- 
 courage them where it is combined with separate dwellings and 
 rural residence. There is not in the world a more industrious 
 and frugal set of men than the watchmakers of Jura, the straw 
 manufacturers of the Val d'Arno, the chintz workmen of 
 Soleure, or the clothiers of Cumberland and the West of 
 Yorkshire. The savings of these laborious men are all realized 
 for the benefit of their families, and produce those beautiful 
 little properties which gratify the traveller in those delightful 
 regions. On the other hand, there is not to be found among 
 civilized nations, a more dissolute, improvident, or reckless 
 race than the silkweavers of Lyons or Spitalfields, the cotton
 
 340 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 manufacturers of Rouen or Manchester, or the muslin opera- 
 tives of Glasgow and Paisley. How great soever their 
 earnings may be, they are for the most part wasted in the 
 lowest licentiousness ; the recurrence of seasons of distress has 
 no effect in inducing habits of economy ; the revival of pros- 
 perity only increases the oceans of spirits which are swallowed ; 
 the return of depression sends their furniture to the pawn- 
 brokers, their families to the workhouse. It is the extension 
 of machinery, the accumulation of men together, which pro- 
 duce these fatal effects. The man who could discover a mode of 
 combining manufacturing skill with isolated labour and country 
 residence, would do a greater service to humanity than the ivhole 
 race of philosophers." Alison, vol. 2, pp. 8 and 155.* 
 
 * The last testimony we have confirms the view here taken by Mr. Laing 
 and Sir A. Alison. Vacuus Viator, writing to the Sj^eclator, Nov. 8, 1862, 
 says, " It is a blessing to find that a journey right across Europe only con- 
 firms one in one's love for Old England. I can safely say that I would sooner 
 be a London mechanic than a grandee of any Continental nation. At the same 
 time, there is no denying that England presents a sad contrast in some 
 matters, and those most vital ones, to almost every other country. Nowhere 
 else in Europe are the extremes of wealth and poverty so fearfully apparent. 
 In my four miles daily walk in London, I see more of the agony of the 
 struggle for mere life more men, women, and children walking about with 
 the signs of physical misery in their faces, their limbs, their clothing, than in 
 any country I have passed through, not excepting Turkey. I can name a 
 dozen villages within fifty miles of London, most of them the property of 
 great Lords and Commoners, in which almost every labourer's cottage is far 
 less fit to be the home of men and women than any way-side hovel which 1 
 saw between Calais and Constantinople, with the one single exception of the 
 Tartars' huts near Chernavoda. For a certain time the hardest working people 
 of the world, our poor, may go on bearing upon their shoulders this huge 
 superstructure of wealth and luxury in which we live, without better food, 
 clothes, or houses than we find for them now. But some day or other short 
 food, over-work, and over-crowding, must do their work, and it will be too 
 late then to plead that the poor always got all they had a right to get in the 
 labour market, that it was impossible to hinder the higgling of the market 
 from goiug against them. The fact is, that it would well pay us as a com- 
 mercial speculation, and having regard to the future, to manage somehow or 
 another that the producers and upholders of our England with its curious 
 BU pel-structure of the richest middle-class and aristocracy in the world, mon- 
 ster exhibitions, the turf, game preserves, and the rest of it should get such 
 food and lodging as will, at any rate, keep their bodies in thorough good 
 working condition."
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 341 
 
 The Free Trade principle, " that we should never produce 
 in one country what can be produced at less cost of lahour in 
 another," should be received as admitting of many exceptions, 
 because where labour would probably be to spare, such occu- 
 pations would be chosen as were most conducive to health and 
 happiness rather than always those that the circumstances of 
 the country rendered most productive. At present production 
 is considered only, without reference to health, and the produce 
 of one hour's labour in our manufactories is exchanged for the 
 produce of one hour's labour upon land abroad; such land 
 being twice as productive as our own, one hour's labour on 
 manufactures here produces by the exchange double the 
 quantity of corn that could be produced by the same labour 
 upon our own soil. But may not the question fairly be asked, 
 whether two hours' labour upon land be not more to the 
 interest of the labourer, if he had his due share of the produce, 
 and all other influences being taken into consideration, than 
 one in a factory? That system must be bad which takes no 
 account of the health of body or mind in the saving of labour. 
 
 " A time there was, ere England's griefs began, 
 When every rood of ground maintain 'd its man ;" 
 
 and to this state we should return, with the differences in- 
 dicated. 
 
 COLONIZATION AND EMIGRATION. That population hitherto 
 has pressed upon the means of subsistence, that mankind, 
 governed more by brute instinct than by reason, have not 
 limited their numbers within the means provided for their sup- 
 port, is well for the world at large, as it has driven numbers 
 from their native hearths and the comforts of home and civiliza- 
 tion, to fight with and subdue nature to their use in new and 
 untrodden regions of the earth. It has been found that disease 
 and crime increase in proportion to the number of the 
 people on a square mile, and more than proportionately to the 
 increase of numbers, and as the only way to raise wages is to 
 make labour scarce, it is most desirable that the road to our 
 colonies should be made as short and as easy of access as
 
 342 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 possible. That wages are high in America is not owing to its 
 democratic institutions, but that its surplus population is drafted 
 off to the prairies of the far West. We ought to have our far 
 West to thin the population of our densely crowded cities, and 
 to transport our underpaid mechanics and agricultural 
 labourers to new countries where their labour is the thing most 
 wanted ; to rescue the former from all the temptations to which 
 a large city subjects them, and to transport both to new regions 
 where their labour shall produce for them at least every 
 necessary of life. The evils generated in the hotbed of 
 civilization are best cured by labour on land and in a new 
 country, and Government should see that Australia and New 
 Zealand and Canada and our other colonies, by a well- 
 organised system of emigration, are put within the reach of 
 our working classes. Since the potato failed in Ireland, 
 emigration has been very rapid, not only from that country, 
 but from England and Scotland, and it has done much to raise 
 the condition of the operatives who remained at home. Our 
 Colonies should be systematically fed from our Reformatories, 
 both for children and adults : the old country is no abiding 
 place for the criminal class ; society has little faith in their 
 amendment, and will not receive them, and they are cast out 
 too often with no means of support but by returning to their 
 old vicious courses. 
 
 EDUCATION. The most important of all measures for the 
 improvement of the condition of the people is the improvement 
 of the people themselves through the means of education, and 
 this we are glad to find is now very generally recognized, but 
 while our religious guides have been trying to agree as to what 
 religion shall be taught in the common schools and how it shall 
 be taught, anything deserving the name of education has 
 become almost an impossibility for the mass of the people. If 
 on the great expansion of our national industry by steam all 
 children had been obliged by law under a national system of 
 education to go to school till the age of 12 or 14, then educa-
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 343 
 
 tion of some kind would have been possible to all, and the rate 
 of wages would have adapted itself to the consequent lessened 
 supply of labour ; but now the children have been absorbed 
 into the industrial employments of the country, and wages have 
 fallen so low that parents cannot do without their earnings, and 
 children are therefore kept from the schools. But this is not 
 the worst ; the mothers as well as the children have been set 
 to work, and the effect of the ignorance and neglect, conse- 
 quent upon the mother's divorcement from domestic duties, is 
 that more than 50 per cent, of the mortality in all great towns 
 is of children under five years of age. For every such death 
 there are at least 28 cases of sickness, and education in after 
 life can do little towards counteracting the effects of influences 
 so weakening and deteriorating to the whole constitution. We 
 have thus in a large proportion of the rising generation a 
 stunted growth, a nervously predominant bodily system, an 
 ill-balanced mind, and a perpetual craving for unnatural and 
 unwholesome stimulants. 
 
 But oui' semi-voluntary and wretchedly-defective no-system 
 of education does not reach low enough down in the scale of 
 society to affect in the least the classes who most require it. It 
 passes over almost all who are without the pale and influence 
 of some religious organization. To remedy this defect Ragged 
 Schools and Reformatories for juvenile delinquents have been 
 lately established, and an Act has been passed by which young 
 vagabonds with no ostensible means of occupation can be seized 
 and forcibly committed to some school. But this Act, I fear, 
 is likely to remain a mere dead letter for some time to come. 
 The Annual Report of the Committee of the Privy Council on 
 Education has been issued, June, 1862. It details their pro- 
 ceedings during the past year, and shows that the number of 
 schools, or departments of schools, under separate teachers, 
 which were inspected, had been increased by 497, the number of 
 children by 65,758, of pupil teachers by 742, of certificated 
 teachers by 987 ; of students in training for teachers, 43 ; and 
 that new school accommodation was created for 47,103 children.
 
 344 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 The sixty Inspectors visited 10,900 daily schools, or depart- 
 ments of schools, and found present in them 1,028,690 chil- 
 dren (five boys to four girls), 8,069 certificated teachers, and 
 15,498 apprentices. The Inspectors also visited 39 Training 
 Colleges for teachers, occupied by 2,869 students, and examined 
 these and 2,782 candidates; besides visiting 422 schools for 
 pauper children, containing about 30,000 inmates, and 58 
 ragged or industrial schools, containing 4,411 inmates. The 
 Privy Council Committee notice that while making a certifi- 
 cated teacher a condition of annual grants, they have provided 
 for the granting of certificates to younger and humbler classes 
 of candidates for service in small schools, and that they are 
 now engaged i: revising the subjects wherein teachers are re- 
 quired to be examined. A hope is expressed that by the en- 
 couragement given to the instruction of infants as a foundation, 
 and to the instruction of evening scholars as a continuance of 
 the elementary day school, a road has been marked out for the 
 solid and suitable education of the classes who support them- 
 selves in independence by manual labour. As for the educa- 
 tion of the pauper and criminal classes, they are now dealt with 
 by the Legislature as separate parts of the question, and with, 
 by way of supplement, the missionary action of Sunday 
 Schools and Ragged Schools, the Council entertain a confident 
 hope that no part of the great field of education for the poor re- 
 mains unknown or uncared for ; and that in the midst of many 
 difficulties, and more differences, progress is being everywhere 
 made. 
 
 Notwithstanding, our educational establishments are deficient 
 in the quantity, and still more so in the quality of instruction 
 supplied. With most who use the term, education means intel- 
 lectual instruction, but it has been previously defined to be the 
 " improving and perfecting of every bodily and mental faculty." 
 " It is," says Mackintosh, " a wise disposal of all the circum- 
 stances which influence character, and of the means of producino- 
 those habitual dispositions which ensure well doing." And 
 the spread of education among the working classes in either of
 
 PKOPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 345 
 
 the above senses, is at present utterly impossible. If both 
 strength and leisure were permitted them for mental improve- 
 ment if our Infant, National, and British Schools, and 
 Mechanics' Institutions were filled, it would not be there that 
 the poor would receive their education. It would be the cir- 
 cumstances by which they were surrounded at home that would 
 form their minds and characters. Had they leisure to acquire 
 a perfect knowledge of all the sets of laws, physical, organic, 
 and moral, on which well-being is dependent, it would be 
 quite out of their power to obey them. A sound mind can 
 only be based upon a sound body ; for which latter we are to a 
 certain extent dependent upon our parents, and the circum- 
 stances in which they were placed previously to our birth. 
 These circumstances are decidedly unfavourable, and, as we 
 have seen, in many cases, they cause a deterioration of both 
 bodily and mental faculties greater than any after educational 
 training can remedy. They are too often ill-fed, over-worked, 
 badly lodged and clothed ; the exercise of their bodily and 
 mental powers is partial and irregular, and they are subjected 
 to numerous sources of disease consequent upon their particular 
 employments ; these are evils that act upon the constitution of 
 their children before they are born, and must be removed 
 before they can be educated. " It is a very important physical 
 fact," says Dr. Conolly, " deeply connected with the improve- 
 ment of nations and the progress of civilization, that the 
 human frame and human brain obey certain physical laws, in 
 consequence of which many qualities are inherited, and com- 
 munities perfected and deteriorated in the course of successive 
 generations to an indefinite extent, deteriorated to almost 
 inactivity bordering upon fatuity of mind ; and on the other 
 hand improved, how far it would be presumptuous to say ; but 
 certainly beyond any limit yet attained." And again, in 
 speaking of St. Giles and similar haunts in London, and other 
 crowded cities, he says, il In these cases, it is not defective 
 education, but I feel assured from observation that the frame 
 is modified, the organization affected by long-established 
 u u
 
 346 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 ancestral errors, the results of which upon the human frame 
 are an incapacity to preserve its intellectual and moral beauty, 
 any more than its physical beauty, which is so defaced that the 
 figure and countenance reveal a whole life of wretchedness and 
 foul thoughts, and often of crime." 
 
 These circumstances, we trust, are now exceptional. But 
 to spread anything really deserving the name of education 
 amongst the adult working classes is, to a great extent, im- 
 practicable. It is quite impossible that the nervous energy 
 which each brain generates or supplies can be devoted to 
 mental, when it has already been spent in physical effort. It 
 is impossible, after a day's hard toil, that there can be much 
 disposition to study. A stimulant for the exhausted faculties, 
 found generally in physical excitement, seems to be the thing 
 required and sought for by most. It is owing to this that our 
 Mechanics' Institutions scarcely deserve the name, and that 
 amongst the members are seldom numbered 20 per cent, of the 
 working classes, and not perhaps more than 1 per cent, of all 
 the working men in the several towns in which they are 
 established. 
 
 But although we have no National System, the electric 
 telegraph, the cheap railway train, the penny newspaper, the 
 Parliamentary debates are our great schoolmasters, and our 
 workshops our schools of industry, and education of some kind 
 though not the kind that is desirable not the kind that is 
 safe is advancing rapidly amongst the people. It is edu- 
 cation of the intellect alone ; there are few now who cannot 
 read and write ; but physical and moral education, so much 
 more difficult to instil and to imbibe, is almost entirely 
 wanting. In the growth of the individual mind the intellect 
 advances before the moral powers, for it is necessary to 
 know what is right before we can practise it; and this 
 precedence of the intellect is perhaps a necessary stage in 
 the advance of the race; but there are circumstances that 
 make this stage of our progress, in this country, and per- 
 haps in all old countries, particularly dangerous. " The tend-
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 347 
 
 ency," says Mr. Alison, " of the present state of society is 
 everywhere towards great cities, huge properties, corrupted 
 manners, dense masses of the poor, selfish habits in the rich, 
 and universal thirst for pleasure."" In such a state of things 
 the " little knowledge'' which the poet so truly describes as a 
 " dangerous thing," and which is all that the majority of the 
 working classes have leisure to acquire, is little better, and 
 more dangerous to society, than no education at all. It is suffi- 
 cient to show them the advantages which the possession of capi- 
 tal gives to its possessor over those who live by the wages of 
 labour ; to show them the evils attendant on the present law of 
 property, without showing them that all civilisation has been 
 based upon that law, and that without security there could be 
 no property at all. It is sufficient to give them ideas above 
 their station and a desire for wealth without showing them that 
 the possession of wealth, without the habits acquired in its 
 accumulation, or still higher moral and intellectual aspirations, 
 would be worse than their previous poverty. In fact, the 
 knowledge that they can acquire, (of course there are many 
 exceptions,) is of that superficial kind which tends only to give 
 them exalted ideas of their own judgment, to make them 
 intolerant, bigoted, dogmatical ; the prey of every species of 
 empiricism, and of every designing demagogue who has a 
 free flow of language, and sense and skill sufficient to flatter 
 their prevailing passions and prejudices. Yet is there no road 
 open to us but onwards ; we must make the education of the 
 people as complete as circumstances will admit ; and we trust 
 that this country may be saved the experience that a mass of 
 ill-digested information is worse than ignorance, f 
 
 * Vol. 2, p. 282. 
 
 t In the education of Workhouse children or of children in Reforma- 
 tories we must not forget that we have a different material to deal with than 
 that existing in other schools. They will generally be found deteriorated 
 through several generations in both mind and body, and they will require 
 proportionally better and often more expensive treatment than the children 
 of the better class. In some, bodily weakness and disease will predominate, 
 with the mind sluggish and almost obliterated ; in others, undue activity of
 
 348 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 RELIGION. The dangers which arise from merely intellectual 
 education, have been fully appreciated, if not exaggerated, 
 by a large class in this country who are aware that the " school- 
 master is abroad," and that it is now useless to attempt to 
 confine him at home ; they therefore endeavour to obviate the 
 mischief that arises from partial instruction, from the mere 
 training of the intellect, by joining it with religious instruction. 
 They justly think that a knowledge of rights should be accom- 
 panied by a knowledge of duties, and as they have no idea of 
 morality separate from religion, they imagine that such in- 
 struction can only be imparted by religious establishments. If 
 the science of morality were in a more perfect state and more 
 cultivated, the distinction between morality and religion would 
 probably be acknowledged; Religion being the perception of 
 the relation in which we stand to our Creator ; Morality having 
 reference to the duties we owe to our fellow-creatures. But 
 imperfect as the science of Morality is at the present day, 
 Religion is so much more clogged with error and absurdity as 
 to render the union of the two, which would naturally be so 
 harmonious so salutary, productive of confusion and even 
 mischief. And yet the Christianity of our generation, mixed 
 as it is with the barbarous dogmas of a young and uncivilized 
 age, still contains the beautiful embodiment of the Moral Law, 
 
 the nervous system will prevail, according to the habits of the parents, 
 as they may have been starved, or given to drink, or brought up in factories, 
 or belong to the predatory classes. Each case will require to be treated on 
 its own merits, as we would mend or improve a broken or defective piece of 
 machinery. Certain effects have to be produced, and anything short of the 
 requisite causes must be a failure, and it will be absurd therefore to lay that 
 failure on the children, or to talk of their deserts. Success may be 
 costly, but failure is more so, as it is throwing funds away. But it is 
 said, will not all this care, for such children will require better food, better 
 everything, to bring them up to the normal standard be a premium to 
 improvidence in the class above ? The class above may and must be educated 
 to value character and independence above all such advantages at the State or 
 parish cost ; but should this not be possible in all cases, still any treatment 
 short of what is required for a cure is comparatively useless, and the risk 
 must be run, and any ill effects in that direction met and obviated as far as 
 possible.
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 349 
 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," and so long as 
 men insist upon having the knowledge of their social duties 
 conveyed to them in so cumbrous and unsightly a vehicle, our 
 religious teachers must continue to be almost the only teachers 
 of morals, and they are right who insist so strenuously upon 
 the union of Religious with Secular instruction. While, how- 
 ever, we thankfully take the good that is granted us, it must be 
 matter of great regret that the zeal which is so abundantly 
 manifested at the present day in the cause of religion, is not 
 more a zeal according to knowledge. The evils that surround 
 us, our hardships and privations, our toils and misfortunes, our 
 bodily sufferings, our mental anguish, are not regarded as con- 
 sequences resulting from causes over which we have anv con- 
 trol, but as part, a necessary part, of the ordinances by which 
 the world is governed ; not as warnings that we have broken 
 those laws upon which our welfare is dependent here, but as 
 trials sent to prepare us for a state of happiness hereafter. So 
 long as this view prevails, there will be no seeking for the 
 causes of misery in the circumstances that surround us, in the 
 imperfections of our own institutions ; and without a due 
 appreciation of the cause, we cannot control the effect. The 
 same causes that prevent the extension of general enlighten- 
 ment amongst the people, prevent the extension of a pure 
 religion. True religion, the love of the Invisible Source of all 
 that is good and beautiful, springing from the love of the 
 goodness and beauty that is visible ; which spends not itself in 
 idle admiration and adulation, but perpetually gains strength by 
 efforts to make this earth still more good still more beautiful 
 can scarcely co-exist with the ignorance in which the multi- 
 tudes are imprisoned. Superstition may grow and ripen, for 
 ignorance is the soil in which it best flourishes : we may im- 
 plant a slavish fear of Hell or a selfish hope of Heaven, but 
 not the love of right for its own sake. We may pray for the 
 coming of the Kingdom of God, as well as for our daily bread, 
 but both are equally dependent upon our own effort, upon the 
 use of natural means ; and we can no more plant true religion
 
 350 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 in a soil that has not been prepared for it, than we can gather 
 grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles, or reap where we have not 
 sown. The erroneous notions concerning the freedom of the 
 will ; the idea that man is able to act contrary to the laws of 
 his being, and the influence of surrounding circumstances, 
 have helped to retard this moral reformation. It is much 
 easier for a Minister to rest satisfied with the conclusion that 
 the members of his flock are all free agents, and that their con- 
 demnation must consequently be upon their own heads, than to 
 examine into the causes of their irreligion or unbelief, and to 
 take the proper means to prevent its occurrence. But this 
 would give much trouble to the Pastor ; and moreover, in 
 such a mode of procedure, "faith," Le. the belief that effects 
 may be wrought without cause or means would be left out; 
 so it is easier to leave the flock to God's free grace and their 
 own free will. But when the causes of vice and irreligion are 
 better understood, it will be seen who were the hirelings and 
 who the true shepherds. The failure of the vast efforts that 
 have been and are being made for the spread of religion for 
 a failure it must be pronounced when the effects produced are 
 compared with the enormous machinery in operation can be 
 accounted for only on the supposition that these efforts have 
 not been made in accordance with the laws of God, as revealed 
 in the established connexion between cause and effect. 
 
 We are told by Thomas Carlyle, that " the old Pope of 
 Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they cart him 
 through the streets to bless the people on Corpus- Christi Day, 
 complains of rheumatism ; whereupon his Cardinals consult; 
 construct him, after some study, a stuffed cloaked figure, of 
 iron and wood, with wool or baked hair ; and place it in a 
 kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure ; to this 
 stuffed rump, he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by 
 the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread 
 hands : the rump with its cloaks kneels, the Pope looks, and 
 holds his hands spread ; and so the two in concert bless the 
 Roman population on Corpus- Chrwti Day, as well as they can."
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 351 
 
 Protestants have also their stuffed behinds as well as Papists, 
 and religion with them has become a series of forms and 
 ceremonies and customs, in one-half of which there is no real 
 life. Its teaching both in pulpit and school, is that of a bye- 
 gone and obsolete age, consisting for the most part of vague 
 platitudes and inapplicable generalities, and yet all other is 
 required to give place to it, for there are to be no schools 
 from which this kind of religious teaching is excluded. But 
 society is beginning to perceive that the old-fashioned system 
 of teaching and preaching is out of date and unsuited to the 
 times in which we live. We do not want a string of im- 
 practicable generalities ; we require something more definite. 
 The Bible may supply the spirit and general maxims, but the 
 knowledge requisite to put them in practice it is not intended 
 to supply. It is no more intended to supply us with certain 
 knowledge on Physiology, Psychology, and the Science of 
 Morality, than it is on the Sciences of Physics or Chemistry. 
 And yet we require this certain knowledge we require to be 
 able to trace cause and effect in all departments, in mind as 
 well as matter. For instance the Cholera, if it is a judgment 
 at all, is a judgment against uncleanlinesa and those physical 
 causes which deteriorate the health and lower the capabilities 
 of enjoyment of a whole population ; and yet people are still 
 told from the pulpit that it is a judgment against the Maynooth 
 grant, or for particular sins such as Rush's murder, &c., with 
 which it has no possible relationship of cause and effect. 
 Society, we say, is beginning to take a different view of this 
 question. What said the first person in the realm next the 
 throne ? Prince Albert said " Man is approaching a more 
 complete fulfilment of that great and sacred mission which he 
 has to perform in this world. His reason being created after 
 the image of God, he has to use it to discover the laws by 
 which the Almighty governs his creation ; and, by making 
 these laws a standard of action, to conquer nature to his use 
 himself a Divine instrument." The next highest personage, 
 our Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, in his letter to the
 
 352 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 Presbytery of Edinburgh, October, 1853, says, "The Maker 
 of the universe has established certain laws of nature for the 
 planet in which we live, and the weal or woe of mankind 
 depends upon the observance or neglect of those laws." But 
 unfortunately the religion of the country does not recognise 
 these laws, and they are thought to pervade the department 
 of Physics only, and to have nothing to do with mind and 
 morals, and consequently we have good men declaring that 
 religion is independent of the secular knowledge which teaches 
 what these laws are. The unfortunate result of all this is, 
 that the consequences of our actions, instead of being minutely 
 traced out here and shown to be unvarying and unavoidable, 
 are deferred in their rewards and punishments to another world 
 and state of being, and are regarded as problematical and 
 most uncertain. A general practical scepticism is the conse- 
 quence for too many ; believing that future rewards and 
 punishments are mere school-boy bugbears, people come to 
 consider the laws by which the world is governed, upon which 
 their weal or woe depends, as deserving of only equal atten- 
 tion. " For the faith in an Invisible, Unnameable, Godlike, 
 present everywhere in all that we see, and work, and suffer" 
 as Carlyle says, " is the essence of all faith whatsoever ; and 
 that once denied, or still worse, asserted with lips only, and out 
 of bound prayer-books only, and what other thing remains 
 believable ?" On the contrary, it might be clearly shown and 
 proved that there was no bad action, or even evil thought, but 
 had its evil consequences here that it is impossible to infringe 
 any moral law without inducing suffering ; and in the best 
 
 * At the present time (Nov., 1862,) Slavery, the greatest blot on modern 
 civilization ; cursing all connected with it the master, the slave, and the 
 mean white or independent labourer; opposed to every moral law, has caused 
 at last, as might have been expected, a difference between North and South 
 America. England has been the principal supporter of this slavery in its 
 demand for cotton, and suffers in consequence, but there seems to be no sus- 
 picion, and no one hints from the pulpit, that this suffering is in any way 
 connected with the direct breach of God's lawa. The universal prayer, 
 loudest among the High Church and Tory Party, is for peace, that we may 
 again fatten upon slave-grown cotton.
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 353 
 
 Secular Schools the elements of physical, physiological, and 
 moral science, and social economy, are taught, and their 
 connection with our well-being logically and lucidly demon- 
 strated. God commands nothing that is not for the good of 
 His creatures, and His laws need not be based upon authority 
 alone, but it may be shown why He has given them ; and this 
 mode of instruction has a very different effect to mere creeds 
 and catechisms taught by rote. 
 
 That which separates happiness here from happiness here- 
 after, as if they were inconsistent with each other, is a great 
 and pernicious error. It is only by obedience to all the laws of 
 God that happiness can be obtained here, and any other pre- 
 paration for a future state of happiness besides such obedience, 
 is inconceivable. And yet, does there ''arise a philanthropist 
 who studies the laws of his Creator, and teaches mankind that 
 happiness is to be sought by obedience to these laws, is he not 
 decried by the priesthood as not of them, or of their creed 
 as a pernicious misleader, who offers happiness to men at the 
 expense of their eternal salvation ; temporal gifts for their 
 everlasting interests ? It is, unhappily, too much the policy of 
 the priesthood to separate religion from temporal interests, to 
 disconnect it altogether from worldly prosperity and happiness, 
 and in place of the good things which God has given so 
 plenteously, and which He intends equally for all His children, 
 to allow liberally to the poor " post obit bills on Heaven," as 
 a compensation for what has been taken from them here. 
 
 Zeal in the cause of the religion of the country is perhaps 
 a characteristic of the age, and if it were founded more upon 
 knowledge, and were purified from motives that are secular, 
 and often selfish, it might have a most beneficial and human- 
 izing effect upon our manners and institutions. But while the 
 so-called orthodox religion is supported by one class, because 
 " the Deity is in some inexplicable manner supposed to be of 
 the government party," Church and State always going 
 together it is supported by another class, equally numerous, 
 out of deference to public opinion. There is, undoubtedly, one 
 v v
 
 354 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 portion of the religious world, whose zeal in the cause may be 
 traced to a sincere anxiety for the eternal interests of them- 
 selves and their fellow-creatures ; and this class, although 
 comparatively a small one, contains many of the excellent of 
 the earth, who have sought a resting-place for the highest, and 
 purest, and most ennobling of the feelings peculiar to man, and 
 finding none in the impenetrable selfishness of the world 
 have flown to the beautiful precepts of pure Christianity. But 
 these have erred in forgetting, or in too much neglecting, the 
 book of God's works, and in not using it as the interpreter and 
 test of all other books that have been handed down to us for 
 our instruction and guidance. 
 
 A far more numerous class than this is one with which the 
 forms and ceremonies of religion constitute the code of morality. 
 The individuals composing this class are regular attendants at 
 the parish church, or meeting-house, to which they have been 
 accustomed from childhood ; they annually give their guinea 
 at the charity sermon, for the education and clothing of pauper 
 children ; and if called upon, subscribe handsomely to the Bible 
 Society, or to the Missionary Society, or towards building a 
 Christian Church for converted Jews at Jerusalem. 
 
 And yet to those who have faith in the power of truth, 
 there is always the cheering hope that even with respect to 
 religion, it will prevail at last. For instance, it will be 
 found that the interposition of a particular providence 
 is incompatible with the exercise and use of reason ; that 
 God's only mode of helping us, is by giving us powers 
 by which we are enabled to make use of those causes which 
 He has appointed to produce the effect we desiderate. That 
 original sin is only the necessary consequence of the unavoidable 
 limitation of our intellectual being. That accountabilitv, in the 
 sense in which the term is commonly used by religionists, does 
 not exist; that punishment is always intended for the reform- 
 ation and good of the offender, and that therefore forgive- 
 ness of sins would be an injury. That nothing is to be left
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 355 
 
 to man's free will, because his character depends upon his 
 original constitution and the circumstances in which he is 
 placed. That his faith, therefore, can only depend upon 
 evidence, and his morality, religion, and intelligence, upon 
 the influences calculated to make him moral, religious, and 
 intelligent. 
 
 It is not, therefore, to the present religious world or its 
 teachings that we can ultimately look for the amelioration of 
 the condition of society, for it holds that the evils under which 
 we suffer are not remediable, but are a necessary part of man's 
 worldly estate a doctrine which acts as an effectual drag upon 
 the progress of improvement, by inducing men to suppose any 
 great forward movement to be impossible, and exalted views 
 of man's future condition here, Utopian. Yet, however in- 
 efficient our various religious establishments - are, compared to 
 what they might be with their machinery and enormous 
 resources in the present wretched state of society, in which 
 the degrading pursuit of individual gain, the competition for 
 individual advantage, form the business of life, they are the 
 only establishments that we have for the calling forth and 
 exercising of man's best and highest feelings, and in which the 
 precepts of Him who said, " Woe unto them that are rich," 
 are read, if not heeded. Moral training for the people there 
 would be none without them. 
 
 We find no fault, therefore, with the temples that every- 
 where cover the land ; and we would lend no helping hand to 
 pull them down ; but as soon as may be we would have the 
 money changers and the spirit of Mammon driven thence we 
 would have them converted into the temples of God, where His 
 laws should be taught, and the people instructed to follow His 
 will on earth, as it is in Heaven. The physical, the organic, 
 and the moral laws are the Laws of God, and the petition, 
 " Deliver us from evil," is useless so long as we disobey them 
 in wil fulness or ignorance. Places of assembly for the people 
 we must hare, because " the people" must always be led, and
 
 35 6 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY, 
 
 where else are they to look for those appointed by God for 
 leaders, by a greater endowment than the average of mental 
 and moral qualities where else can the right road be so well 
 pointed out to them, or the feeling generated that is to carry 
 them[on that road rejoicing ? But places for public worship there 
 can properly be none ; and in nothing did the Great Teacher 
 prove His wisdom and deep insight into the nature of the human 
 heart, more than by the veto which He virtually put upon 
 " standing up in the synagogue to pray," and by the sanction 
 which He gave exclusively to the prayer that is uttered to the 
 Father in secret, when the door is closed against all human 
 intrusion. And we find that though He taught in the syna- 
 gogue, He prayed on the lonely mountain side, or in the desert 
 place apart.* 
 
 * The words or example of Jesus of Nazareth must, however, have little 
 weight with those wlio take His own simple and beautiful prayer which He 
 bequeathed to His disciples lest they should fall into the practice of " much 
 speaking" and " vain repetition" and repeat it four, and frequently five times 
 in the space of an hour and a half every Sunday morning, and twice or thrice 
 in the evening. 
 
 The practice of public worship has now perhaps reached its acme of abuse. 
 Although there may be a few who frequent the consecrated edifice because they 
 feel it to be right, aud who succeed iu summoning the spirit of devotion, even 
 amidst the accessories of a pompous priest and a gazing, listless multitude, 
 there cannot be a doubt that, with the exception of those who " go to Church" 
 from mere habit, the principal motive for the regular attendance of the 
 majority, is " that they may be seen of men." The opulent man fears the 
 tacit wonder and reproach of his neighbours if he neglect the "decencies" of 
 religion. The tradesman fears to lose his customers, or the patronage of the 
 Clergyman, if he pay no regard to established observances; the poor man 
 likes to show how respectable an appearance he with his wife and children can 
 make once a week ; but it ia probable that if a Church were so contrived that 
 all the members of the congregation were invisible to each other, and so that 
 no eye could mark the entrance or exit of any one, the Clergyman would not 
 seldom find himself in Dean Swift's predicament preaching to himself aud 
 " dearly beloved Roger." 
 
 But to go and " pray in the synagogue," " that they may be Been of men," 
 is not only the unacknowledged practice of the many, but in a few instances 
 fashion has sanctioned it into a most legitimate and expedient custom. The 
 bridfi, when she takes her place iu the pew by tho side of her newly-rnads 
 husband, does so for the express purpose of being " seen," for this " being 
 seen at Church" is the important prelude to a series of calls and visits; and 
 if the appointments of the drawing-room iu which she is to sit to receive her 
 guests are not iu due order, or the becoming morning dress in which she is to
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 357 
 
 And is it not in solitude, in the temple that He Himself has 
 created, that the heart is most drawn towards the Eternal, and 
 the conviction forced upon us that if we would serve Him, it 
 
 perform this ceremony is not yet completed by themantua-maker, she hesitates 
 not to put off her appearance at Church till another Sunday, justly thinking 
 that her weekly homage will not, for once, be much missed in Heaven. In 
 the sadly-different case where a train of bereaved ones fill a pew with the 
 lugubrious signs and apparel of mourning, it is still " to be Been of men" 
 that they are there; for their aching hearts tell them too plainly that were it 
 not a duty that they owe to custom, this making of their sorrow public is not 
 indeed the way to assuage grief. 
 
 All this would be \ery well it would be very well for the rich 
 and poor to meet together once a week in a place of public instruction ; 
 it would be well for fellow-citizens to have such opportunities of friendly 
 though silent intercourse, of forming the bond of union which the being 
 members of one Church always creates ; it would be well for the work- 
 ing man to have this inducement to emulate his more comfortable neigh- 
 bours in the cleanliness and respectability of his attire ; for the newly- 
 married couple, if so it please them, thus publicly to introduce them- 
 selves to their friends, and pledge themselves to society as iis new mem- 
 ber ; and even for mourners to show openly to the woild their sense of 
 bereavement, if in so doing they find peace and satisfaction, and are not com- 
 pelled to it against, their natural feelings by the idea of its being a religious 
 duty ; all this would be very well, if our Churches were places where duties 
 were taught and consolation administered, the mind instructed, and the heart 
 made better but it is far, far from well in what are called Houses of Prayer. 
 It is not well that at such times when it is pretended, and believed, lhat man 
 is ushered into the more immediate presence of the Great First Cause, for the 
 purpose of holding actual communion with the tremendous Power of the 
 Universe, external circumstances should be so arranged that it is scarcely 
 possible for the mind to free itself from thoughts, that if not absolutely 
 frivolous and trifling, are exclusively of the earth, earthly. This constant 
 triumph of (he animal nature over the high aspirations of religion can have 
 but one tendency, viz., to deaden the heart again&t the influences of devotiou, 
 to produce hypocrisy and lip-service, and in some minds to generate Atheism 
 of the worst species ; for the practical Atheism of the unreflecting Church- 
 goer is far more destructive to all that is good in man, than the philosophic 
 non-belief in any personal Deity, which may spring up in the mind of a Hume 
 or Spinoza. No, let the principle of devotion be suggested to every heart, as 
 well by the discourses of good and wise men in temples made with hands, as 
 by Nature's teachings under the high-arched roof of Heaven ; but let not its 
 accents be periodically forced from lips as cold as the stones that echo back 
 the heartless murmur, and the Most High be perpetually mocked that man 
 may be occasionally edified.
 
 358 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 can only be by love and sympathy towards all creation, and in 
 active efforts to promote the happiness of all made capable of 
 enjoyment ?* 
 
 * " What is called Christian, but should rather be termed theological, 
 morality, was not the work of Christ or the Apostles, but is of much later 
 origin, having been gradually built up by the Catholic Church of the first five 
 centuries, and ihough not implicitly adopted by moderns and Protestants, has 
 been much less modified by them than might have been expecte'l. * * * 
 Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a re-action ; it is, in 
 great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than posi- 
 tive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence 
 from Evil rather than energetic Pursuit of Good : in its precepts ( as has been 
 well said) ' thou shalt not' predominates unduly over ' thou shalt.' In its 
 horror of sensuality, it made an idol of asceticism, which has been gradually 
 compromised away into one of legality. It holds out the hope of heaven and 
 the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life ; 
 in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to 
 give to human morality an essentially selfish character, by disconnecting each 
 man's feelings of duty from the interests of hia fellow-creatures, except so far 
 as a self-interested inducement is offered to him for consulting them. It is 
 essentially a doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all 
 authorities found established ; who indeed are not to be actively obeyed when 
 they command what religion forbids, but who are not to be resisted, far less 
 rebelled against, for any amount of wrong to ourselves. And while, in the 
 morality of the best Pagan nations, duty to the State holds even a dispropor- 
 tionate place, infringing on the just liberty of the individual ; in purely 
 Christian ethics, that grand department of duty is scarcely noticed or acknow- 
 ledged. It is in the Koran, not the New Testament, that we read the maxim : 
 'A ruler who appoints any man to an office, when there is in his dominions 
 another man better qualified for it, sins against God and against the State.' 
 What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern 
 morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian ; as, 
 even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high- 
 mindeduess, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived from the 
 purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have 
 grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly 
 recognised, is that of obedience." *#*** ***j 
 
 much fear that by attempting to form the mind and feelings on an exclusively 
 religious type, and discarding those secular standards (as for want of a better 
 name they may be called) which heretofore co-existed with and supplemented 
 the Christian ethics, receiving some of its spirit, and infusing into it some of 
 theirs, there will result, and is even now resulting, a low, abject, servile type 
 of character, which, submit itself as it may to what it deems the Supreme 
 Will, is incapable of rising to or sympathizing in the conception of Supreme 
 Goodness. I believe that other ethics than any which can be evolved from 
 exclusively Christian sources, must exist side by side with Christian ethics to 
 produce the moral regeneration of mankind. * * * * If Christians 
 would teach infidels to be just to Christianity, they should themselves be just
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 359 
 
 After enumerating these different remedies for existing 
 social evils, and plans for improvement proposed by various 
 parties who admit and deplore their existence, we must not 
 omit to mention another numerous and powerful party, who, 
 being in possession of all the comforts and advantages of 
 civilization, desire no change. The present system works well 
 for them, and they fear its subversion. The great inequalities 
 of condition, consequent upon the present arrangements for 
 the production and distribution of wealth, they profess to 
 believe to be necessary and established by the Deity. Kings, 
 Lords, and Commons masters and workmen rich and poor 
 they hold to be natural grades, and not to depend upon the 
 will of society. Those who reason amongst this class draw 
 their arguments from the page of history : such has man ever 
 been and such he must ever be. The progressive character of 
 man's nature is omitted in the estimate. They point to all the 
 necessary evil that has attended all great changes and revolu- 
 tions, and to the failure of so many of the schemes for the 
 amelioration of the condition of mankind. As in all changes, 
 however great may be the ultimate advantage, some must 
 suffer, these sufferers are the only objects of their regard. 
 The agonies of the few who fell in the breaking down of the 
 old and rotten institutions of France in 1789, strike them with 
 horror, but the sufferings of the millions slain in support of 
 the present system are not thought worthy of notice. The 
 blood of a few thousands of the privileged they esteem more 
 worth than an ocean from plebeian veins shed on the field 
 of battle.* They delight to picture the anarchy, disorder, and 
 disorganization that would arise from the predominance of an 
 ignorant democracy for a democracy otherwise than ignorant 
 is to them an anomaly. Believing that the world must always 
 
 to infidelity. It can do truth no service to blink the fact, known to all who 
 have the most ordinary acquaintance with literary history, that a large portion 
 of the noblest and most valuable moral teaching has been the work, not only 
 of men who did not know, but of men wh<> knew and rejec'ed, the Christian 
 faith." J. S. Mill, on Liberty, pp. 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, and 93. 
 
 * Se Carlyle's French Revolution, vol. 3, p. 65.
 
 360 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 be divided into castes, and that " the poor, (signifying 
 miserable, half-starved beings,) we must always have with 
 us," they are unfriendly to any education for the people, 
 excepting that State religious education which teaches them to 
 look to another world for comfort and not to this; which 
 carefully instils into them the belief that the present division 
 of society into those that rule and those that serve, is appointed 
 of God, not of man, and that therefore the principal duty of 
 the people is to " Honour and obey the King, and all that are 
 put in authority under him." " To submit themselves to all 
 their governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters." "To 
 order themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters." 
 " Not to covet or desire other men's goods ; but to learn and 
 labour truly to get their own living, and to do their duty in 
 that state of life into which it has pleased God to call them." 
 They remember that the Founder of Christianity sanctioned 
 the payment of tribute to Cassar, but they forget that after de- 
 scribing how " the Princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion 
 over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon 
 them," he added, " But it shall not be so among you, but who- 
 soever will be great among you, let him be your minister. And 
 whosoever would be chief among you, let him be your servant." 
 They are the active supporters of charities, for they hold that 
 one great use of the poor is that the rich may have objects to 
 exercise their Christian benevolence upon. These charities, 
 however, are seldom such as help the poor to help themselves, 
 but such as mark the dependence of the poor upon the rich, 
 and care is taken that the badge of servitude shall not be 
 omitted. 
 
 It may sound paradoxical, but nevertheless it may be seri- 
 ously doubted whether the philanthropy of the present day 
 does not do more harm than good ; certainly eleemosynary 
 charity is more a curse than a blessing. The demoralising and 
 pauperising influence of such endowments in our great towns, 
 where, besides large " gifts," the poor are brought into the 
 world and educated and doctored by charity, has long been
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 361 
 
 well known, and our Charity Commissioners have hitherto 
 vainly tried to divert their course in a direction that should 
 " help the poor to help themselves ;" but the conservative 
 spirit, and the spirit of patronage, and the ignorance and preju- 
 dice of the recipients, have been too strong for them. Self- 
 reliance and self-dependence, based upon prudent foresight, 
 are the virtues on which most others are built in the poor, and 
 these charities, by introducing an element of chance and ser- 
 vility, destroy them at the root. Providence, to the extent to 
 which it is necessary amongst the poor, is a very difficult virtue 
 to practise, and they will not use the self-denial necessary if 
 they think the fruits of providence are to be had without. 
 When once a man begins to trust to other than his own efforts, 
 he invariably begins to go down in the world ; such reliance 
 would have this effect even if he succeeded in obtaining the 
 charity or " gifts" he sought, but three at least out of four who 
 seek and rely upon them are disappointed. In fact, to offer 
 premiums to improvidence and to weaken the natural supports 
 to self-reliance and self-dependence is false charity ; and in- 
 deed we may say of misguided philanthropy generally, that the 
 only and " ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of 
 folly, is to fill the world with fools." 
 
 The spirit of Conservatism, like every other human mani- 
 festation, is of complex origin the offspring of men's better 
 nature, as well as of their narrowness and weakness. It may 
 have a great tap-root of selfishness, but there are a thousand 
 fibres by which it attaches itself to the most noble and refined 
 sentiments. Our poetry, our affections, our religion, are so 
 associated with existing forms, that we suppose them to inhere 
 in those forms, instead of being, as they really are, the rain- 
 bow hues of that ever living universal light, which will clothe 
 the new no less than the old with beauty. 
 
 There are many of this party, as of all parties, who con- 
 scientiously oppose change from the fear of its leading to 
 greater evils than those under which the nation at present 
 suffers ; but it is to be feared that the majority of them are 
 w w
 
 362 PEESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 wilfully ignorant of the real condition of the great body of the 
 people, and that their opposition to change is dictated by the 
 instinctive selfishness that fears to lose any of the distinguish- 
 ing advantages which belong to their peculiar caste. It is not 
 to this party, therefore, that we can look for any great im- 
 provement in the condition of the working classes. 
 
 It is but justice, however, to say, that if the working 
 classes must always remain working classes ; if the increase of 
 their numbers, and their own ignorance and improvidence must 
 always keep them poor and condemned to labour incessant, 
 then the policy of the Conservative party is the right one 
 there is more to be feared than hoped from change. The 
 people, as long as they remain ignorant, ought not to be en- 
 trusted with power, as it must under such circumstances be 
 subversive of order. To educate them would be wrong with- 
 out an addition to their physical comforts, for it would render 
 their lot even more unbearable. It has been said, and with 
 truth, that education hitherto has only tended to make the poor 
 dissatisfied : and such might have been expected to be the 
 effect of giving moral and intellectual wants without the means 
 of gratifying them. An ass, while he is an ass, does his work 
 contentedly ; but could you change his nature by enlightening 
 him, be would require a more just portion of the fruits of his 
 labour than the road-side thistle. So, if the condition of the 
 mass of the people does not admit of physical improvement, it 
 is better, if it be possible, to keep them in a state of ignorance, 
 utter, blind, gross ignorance for knowledge can only serve 
 to show them a state of happiness and comfort in which they 
 must never share. If this be not possible which this party 
 begins to suspect then are they still politic in striving to give 
 to increased knowledge the consolation of believing that what 
 they do not receive here will be made up to them hereafter. 
 
 CO-OPERATION. It would appear from the statistics given 
 in the First Section of this Part 3rd that one-seventh or about 
 three millions of the population of Great Britain possess two- 
 thirds of the Annual Income, one-third only going to the
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 363 
 
 remaining six-sevenths or 18 millions. It is evident, if this 
 is so, that Capital must not only be very plentiful, but that it 
 must possess considerable advantages over Labour. Now I am 
 quite aware of, and fully appreciate, all the advantages of 
 capital, as explained by the Economists ; its tendency to fly 
 away if not well treated, and how much more easily 
 it takes wing than labour can do. I also fully appre- 
 ciate a wise and energetic superintendence and direction 
 of capital, and I know that accumulations will not be 
 made, and capital will not increase rapidly unless there 
 be sufficient inducement. All this is most eloquently and 
 lucidly explained by Messrs. Newman, M'Culloch, and others. 
 Still I am of opinion that, if one-seventh of the population 
 take two-thirds of the "joint produce," it is a little more than 
 can be said justly to belong to them ; and that whenever it may 
 " suit the convenience" of the workmen to take a little more of 
 that which they are at least equally instrumental in producing, 
 there is a wide margin left for the improvement of their 
 condition. 
 
 As we have said, there are two ways by which a more just 
 and equal division of the produce of labour may be brought 
 about The one recommended by the Political Economists is, 
 so to raise the condition of the operatives that they may feel all 
 the advantages of their improved condition, and resolve to 
 maintain it by provident marriages and providence in all other 
 departments. By thus checking the increase of their own 
 numbers, labour will become scarce, and they can make better 
 terms, if not their own terms, with the capitalist. This plan is 
 not at present popular with the workmen. 
 
 The second plan is, that the working classes should possess 
 themselves of capital, either by clubbing their joint means, or 
 renting, and borrowing at interest, and then dividing the joint 
 produce, either equally or in proportion to capability and 
 earnings. 
 
 These plans may be said to represent the objective and sub- 
 jective, that is, what a man can do for himself, and what can
 
 364 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 be done for him by external circumstances. The feeling of 
 society is now divided between these two theories ; the few 
 being of opinion that a man can only help himself, and that 
 very little can be clone for him in fact, that everything must 
 come from within, whilst the many are of opinion that a great 
 deal depends upon circumstances and upon the organization of 
 industry. These are probably but different points of view of 
 the same question the different sides of the same shield and 
 both parties are right and both wrong ; that il action and reac- 
 tion are equal and contrary," applies as much to the moral world 
 as to matter ; and the two states, the internal and external, act 
 and re-act equally upon each other. The last twenty years 
 have witnessed a great change for the better in the condition of 
 the working classes. A nearer approach to free trade, and an 
 extensive emigration, have kept them well employed, and, in 
 some instances, made labour scarce. Many have raised them- 
 selves to the condition of masters and capitalists, and great 
 savings have been made and invested in Building, Freehold 
 Land, and other Societies. During the last fifteen years, there 
 is a general air of increased comfort in lodging, clothing, and 
 food, and this improved condition in very many cases, is likely 
 to be maintained. On the other hand, many attempts at Co- 
 operation, and efforts by the working classes to become their 
 own masters, have failed. Mr. Robe'rt Owen's " New Moral 
 Worlds," both in America and England, the Leeds Redemp- 
 tion Society, and other experiments in Communism, have all 
 failed. Whenever there has been a sufficient tie, either of 
 Religion or Fanaticism, to keep men together, such Societies 
 have always been an economical success; but among the 
 working classes at present there is no tie, there is no principle 
 strong enough to overcome the individualism, the selfishness, 
 and ignorance, that pretty universally prevail. When the 
 moral nature, which is at present all but rudimentary, shall 
 be fully developed, when a man's desire to do right is as 
 strong as his propensities now are, when he is as much 
 pinched by his conscience if he neglects to do right, as he now
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 365 
 
 is by his stomach if he neglects to work for his living, some 
 form of such Societies may become possible : but not before. 
 The working classes have attempted various other minor forms 
 of Co-operation. Tailors and other trades have combined to 
 work for themselves, and divide the profits between them. 
 Others have associated to supply themselves with the neces- 
 saries of life at first-hand, and have become their own millers, 
 grocers, provision and coal dealers, and in these more limited 
 directions they have been more successful. The Co-operative 
 stores at Rochdale, where I understand there is a large-headed 
 and large-hearted manager, who gives, almost gratuitously, the 
 whole of his time to the Society, have been a great success ; 
 also there has been success at Leeds and other places. 
 
 Referring to the success of Co-operative Societies, Lord 
 Brougham is reported by the Athenaeum to have said in his 
 opening address to the National Association for the Promotion 
 of Social Science, 1862 " Enjoying the great advantage of Mr. 
 William Cooper's assistance (Secretary of the parent Society 
 at Rochdale), I am enabled to state that there are now above 
 500 of those admirable institutions in the island ; and their 
 importance may be estimated by this, that 273 of them have 
 69,000 members, a capital of two and a-half millions, and 
 their sales for the last quarter were upwards of 560,000. 
 Co-operation is becoming a power in the State, and strenuous 
 endeavours are making to mould the laws regulating those 
 institutions into the best form for securing their permanence, 
 and adaptation to their objects. The subject of co-operation 
 is the more important, because it is comparatively in its in- 
 fancy. It may perfectly well embrace branches of industry 
 beyond those to which it is now confined, nor is there any 
 reason why country labour, as well as town, should not come 
 within its scope." 
 
 The Co-operator for June, 1862, gives a list only of 250 
 Societies, representing about 60,000 members, half a million 
 capital, and a trade during the past year of two millions ; and 
 this is probably more correct than the statistics furnished to 
 Lord Brougham.
 
 3GG PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 The principle at present, probably, most likely to succeed 
 in giving the workman a more just share of the joint produce, 
 is to give him a share of the profits in the establishment in 
 which he works. This is successfully practised in many trades 
 in Paris.* Under this system he is paid his wages as usual; 
 is not allowed to interfere in the management ; and the addi- 
 tional profits he receives are a premium upon his good behaviour 
 and additional skill. Mr. John Stuart Mill, writing on the 
 " Probable Future of the Labouring Classes," says, " Con- 
 fining ourselves to economical considerations, and notwithstand- 
 ing the effect which improved intelligence in the working 
 classes, together with just laws, may have in altering the 
 distribution of produce to their advantage, I cannot think it 
 probable that they will be permanently contented with the 
 condition of labouring for wages as their ultimate state. To 
 work at the bidding and for the profit of another, without any 
 interest in the work, the price of their labour being adjusted 
 
 * An alteration, however, of the law of partnership would first be re- 
 quired here to enable an employer to make his workpeople partners in profit, 
 without giving them the power to interfere in the management, or to involve 
 him in debt or difficulty. The late Act 25 and 26 Viet., c. 87, (passed on the 
 7th August, 1862,) has repealed from that day all the previous Acts relating 
 to Co-operative Societies, and alters very materially the law affecting them 
 and their members, and more especially the personal liability of the latter. 
 On obtaining a certificate of registration from the Registrar of Friendly Socie- 
 ties, the Society becomes a body corporate, with limited liability ; and no 
 member can be sued individually for the debts contracted by or on behalf of 
 the general body. In a Society registered under this Act, no member can be 
 liable in any event for more than the full amount remaining unpaid of his 
 shares. 
 
 The matters for which the Act obliges every Society to make provision 
 are contained in a set of rules, which have been prepared by Mr. Tidd Pratt, 
 the Registrar, and should be inserted at the beginning of each set of existing 
 rules. There is no expense in obtaining the certificate of registration, and a 
 form of the rules required to be inserted may be obtained, free of expense, on 
 application to the Registrar, 28, Abingdon-street, Westminster. 
 
 The rules referred to regulate the title of Societies, the admission of 
 members, the mode of holding and voting at meetings of shareholders, the 
 making and altering of rules, the registration, transfer, and withdrawal of 
 members, the audit of accounts, the investment of capital, the management 
 of affairs generally, and what may prove to be very useful the settlement of 
 disputes.
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 367 
 
 by hostile competition, one side demanding as much and the 
 other paying as little as possible, is not, even when wages are 
 high, a satisfactory state to human beings of educated intelli- 
 gence, who have ceased to think themselves naturally inferior 
 to those whom they serve. * * 
 
 " The problem is, to obtain the efficiency and economy of 
 production on a large scale, without dividing the producers 
 into two parties with hostile interests, employers and employed, 
 the many who do the work being mere servants under the 
 command of one who supplies the funds, and having no in- 
 terest of their own in the enterprise, except to fulfil their 
 contract and earn their wages." 
 
 " It is this feeling," he says, " almost as much as despair 
 of the improvement of the condition of the labouring masses 
 by other means, which has caused so great a multiplication of 
 projects for the ' organization of industry,' by the extension and 
 development of the Co-operative Joint- Stock principle : some 
 of the more conspicuous of which have been described and 
 characterised in an early chapter of this work. It is most 
 desirable that all these schemes should have opportunity and 
 encouragement to test their capabilities by actual experiment. 
 There are, in almost all of them, many features in themselves 
 well worthy of submitting to that test ; while, on the other hand, 
 the exaggerated expectations entertained by large and growing 
 multitudes in all the principal nations of the world, concerning 
 what it is possible, in the present state of human improvement, 
 to effect by such means, have no chance of being corrected 
 except by a fair trial in practice. The French Revolution of 
 February, 1848, at first seemed to have opened a fair field for 
 the trial of such experiments, on a perfectly safe scale, and 
 with every advantage that could be derived from the counte- 
 nance of a Government which sincerely desired their success. 
 It is much to be regretted that these prospects have been 
 frustrated, and that the reaction of the middle-class against 
 anti-property doctrines has engendered for the present an 
 unreasoning and ^discriminating antipathy to all ideas, how-
 
 368 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 ever harmless or however just, which have the smallest savour 
 of Socialism. This is a disposition of mind of which the 
 influential classes, both in France and elsewhere, will find it 
 necessary to divest themselves. Socialism has now become 
 irrevocably one of the leading elements in European politics. 
 The questions raised by it will not be set at rest by the mere 
 refusal to listen to it ; but only by a more and more complete 
 realisation of the ends which Socialism aims at, not neglecting 
 its means so far as they can be employed with advantage. On 
 the particular point specially considered in the present chapter, 
 these means have been, to a certain extent, put in practice in 
 several departments of existing industry; by arrangements 
 giving to every one who contributes to ths work, whether by 
 labour or by pecuniary resources, a partner's interest in it, 
 proportionally to the value of his contribution. It is already a 
 common practice to remunerate those in whom peculiar trust 
 is reposed by means of a per centage on the profits ; and cases 
 exist in which the principle is, with the most excellent success, 
 carried down to the class of mere manual labourers." 
 
 " The value of this l organization of industry' for healing 
 the widening and embittering feud between the class of 
 labourers and the class of capitalists, must, I think, impress 
 itself by degrees on all who habitually reflect on the condition 
 and tendencies of modern society. I cannot conceive how any 
 such person can persuade himself that the majority of the com- 
 munity will for ever, or even for much longer, consent to hew 
 wood and draw water all their lives in the service and for the 
 benefit of others ; or can doubt, that they will be less and less 
 willing to co-operate as subordinate agents in any work, when 
 they have an interest in the result, and that it will be more and 
 more difficult to obtain the best workpeople, or the best services 
 of any workpeople, except on conditions similar in principle to 
 those of Leclaire ( who gives in Paris a share of the profits.) 
 Although, therefore, arrangements of this sort are now in their 
 infancy, their multiplication and growth, when once they enter 
 into the general domain of popular discussion, are among the 
 things which may most confidently be expected."
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 369 
 
 Of course Mill is here alluding only to what is possible 
 in the future for the labouring classes ; all who know the 
 present low moral and intellectual condition of the great ma- 
 jority must know that any change of the sort contemplated is 
 impossible at present, unless in exceptional cases. " To that 
 complexion they may come at last," but it must be through 
 years of discipline. Mill most truly says " no remedies for low 
 wages have the smallest chance of being efficacious, which do not 
 operate on and through the minds and habits of the people. 
 While these are unaffected, any contrivance, even if successful, 
 for temporarily improving the condition of the poor, would only 
 let slip the reins by which population was previously curbed."" 
 
 During the last twenty years I have witnessed great im- 
 provements in the condition of the working classes ; and 
 although I have lost all faith in any single remedy for all their 
 ills, I have an increasing conviction that no effort is thrown 
 away, but that all measures for their improvement are working 
 together for their good ; gradually and slowly bringing about a 
 time in which all may enjoy what hitherto has been the privilege 
 of the favoured few. I say slowly, because conduct depends 
 more upon individual organization than upon opinions, however 
 enlightened, and the organizations have yet to be grown. 
 
 * I have worked with the workiug classes at all measures for improving 
 their condition for a quarter of a century, but have never yet found them 
 capable of conducting their own affairs. If their affairs were of a trading 
 kind, they were jealous and niggardly of the pay of those who were principally 
 instrumental iu making them succeed, and what was ordered by a Committee 
 one week or month was too frequently undone the next. There was no per- 
 manency or persistency. If their affairs were of other kinds, they fell out 
 among themselves, and could not long be kept together. The worst feature 
 of ignorance is intolerance, and the worst of the working classes is that they 
 cannot agree to differ. They are for the utmost freedom of thought and 
 liberty of opinion, but denounce as knave or fool every one who does not think 
 as they think. They are too generally suspicious of each others' motives, and 
 find it very difficult to rise to the comprehension of a disinterested feeling. I 
 have heard a philanthropist denned as a person who acts from no motives at 
 all. I have heard the most damning denunciations of government pay and 
 patronage, of aristocrats helping themselves and their relations out of the 
 public purse ; but 1 have known the same persons order a larger quantity of 
 tea and sugar for a tea-drinking than could possibly be used, that they might 
 divide it among themselves at Aa//-price afterwards. Of course there are many 
 and glorious exceptions. 
 
 In a paper read at the Social Science Association, 1862, by Mr. 
 X X
 
 370 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 J. G. Holyoake, on " Certain Moral Errors which Endanger tho 
 Permanence of Co-operation," he says 
 
 " The moral obstacles which constantly frustrate Co-operative success, 
 and dissipate it when it has been achieved, are these 1st. The difficulty 
 of acting with and tolerating people you don't like, and trusting those 
 in whom you have no confidence. 2nd. The difficulty of creating 
 personal authority and prohibiting offensive imputations. 3rd. The 
 difficulty of viewing with satisfaction, and personally promoting the 
 growing prosperity and influence of those whom you know to be 
 unworthy, and rather detest. 
 
 " We have not got so far yet as to recognise the right of others to 
 differ from us in conduct and opinion. We have not even got so far as 
 to tolerate the habits and rnaimers of others distasteful to us. Tho 
 great principle of all social liberty laid down by Mr. J. S. Mill, that we 
 should admit the right of all conduct which does not concern us, nor 
 harm us, is nowhere understood among the populace ; and to all people 
 who do not understand it, association is always precarious and often 
 absolutely repulsive. To learn to tolerate all people necessary to a 
 Society is a thing never thought of, and no Society is sure of standing 
 until this lesson is well learnt. On all these points the poor are much 
 more intolerant than the rich, because ignorance has less sense and less 
 forbearance. An indignant wife will abstract her active husband and 
 family from a Society, and distil animosity through all her kindred and 
 neighbourhood, because she won't sit down with a woman the colour of 
 whose cap ribbons she does not like. The rich better understand social 
 consequences, and they know what the poor do not that if you make 
 up your mind to join an Association, you do it because you know what 
 the object is and approve it, and because you mean to count and keep 
 all personal questions subordinate to that. In an Association of gentle- 
 men if a servant is suspected of dishonesty, checks are devised to test 
 him or in due course he is quietly superseded. But in a working- 
 class Association a suspected servant is denounced on suspicion, and in 
 every house in the village or workshop in a town he hears himself spoken 
 of as a thief before a single defalcation is proved against him. In some 
 places a storekeeper dare not look well-fed, or he is suspected of eating 
 up the provisions himself if he grows fat he would be condemned at 
 once ; if his wife, whose frugality and good management entitle her 
 to a new gown, appears in one, it would be a proof positive of Co- 
 operative larceny ; if the storekeeper put on a better coat than the 
 members wore, it would cost him his character. There is nothing more 
 jealous than poverty, nor meaner than ignorance. Thus, many a store 
 has been broken up by self-sown distrust, and honest, experienced 
 servants driven in disgust into the more merciful service of shop- 
 keepers. 
 
 " But woise than this evil of suspicion is the evil of imputation. 
 In the House of Commons every gentleman bows to the authority of 
 ' Mr. Speaker,' who exercises a prohibitory power over an imputation
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 371 
 
 of dishonesty, falsehood, and disloyalty. Among working men, except 
 in a few great and well-governed stores, 110 disciplined good sense of 
 this kind prevails. The President has no rules of speech to enforce ; 
 ho may not understand them ; his authority is not defined, nor often 
 respected when invoked. 
 
 " A group of mechanics founding a Co-operative Store or conducting 
 a Co-operative Manufacturing Society is a focus of all the good in- 
 tention which sweetens the world, and of all the folly which disgraces 
 it, and the passion which on a larger scale devastates it. The selfish, 
 the base, the morally indolent, and the mean are there, as well as the 
 generous, the self-denying, and the good. But the worthless can be 
 governed and guided, if the sensible and active have good-temper and 
 discipline of speech. 
 
 " Perhaps the most fatal thing about a Society is an honest cantan- 
 kerous man. Because a thing is in his opinion true, it ought to be 
 said. He does not know that before a thing is fit to be spoken, it must 
 have two marks about it. It must be relevant and useful. He does not 
 know that well-meaning men who ignore this fact often do more harm 
 than bad men. No Society can be carried on where any irrelevancies 
 which are true may be introduced, and motives may be disciissed. The 
 moment an imputation is made ill-feeling begins, and the wisdom or 
 error of any step is at once lost sight of. The moment personalities are 
 permitted, the tongue of every fool is loosened, and floods of resent- 
 ment and rancour drown all harmony and arrest all concert. Epithets 
 are explosive they go off like Armstrong guns, blowing up character, 
 interest, and friends. Epithets affect the blood of some men like 
 poison, and they are never the same persons afterwards. I have never 
 been called in to act as arbitrator in a Co-operative Society, but passion 
 and an imputation have been at the bottom of the grievance or the 
 ruin. An experienced Bishop has said that ' Temper is nineteenths of 
 Christianity.' There are times when it appears to be the whole of Co- 
 operation. 
 
 " The only rule that can avert disunion is for members to make it 
 their chief maxim to reason but not to quarrel, to differ but never dis- 
 agree, to regard each person as speaking the truth as he understands it, 
 as meaning the truth bub missing it, as intending the common good but 
 mistaking the means of securing it. Each member must restrict him- 
 self to showing what he takes to be the truth and the means he con- 
 ceives would best promote the joint interest of the Society, and stopping 
 when he has done this. 
 
 "But more fruitful in mischief and more difficult to extirpate than 
 imputation is the disinclination men have to aid the aggrandisement of 
 people whom they know to be unworthy and rather detest. In 
 competitive life, if disagreeable people succeed you don't so much 
 care, you cannot help it ; they have done it in spite of you. 
 But in a Co-operative Society you can help it, and an active, indis-
 
 372 PRESENT CONDITION OF SOCIETY. 
 
 pensable man, may often frustrate the prosperity of all by with- 
 drawing. Why should he not ? In Co-operative Societies the con- 
 stitution is democratic. After a store or manufacturing Society has 
 been in existence for ten or fifteen years, and self-denial, good sense, 
 and hard labour have made it prosperous, a crowd of people, selfish and 
 ignorant, may rush in, intent only on the gain they may get, caring 
 nothing and knowing nothing of the true spirit and purpose of Co- 
 operation. They have the same power of control as the founders ; and 
 a few empty-headed, blatant, imputative men, will have more weight 
 with the new members, than the quiet, modest, worthy pioneers, to 
 whom everything is owing, and who are ousted from office with 
 indignity, and their advice disregarded. 
 
 "In the days of the early struggle, when the sanguine are hoping, 
 and the energetic are working, and the disinterested are making 
 sacrifices, there is peace and unity there is nothing to covet, nobody 
 to envy. The selfish, who take care to risk nothing, are silent in self- 
 protection, and the cowards stand out of the way to see what will 
 come of it. But as soon as the sunshine of success warms up the 
 scheme, the envies and jealousies crawl out like parasites, and, in some 
 places, where human nature is worse than in others, they overrun every- 
 thing, and make the Society morally uninhabitable. No vigilance can 
 anticipate them, no Twelvetrees can arrest them. 
 
 "Among the higher class of masters any responsible servant is 
 adequately provided for ; they give a salary which secures the whole of 
 his interest and powers, and they commonly tolerate his prosperity so 
 long as they are well served. The working class rarely do this. They 
 are rather apt to fix all salaries at the workshop rate, and begrudge 
 every sixpence over that. For a man's brains, devotion, interest, and 
 experience they award nothing willingly, and make it so humiliating to 
 receive anything extra, that he who does so is eventually glad to accept 
 competitive employment, unless his devotion is impassible and stronger 
 than pride, independence, and self-respect. It is no man's interest to 
 hold any office in any Co-operative Society. On the contrary, it is his 
 interest not to hold it. He escapes labour, anxiety, suspicion, and out- 
 rage by not doing it. The rheumatic discontent which finds fault, the 
 blatancy which disclaims, the supineness which does nothing, and the 
 selfishness which covets all, is as it is everywhere, the most secure, safe, 
 and popular. And this experience it is which has already produced 
 disasters and fatal re-action in the Co-operative ranks. Astute men, 
 seeing small chance given them on account of special service and talent, 
 project or pervert new Societies into Joint-Stock Companies, in which 
 a portion monopolise the profits of all. The reason why many Societies 
 already affected by this moral disease of the heart do not collapse is owing 
 to certain brave and disinterested men, who founded them, taking such 
 pride in the honour of their order that they stand by their Societies on 
 this account, until that stage shall be reached, which let us hope has
 
 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 373 
 
 commenced now when the moral disqualifications of co-operators shall 
 receive as ranch attention as has been so succesfully given to their finan- 
 cial errors. Any one acquainted with the leaders of the chief working 
 class movements in this country for twenty years past will bear me out 
 in the assertion that the best men, whose capacity was greatest and 
 whose pride and self-respect were strongest, have been driven out of the 
 ranks by the social errors I have described. Had it not been so, the 
 working classes would not now be, as they yet are, the Pariahs of the 
 State, whom everybody compliments, but no Statesman trusts, and the 
 Constitution, by common consent in the House of Commons, ignores."
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 
 
 WE have hitherto spoken of Society as it now exists, and 
 have considered how its shortcomings may be best remedied, 
 but there are those who consider that its evils cannot be reme- 
 died can at the best be only palliated, as they are inherent in 
 the system itself. The assailants of the present form and con- 
 stitution of Society, based upon the law of individual property, 
 have'been called Socialists or Communists. 
 
 We have all been brought up under the present system, 
 and are accustomed to all its abuses and to all the restraints it 
 imposes upon us, as the bird to the cage in which it was born, 
 and our aspirations after greater freedom are as little under- 
 stood by us as by the poor prisoned bird. 
 
 Mr. M'Culloch may be said fairly to represent the school 
 who support the present system ; in favour of it he says 
 
 " We incline to think that the great inequality of fortune that has 
 always prevailed in this country has powerfully contributed to excite a 
 spirit of invention and industry among the less opulent classes. It is 
 not always because a man is absolutely poor that he is perseveriugly 
 industrious and economical : he may have already amassed considerable 
 wealth, but he continues with unabated energy to avail himself of every 
 means by which he may hope to add to his fortune, that he may place 
 himself on^a level|with the great landed proprietors and those who give 
 the tone to society in all that regards expense. No successful manu- 
 facturer or merchant ever considers that he has enough till he be able 
 to live in something like the same style as the most opulent persons. 
 Those immediately below the highest become, as it were, a standard to 
 which the class next to them endeavour to elevate themselves ; the 
 impulse extending in this way, to the very lowest classes, individuals 
 belonging to which are always raising themselves by industry, address, 
 and good k fortune, to the highest places in society. Had there been less 
 inequality of fortune amongst us, there would have been less emulation, 
 and indtistry would not have been so successfully prosecuted. It is true 
 that the desire to emulate the great and affluent, by embarking in a
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 375 
 
 lavish course of expenditure, is often prematurely indulged in, and 
 carried to a culpable excess ; but the evils thence arising make but a 
 trifling deduction from the beneficial influence of that powerful stimulus 
 which it gives to the inventive faculties, and to that desire to improve 
 our condition and to mount in the scale of society, which is the source 
 of all that is great and elevated. Hence we should disapprove of any 
 system which, like that of the law of equal inheritance established in 
 France, had any tendency artificially to equalize fortunes. To the 
 absence of any such law, and the prevalence of customs of a totally 
 different character, we are inclined to attribute a considerable portion of 
 our superior wealth and industry." 
 
 " We are also disposed to believe, how paradoxical soever such a 
 notion may appear, that the taxation to which we have been subjected 
 has, hitherto at least, been favourable to the progress of industry. It 
 is not enough that a man has the means of rising in the world within 
 his command ; he must be placed in such a situation that unless ho 
 avail himself of them and put forth all his energies, he will be cast 
 down to a lower station. Now this is what our taxation has effected : 
 to the desire of rising in the world, implanted in the breast of every 
 man, it superadded the fear of being thrown down to a lower place in 
 society ; and the two principles combined, produced results that could 
 not have been produced by either separately. Had taxation been 
 carried beyond due bounds, it would not have had this effect. But 
 though considerable, its increase was not such as to make the contribu- 
 tors despair of being able to meet the sacrifices it imposed, by increased 
 skill and economy ; and the efforts they made in this view were far 
 more than sufficient for their object, and consequently occasioned a 
 large addition to the public industry and wealth that would not other- 
 wise have existed." M'Culloch, vol. 1, p. 615. 
 
 On the other hand, Mr. Combe is not quite so satisfied : 
 he says : 
 
 "In Britain, that individual is fitted to be most successful in the 
 career of wealth and its attendant advantages, who possesses vigorous 
 health, industrious habits, great selfishness, a powerful intellect, and 
 just so much of the moral feelings as to serve for the profitable direc- 
 tion of his animal powers. This combination of endowments would 
 render self-aggrandizement and worldly-minded prudence the leading 
 motives of his actions ; would furnish intellect sufficient to give them 
 effect, and morality adequate to restrain them from abuses, or from 
 defeating their own gratification. A person so constituted would feel 
 his faculties to be in harmony with his external condition ; he has no 
 lofty aspirations after either goodness or enjoyment which he cannot 
 realize ; he is pleased to dedicate his undivided energies to the active 
 business of life, and he is generally successful. He acquires wealth 
 and distinction, stands high in the estimation of society, transmits
 
 376 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 comfort and abundance to 1m family, and dies in a good old age." 
 Combe's Moral Philosophy, p. 205. 
 
 " The tendency of the system is to throw an accumulating burden 
 of mere labour on the industrious classes. I am told that in some of 
 the great machine manufactories in the West of Scotland, men labour 
 for sixteen hours a-day, stimulated by additions to their wages in pro- 
 portion to the quantity of work which they produce. Masters who push 
 trade on a great scale, exact the most energetic and long-continued ex- 
 ertion from all the artizans whom they employ. In such circumstances, 
 man becomes at once a mere labouring animal. Excessive muscular 
 exertion drains off the nervous energy from the brain ; and when, labour 
 ceases sleep ensues, unless the artificial stimulus of intoxicating liquors 
 be applied to rouse the dormant mental organs and confer a temporary 
 enjoyment, which, in such instances, is very generally the case. To 
 call a man, who passes his life in such a routine of occupation, eating, 
 sleeping, labouring, and drinking, a Christian, an immortal being, 
 preparing by his exertions here, for an eternity hereafter, to be passed 
 in the society of pure, intelligent, and blessed spirits, is a complete 
 mockery. He is preparing for himself a premature grave, in which he 
 shall be laid exhausted with toil, and benumbed in all the higher attri- 
 butes of his nature, more like a jaded and maltreated horse, than a 
 human being. Yet this system pervades every department of practical 
 life in these islands. If a farm be advertised to be let, tenants compete 
 with each other in bidding high rents, which, when carried to excess, 
 can be paid only by their converting themselves and their servants into 
 labouring animals, bestowing on the land the last effort of their strength 
 and skill, and resting satisfied with the least possible enjoyment from it 
 in return. 
 
 " By the competition of individual interests, directed to the 
 acquisition of property and the attainment of distinction, the practical 
 members of society are not only powerfully stimulated to exertion, but 
 actually forced to submit to a most jading, laborious, and endless course 
 of toil ; in which neither time, opportunity, nor inclination, is left for 
 the cultivation and enjoyment of the higher powers of the mind. The 
 whole order and institutions of society are framed in harmony with this 
 principle. The law prohibits men from using force and fraud in 
 order to acquire property, but sets no limit to their employment of 
 all other means. Our education and mode of transacting mercantile 
 business, support the same system of selfishness. It is an approved 
 maxim, that secresy is the soul of trade, and each manufacturer and 
 merchant pursues his separate speculation secretly, so that his rivals 
 may know as little as possible of the kind and quantity of goods which 
 he is manufacturing, of the sources whence he draws his materials, or 
 the channels by which he disposes of his produce. The direct advan- 
 tage of this system is, that it confers a superiority on the man of acute 
 and extensive observation and profound sagacity. He contrives to
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 377 
 
 penetrate many of the secrets which are attempted, though not very 
 successfully, to be kept ; and he directs his own trade and manufacture, 
 not always according to the current in which his neighbours are 
 floating, but rather according to the results which he foresees will take 
 place from the course which they are following ; and then the days of 
 their adversity become those of his prosperity. The general effect 
 of the system, however, is that each trader stretches his capital, bis 
 credit, his skill, and his industry, to produce the utmost possible 
 quantity of goods, under the idea that the more he manufactures and 
 sells, the more profit he will reap. But as all his neighbours are 
 animated by the same spirit, they manufacture as much as possible 
 also ; and none of them know certainly how much the other traders iu 
 their own line are producing, or how much of the commodity in which 
 they deal, the public will really want, pay for, and consume, within any 
 specific time. The consequence is, that a superfluity of goods is pro- 
 duced, the market is glutted, prices fall ruinously low, and all the 
 manufacturers who have proceeded on credit, or who have limited 
 capitals, become bankrupt, and the effects of their rash speculations 
 fall on their creditors. They are, however, excluded from trade for a 
 season, the other manufacturers restrict their operations, the opera- 
 tives are thrown idle, or their wages are greatly reduced ; the surplus 
 commodities are at length consumed, demand revives, prices rise, and 
 the same rush towards production again takes place ; and thus in all 
 trades the pendulum oscillates, generation after generation, first 
 towards prosperity, then to the equal balance, then towards adversity, 
 back again to equality, and once more rises to prosperity. 
 
 " The ordinary observer perceives in this system what he considers 
 to be the natural, the healthy, and the inevitable play of the constituent 
 elements of human nature. He discovers many advantages attending 
 it, and some evils ; but these he regards as inseparable from all that 
 belongs to mortal man. The competition of individual interests, for 
 example, he assures us, keeps the human energies alive, and stimulates 
 all to the highest exercise of the bodily and mental powers ; and the 
 result is, that abundance of every article that man needs is poured into 
 the general treasury of civilised life, even to superfluity. We are all 
 interested, he continues, in cheap productions, and although we appa- 
 rently suffer by an excessive reduction in the prices of our own com- 
 modities, the evil is transitory, and the ultimate effect is unmixed good, 
 for all our neighbours are running the same career of over production 
 with ourselves. While we are reducing our shoes to a ruinously low 
 price, the stocking maker is doing the same with his stockings, and the 
 hat maker with his hats ; and after we all shall have exchanged article 
 for article, we shall still obtain as many pairs of stockings, and as many 
 hats, for any given quantity of shoes, as ever ; so that the real effect of 
 competition is to render the nation richer, to enable it to maintain more 
 inhabitants, or to provide for those it possesses more abundantly, with- 
 
 Y Y
 
 378 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 out rendering any individuals poorer. The evils attending the rise and 
 fall of fortune, or the heart-breaking scenes of bankruptcy, and the 
 occasional degradation of one family and elevation of another, they 
 regard as storms in the moral, corresponding to those in the physical 
 world, which, although inconvenient to the individuals whom they 
 overtake, are on the whole, beneficial, by stirring and purifying the 
 atmosphere ; and, regarding this life as a mere pilgrimage to a better, 
 they view these incidental misfortunes as means of preparation for a 
 higher sphere. 
 
 " This representation has so much of actual truth in it, and such 
 an infinite plausibility, that it is almost adventurous in me to question 
 its soundness ; yet I am forced to do so, or to give up my best and 
 brightest hopes of human nature and its destinies. In making these 
 remarks, I blame no individuals. It is the system which I condemn. 
 Individuals are as much controlled by the social system in which they 
 live, as a raft is by the current in which it floats." Ibid, p. 216. 
 
 It is true that society, as at present constituted, is a mere 
 chaos of conflicting interests, born of chance and of selfish 
 instinct, over the surface of which the spirit of reason, direct- 
 ing and arranging each part for the production of the greatest 
 happiness, has never moved. That society should be founded 
 upon laws by which all might live together in the most happy 
 manner possible, has yet to be acknowledged. On the con- 
 trary, it has been left to form itself; part has been added to 
 part, as time and circumstances, the increase of mankind, and 
 the formation of section after section, have called for it, each 
 portion fashioned after the individual interests of class, with- 
 out any reference to the good of the whole. It has been said, 
 and truly, that " our laws and institutions are not the product 
 of wisdom and virtue, but of modern corruption grafted upon 
 ancient barbarism."* Thus it is we find " all mankind heaped 
 and huddled together, with nothing but a little carpentry or 
 masonry between them ; crammed in like salt fish in their 
 barrel ; or weltering ( shall I say ? ) like an Egyptian pitcher 
 of tamed vipers, each striving to get its head above the rest."f 
 The immutable and resistless laws of nature have, however, 
 been doing their work, and through the all-powerful influences 
 of pleasure and pain, have been pushing man forward in the 
 
 * Westminster Review, No. 61. t Sartor Resartus.
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 379 
 
 march of improvement, and like the forces which, in the course 
 of many ages, laid stratum upon stratum and prepared the way 
 for sensitive existence upon the earth, have gradually been pre- 
 paring for the existence of man, not merely as a selfish 
 animal, but in all the capacities of his physical, moral, 
 and intellectual being. 
 
 If we trace back the progress of the development of man's 
 resources, we find the foundation of the present social institu- 
 tions laid at a time when, to prevent him preying upon his 
 fellow like wild beasts upon each other, rights of property 
 were established and maintained by the strong arm of force 
 alone. The greatest want, and therefore the greatest blessing, 
 was security of life and limb ; and the institution that could 
 best afford it, was the most desirable. Here then was the 
 foundation of an aristocracy. The leaders chosen to head the 
 different associations of men for their common protection, main- 
 tained a kind of security, and " the strong man" was in pro- 
 portion respected. Kings were at first only the chosen leaders 
 of armies ; valour and military skill were the virtues most in 
 request ; protection became a profession, and a soldier as the 
 representative of that profession, the most honoured.* 
 
 But the power thus necessarily entrusted to an individual, 
 was soon abused, assumed as a right derived from God only, 
 and not from the people, and ultimately became irresponsible. 
 A profession of arms having been established with leaders 
 whose interests were at variance with those of the people, con- 
 stant wars were necessasy to find occupation for such a pro- 
 fession, to promote the individual aggrandizement of the 
 leaders, and maintain the influence they had usurped ; and 
 their real motives were concealed under the high-sounding 
 names of Glory, Patriotism, and National Honour. 
 
 * " All high titles come hitherto from fighting. Your Herzog (Duke, Dux,) 
 is leader of armies ; your Earl (Jrl) is strong man ; Marshal, cavalry horse- 
 Bhoer. A Millenium, or reign of Peace and Wisdom, having been prophesied, 
 and becoming daily more and more indubitable, may it not be apprehended 
 that such Fighting titles will cease to be palatable, and new and higher need 
 to be devised?" Sartor, p. 256.
 
 380 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 The power thus yielded by the people to ensure personal 
 security when no better means could be devised, has never yet 
 been recovered. Magna Cliartas, Oomwellian Revolutions, 
 Parliamentary Reforms, mark the progress which has been 
 made towards it, and the barriers to liberty that have been 
 removed. The problem to be solved is, how to make perfect 
 liberty compatible with security to life and limb, and the fruits 
 of industry. 
 
 In the first stage of society physical prowess was alone re- 
 garded ; but no sooner were the wild barbarous hordes that 
 founded the present nations of Europe settled down into some 
 quiet, than the influence of mind began to be felt, and then 
 arose the power of the priesthood a power sufficient, in some 
 measure, to control the license of the feudal lords, and to 
 weaken the arm of violence and blood, which was constantly 
 uplifted in their mutual aggressions, or attacks upon the liberty 
 of neighbouring States. 
 
 Oral teaching was then all-important, for when there were 
 few books, and fewer still who could read, it was almost the 
 only means of imparting instruction. The sole possessors and 
 interpreters of the book which was supposed to contain the 
 Revelation of God's Word, claimed and received universal 
 dominion over the multitudes who knew no other source of 
 light and truth ; but now that we are furnished with a more 
 ample revelation of His laws unfolded by the experience of 
 ages, and the written means of communicating it to the hearts 
 of all, oral instruction is no longer the only method of making 
 known the law of the Lord, and the more extended know- 
 ledge of His will, as revealed in His works. 
 
 O * 
 
 As other wants of society took shape and form, the class 
 through whom such wants found the means of gratification 
 arose in importance. With personal security and comparative 
 security to property, trade and commerce began to flourish ; 
 and however much the pursuits connected with them were at 
 first despised, as the dependence of society upon them for 
 foreign productions, and even the comforts of life, became
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 381 
 
 recognised, they were first tolerated, and then protected, until 
 an aristocracy of wealth has gradually arisen, which treads 
 closely upon the heels of the aristocracy of birth. 
 
 When trade and commerce flourished, and the right of the 
 strongest was no longer admitted, the laws of property became 
 necessarily more complicated ; hence a class was called forth 
 for the expounding of those laws, and their administrators 
 rose in proportional importance. On the complexity of the 
 laws depended the necessity for Lawyers, make the laws 
 plain, their occupation is gone. Consequently the simplest 
 question, in their hands, assumes an intricacy which the 
 strongest uninitiated intellect cannot unravel ; and the plainest, 
 most intelligible language of common sense and justice, soon 
 becomes that of an unknown tongue to the people. With truth 
 did Voltaire designate the body of lawyers as " the conserva- 
 tors of ancient barbarous usages." 
 
 Thus it appears the right of each class of society to the 
 distinction it claims was based upon utility ; but the world is 
 changed, and society pays homage to the shadows of things 
 that were. As each of these leading divisions became neces- 
 sary to the good of society, its pre-eminence has been ac- 
 knowledged ; and although the wants that gave rise to it may 
 be now reduced in importance, it still maintains its rank in 
 the social scale. With security and peace, the power of man 
 over the earth and its produce has increased, until money, the 
 representative of this produce, has become almost omnipotent, 
 " and whoso has sixpence is sovereign, (to the length of 
 sixpence,) over all men ; commands cooks to feed him, phi- 
 losophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him, to 
 the length of sixpence." Money, therefore, is the universal 
 want, and respect in proportion is paid to those who have it 
 with it man is everything, and without it he is nothing. 
 
 The Military and fighting age has passed, and protection 
 to property being secured, a Commercial age has commenced. 
 Kings, no longer wanted as military leaders, their power is fast 
 passing over to our commercial leaders. A Constitutional
 
 382 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 Sovereign has become a mere abstraction the embodiment 
 and representative of all the power and dignity of the state ; 
 and the Rothschilds and great moneyed men possess the real 
 power in the civilized world. 
 
 One class only has not hitherto been duly acknowledged 
 the working class ; but the signs of the times indicate the 
 approach of a period when it must and will be recognized. 
 " There is, however, something greater in the age than its 
 greatest men ; it is the appearance of a new power in the 
 world, the appearance of a multitude of men on that stage, 
 where as yet the few have acted their parts alone."* Money, 
 the representative of all the produce which flows from the 
 labour of the multitude, has been the means of defrauding 
 them of the rights resulting from their real weight and im- 
 portance ; by the help of money the truth has been concealed 
 that everything which gives support, accommodation, and 
 luxury to life, comes through the medium of labour, and the 
 tribute due to the labourers in return has been paid to the 
 god of these latter days Mammon. They will discover this, 
 Mammon will be undeined and dethroned, the working classes 
 in working for others will also work for themselves, and their 
 claims will be then acknowledged. Yes, " he who first 
 shortened the labour of copyists by device of moveable types, 
 was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and 
 senates, and erecting a whole new democratic world : he had 
 invented the art of printing, "f By its means the people will 
 ultimately become wise enough to take their own concerns into 
 their own keeping, to govern and protect themselves ; and 
 present not past utility will be the only acknowledged title to 
 distinction. 
 
 The Socialists say that to base society on competition on 
 individual conflicting interests and opposing objects, was a 
 great mistake ; that it ought to be based on Community of 
 interest and Unity of purpose, and that property, therefore, 
 should not belong to individuals, but should be held in trust 
 by society for the benefit of all. 
 
 * Dr. Chaiining's " Present Age." f Carlyle.
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 383 
 
 They say it has been well ascertained that each healthy 
 adult individual can produce considerably more than he can 
 consume, if his labour be profitably directed. " Taking the 
 best data that can be had, it appears that the labour of 19 
 families is required to produce annually 1,160 quarters of all 
 kinds of grain, being at the rate of 61 quarters by each 
 family." 51 According to this estimate the labour of one family 
 would support about 15, and these 15 families, therefore, might 
 be spared for manufactures. The productive powers of ma- 
 chinery in manufactures are scarcely calculable ; in the cotton 
 manufactory, already, one man by this power performs the 
 work of two or three hundred, and the whole mechanical 
 power of the country is estimated at that of 400, according to 
 some of 600, millions of men. This power it is said properly 
 economised, and the produce of it properly distributed, is 
 sufficient to supply all the wants of society. This idea of com- 
 munity of property and interests is not altogether new. To 
 what extent it has been carried out in practice at different 
 periods of the world's history I considered in the Appendix to the 
 1st Edition of this work. To such a system have the hopes of 
 mankind, during all ages, with more or less distinctness been 
 directed. Sometimes the happy community was to dwell in a 
 millennium of this earth, sometimes in a fellowship of the saints 
 in heaven the poet dreamed of it in the golden age the 
 philosopher in his Republic, his Atlantis, his Utopia. Amidst 
 all the draperies of fancy and fable which have clothed the 
 vision, it still stands forth, a living form a type of the future 
 brotherhood of man. 
 
 The change contemplated it is said would render it unne- 
 cessary for the workman to sell his share of what his labour 
 produces for less than it is worth ; it would give capital the 
 most profitable direction towards further production, and cause 
 machinery to work for the labourer, never against him. 
 
 These objects could only be effected by the re-union of 
 capital and labour by the labourer himself becoming a capi- 
 
 * Porter, vol. 1, p. 59.
 
 384 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 ttilist, and the owner of the machinery with which he pro- 
 duces. It is proposed, therefore, that the working men should 
 be encouraged and assisted to unite together in associations or 
 communities, upon the principle of Joint-stock Companies, in 
 such numbers as convenience may dictate, for the production 
 and equal distribution of all the necessaries and comforts of 
 life. 
 
 The capital of these associations would consist of sums con- 
 tributed by each member, the produce of his own savings, or 
 furnished by capitalists, who, from motives of benevolence or 
 interest, should lend their aid to the undertaking. This joint 
 capital would be laid out in the purchase of land, the building 
 of houses and manufactories, and the furnishing of agricul- 
 tural stock, machinery, and raw material. Or, all this might 
 be done by a company of capitalists, and then let to the mem- 
 bers of the association, at such a rental as should pay the in- 
 terest and profit on the capital, allowing them the right of 
 future purchase. 
 
 All trades and professions that had for their object the sup- 
 ply of the necessaries and most essential comforts of life, 
 would be comprised within the community, so that all of 
 which the particular locality would admit, would be produced 
 upon the spot. A staple manufactory would also be established 
 in each, the produce of which would be sold to furnish the 
 means of procuring such articles of foreign growth as are 
 indispensable to comfort. 
 
 A Governor or Board of Directors would require to be 
 chosen by the members themselves, whose office it would be to 
 provide that each should be employed in that occupation for 
 which nature or education had best fitted him. The joint pro- 
 duce, or, at least, the greater part of it, would be common 
 property, and used by the Directors to furnish to all the largest 
 amount of comfort and enjoyment to which it could be ade- 
 quate, allowing luxuries to none until necessaries were afforded 
 to all. The co-operation required would be voluntary; the 
 right to private property being given up to the community by
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 385 
 
 the individual himself, in consideration of receiving a greater 
 advantage in return than he could gain by any other invest- 
 ment. It is no part of the proposed plan to interfere with 
 either the rights or security of the property of others as now 
 established. 
 
 I shall state what has been said for the proposed Social 
 change, and also what has been said against it. First, then, as 
 to the economy of such an arrangement. We know that the 
 members of a large family, whose funds would not allow of 
 their keeping separate establishments, will find their incomes, 
 when united, amply sufficient to maintain them in one ; and it 
 is accordingly inferred that by means of combination the 
 artizan's pound a-week might be made to furnish him with 
 comforts that would otherwise require many pounds to pur- 
 chase, and that for the small and ill-built house, might be 
 substituted large and commodious apartments. The household 
 arrangements would be those of a large family, whose mem- 
 bers would be equally furnished with comforts in proportion 
 to the amount of the common fund. The great amount of 
 labour now wasted in individual establishments would thus be 
 placed at liberty. In the department of cookery, for instance, 
 there is no doubt that labour and expense would be much 
 economized if the food of a multitude of persons could be 
 prepared at one fire, and by means of the same apparatus ; 
 and it is well known that the fires which are necessary to warm 
 one large house, might, by proper management, be made to 
 warm those of a whole community. The same principle would 
 hold good with most of the other items of domestic economy. 
 But although kitchens, dining-rooms, drawing-rooms, read- 
 ing-rooms, lecture-rooms, gardens, would be in common for 
 all who chose to make use of them, upon the plan of clubs in 
 London and elsewhere, solitude need not be denied to the 
 lovers of solitude ; on the contrary, to each might be secured 
 private apartments, and, with the means of perfect seclusion, 
 all the advantages that solitary individual arrangements could 
 possibly furnish, 
 z z
 
 386 PKOPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 Another great saving would arise from the conversion of 
 unproductive labourers into producers. We have seen how 
 very large a portion of the products of labour, under the pre- 
 sent system, go to the non-producer in the shape of profits to 
 the retail traders, manufacturers, merchants, land-owners, and 
 land-occupiers ; almost all of which would be saved under the 
 proposed arrangements. The division into masters and work- 
 men, manufacturers and operatives, would no longer exist ; 
 and as a single store of the requisite articles of consumption 
 would perhaps be sufficient for a whole society, the profits of 
 retailers would not only be saved, but the retailers themselves 
 would be employed in production ; and as the persons engaged 
 in that department of industry constitute a fourth of the whole 
 population, an immense mass of labour would thus be liberated ; 
 liberated, too, from an employment as degrading under the 
 present system as it would be unnecessary under the other. 
 
 One of the great advantages of the plan proposed would 
 be, that all the labour that could be set free, would be so 
 much gain to the whole community; since, as all in the 
 capacity of joint proprietors would receive a just proportion of 
 the produce, any improvement in machinery which would 
 enable them to do ten or twenty times the work in a given 
 time, would be a common benefit ; when the stores were full, 
 they might cease to labour without being starved. 
 
 By this means the use of machinery would become at once 
 a direct blessing to mankind. The enormous power generated 
 by steam machinery during the last forty years, if it has 
 cheapened produce, has rather tended to increase manual 
 labour, than to furnish leisure for the development of the moral 
 and intellectual powers of the labourer. Let machinery receive 
 its proper direction, and it will be found that manufactured pro- 
 duce is limited only by the will of man, and by the capability of 
 earth to supply raw material : machinery being a servant that 
 never tires, that consumes but little, and whose powers may be 
 multiplied almost to infinity.
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 387 
 
 The fruits of machinery are now wasted in an unproductive 
 foreign commerce of luxuries, and in setting the people to 
 work upon useless, worse than useless employments, while 
 hundreds of thousands want the comforts of life at home. It 
 must never be forgotten that " labour was the first price, the 
 original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was 
 not, and is not, by gold or by silver, but by labour that all the 
 wealth of the world was originally produced." No factitious 
 or artificial want can be indulged without causing extra labour 
 to some member of the community ; we can make use of 
 nothing that has not cost labour in its production ; and that 
 this labour is necessary to the support of the workman, and 
 is therefore thought a blessing, is the pernicious consequence 
 of the present law of distribution. 
 
 A state of society such as we are contemplating of co- 
 operation for mutual interests, where all should be pro- 
 prietors, and where all should share the labour required for 
 everything produced, would in all probability soon change all 
 this, and introduce a new standard of wants. At least one- 
 third of the labour employed in Britain is wasted in supplying 
 artificial and factitious desires ; but the vanity of the absurd 
 distinctions which now characterise society, would soon be seen 
 and felt, when it was found that to furnish them required the 
 extra two or three hours' labour per day of each member of 
 the society. Neither, for the same reason, would idle servants 
 or useless horses be maintained. The standard of utility would 
 supplant that of caprice and fashion ; and as useless articles of 
 luxury and vanity would no longer be an indication of the 
 extent of private property, or marks of superiority, being 
 possessed by all if by any, they would no longer be desired, 
 and distinction would be sought where alone it ought ever to be 
 found, in useful and ennobling qualities. Food, lodging, and 
 clothing, with everything that tended to produce sound health, 
 would first be secured as the necessary foundations of all 
 liappiness, and until these were obtained for all, luxuries would 
 be permitted to none. All artificial wants would give place to
 
 388 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 real ones, and those the most essential and the least costly 
 would be first attended to ; and although foreign markets might 
 still be desirable for the sale of home manufactures and the 
 supply of foreign produce, yet as everything indispensable to 
 life and comfort would be furnished to all without aid from 
 abroad, men would be virtually independent of all such markets, 
 if deprived by any unforeseen circumstances of them. It is as 
 injurious to the interests of a town like Manchester to cut off 
 its supply of cotton from abroad, or its markets for the sale 
 of such cotton when manufactured, as to deprive it directly of 
 its supply of corn, either by home scarcity or foreign enmity. 
 
 When all possible physical wants, comforts, and con- 
 veniences had been supplied, when all the high and ennobling 
 pleasures derivable from our moral and intellectual nature had 
 been provided for, then, and then only, the labour of society, 
 if it were to spare, might be employed in the acquisition of 
 comparatively modern luxuries and ornaments. 
 
 The means of gratifying the wants of that part of his 
 nature, which peculiarly distinguishes man, are to be acquired 
 at little expense of labour either to himself or others. On 
 every page of the book of nature the progress of science has 
 written something deserving his attention, and the beauties and 
 wonders which she opens to his view may well compensate for 
 the childish and costly pursuits that now occupy him. A flower 
 may come to be esteemed more highly than a diamond, and a 
 more becoming ornament than pearls ; since these latter, how- 
 ever beautiful, cost more labour than society will be willing 
 to bestow in exchange for them. 
 
 If we, therefore, calculate the saving of labour that would 
 be effected by the introduction of such a system of society, 
 from all the above-mentioned sources, it will be found to be of 
 immense amount, and sufficient, properly employed, to furnish 
 not only necessary comforts to the working classes, but ample 
 time for intellectual and moral enjoyment. There would be 
 the saving from all household arrangements being in common, 
 instead of individual family establishments ; of the profits of
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. . 389 
 
 manufacturers, merchants, and retailers, and of the enormous 
 expense to which it is now the fashion to go in retailing ; of 
 much of the carriage and expense of conveyance of goods, as 
 more things would be produced and consumed on the spot ; of 
 the maintenance of the unemployed and half-employed labourers 
 who are without work from the various causes that so 
 frequently disturb our artificial system ; and lastly, and above 
 all, from the release of the labour that is now uselessly and 
 perniciously engaged in gratifying the artificial wants of the 
 rich, and the employment of that labour for the good of the 
 whole community. 
 
 60 far, then, for the economical arrangements, for the 
 saving of labour. With respect to the direct production of 
 wealth : the universal diffusion of the appropriate knowledge, 
 and the absence of all selfish impediments, with unity of 
 purpose in production, might equal, if not exceed, the present 
 results of competition. 
 
 Again. Would Socialism afford equal facilities for obedience 
 to the Physical, Organic, and Moral Laws ? 
 
 A community such as we are contemplating must be re- 
 garded as one large family, each member being dependent 
 upon the labour, and, therefore, the health and strength of all ; 
 the strongest possible inducement is thus held out for the 
 making of all its arrangements in harmony with those laws 
 upon which health and strength of body are dependent ; and 
 for the adoption of all plans by which labour may be shortened. 
 The medical functionaries of such an establishment would have 
 an interest in keeping every one in good health, not, as now, 
 depending upon the want of health of the community for sub- 
 sistence ; they would be anxious to make known, and to teach 
 every one to avoid all causes of ill health ; and to this end 
 every one would be made intimately acquainted with the 
 structure and functions of his own body, and the relation of 
 everything around him to his well-being. The best arrange- 
 ments for the preservation of health, which the knowledge 
 yet acquired could suggest, would be adopted in all buildings,
 
 390 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 sitting and sleeping rooms, factories, workshops, &c. The 
 greatest attention would be paid to warming, ventilation, and 
 cleanliness ; to clothing, diet, and all circumstances upon 
 which physical welfare depends ; for the illness of a member 
 would be the loss of his share of labour to the community. 
 Among parties co-operating for mutual interest, this care 
 would be possible ; in choosing their site for building, they 
 would determine upon a healthy and convenient spot. How 
 little care is now taken of the health and comfort of the poor 
 in this respect ! In passing through the countiy, it must strike 
 all who observe how little mutual accommodation, how little 
 regard to others' interests is shown in every pile of building 
 that meets the eye. The situation of each is dictated by 
 individual caprice, with no regard to the laws of health ; and 
 we are irresistibly compelled to wonder at the Power which 
 could make a piece of mechanism so delicate as that of 
 man, capable of withstanding, in any degree, so many 
 deleterious influences. In manufacturing cities, the dwellings 
 of the poor are still worse crowded together in courts and 
 alleys, the sitting room and sleeping room frequently the same 
 small, dirty, unventilated, ill-constructed, and ill-drained, 
 can we wonder that health is not often found there ? A com- 
 plete change would be effected as regards these evils, since 
 agriculture would be made in all cases the basis of the pros- 
 perity of the members. All males would be employed, at least 
 part of their time, upon the land in producing at home what- 
 ever the soil and climate would permit. The advantages of 
 country and town residence would thus be gained, and, with- 
 out losing those that are derived from the division of labour, 
 agricultural and manufacturing labour would be united. No 
 man would be kept for ten or twelve hours together in one dull, 
 monotonous, soul-destroying employment, but labour would be 
 so blended as to ensure the largest return of health and 
 happiness. 
 
 We now find a great disregard of the organic laws among 
 the poor, both from ignorance, and from an utter inability, in
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 391 
 
 those who have more knowledge, to help themselves ; and who, 
 now, has any interest in altering the state of things ? All are 
 disunited, isolated, individualized, competing with each other ; 
 not as members of one family, working pulling together. 
 The slaveowner has an interest in the health and physical well- 
 being of his slaves, the capitalist has the same in that of his 
 horses and dogs; but if his workman dies it makes little 
 difference, since his place is soon supplied in the labour-market. 
 But under a system in which all were made to feel immediately 
 and directly the suffering of any individual member, every- 
 thing that tends to improve the race, to increase its health, 
 and strength, and beauty, to perfect the bodily and mental 
 faculties, would be the subject of inquiry and deep interest. 
 
 The laws of the hereditary descent of the qualities of body 
 and mind have, up to the present time, been deemed worthy of 
 application only to the brute creation to horses, dogs, and 
 cattle : yet if we would regulate the influences upon which the 
 possession of " a sound mind in a sound body" depends, we 
 must begin before birth. In health alone is comprehended the 
 " possibility of every exertion we wish to make every virtue 
 to which we aspire every happiness we would possess ;" and 
 yet no care is taken by parents to fulfil those conditions which 
 are essential to a perfectly healthy constitution, and the seeds 
 of disease, mental and bodily, are born with most of us. The 
 license of a Clergyman or of a Registrar is deemed an all- 
 sufficient warrant for handing down to posterity every disease 
 of body, and weakness of mind. The character of man, and 
 the happiness dependent upon it, result from the original con- 
 stitution derived from his parents, and the circumstances in 
 which he is placed ; but no after-circumstances can overcome 
 the effects of an originally defective constitution. An American 
 writer says, " The disregard and ignorance of the laws of 
 human organization manifested in the transmission of disease to 
 posterity, deserve the severest censure. While parents will 
 spare neither labour and toil of body, nor care and anxiety of 
 mind, to accumulate and bequeath princely fortunes to their
 
 392 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 children, they little think, perchance, of the germs o f disease 
 entailed upon them. * * May the day be not far distant 
 when a sound and vigorous constitution shall be esteemed the 
 richest legacy that ancestors can bequeath to their posterity."* 
 In the transmission of consumption and madness, the law is 
 acknowledged, but little regarded ; passion, and interested 
 worldly motives, are sufficient to throw into the shade all moral 
 considerations of the consequences to others. Not only in 
 these more striking instances do we behold the truth exemplified, 
 but in large classes everywhere around us, whose physical 
 condition, every physiologist will acknowledge, is far below 
 what it might have been if this law had been obeyed. 
 " Wherever we turn our eyes on the crowd of life," says 
 a writer of large experience, " we see human beings 
 falling a sacrifice from their early years, all through their 
 career up to old age, to causes of premature death which seem 
 to be unavoidable ; and a truly natural decay is a rare occur- 
 rence." 
 
 Mind, too, dependent upon organization, owes its health 
 and vigour and capacity, or its weakness and inefficiency, to 
 parents, and the laws regulating the transmission of mental 
 qualities are deserving of the most careful attention as inti- 
 mately connected with our highest happiness. Let but the 
 same care be given to man which is now bestowed upon the 
 brute creation, and a constitution approaching more and 
 more to perfection, might be imparted to each successive gene- 
 ration. In a state in which it would be for the interest com- 
 fort and happiness of all, that each member should possess an 
 originally sound and vigorous constitution, no pains would be 
 thought too great to ensure it. The voice of public opinion 
 would be loud against all unions that had an opposite tendency. 
 Marriages would be dictated by different and higher motives 
 than those which now cause the union of the majority of man- 
 kind. Worldly circumstances, which, from the highest to the 
 lowest, are too frequently the motives to such connexions, 
 * American Phrenological Journal, No. 3.
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 393 
 
 rather than suitable menta"! and bodily qualifications, could 
 have no influence in a state of society where all would be 
 equal, and no motives but mutual affection could have place. 
 
 The present system of competition is founded upon the 
 predominance of the selfish and animal principles of our 
 nature ; each is left to take care of himself, and if he cannot 
 do that the world has no place for him. There is no co- 
 operation for the good of all ; each class, each family, each 
 individual, has interests at variance with those of his neigh- 
 bours. The lawyer has an interest in the promotion of civil 
 strife ; the medical practitioner in the increase of disease ; the 
 clergyman, the soldier, the placeman, desire the death of their 
 superiors, that they may obtain preferment, the young that of 
 the old, that they may inherit their riches, their honours. 
 Capitalist competes with capitalist, workman with workman, 
 retailer with retailer ; and in this contest, not for happiness 
 but for support, and for the means of rising each above his 
 neighbour, every sound moral feeling is vitiated, every dis- 
 social impulse called into habitual activity, and multitudes 
 driven to madness and despair, sink in the worldly strife. 
 
 The right of the strongest, in body, to deprive his neigh- 
 bour of his share of the common bounties of Providence is no 
 longer acknowledged, but the right of the strongest in mind is 
 still maintained ; the weak, for no fault but that he is weak, is 
 trampled into the earth, and deprived of his share of the com- 
 mon stock in the general scramble. In the present competition 
 for wealth, not only can the rich oppress the poor, but the 
 strong-minded can legally take the portion of his weaker 
 brother. Men, it is true, do not, like the beasts of the 
 desert, devour one another ; but they do that which is worse 
 they devour each other's substance, and leave famine and 
 misery to finish the work. 
 
 In a state of society like this, say the advocates of " The 
 New Moral World," the law of universal brotherhood is in- 
 operative, the moral law is impracticable, and man might as well 
 make all his physical arrangements at variance with the law of 
 A A 2
 
 394 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 gravitation, as expect to find happiness with all his institutions 
 so opposed to the moral law. But society based upon the 
 principle they propose reconciles all conflicting forces and 
 unites the interests of all. The members would be as one 
 family, each bringing what he possessed to the common stock 
 for the general good ; each employing the talents with which 
 Nature had endowed him, not for his own personal advance- 
 ment, but for the good of all. Are any strong in mind 
 or body, they owe it to God and not to themselves ; for so 
 far as merit is concerned, the doctrine of necessity shows us all 
 to be equal ; they will therefore share their strength with the 
 weak. God has said, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thy- 
 self;" and if He has given to one advantages more than to his 
 fellows^ it was that he might be the instrument of com- 
 municating them, and he will look for a higher reward than 
 that which society now offers to him individual advancement 
 in the reflection of the happiness which his extra endow- 
 ments enable him to confer upon others. All, then, would be 
 employed according to the talents, physical, moral, or intellec- 
 tual, with which nature and educatiou had furnished them, and 
 all would share alike the fruits of such labour; the weak 
 would be assisted by the strong, the sick by the healthy, the 
 old by the young. The idle could not continue idle where all 
 others were industrious, nor the vicious continue vicious in an 
 atmosphere of morality. Offences against property must cease 
 when all were joint proprietors, and " envy, hatred, malice, 
 and all uncharitableness," would disappear with this strife of 
 competition for individual advancement and enrichment. 
 
 Here, they say, would be " a wise disposal of all the cir- 
 cumstances that influence character, and of the means of pro- 
 ducing those habitual dispositions which ensure well-doing." 
 Every bodily and mental faculty would receive proper direction 
 and exercise, and all that knowledge and attention could do, 
 would be done to bring such faculties to perfection. The young 
 would early be taught the principles upon which the good of 
 the community depends, and all instruction would be made to
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 395 
 
 bear upon this, the most essential point ; above all, they would 
 be taught that they were children of the community, that they 
 were all one family, and that the duty of love is to all, not 
 merely to those who are parents, or brothers and sisters, by 
 blood, and consequently that all their bodily and mental 
 endowments were due to the service of all. Virtuous dis- 
 positions, habits, and feelings, would be the first developed, and 
 consequently the intellectual and moral faculties would almost 
 naturally take their rightful ascendance over the lower feelings, 
 and the happiness of the individual would result from well- 
 directed efforts for the general good. 
 
 That this should be the case now, it is said, is impossible, 
 unless the laws of nature should be reversed and the same 
 causes produce different effects. The strength and activity of 
 a feeling is in proportion to the exercise it receives. 
 The selfish feelings are now most exercised, because each 
 individual is obliged to take care of himself; therefore they 
 are too often predominant. The law of love may be preached, 
 and the innate depravity of human nature pointed to as the 
 cause of the inefficiency of such preaching ; but Mr. Combe 
 observes truly, that " if a constant struggle for supremacy in 
 wealth and station be unavoidable among men, it is clearly 
 impossible for us to obey such precepts, which must therefore 
 be as little adapted to our nature and condition, as the com- 
 mand to love and protect poultry, but never to eat them, 
 would be to that of the fox."* 
 
 Such then is said to be the Social Reform needed, such 
 the means by which the Socialists propose to bring about the 
 amelioration of the condition of the people. This alone, they 
 say, strikes at the root of all the evils that now beset us 
 poverty, ignorance, crime, the toiling anxiety of the millions ; 
 and that if we examine the registers of crime, we shall find that 
 the causes of most of the offences committed against property 
 are poverty and ignorance. The offences that are not punish- 
 able by the criminal code ill-will, suspicion, jealousy, mis- 
 * Moral Philosophy.
 
 396 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 trust, unfairness, covetousness, are no less the produce of com- 
 petition for individual advantages. 
 
 The way in which people will permanently act depends 
 more upon their organizations, than upon either their opinions 
 or the circumstances in which they are placed, and the state 
 of society we have been contemplating would depend, therefore, 
 for its success upon a predominance of the unselfish feelings. 
 If even in a majority of the members of such a society the 
 unselfish feelings were naturally in the ascendant, it might 
 succeed ; if otherwise, in our opinion, it must fail. But we 
 shall consider the objections that have been made to Socialism 
 more in detail. 
 
 Perhaps the objection that has most weight with those who 
 have given most attention to the subject is founded upon that 
 axiom of the political economists before alluded to, that 
 " capital has a less tendency to increase than population ; and 
 that forcible means employed to make capital increase faster 
 than its natural tendency, would not produce desirable effects." 
 If all were placed in a state of physical comfort, if the natural 
 checks upon population, of want, misery, ignorance, and crime, 
 were withdrawn, numbers, it is imagined, would soon overflow 
 beyond all power of capital to provide for them. This is 
 founded upon the supposition, that land would give less and 
 less return to the labour and capital bestowed upon it, that it 
 would ultimately be impoverished, and, that therefore the 
 much-increased population would necessarily be reduced to great 
 poverty and distress, and ultimately starve. The hypothesis of 
 Mr. Malthus is, that population has a tendency to increase in 
 geometrical progression, while subsistence can only be made 
 to increase in arithmetical progression ; but Mr. Alison, in his 
 work on Population, says, " there is no instance in the history 
 of the world of a country being peopled to its utmost limits, 
 or of the multiplication of the species being checked by the 
 impossibility of extracting an increased produce from the soil ;" 
 and that "the true question on which mankind is really 
 interested is very different : that the main point in civilized
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 397 
 
 society is not what are the productive powers of nature in the 
 soil, but what are the means that the human race have " for 
 getting at these powers, and rendering them available for general 
 happiness."* The Earl of Lauderdale calculated that a farm 
 containing 504 statute acres would, under proper manage- 
 ment, produce sufficient food for the maintenance of 1,977 
 people ; and, consequently, that 9,000,000 of people would 
 require only 2,412,746 acres for their support. In that case 
 England would support 180,000,000 of souls. The land 
 annually under cultivation for wheat in England and Wales is 
 but 3,800,000 acres, f and yet this, in years of ordinary 
 plenty, supplies the whole population of Great Britain. In 
 six bushels of wheat there are 2801bs. of fine flour, without 
 including the coarser sort, bran and waste ; this is equal to 
 373 Ibs. per quarter. Every 141bs. of flour make 18 Ibs. of 
 bread. The average produce of wheat, as given by M'Culloch, 
 is 3 quarters per acre, which would give 1,556 Ibs. of bread 
 per acre. This would allow 1 Ib. per day to 4 persons 
 throughout the year. If a third of the land in Great Britain 
 were under cultivation annually for wheat, although this is 
 perhaps more than is possible, it would allow 1 Ib. of bread 
 daily to three times the present population. But some land 
 will produce six quarters per acre ; and by an improved system 
 of cultivation, most land might be made equally productive, 
 and this again would nearly double the population that could be 
 supported. 
 
 Still, Mr. Mill truly says, " If all the instruments of pro- 
 duction were held in joint property by 'the whole people, and 
 the produce divided with perfect equality among them, and if 
 in a society thus constituted, industry were as energetic and 
 the produce as ample as at present, there would be enough to 
 make all the existing population extremely comfortable; but 
 when that population had doubled itself, as, with the existing 
 habits of the people, under such an encouragement, it un- 
 doubtedly would, in little more than twenty years, what would 
 * Alison, vol. 2, p. 473 ; vol. 1, p. 77. t See M'Culloch.
 
 398 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 then be their condition ? Unless the arts of production were 
 in the same time improved in so unexampled a degree as to 
 double the productive power of labour the inferior soils which 
 must be resorted to, and the more laborious and scantily 
 remunerative cultivation which must be employed on the 
 superior soils, to procure food for so much larger a population, 
 would, by an insuperable necessity, render every individual 
 in the community poorer than before. If the population 
 continued to increase at the same rate, a time would soon 
 arrive when no one would have more than mere necessaries, 
 and, soon after, a time when no one would have a sufficiency 
 of those, and the further increase of population would be 
 arrested by death." That is, it would be arrested by death if 
 the natural tendency of the population to increase, if " the 
 existing habits of the people," were to continue, but would it 
 be so ? Would an educated and enlightened population, such 
 as the new system would produce, who had tasted the sweets of 
 plenty, and all the refined advantages which such plenty could 
 bestow, allow of increase to its numbers beyond the point at 
 which such a state could be maintained ? Would all other 
 advantages be sacrificed to that of increase without restriction ? 
 Among men alone, and men of cultivated moral and reasoning 
 powers, is the increase of population not to be limited to the 
 means of support ? If we were to permit the brute creation 
 under our charge to multiply past our means of keeping them, 
 so that they should perish for want, would not the immorality 
 of it be sufficiently glaring ? 
 
 The Shaker communities, under the influence of super- 
 stition alone, and not of reason, adopt the children of others, 
 and have none of their own ; and under a system of com- 
 munity of interests public opinion, on this question of the rate 
 of desirable increase, would soon become omnipotent. Now, 
 as Mill says, " one of the most binding of all obligations, that 
 of not bringing children into the world unless they can be 
 maintained in comforts, and brought up with a likelihood of
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 399 
 
 its continuance, is both disregarded in practice, and made light 
 of in theory in a manner disgraceful to human intelligence." 
 
 But it is said community of property would destroy, or at 
 least weaken, the motives to exertion, and consequently impede 
 the progress of improvement : without individual reward there 
 would be no individual efforts ; unless each could appropriate 
 to himself the fruits of his .labour, he would not labour. 
 
 It is replied, it is very true that men would not labour unless 
 they could enjoy the fruits of their labour, if they were not 
 compelled, as at present, by dire necessity and the fear of 
 starvation ; but a community of interests does not suppose an 
 annihilation of interests ; on the contrary, it proposes that each 
 shall receive the full reward of his labour, and if he shall find 
 that by allowing it to form part of the common stock, all the 
 advantages to be derived from that produce will be greatly 
 increased, he will be most willing that it should be so. The real 
 reward of labour is not individual property, but the comforts, 
 conveniences, and enjoyments which that property will furnish. 
 If men will labour incessantly for the few necessaries that 
 labour will now procure, would there not be an extra motive to 
 exertion when they found that they were working to enrich, 
 not a master, but themselves ; that every effort added some- 
 thing to their capital, and produced an adequate reward ? 
 
 It is found that in those countries where, from advantages 
 of climate or other causes, the necessaries of life are easily 
 attainable, lodging and clothing of the slightest kind being 
 sufficient, and simple vegetable food being produced without 
 much labour, that the people advance but very slowly in 
 civilization, and rise but little above the mere animal state. 
 " Necessity is the mother of invention ;" and in the early 
 stages of society, whether exhibited in the past or present 
 history of the world, when the physical wants of man were 
 gratified, there was nothing left to set him in motion, to 
 ensure healthy activity of mind and body. 
 
 This it is admitted is quite true, and until moral and 
 intellectual tastes have been developed it is not desirable that
 
 400 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 the physical requirements of man should be too easily supplied ; 
 additional leisure would be wasted in mere animal pursuits and 
 pleasures. If the majority of the working class were at present 
 suddenly relieved from half their labour, if their wages were 
 at once to be doubled, it is to be feared it would be greatly to 
 their own injury and to that of so % iety ; for they have as yet 
 no tastes upon which such time and money could be harmlessly 
 expended. Ill-educated as they now are, the strong bond of 
 physical necessity seems still to be required, to keep all in their 
 places and to maintain the order and peace of society. A 
 modification of the community principle, such as we have 
 already considered, would give time for the exercise of all their 
 faculties, and only remove the physical necessity to labour, so 
 far as higher motives to exertion and more refined tastes should 
 render it desirable. 
 
 The present motives to exertion are, on the part of the 
 majority, physical want ; on that of the minority, for the most 
 part, individual advancement and personal distinction (in- 
 cluding a man's family always in the sphere of self;) it must 
 be granted, therefore, that the change proposed would weaken 
 and ultimately destroy such motives to exertion ; but as it 
 would replace them with higher motives, equally strong, it 
 would not impede, but accelerate the progress of improve- 
 ment. Such motives, however, would probably not induce to 
 the production of all the luxuries which to the higher orders 
 may now seem indispensable ; but luxurious indulgences are 
 opposed to the highest virtue : a habit of self-denial in little 
 things is necessary to keep the mind in the most healthy state ? 
 " A scrip with fruits and herbs supplied, and water from the 
 spring," may be rather too poetical a limitation of our physical 
 wants, but it may possibly be found that the standard of 
 physical indulgence is now placed too high to coincide with 
 that of the greatest happiness. 
 
 But it may be asked, would there be sufficient inducement 
 to perform all the disagreeable offices and duties which society 
 now requires to be fulfilled, since in a state in which all were
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 401 
 
 equal, no one could expect another to do that which he was 
 unwilling to do himself? At present there is no office, however 
 laborious and disagreeable, which, if a mere living is to be 
 gained by it, numberless applicants are not anxious to under- 
 take. The present system seems as much opposed to a vacuum 
 in the labour-market as nature was thought to be to one in the 
 physical world. The necessity that so large a portion of the 
 population is under to find employment, even to live, fills up 
 every channel for labour with the divisibility of a fluid, and 
 force of a hydraulic press, developing every latent power, 
 energy, and resource of man's nature. He labours in the 
 dark mine, and in the sulphurous breath of the fiery furnace, 
 he works with the fine thread of silk, emulating the spider 
 in the nicety of her touch, he searches the deep, and exposes 
 himself to every variety of temperature in the frigid and torrid 
 zones, he braves all the dangers of tempests by sea, and of 
 perils by land, in fact, bond slaves, or slaves of necessity, 
 society has always required for it " hewers of wood and drawers 
 of water," and can their place be supplied in a society where 
 all are free ? When the object is to save labour, not to create 
 it, much that is now done by hand will be executed by 
 machinery. There are very few useful occupations degrading 
 in themselves, or in which some superior minds have not been 
 at some time or other engaged, or in which any person could 
 reasonably object to be employed for a short period of the 
 day or of life ; but if any such there were, and necessary to 
 the well-being of the community, its master minds would be 
 turned towards inventions and expedients for shortening such 
 labour, or for making the steam-engine take the place of man. 
 The advocates of the change of system say that the end 
 proposed by the present system is production, without reference 
 to either the good of the producers, or to that distribution of 
 the produce which shall create the greatest sum of enjoyment. 
 The " superior wealth" of such a state, they say, is the 
 superior wealth of a few, realised at the expense of the superior 
 industry, which means the over work of the many. u Efforts 
 B B 2
 
 402 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 to place ourselves on a level with the great landed proprietors, 
 and those who give the tone to society in all that regards 
 expense," " the desire to improve our condition and mount in 
 the scale of society," by the acquisition of wealth, is supposed 
 to be the source of all that is great and elevated ! 
 
 But can a sufficiently strong motive for exertion be found, 
 when this of personal distinction from individual property is 
 annihilated? When all are equal with respect to property, 
 what then shall raise one man above another how shall he 
 distinguish himself? It is replied that mental and moral 
 excellence will alone open the path to eminence. The desire of 
 distinction, one of the strongest feelings of our nature, will no 
 longer be associated with pride of caste, of family, of wealth, 
 of establishment, of equipage, or of personal decoration, but 
 it will take the direction of the higher sentiments, of the moral 
 and intellectual faculties ; each will endeavour to excel in what 
 is intrinsically good, in everything that can add to the happiness 
 of all ; and he who is most forward in the march of improve- 
 ment will reap the meed of honour. It is impossible, it is said, 
 sufficiently to appreciate the effects of such a change ; if our 
 present position in civilization is the result of a limited education 
 upon the minds of a few, what would be the effect produced 
 if all should receive the best possible education, and all talent 
 be turned towards the advancement of the general welfare ?* 
 Each would receive his reward the only reward the great and 
 good ever covet, in the consciousness of the happiness he 
 would be the means of bestowing on all around, and in the 
 
 * " More discoveries (says Dr. M'Culloch, speaking of Mechanics' Institutions,) 
 will be made, according to the degree in which more individuals are placed in 
 a situation to make them. And it is neither impossible nor at all improbable 
 that the lustre that now attaches to the name of Arkwright and Watt, may 
 be dimmed, though it can never be wholly effaced, by the more numerous and 
 perhaps more important discoveries, that will at no distant period be made 
 by those who have passed fi\>m the cradle to the tomb, iu the sme obscure 
 and beaten track that had been trodden by their unambitious ancestors, bad 
 not the education now so generally diffused, served to elicit and ripen the 
 aeeds of geuiun, implanted io them for the general advantage of mankind." 
 Dr. Cooper's Political Economy, p. 299. 

 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 403 
 
 respect and distinction that must always follow when every one 
 is valued in proportion to the happiness he communicates. 
 
 The reason why the discoverers of new truths they who by 
 their writings and inventions have shown themselves in advance 
 of their kind, so seldom meet with a due appreciation until 
 such appreciation comes too late to be of service to them, and 
 why their reward is confined to their own breasts, in philan- 
 thropic feeling and consciousness of successful talent, is, that 
 individual interests are everywhere mixed up with prevailing 
 errors, and are concerned in maintaining them. There is no 
 error however great, no abuse however monstrous, but the 
 interests of some are involved in it, and in the selfish clamour 
 of these against all improvement we find the cause of the so 
 frequent ill -requital of talent. But when all interests are one, 
 when all know that suffering proceeds principally from error, 
 truth will be loved for its own sake, and the elicitation of a 
 new truth will be an indisputable claim to distinction. When 
 the advantage of no party is connected with error, when it is 
 not how a question affects the interests of the Church, or of the 
 Law, or of the Medical Profession, or of the Government, 
 or of the Aristocracy, or of any of the other separate and 
 frequently conflicting interests into which society is now 
 divided, but how it affects the interests of all, then alone will 
 truth be fairly discussed. 
 
 There are few questions bearing directly upon the welfare 
 of man that may not be subjected to the test of experiment, 
 a truth which, although acknowledged in physical, has still to 
 be recognised in moral science. Morality is, however, a no 
 less inductive science than Chemistry or Medicine, and when 
 taken from the guardianship of a class who have reduced its 
 most important precepts to their own low standard, it will 
 assume all the importance of a regular science, the inductions 
 of which may, as in all other cases, be subjected to the test of 
 experience. Morality we have defined to be the science which 
 teaches men to live together in the most happy mariner possible ; 
 but mankind are still undecided, except on a few obvious
 
 404 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 points, as to its leading axioms. They agree that they should 
 do no murder, that they should not steal, nor bear false wit- 
 ness, nor break through a few other positive precepts ; but 
 upon most of the questions bearing upon the happiness of man, 
 their opinions differ, being borrowed generally from those of 
 the class or caste in which they have been educated, and par- 
 taking of all the various degrees of latitude from the Quaker's 
 to the soldier's, from those of the Radical to those of the ultra 
 Tory. If freed from the trammels of interested motives, 
 these questions could all soon be decided by experience, as 
 questions of family economy are now decided. 
 
 It has also been objected to communities of united interests 
 that they would tend to engender too great an uniformity of 
 character, thus doing away with the variety on which happiness 
 so much depends. Uniformity in all good feelings might be 
 the result of such associations, but the difference in intellectual 
 faculties would be as the vast variety of directions to which 
 they would be turned. Character depends upon organization 
 as well as upon surrounding circumstances, and the organiza- 
 tion of an individual depends very much upon the predominant 
 faculties (predominant in activity) of the parents ; and the 
 faculties that should predominate in activity in the parents 
 would depend upon their leading pursuits. All the differences 
 in character, therefore, that could be desirable would exist, for 
 each mind would take a peculiar bent from its own peculiar 
 combination of intellectual powers and the different pursuits 
 to which this would lead. 
 
 Such is a brief sketch of the principles upon which 
 Socialism is founded. 
 
 Is the change in the constitution of society, which is thus 
 contemplated, to be considered as anything but the dream of 
 philanthropy, is it, or any part of it, really practicable ? 
 Experience has shown us that all great revolutions, to be per- 
 manent and efficacious, must be the produce of time; they 
 cannot be brought about suddenly ; for as the body changes 
 its parts gradually, in the process of waste and reproduction,
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 405 
 
 so also the mind requires to undergo a similarly gradual process 
 in any great alteration of feeling and opinion. Use and educa- 
 tion have made the present form of society so familiar that we 
 are even unconscious of the restraints to which it subjects us ; 
 we are familiarized to our bonds until we fancy ourselves at 
 perfect liberty, and have not even a wish to be released. But 
 every restraint imposed by a new social state would be galling 
 because not customary, and we should appear to lose liberty 
 when even we were gaining it. The greater part of the actions 
 of even the most intelligent are automatic, and the number of 
 these increase with the diminution of intelligence, so that the 
 most necessary thing for those classes who have at present the 
 least cultivation of intellect is an established and authorized 
 form of proceeding. It is impossible to go into the world and 
 see the ignorance and physical destitution of the mass, the 
 gross selfishness of the middle and upper classes, without 
 receiving the conviction that a complete social change, such as 
 we have sketched, is, in the present state of feeling, quite 
 impossible. The minds of the existing generation are formed 
 upon an entirely different model to that which will be required 
 for society upon the new principle. Whether we go into town 
 or country, we must be struck with the fact that there is 
 scarcely a single person with whom we meet who would be a 
 fit member. Individual efforts to procure wealth and aggran- 
 dizement are reckoned among the first virtues, and the man who 
 can accumulate the largest amount of the blessings intended 
 for all is most respected by mankind. 
 
 Consequently all attempts to bring the principles of Social- 
 ism into practice have hitherto failed. The fear of want or 
 actual hunger now keeps every one moving and in their place, 
 and the sense of duty is not yet strong enough to insist upon 
 obedience as those feelings do. As we said before, when the 
 moral nature shall be fully developed, when a man's desire to 
 do right is as strong as his propensities now are, when he is 
 as much pinched by his conscience if he neglects to do right,
 
 406 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 as he now is by his stomach if he neglects to work for his 
 living Socialism may become possible : but not before.* 
 
 The system we have been examining contemplates com- 
 munity of property, with an equal division of the produce of 
 labour, and which originated in and is confined to England ; 
 but there are many forms of Communism which do not go this 
 length, and are therefore more in harmony with the present 
 feeling of society. In France, after the failure of the fanatical 
 attempts of Babeuf, which formed the first phase of French 
 Communism, the question of a re-organization of societ}*- in 
 favour of the industrial classes, was first revived, in a 
 more sober and philosophic spirit, by St. Simon. The first 
 work of his which drew any attention was published in 1814; 
 but, though he won many young and ardent disciples, some 
 of whom have since distinguished themselves among the first 
 writers and thinkers of the age, his doctrines made little im- 
 pression on the general mind, up to the time of his death, in 
 1825. The leading tenets of St. Simon, as taught by himself, 
 and expounded by his able and conscientious follower Bazard, 
 were briefly these : In a rightly-constituted state of society, 
 the interests of the industrial class, the workers, who are the 
 true vital system of the social body, must take the highest rank. 
 To this end a new regulating principle must be applied to 
 industrial occupations ; individual interest must no longer be 
 the sole arbitrator between production and consumption. 
 Industry must be organized, so as to secure to talent, skill, and 
 labour the right application and their just reward. This task 
 must be consigned to the State or Government, which is to be 
 regarded as the presiding intellect of the social body. The 
 Government is to assume the form of a system of Banks, which 
 are to spread their ramifications over the whole country. These 
 
 * I must confess that the great objection to Socialism, if not the in- 
 superable one, appears to me to be the sacrifice of individual liberty which it 
 would seem to entail. No one likes to feel that he cannot on all occasions do as 
 he pleases, or likes to give another the right to find fault with him. This objec- 
 tion may not apply with equal force to the great majority wh-> now have a 
 master, or, still worse, who are slaves to the mere necessities of living.
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 407 
 
 Banks are to be the depository of the entire productive fund, 
 which is to be distributed in accordance with the fundamental 
 maxim of St. Simon's theory : " To each according to his 
 capacity, to every capacity according to its work." Privileged 
 idleness must no longer be tolerated ; the vicious son is not to 
 inherit the gains of the laborious father ; no votaries of luxury 
 must be allowed to divert industry from its true office that of 
 administering to the wants of the many. General education 
 on scientific principles, by which the true capabilities of each 
 may be elicited, is at once the essential condition to the full 
 development of this new social state, and one of its most 
 important elements. St. Simon held that his views derived 
 their highest sanction from Christianity, which, in the com- 
 mand, " Love as brethren," implies the principle of social 
 equality, and binds us to use the most earnest care for the 
 welfare of the poorest and most numerous class. 
 
 Another modification of Communism, cotemporary in its 
 promulgation with that of St. Simon, is the system of Charles 
 Fourier. Impressed with the conviction that under the present 
 system of family isolation and competition, the bulk of man- 
 kind must inevitably be condemned to moral debasement and 
 physical privation, Fourier devoted his genius and enthusiasm 
 to the discovery of a scheme of association which, by its 
 organization of labour, should at once increase and economise 
 produce, and secure to each member of the community the 
 thorough development aud gratification of his faculties. He 
 proposed that by a voluntary contribution of capital, Phalan- 
 steres, or symmetrical structures, should be erected, containing 
 private dwellings and public Institutions for a Phalange, or 
 associated community, consisting of sixteen or eighteen hundred 
 persons. To each Phalanstere he proposed to assign about nine 
 square miles of land, to be cultivated for the common good. 
 The industrial occupations of the Phalange are to be divided 
 into series of classes, as household, culture, fabrication, science, 
 the fine arts, &c., and these classes are again and again sub- 
 divided, until we come to the special varieties of labour, which
 
 408 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 are performed by groups of seven to nine members. By this 
 means every variety of taste and character will find satisfaction 
 and suitable employment, since each member may range him- 
 self by turns in a number of groups and series, and so obtain 
 an alternation of labour. Thus every faculty will be developed 
 and applied, while bodily health and mental elasticity will be 
 preserved. Education is to be given to every child in the com- 
 munity in accordance with this plan of varied exercise and 
 development. The right of property in the land is to consist 
 in transmissible and heritable shares, and every member of the 
 Phalange will remain personal possessor of the capital which 
 he has deposited or earned, his share in consumption being 
 determined by his contribution of capital, labour, and talent. 
 Thus Fourier regarded inequalities of possession and rank as a 
 necessary element in his new form of society. His system, 
 therefore, does not contemplate the abolition of private pro- 
 perty ; but takes into consideration, in the distribution of 
 the produce, capital as well as labour. When his system of 
 association should be established, he conceived that there would 
 be an exchange of productions between the various communities, 
 and that works of common interest, such as roads, mining 
 operations, &c., would be effected by their combined effort. 
 Fourier, like St. Simon, won some distinguished disciples, who 
 have been more successful than their master in adapting his 
 ideas to the reception of the many. Through their efforts, his 
 system has taken a new and more practical form, and has been 
 widely disseminated by numerous Societies and an extensive 
 literature, consisting both of independent works and periodicals. 
 To those who have carefully considered what may be done 
 by order and combination, the whole world of work seems at 
 present an enormous chaos of powers working blindly on, 
 undirected to any general object by unity of purpose, a 
 mighty lottery- wheel which casts up wealth for the few, without 
 greatly benefitting the million. " All human interests," says 
 Carlyle, " combined human endeavours, and social growths in 
 this world, have at a certain stage of their development,
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 409 
 
 required organizing ; and work, the grandest of human 
 interests, does now require it."* 
 
 It is easy to find practical illustrations of what is meant by 
 organization of industry. The Post-Office is a familiar in- 
 stance. By means of such an organization we can send a 
 steam carriage with a letter to any part of the kingdom, and a 
 penny really pays the cost and leaves a profit. Here the clear 
 gain effected by organization is the difference between the 
 penny and its profit and what it would cost an individual to 
 send a letter himself by his own conveyance. Railways afford 
 another powerful illustration of the advantages of industrial 
 organization. By the present uniform system of arrangement, 
 a person can go from London to Edinburgh in about ten hours, 
 a vast saving of time compared to a system of steam 
 travelling in which every person had to lay down the rails over 
 his own land, according to his own ideas, causing an infinity of 
 gauges and stoppages -, and yet the saving effected by order, 
 arrangement, and organization in the Post-Office and in Rail- 
 ways, is probably not greater than would be effected by intro- 
 ducing order and organization into our present individual and 
 disjointed efforts for the increase and distribution of wealth in 
 all departments of industry upon our present system of laissez 
 faire. The Post-Office and Railways keep comfortably all 
 parties employed in and on them, and leave a large profit. The 
 Clubs at the West-end of London are a result of organization 
 of industry, by means of which gentlemen of refined tastes get 
 palace accommodation, a splendid library, excellent attendance, 
 the best wines, the simplest and most recherchd fare at a third of 
 the charges of the ordinary hotels. The model lodging-house 
 is another instance of the advantages to be derived from the 
 organization of labour. Large and airy rooms, baths, easy and 
 economical methods of cleaning, washing, and cooking, are 
 provided for the use of the poor, at a less cost than the 
 miserable and ill-ventilated rooms in the back alleys of London. 
 The large factories, warehouses, and trading emporiums of 
 * Past and Preaent, p. 368. 
 
 c c 2
 
 410 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 England are all evidences of what can be effected by a com- 
 bination of industrial operations. In fact, the chaos of work is 
 of itself gradually crystallizing throughout the empire, and the 
 process only requires to be carried a few steps further to reach 
 the working man. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle, our great philosopher, says, " This that 
 they call ' Organization of Labour,' is, if well understood, the 
 problem of the whole future, for all who would in future pre- 
 tend to govern men ;" and the 19th century may see a consider- 
 able advance in this direction.* It is much easier to form 
 theories than to work them out in practice. Making the best of 
 the present system of separate individual interests, we may see 
 in healthy country districts squares of 300 or 400 houses, with 
 as much land attached to each house as each man could 
 cultivate, with a steam engine in the centre of each square, with 
 power conveyed to each house to do all hard and dirty work, or 
 to work the loom or other machinery upon which the women 
 and children might wait : or looking into the far future we may 
 see the system of society changed to one of community of 
 property and interest, of which our present country gentleman's 
 
 * While this was passing through the press, the following interesting letter 
 appeared in the Times: "Assington Hall, Suffolk, December 19, 1862. 
 Sir, The interesting article from your ' Own Reporter,' dated Roch- 
 dale, respecting Co-operative Societies, induces me to trouble you with a few 
 lines on the same subject. About 30 years ago, upon a small farm in Suffolk 
 becoming vacant, I called together 20 labourers and offered to lend them 
 capital withoxit interest if they would undertake to farm it, subject to iny 
 rules and regulations. They gladly availed themselves of my offer. In the 
 course of 10 years they paid me back my capital, so that I was induced to let 
 another farm of 150 acres to 30 men upon the same terms. These have also 
 nearly paid back the capital lent to them, and, instead of eating dry bread, 
 as I regret to say many of the agricultural labourers are now doing, each man 
 has his bacon, and numberless comforts that he never possessed before ; thus 
 the Rates are reduced, as these 50 families are no longer burdensome. The 
 farmers are sure to meet with honest men, as conviction of crime would 
 debar them of their share, and the men themselves have become much moi'e 
 intelligent, and present happy, cheerful countenances. If every country 
 gentleman would follow my example, distress among the agricultural poor 
 would not be known. I merely add that I have no land BO well farmed. I 
 shall be happy to send you my plan, rules, and regulations, if required. 
 
 " I am, Sir, your obedient servant, JOHN GURDON."
 
 THE SOCIALIST UTOPIA. 411 
 
 seat should furnish the model. We may imagine a large house, 
 on a sufficiently large estate, where each family had their 
 separate rooms and common rooms for sitting and meals, and 
 where, instead of the exercise and labour required for health 
 being taken, as it now is, in hunting and shooting, it might be 
 employed in the labour of the farm, and where the women, 
 instead of riding, gossiping, and dressing, might have their 
 mornings usefully employed also : and where the labour of all 
 properly directed, should furnish everything that the highest 
 happiness requires and where the community of interest should 
 develop all the best feelings, and make a really united family. 
 
 What form society may ultimately take it is impossible to say : 
 one thing only is evident, that the morals and intelligence of the 
 working classes is at present unequal to any but the lowest form 
 of Co-operution. When their character shall be raised, when 
 they have felt the advantages of comfort and civilization, and 
 have determined to maintain that state by keeping their num- 
 bers within what will make it possible, much more may be got 
 from the present form of society than has yet been attained, for 
 Mr. Mill truly says " the principle of private property has never 
 yet had a fair trial in any country ; and less so, perhaps, in 
 this country than in any other." He also says " property has 
 been made of things which never ought to be property, and 
 absolute property where only a qualified property ought to 
 exist." Probably that form will be ultimately preferred which 
 gives the greatest amount of individual liberty. At present, 
 the great majority of mankind are slaves to work and to the 
 necessity of living ; their liberty is bounded by their wants and 
 narrow means, and at no time perhaps can they properly be 
 said to be their own masters ; and if, under a Co-operative sys- 
 tem, they gave up their liberty for half the day, so that they 
 might call the other half their own, they would be great 
 gainers in that respect. On the present system, " whoso has 
 sixpence, is sovereign (to the length of sixpence) over all 
 men ;" and, as Dr. Arnott truly says, " each individual of 
 the civilised millions dwelling on the earth, (by the appliances
 
 412 PROPOSED MEASURES OF AMELIORATION. 
 
 of Trade and Commerce, Art and Science,) may have nearly 
 the same enjoyments as if he were the single lord of all." All 
 this is possible in this " old immoral world" for individuals, 
 and the mental qualifications that would make Socialism 
 practicable, would give to all what is now the privilege only 
 of the few. Still Socialism appeals more directly to all our 
 higher feelings, and may perhaps be the last form that society 
 will take when the perfectability of man shall have reached a 
 higher range on this earth ; and as regards the guarantees for 
 liberty, that is the fullest liberty which is exercised according 
 to known and recognised laws. The nearer we attain to 
 perfect goodness and intelligence, the less choice have we, as 
 there is ordinarily but one right path. 
 
 But that we should be able absolutely to determine the best 
 form of society is of less consequence, inasmuch as the growth 
 of the world seems to have been little influenced by theories. 
 If some wise Ichthyosauri had clearly foreseen our present state, 
 we must still probably have approached it by the intervening 
 hundred hundred centuries. It is not any grand and logical 
 theory that has made mankind what they are, but the hundred 
 million little causes or antecedents of which probably they 
 have been altogether unconscious. Many old forms which 
 have trammeled the progress of the race are now breaking 
 up ; we have attained to security of life and limb and to the 
 perfection of mere animal life, and society seems now working 
 towards the complete " Individuality of the Individual ;" and 
 when each atom of mankind has liberty to move equally in 
 every direction, Society will crystalize into new forms more in 
 accordance with man's higher and superior and essentially 
 human nature. What we have now to do then, is, not to 
 neglect any means which are oifered to us for developing and 
 perfecting the individual ; among which means Temperance 
 and Education must stand first.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 " NOTHING comes to pass without a cause. What is self- 
 existent, must be from Eternity, and must be unchangeable ; 
 but as to all things that begin to be, they are not self-existent, 
 and therefore must have some foundation of their existence 
 without themselves." Jonathan Edivards. 
 
 " In no mind is there an absolute or free volition ; but it is 
 determined to choose this or that by a cause, which likewise 
 has been fixed by another, and this again by a third, and so 
 on for ever." Spinoza. 
 
 " Every action or phenomenon, so far as it produces 
 an event, is itself an event or occurrence which pre-supposes 
 another state wherein the cause is to be met with ; and thus 
 everything that happens is but a continuation of the series, 
 and no beginning which occitrs of itself is possible : con- 
 sequently, all the actions of the natural causes in the succession 
 are themselves again effects." Kant. 
 
 " Everything that exists depends upon the past, prepares 
 the future, and is related to the whole." Oersted. 
 
 " The conviction that phenomena have invariable laws, and 
 follow with regularity certain antecedent phenomena, was only 
 acquired gradually, and extended itself as knowledge advanced, 
 from one order of phenomena to another, beginning with those 
 whose laws were most accessible to observation. This progress- 
 has not yet attained its ultimate point ; there being still one 
 class of phenomena (human volitions) the subjection of which 
 to invariable laws is not yet universally recognized. 
 At length we are fully warranted in considering that law, a 
 applied to all phenomena within the range of human observation, 
 stands on an equal footing in respect to evidence with the 
 axioms of geometry itself." J. S. Mill.
 
 414 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 " Various classes of facts unite to prove that the law of 
 metamorphosis, which holds among the physical forces, holds 
 equally between them and the mental forces. Those modes of 
 the Unknowable which we call motion, heat, light, chemical 
 affinity, &c., are alike transformable into each other, and into 
 those modes of the Unknowable which we distinguish as sensa- 
 tion, emotion, thought, these, in their turns, being directly or 
 indirectly re-transformable into the original shapes. That no 
 idea or feeling arises, save as a result of some physical force 
 expended in producing it, is fast becoming a commonplace of 
 science ; arid whoever duly weighs the evidence will see, that 
 nothing but an overwhelming bias in favour of a pre-conceived 
 theory, can explain its non-acceptance. 
 The universal truth above illustrated under its various aspects, 
 is a necessary corollary from the persistence of force. Setting 
 out with the proposition that force can neither come into 
 existence nor cease to exist, the several foregoing general con- 
 clusions inevitably follow. Each manifestation of force can be 
 interpreted only as the effect of some antecedent force ; no 
 matter whether it be an inorganic action, an animal move- 
 ment, a thought, or a feeling. Either this must be conceded 
 or else it must be asserted that our successive states of con- 
 sciousness are self-created. Either mental energies, as well as 
 bodily ones, are quantitatively correlated to certain energies 
 expended in their production, and to certain other energies 
 which they initiate ; or else nothing must become something 
 and something must become nothing." Herbert Spencer. 
 
 " Now, the most general force of this kind is the force of 
 gravity or attraction, and its correlate, repulsion. Motion is 
 the result of the reciprocal action of these forces. The 
 derivative physical forces are those termed the imponderables 
 namely, heat, light, magnetism, chemical affinity, in an 
 evolving scale of progress. Derivative again from these are 
 the vital forces, which finally culminate in the vis nervosa and 
 Mind. * * * * The life of a man is there- 
 fore like a stream of events or changes in linked sequence,
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 415 
 
 flowing on as necessarily as the waters of Niagara. It is 
 true that, in common language, the will is spoken of as the 
 first cause of conscious thoughts and acts, but no act of will 
 (that is, of mental energising) can occur without its necessary 
 co-existents and antecedents that is, its causes ; and such as 
 these are, so will the act of will be. There is, in fact, no more 
 a spontaneous act of will than there is spontaneous generation. 
 Strictly, such an act is a creation, and belongs only to creative 
 power. (An " independent will," or one not governed by 
 motives, or resulting from the lost dictates of the understand- 
 ing, is in fact an absurdity.) 
 
 And this general truth points to another viz., that the 
 causes of every present state of consciousness of organisms 
 extend far back into time. Tracing the life of any organism 
 whatever, we find that the necessary antecedent to its existence 
 in time and space is the existence of another organism in time 
 and space." Dr. Laycock. 
 
 " Rejecting, then, the metaphysical dogma of free will, and 
 the theological dogma of predestined events, we are driven to 
 the conclusion that the actions of men, being determined solely 
 by their antecedents, must have a character of uniformity, that 
 is to say, must, under precisely the same circumstances, 
 always issue in precisely the same results. And as all ante- 
 cedents are either in the mind or out of it, we clearly see that 
 all the variations in the results, in other words, all the changes 
 of which history is full, all the vicissitudes of the human 
 race, their progress or their decay, their happiness or their 
 misery, must be the fruit of a double action ; an action of 
 external phenomena on the mind, and another action of the 
 mind upon the phenomena." H. T. Buckle. 
 
 11 Every change, however slight, and every movement, 
 however minute, and every event that comes to pass, are fore- 
 ordained and regulated by the Almighty." * * * " When 
 we view the world as one universal effect, we are at once led to 
 the contemplation of a Universal Divine Agency. Does not 
 the Infinite act on every atom ? * * * God never dele-
 
 416 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 gates His power : He cannot transfer divinity to a substance : 
 there is no power therefore separated from Himself." Rev. J. 
 White Mailler, M.A. 
 
 " In Him we live and move and have our being." " It is 
 God that worketh in us to will and to do of His good pleasure." 
 St. Paul 
 
 The freedom of will, and of action, therefore, with which 
 we suppose ourselves to be endowed, is a delusion. For ages 
 men believed the sun to go round the earth, because it seemed 
 to do so. A similar delusion is at the base of our Ethical 
 system, because we seem free. Whence, then, the source of 
 the delusion ? Our apparent freedom consists in the absence 
 of all physical restraint, and, in our power therefore to do as 
 we please; but what we please to do depends upon our 
 mental constitution and the circumstances in which we are 
 placed ;* or, as Buckle says, upon " an action of external 
 phenomena on the mind, and another action of the mind upon 
 the phenomena." The forces of nature which culminate in 
 mind, re-act on nature, as an intelligent power, and thus the 
 
 * It is said " we feel we may do a thing or leave it undone ;" but is this so ? 
 Does any good man feel that he may lie or commit robbery or murder, or 
 leave it undone ? Dr. Neil Arnott says, " no one doubts that a person sitting 
 near an open barrel of gunpowder, and who sees a thoughtless child, with a 
 burning stick in his hand, running towards it, could, if he so willed, continue 
 sitting, although sure to be blown into the air the next moment." True, if 
 he so willed ! but where is the person who could so will ? Who feels that in 
 this case he has power '' to do a thing or leave it undone ?" Certainly no 
 person of sound mind ; for, as Dr. Arnott says, " if he be of sound mind, his 
 love of life will induce him to dart forward instantly to arrest the child, and 
 so to avert the threatened catastrophe." And this Dr. Arnott gives as an 
 illustration of " freedom of will," which he says closer examination has taught 
 him to reconcile with " the fixed laws of mental action." It is evident that h 
 means that the person was not obliged by any physical force to get off the 
 barrel ; but the mental force made it " necessary" if the physical did not. Of 
 course, it is possible that a person should continue to sit on an exploding barrel, 
 as Regulus returned to his barrel of spikes ; but this would be in obedience to 
 a higher feeling or mental law than the " mere love of life." It is true that 
 there are few who feel they have this liberty or " freedom of will," but no 
 doubt the Phrenologist could point them out, and could point to the law 
 under which they act, and moved by such law of their nature, they have no 
 more choice " to do the thing or leave it undone," than a good man has to lie, 
 steal, or commit murder.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 417 
 
 hand of necessity is hidden, but it is not the less there, acting 
 with undeviating regularity and resistless force. It is true 
 that the "liberty" seems infinite, and action inexhaustibly 
 various ; yet the limitation is complete, and the almighty con- 
 trolling power ever present, although unseen and unnoticed, 
 and pressing with the lightness of a feather. 
 
 Nothing, then, under the circumstances, could have happened 
 but that which did happen; and the actions of men, under 
 precisely the same circumstances, must always issue in precisely 
 the same results. We may dismiss then the past, with all its 
 vain regrets, and we must learn to judge of our position by 
 what it really is and may be, and not by what we vainly sup- 
 pose it might have been ; for nothing is more certain than that 
 we could not have acted differently in any act of our lives, with 
 the state of mind and circumstances then existing. Half the 
 misery in life arises from not seeing and knowing this, and 
 from the feeling that we could have done otherwise, might have 
 done otherwise, and ought to have done otherwise ; and half 
 the crime results from the feeling of revenge, based on the same 
 error. 
 
 " Let the dead past then bury its dead," for the past could 
 not have been different, and comes not back again ; the present, 
 the future, only are in our power ; for the experience of the 
 past the consequences of our actions, alters both the mind 
 and circumstances, and makes a different result possible. 
 
 For " if such co-existences and sequences as those of 
 Biology and Sociology are not yet reduced to law, the pre- 
 sumption is, not that they are irreducible to law, but that 
 their laws elude our present means of analysis."* "The 
 actions of men have the same uniformity of connection which 
 physical events have ; and the law or laws of these uniformities 
 can be inductively ascertained in the same way as the laws of 
 the material world."f 
 
 Hence the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, or the Law 
 of Consequences, becomes of the highest importance, teaching 
 
 * Herbert Spencer. f H. T. Buckle. 
 D D 2 
 
 I 
 

 
 418 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 as it does, that for every consequence, or effect, there is an 
 antecedent cause, which is always equal, under like circum- 
 stances, to produce the same effect, and can produce no other; 
 thus making us, as we attain the knowledge of such causes, 
 masters over our own condition for good or ill. 
 
 The various superstitions fostered in the minds of the 
 ignorant, in all ages and countries, have taken their rise in the 
 misunderstanding of this law. Spiritual agents of every ima- 
 ginable kind, Gods of the Woods and Streams, of Earth and 
 Air, Genii, Fairies, Angels, Devils, Immaterial Souls, have all 
 been brought forward to account for effects whose causes lay 
 remote from ordinary sight ; while each of these agents lias 
 been gifted with a free-will, or power of acting, or not, under 
 similar circumstances ; so that the uniformity of the laws of 
 nature has been lost sight of, or has been unknown. All 
 uncivilized nations, and even such as have attained consider- 
 able knowledge, refer all natural effects inexplicable to them- 
 selves, to the power of spirits or demons. No rational means 
 are therefore taken to secure the blessings, or avert the ills, 
 which come and go at the caprice of these mysterious powers ; 
 but charms and offerings, sacrifices and prayers, are used to 
 appease their wrath, or propitiate their favour. 
 
 Good and evil have been represented as depending upon the 
 influence of the Stars, of Fate, of Original Sin - upon the 
 conflicting power of Satan with that of the Spirit of God 
 rather than as the natural and necessary consequences of our 
 own conduct. It has been overlooked that our Creator, in 
 giving us Reason, or a capability of foreseeing consequences, 
 has given us power over both good and evil, and that such a 
 gift would have been rendered comparatively useless, if not 
 fatal, if He had permitted the established course of nature 
 upon which the exercise of reason is dependent to be inter- 
 fered with by influences obeying no fixed law, or none, at least, 
 upon which man could calculate. 
 
 Since about the year 1700 no one has been burnt for witch- 
 craft in our enlightened country ; but the Devil, according to
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 419 
 
 the most favoured creed, is still supposed to be powerful 
 among us. The true character of evil is disguised, and in 
 our popular religious instruction natural effects are attributed 
 to anything but their real and efficient causes. Our moral and 
 religious teachings are still largely mixed with the superstitions 
 of the dark ages, instead of having for their object to make 
 known the " Law of the Lord" the Physical, the Organic, 
 the Moral Law with the natural pains and pleasures con- 
 nected with it. May we not hope, however, that the time 
 approaches when God shall be known in His works, and a 
 Spirit of Evil no longer be supposed to divide the sovereignty 
 of the earth with Him ; when Chance, already dismissed from 
 the physical, shall be banished from the moral world ; when 
 especial influences, no longer expected in the one, will not be 
 looked for in the other ? 
 
 Herein consists the difference between " Necessity" and 
 Fatalism. The fatalist believes that everything is written in 
 the book of fate, and must happen as there written, and it is 
 useless therefore taking any steps to avoid it ; thus paralysing 
 all effort ; on the other hand, the necessarian believes that for 
 every effect there is a cause, which is equal at all times to pro- 
 duce the result desiderated, and that, therefore, the knowledge 
 and use of these causes put fate in his own hands. It is 
 true that what is written in the book of fate must come to pass ; 
 since that is no more than saying that what will happen will 
 happen ; but if we were permitted to read this book, we should 
 find that the difference of faith in the fatalist and necessarian 
 was itself the efficient cause of an entirely different fate to each 
 believer. 
 
 Again. The necessarian must still use motives ; and as in 
 practice therefore, it is said, he must praise and blame and 
 love and hate as others do, it is the same thing as if he con- 
 tinued to believe in free will. It is true he must still use 
 motives, but he knows that if he does not use efficient ones, he 
 cannot succeed : whereas the believer in free will thinks it 
 always a chance whether he shall succeed or not, and if he
 
 420 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 blames any one, it is generally any one but himself, to whom 
 the fault properly belongs. 
 
 Responsibility can have no reference to the past, which 
 could not have been otherwise, and cannot be recalled ; it con- 
 sists only in the natural and necessary consequences of our 
 actions. These consequences are the same, and the responsi- 
 bility is the same, therefore, whether a man is a free agent or 
 not. The consequences, that is, the pain or the punishment is 
 the same, whether we are pushed into the fire, fall in, or put 
 ourselves in voluntarily, the object of the suffering being our 
 own good to keep us from being burnt. 
 
 Punishment, therefore, must be regarded only as the means 
 to an end, and, except for our good, is unjust and unnecessary. 
 " The ordinary events of History, instead of being causes, are 
 merely the occasions on which the real causes act." ( Buckle, p. 
 753.) And Quetelet thus truly says, ll Society prepares 
 crime, and the guilty are only the instruments by which it is 
 executed." Retributive justice, therefore, as it has been 
 wrongly called, is simply revenge, and as an element in 
 our penal codes has always done more harm than good, as the 
 action of our revised codes, from which it is omitted, abun- 
 dantly testifies. 
 
 Sin is based upon the erroneous supposition that we could 
 have acted otherwise than we did ; and since all punishment is 
 for our good, forgiveness of sins would be an injury. 
 
 Evil is the natural and necessary limitation of our faculties, 
 and our consequent liability to error; and pain, which we call 
 evil, is its corrective. It is our Guardian and Guide, our 
 Schoolmaster, our Stimulus to Action and to all those efforts 
 by which the strong and good are preserved and the weak 
 and bad destroyed, and by which the world goes ever on to 
 better and better. 
 
 The springs, the hidden springs, we may say, of all our 
 actions are pain and pleasure. 
 
 " Most strong sensations awaken feelings either of pleasure 
 or pain. To obtain the first of these, and to avoid the second,
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 421 
 
 is the aim of the whole human conduct. The idea of a 
 pleasure that may be obtained is accompanied by a feeling 
 called desire, and the idea of a pain which may come pro- 
 duces a feeling called aversion. Different degrees of these 
 feelings are named affections, emotions, passions. They excite 
 voluntary muscular actions to bring about the desired results."* 
 
 " No man ever had, can, or could have a motive differing 
 from the pursuit of pleasure or the avoidance of pain. "f This 
 is ordinarily hidden from us, because these pleasures and pains 
 take high sounding names, such as honour, love, fame, 
 magnanimity, friendship, ambition, glory, purity, righteous- 
 ness, piety, envy, hatred, malice, &c. These feelings are 
 classified, and are right or wrong, virtuous or vicious, accord- 
 ing as they tend to one state or the other, that is, of pleasure 
 or pain, happiness or misery ; happiness being the aggregate of 
 pleasurable sensations, misery the aggregate of painful ones. 
 The much exalted " Blessedness" is a sort of sublimated 
 female happiness. 
 
 " The first law of nature is to seek our own happiness,"! 
 and as morality is the shortest and most direct way to it, being 
 in fact " The Science which teaches men to live together in the 
 most happy manner possible," || there is no fear for its interests ; 
 all that is required is that the road should be made sufficiently 
 clear and the obstructions removed. But " freedom" is said 
 to be essential to morality. If, however, morality is the 
 science of man's well being, and a man necessarily seeks his 
 well being, that certainly must tend more directly to the 
 practice of morality, than if he were " free" to reject that 
 cause. 
 
 All experience, it is said, proves man to be a free agent, 
 which means simply that he has the power to do as he pleases. 
 But his actions, or what he pleases to do, result from his 
 natural character and the circumstances in which he is placed. 
 It is clear, then, that what we have to do is to improve the 
 character, and to make a wise disposal of all the circumstances 
 
 * Dr. Neil Arnott. f Jeremy Bentham. Bentham. II Helvetius.
 
 422 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 that influence it. Locke says, " As far as man lias power 
 to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to 
 the preferences or direction of his own mind, so far is a man 
 free." This is quite true : the only " freedom" we have is 
 limited to action in accordance with our natural powers and 
 capacities. What we have to do then is fully to develop these 
 powers and capacities, and to remove all impediments, external 
 and internal, to their free and complete action. There must 
 be no external compulsion from physical impediment, or 
 internal compulsion from defect in the mind itself no obstacle 
 to the full exercise of our natural powers both of body 
 and mind. Education in its full meaning is the developing 
 and perfecting of all these powers. 
 
 We in England have not much to complain of in the 
 way of external compulsion, and to this fact there is not only 
 our own testimony. M. Scherer lately (May, 1862) observed 
 in the Temps : " England is the classic land of liberty ; and 
 for this reason it is a holy land a land which more than one 
 exile has turned to with gratitude. We do not now speak of 
 political institutions, but of civil liberty, of the respect for the 
 rights of all, of independence of exertion, of the space left 
 open for individual action, of the mildness of the laws, of 
 the fewness of regulations. Elsewhere, regulations are the 
 rule ; elsewhere liberty exists only where it is expressly 
 stipulated ; but in England it is liberty which is everywhere, 
 and always supposed. Elsewhere, civil life is encircled by a 
 network, invisible but inextricable, of restrictions; but in 
 England every man speaks, teaches, prints, meets, associates, 
 builds, travels, exercises his calling in industry and commerce, 
 fills the professions, carries out all his designs, without hinder- 
 ance from anything whatever but the equal right of his 
 neighbour." 
 
 J. S. Mill, in his work on Liberty, justly contends that 
 " one very simple principle is entitled to govern absolutely the 
 dealings of society with the individual, in the way of com- 
 pulsion or control, whether the means used be physical force
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 423 
 
 in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public 
 opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which man- 
 kind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering 
 with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self- 
 protection. That the only purpose for which power can be 
 rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, 
 against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, 
 either physical and moral, is not a sufficient warrant." We 
 have nearly arrived at this in England. 
 
 As to our mental freedom, that is another thing : very 
 little has yet been done towards perfecting our natural powers, 
 or bringing them into harmonious action. Our natural powers, 
 both bodily and mental, we derive from our parents ; much 
 therefore depends upon race, upon breeding. Now the art of 
 breeding has been carried of late years to a most extraordinary 
 perfection among animals. The most exquisite hot-house plant 
 does not more surpass its original weed than some animals now 
 surpass their ancestors in symmetry and grace. Short of 
 turning one species into another, the breeder can do anything 
 with his material. The scientific application of physiological 
 principles has revolutionized the whole system. But at present 
 this has been confined to the brute creation ; all attention to 
 natural law has been ignored in the breeding of the human 
 being ; and yet more depends upon the original constitution 
 than upon the training or education afterwards. Mental power 
 and capacity depend upon the nervous system, and very little 
 more than the direction of that power and capacity upon 
 education ; and the perfection of brain and nervous systems, 
 and even mental aptitudes are transmitted from parent to off- 
 spring, and are dependent upon the physiological principles 
 that have revolutioned our Cattle Shows. No education or 
 training will turn a bull-dog into a pointer, yet the human 
 educator expects to work quite as great changes in human 
 beings. From systematically ignoring the laws of cerebral 
 physiology, both the educating and breeding of human beings 
 are the merest chance and empiricism, and our liberty is
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 thereby as much limited in some directions as that of the lame 
 to run or the blind to see. 
 
 The first thing then to aim at is a healthy and well-developed 
 body and brain ; and next, to see that the force generated by 
 the healthy activity of the bodily functions shall be applied to 
 the purposes intended, and properly distributed, in due pro- 
 portion, according to the offices to be performed. This 
 balance between muscular, vital, and nervous power between 
 bodily labour and head work, has never yet been attained, if it 
 has ever been attempted. This has been mainly owing to 
 ignorance of the fact that vital forces are the correlate of 
 physical forces, and mental of vital, and that " from given 
 amounts of such forces neither more nor less of such physical 
 and psychical changes can result." 
 
 We seldom, therefore, attain the mens sana in corpore sano ; 
 either the body or mind is stunted and imperfectly developed. 
 Below a certain temperature the tadpole grows, but does not 
 develop into the frog ; so some human beings, from want of 
 the due balance of force, remain great tadpoles all their lives, 
 while the hot-bed of civilization precociously transforms others 
 into the smallest possible frogs. Herbert Spencer, in his 
 admirable chapter on Physical Education, says, " It is a 
 physiological law, first pointed out by M. Isidore St. Hilaire, 
 and to which attention has been drawn by Mr. Lewes in his 
 essay on Dwarfs and Giants, that there is an antagonism 
 between growth and development. By growth, as used in this 
 antithetical sense, is to be understood increase of size; by 
 development, increase of structure. And the law is, that great 
 activity in either of these processes involves retardation or 
 arrest of the other. A familiar example is furnished by the 
 cases of the caterpillar and the chrysalis. In the caterpillar 
 there is extremely rapid augmentation of bulk ; but the structure 
 is scarcely at all more complex when the caterpillar is full- 
 grown than when it is small. In the chrysalis the bulk does 
 not increase ; on the contrary, weight is lost during this stage 
 of the creature's life ; but the elaboration of a more complex
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 425 
 
 structure goes on with great activity. The antagonism, here 
 so clear, is less traceable in higher creatures, because the two 
 processes are carried on together. But we see it pretty well 
 illustrated among ourselves when we contrast the sexes. A 
 girl develops in body and mind rapidly, and ceases to grow 
 comparatively early. A boy's bodily and mental development 
 is slower, and his growth greater. At the age when the one is 
 mature, finished, and having all faculties in full play, the 
 other, whose vital energies have been more directed towards 
 increase of size, is relatively incomplete in structure ; and 
 shows it in a comparative awkwardness, bodily and mental. 
 Now this law is true of each separate part of the organism, as 
 well as of the whole. The abnormally rapid advance of any 
 organ in respect of structure, involves premature arrest of its 
 growth ; and this happens with the organ of the mind as 
 certainly as with any other organ. The brain, which during 
 early years is relatively large in mass but imperfect in structure, 
 will, if required to perform its functions with undue activity, 
 undergo a structural advance greater than is appropriate to its 
 age ; but the ultimate effect will be a falling short of the size 
 and power that would else have been attained. And this is a 
 part-cause probably the chief cause why precocious children, 
 and youths who up to a certain time were carrying all before 
 them, so often stop short and disappoint the high hopes of their 
 parents." Properly speaking, there is no antagonism between 
 growth and development when the animal force is duly dis- 
 tributed ; it is only when the balance is disturbed, and one is 
 carried on at the expense of the other. If any passion 
 amativeness especially, that being the greatest consumer of force 
 of all, is precociously developed, and indulged, it is at the 
 expense of the growth of the body. Early precocity is the 
 use of mental force at the expense of the vital, and unless 
 the balance is restored, the children cursed with it seldom 
 live. On the other hand, agricultural labourers, and the nomad 
 population generally, have vital power at the expense of the 
 mental ; consequently any injury to the bodily system is more 
 E E 2
 
 426 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 easily repaired, but the mind is sluggish, and the feelings dull, 
 and the sense of pleasure and pain is less keen, and approaches 
 nearer to that of the brute creation. 
 
 In our Educational systems due regard must be had to the 
 requirements of growth, development, and training, and great 
 care must be taken to preserve the balance of power, so that 
 one shall never be allowed to go on at the expense of the 
 other. During rapid fits of growth, there is both bodily and 
 mental prostration, and neither can be forced without injury to 
 the whole system : there is but a limited supply of vital energy, 
 and if the demands are great in one direction, a reduction must 
 be made in some other. The intellectual forcing systems of 
 our Schools, where mental effort alone is looked for and 
 appreciated, are altogether at variance with these principles, 
 and the consequences are lamentable in the extreme, although 
 unobserved or misunderstood from ignorance of the law we are 
 explaining, and of the principle that education is the drawing 
 out the developing, strengthening, and perfecting of all our 
 natural powers, and not a mere strain upon the memory and 
 intellectual faculties, at the expense of the others. 
 
 When growth and development are finished, the same 
 fatal error attends the distribution of force in after life, and 
 parts of the mind are exercised at the expense of the others, 
 until many of our highest and most delicate faculties die for 
 want of sustenance, and we have only a crippled and im- 
 perfect human being.* 
 
 * " You dwarf the remaining faculties, when you develop one to abnormal 
 size and strength. Thus have men been great preachers, but uncommonly 
 neglectful parents. Thus have men been great Statesmen, but omitted to pay 
 their tradesmen's bills. Thus men have been great moral and social reformers, 
 whose own lives stood much in need of moral and social reformation. I 
 should judge, from a portrait I have seen of Mr. Thomas Sayers, the champion 
 of England, that this eminent individual has attended to his physical to the 
 neglect of his intellectual development. His face appears deficient in intelli- 
 gence, though his body seemed abundant in muscle. And possibly it is better 
 to seek to develop the entire nature intellectual, moral, and physical than 
 to push one part of it into a prominence that stunts and kills the rest. It is 
 better to be a complete man, than to be essentially a poet, a statesman, a 
 prize fighter. Such an inordinate growth in a single direction, is truly morbid.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 427 
 
 We have already explained at length the nature of our 
 faculties : we shall now show how they are misused and mis- 
 directed. 
 
 First. With respect to Woman and the still much-disputed 
 point of her greater or less superiority to man. Probably 
 each is superior to the other in the position nature has assigned 
 them ; the difficulty has been to find that position, and for each to 
 be satisfied with it. A man's brain weighs on an average 31bs. 
 8oz. ; a woman's only 21bs. lloz. ; and, as power is in propor- 
 tion to the size of the organ, that settles the question as to the 
 relative strength of mind ; but woman's brain, if it has less 
 power, has generally more sensibility and delicacy of perception, 
 and is calculated to do some things better than a man's. With 
 respect to her place and position in the world,* much has 
 been said of late days about the " independence of woman," 
 and so far as the law has aided to consign her over to man as 
 his property, too much cannot be said about her emancipation ; 
 but in fact neither man nor woman was intended to be inde- 
 pendent. Woman, like the ivy, is supported by the stronger 
 trunk of the man, and if when such support fails her she some- 
 times shoots up into an independent tree, she more frequently, 
 like the ivy, crawls along the ground. Man on the other hand 
 requires softening and refining by the woman. Bachelors and 
 spinsters are not complete in themselves ; man is not made by 
 a given number of legs, arms, and other parts, but by the 
 mind ; now one-third of the mental faculties lie unused and 
 undeveloped in the single man, and this observation applies 
 
 It reminds one of the geese whose livers go to form that regal dainty, the 
 pad de foie grot. By subjecting a goose to a certain manner of life, you 
 dwarf its legs, wings, and general muscular development ; but you make its 
 liver grow as large as itself. I have known human beings who practised on 
 their mental powers a precisely analogous discipline. The power of calculating 
 in figures, of writing poetry, of chesa-playing, of preaching sermons was 
 tremendous ; but all their other faculties were like the legs and wings of the 
 fattening goose." A Modern Writer, name forgotten. 
 
 * The following remarks on Woman's place and work, with but little 
 alteration, formed part of a paper read at the first meeting of the Social Science 
 Association, October, 1857.
 
 428 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 with still greater force to single women. It requires, then, 
 one man and one woman to constitute one human being ; and 
 together as much as possible let them do the work of the 
 world between them. Let the business of the world be equally 
 divided, but each keep in their own department ; each is 
 highest, best, strongest, and first there. Let both take their 
 own road, but let not these roads be competing lines. Women 
 should have work, but not in competition with men. From her 
 peculiar organization, she has her sphere; let her work be 
 found in it. If she feed us, clothe us, bring us into the world, 
 educate us, nurse us, and make a home what it ought to be, 
 this is her work ; and if it be done properly, surely she will 
 have enough to do it is at least one-half the business of life. 
 But at present it is not done. If she will do this well, men 
 being exonerated from taking their turn at child-bearing, she 
 may well be released from all harder work, whether of mind 
 or body. Let us consider each of these points. By feeding 
 us is not meant earning our bread, but cooking it. What- 
 ever it may suit transcendental young ladies to say, gastronomy 
 is of far more importance to us than astronomy ; and what- 
 ever truth may be found in astrology, the stars have less 
 influence upon us than our daily pudding. Cooking is a 
 science, and ought to be treated as such as much so as 
 chemistry. It has been said that if a man drinks beer he 
 thinks beer ; and whether this be true or not, we do know that 
 different meats and drinks affect the mind as well as the body 
 differently, and we ought to be fed according to the require- 
 ments of our systems. We change not with " the breezy call 
 of incense breathing morn," or " still evening" and "twilight 
 grey," so much as with our dietary and the state of our 
 digestions, and moral conduct at present has more to do with 
 eating and drinking than with principle ; for as Dr. Reid says, 
 " He whose disposition to goodness can resist the influence 
 of dyspepsia, and whose career of philanthropy is not liable 
 to be checked by an obstruction in the hepatic organs, may 
 boast of much deeper and firmer virtue than falls to the
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 429 
 
 ordinary lot of human nature." We have much fallen away 
 since the days of our great-grandmothers, who considered 
 attention to these things among their daily duties ; but now a 
 woman of the lower class has no knowledge to guide either her 
 choice of food, or economy in preparing it, and women of the 
 upper class consider such knowledge beneath them. There is 
 not a single change which takes place in the preparation of our 
 food, the rationale of which is understood ; and cooking, the 
 most important of all departments of science, is a series of 
 Mrs. Kitchener's and Mrs. Glasse's old woman's tales, and the 
 purest empiricism. Here, then, is a department of science, at 
 present almost untrodden, open to women. I do not mean to 
 say that they must all turn cooks, but all ought to understand 
 the Chemistry of Food and the Science of Gastronomy and 
 good digestion. 
 
 Again, the departments of nursing and early education 
 belong alone to women, and these cannot go on properly with 
 any employment away from home. Probably the " Mem sana 
 in corpore sawo" depends more upon the first year's nursing 
 than upon all the other years put together. Whatever the 
 lowly may think who go out to work, or the high who transfer 
 the office to asses or other wet nurses, it is an office that can- 
 not be performed by deputy. The mother only can properly 
 nurse her own child, and her arms alone can furnish the cradle 
 it requires. The same may be said of the earliest years of 
 childhood. Women know how " to rear up children," but so 
 far only as instinct and tradition teach them, and all science 
 were useless without such instinct ; but they know nothing of 
 all the " wondrous powers that lie folded up" in the little 
 being they have brought into the world the unfolding and 
 developing of which depend principally upon themselves. 
 What do women know of Physiology and Psychology, and the 
 proper use, and therefore the abuse, of each bodily and mental 
 faculty ; of the education of the body and the education of 
 the feelings which especially belong to their department ? 
 
 It is woman also that must furnish nurses for the sick.
 
 430 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 But this also ought to be a scientific profession, and it is time 
 the race of Mrs. Gamps were only fossil specimens. Here a 
 medical education to enable the nurse the better to aid nature 
 and the doctor would be very useful, and some kind of medical 
 degree might attend it, without assuming the masculine M.D., 
 and such qualified practitioners might perhaps better " minister 
 to the necessities of delicate young womanhood" than the other 
 sex. Nursing is peculiarly a woman's element, and in the 
 arrest of disease as much perhaps depends upon good nursing 
 as upon the physician. 
 
 " Doctoring is one of the ( rights of women,' which albeit 
 theoretically denied is practically conceded so universally that 
 it is probable that all the M.D.'s in England, with the apothe- 
 caries to boot, do not order more drugs than are yearly 
 * exhibited' by their unlicensed female domestic rivals. It is 
 not a question whether such a state of things be desirable ; it 
 exists, and no legislation can alter it. The two differences 
 between the authorised doctors and unauthorised doctoresses 
 are simply these that the first are paid and the second unpaid 
 for their services, and the first have some scientific knowledge 
 and the second none at all. 
 
 "As we have said, men and women will go continually to 
 women for medical advice in all those thousand contingencies 
 and minor maladies out of which three-fourths of the mortal 
 diseases of humanity arise. There is no use scolding, and 
 saying they ought to go to the apothecary or the M.D. People 
 will not do so, least of all will delicate women do so when it is 
 possible to avoid it. The only question is, whether the advice 
 which in any case they will get from a woman will be good 
 advice or bad advice advice founded on some scientific know- 
 ledge, or advice derived from the wildest empiricism and 
 crassest ignorance."* 
 
 Women should clothe us, or at least their own sex and 
 children. Women are no longer spinsters, not even the 
 
 * " What shall we do with our Old Maids ?" by Miss F. P. Cobbe. Fraser, 
 November, 1862.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 431 
 
 unmarried. The time was when the spinning and weaving of 
 sheets, shirts, and broad cloth were done at home ; but now 
 this is done by the steam-engine. A man by the aid of steam 
 and machinery can do 200 times the work his wife formerly 
 did ; and surely the amount of increased production ought to 
 have enabled him to keep his wife and children without their 
 being obliged to add to the weekly income ; and so it un- 
 doubtedly would have done if a National System had obliged 
 the father to send his children to School till the time the boys 
 should be apprenticed to skilled labour, and the girls consigned 
 to the mother's care to be instructed in woman's work.* The 
 wife would thus have found quite enough to do without work- 
 ing at a trade. But our industrial system has now absorbed a 
 large portion of both wife and children, and to retrace our steps 
 will be very difficult. But if machinery now does the spinning 
 and sewing, it was thus intended to release women to some 
 higher occupation. Let them, then, spin the clothing for the 
 mind. To the man belongs strength to the woman delicacy of 
 perception and sensitiveness : her spring of mind is more highly 
 tempered, and vibrates to the slightest touch and to the music 
 of the spheres. Her instincts may be trusted her reason not. 
 The most beautiful thing in creation herself, it is her place to 
 beautify all around to add the ideal to the real. To her, 
 then, particularly belongs the Art of Living. 
 
 The Art of Living is the most important department in life, 
 and it is the least understood. To the strength of man belongs 
 Production the transforming the rough and raw material into 
 all the world requires. To the woman belongs the ordering 
 and administering of these things, so as to produce the greatest 
 economy and the largest amount of enjoyment at home. If the 
 wife of a poor man understood this, it would save him much 
 more than he now gets by her earnings either away from home 
 or at home. At present she does not know how to buy food 
 economically, or to cook it, or to cut out clothes, or to nurse 
 
 * Women cannot be brought up to trades, where highly skilled labour 
 is required, without a long apprenticeship, and surely this would be lost 
 labour in at least three cases out of four.
 
 432 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 and attend to children's complaints, or to do anything else that 
 shows she understands the art of living happily and economi- 
 cally. In the higher classes, if this were understood, it would 
 banish at once the present expensive style of living that is the 
 curse of English society, and all the snobbery that belongs to 
 it; and instead of a heavy, dead, cumbrous, enervating, 
 stifling luxury, we should have beauty and grace, and poetry 
 and the fine arts, and whatever should bring vividly before the 
 mind all that was best worth remembering in the past, or look- 
 ing forward to in the future. When women understand the 
 art of living, she will be able to make a heaven of home upon 
 a third of what it now requires to support our present costly 
 conventionalism. In thus advocating the domestic employ- 
 ment of women, we by no means advocate their dependence 
 upon men : what we contend for is, mutual dependence. To 
 the women we give the highest department of all, the Art of 
 Living of making life happy ; and to her also will generally 
 belong the next highest, the cultivation in man of the spiritual 
 and the aesthetic. The man is too much occupied with the real 
 to have time for the ideal, except through and by the aid of his 
 other half the woman. 
 
 Surely, then, there is enough for women to do to make her 
 properly independent in these departments, if the work is to 
 be done well, without her appearance on the stock- exchange, 
 or in the farmers' market, or in the merchants' desk, or 
 in the factory, or in competition with our parsons, lawyers, 
 or physicians. Here is half the work of the world, if it were 
 well done ; but it has never been well done. Women are not 
 educated to work well, and too many think it a degrading 
 occupation to work at all, at least at any useful occupation. Mrs. 
 Bodichon in her excellent pamphlet on " Woman and Work," 
 very truly says, " People are grasping after some grandiose 
 task, something ; worthy' of their powers, when the only 
 proof of capacity they give is to do small things badly." 
 
 But women, we are told, want work, and 6d. and Is. a-day 
 at shirt-making and slops is but poor pay ; but all unskilled
 
 SUMMAKY AND CONCLUSION. 433 
 
 labour is badly paid, and an agricultural labourer gets little 
 more. Let them qualify themselves to do their own work in 
 the way it ought to be done, and the supply, as the Economists 
 tell us, will beget the demand. 
 
 But the law, we are told, " has tied the hands" of one- 
 half of mankind, and condemned the larger number of women 
 to f{ inactivity and frivolity." We suspect there is considera- 
 able exaggeration here ; but if there are such unjust laws, they 
 should be repealed, and women be placed before the law upon 
 a perfect equality with men. Nature has legislated upon this 
 subject, and so distinctly that man may save himself the 
 trouble. A woman's proper work can be found only at home. 
 Napoleon said long since, " That the old systems of instruction 
 are worth nothing," and he asked what was wanting that the 
 youths of France be well educated, and Madame Campon 
 replied " Mothers ;" but mothers have not been supplied, for 
 where are women qualified to bring up their own children 
 properly, and able in the other departments we have mentioned, 
 to make a home what it ought to be ? If a man's wife goes 
 out to work, he has no home ; the house is dirty, the children 
 uncared for, there is no cookery, no comfort, and the public- 
 house parlour is the working man's home. The factory sys- 
 tem, and the way in which women are employed in England, 
 make a home impossible, and with it goes every social and 
 moral tie, and society falls to pieces. The only thing that 
 enables a working man to rise, and the foundation therefore of 
 all his other virtues, is providence, and it is in a home that 
 this must have its source ; it is there it first rises that is the 
 centre of all his thrift, around which everything accumulates. 
 But many women, we are told, have no homes, and we are 
 also informed (I do not know on what, authority) that 43 per 
 cent, of women in England and Wales at the age of 20 and 
 upwards, are unmarried. This is a large number, but many of 
 the unmarried possess peculiarities, natural or acquired, that it 
 is undesirable to transmit to posterity. If those who have no 
 homes would qualify themselves professionally to help those that 
 F F 2
 
 434 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 have, there would be no fear that their qualifications would 
 remain idle, be unappreciated, or badly paid. Let them im- 
 prove the quality of what they have to offer, and its importance 
 will be recognised, and it will be more in demand. This is the 
 way to make them really " independent," to make them of 
 more importance, and thus ensure to them more respect and 
 better treatment. But by bringing their labour into com- 
 petition with men in the already over-stocked labour market, 
 they drag the married women and children in also. Instead of 
 trying to introduce more women into trades and manufactures, 
 our efforts ought, I think, to be directed towards extricating 
 those who have already got themselves involved, not only with- 
 out any real increase of wages or other measurable advantage 
 to themselves, but to their positive injury ; for, as John 
 Stuart Mill truly says : " Ceteris paribus, those trades are by 
 far the worst paid in which the wife and children of the 
 artizan aid the work. The income which the habits of the class 
 demand, and down to which they are almost sure to multiply, 
 is made up, in those trades, by the earnings of the whole 
 family, while in others the same income must be obtained by 
 the labour of the man alone. It is even probable that the 
 collective earnings will amount to a smaller sum than those of 
 the man alone in other trades ; because the prudential restraint 
 on marriage is unusually weak when the only consequence 
 immediately felt is an improvement of circumstances, the joint 
 earnings of the two going further in their domestic economy 
 after marriage than before." 
 
 With half the work, then, that peculiarly belongs to women, 
 from constitution and circumstances, undone, and the other 
 half badly done, employment in trades, and manufactures, 
 and in professions, as is the present custom in France, would 
 be a step backwards in civilization, not forwards. 
 
 Man has no more at present found his place and position in 
 the world than woman ; and the civilization of the present day, 
 after all, is but a civilized barbarism. According to Carlyle,
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 435 
 
 " If you want to make sudden fortunes in it, and achieve the 
 temporary hallelujah of flunkeys for yourself, denouncing the 
 perennial esteem of wise men ; if you can believe that the chief 
 end of man is to collect about him a bigger heap of gold than 
 ever before, in a shorter time than ever before, you will find 
 it a most handy and every way furthersome blessed and 
 felicitous world. But for any other human aim, I think you 
 will find it not furthersome. If you in any way ask practi- 
 cally, How a noble life is to be led in it ? You will be lucky 
 if you get any creditable answer, or find any made road what- 
 ever. Alas, it is even so. Your heart's question, if it be of 
 that sort, most things and persons will answer with a Nonsense ! 
 Noble life is in Drury-lane, and wears yellow boots. You fool, 
 compose yourself to your pudding !" 
 
 Again. J. S. Mill says, " That entire unfixedness in the 
 social position of individuals that treading upon the heels of 
 one another that habitual dissatisfaction of each with the 
 position he occupies, and eager desire to push himself into the 
 next above it has not this become, and is it not becoming 
 more and more, an English characteristic ? In England, as 
 well as in America, it appears to foreigners, and even to 
 Englishmen recently returned from a foreign country, as if 
 everybody had but one wish to improve his condition, never 
 to enjoy it, as if no Englishman cared to cultivate either the 
 pleasures or the virtues corresponding to his station in society, 
 but solely to get out of it as quickly as possible ; or if that 
 cannot be done, and until it is clone, to seem to have got out 
 of it. The hypocrisy of luxury, as M. de Tocqueville calls 
 the maintaining an appearance beyond one's real expenditure, 
 he considers as a democratic peculiarity. It is surely an 
 English one." 
 
 Man's great aim should be, the predominance and habitual 
 activity of those feelings that peculiarly distinguish him as 
 man ; instead of which he seeks Wealth, and with it Power and 
 Distinction, and we have occasional glimpses only of higher 
 feelings and motives. A savage King visited a discovery ship
 
 436 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 in stark-naked majesty, with an old navy cocked hat on his 
 head, and a pair of tarnished epaulettes on his bare shoulders, 
 the gift of some previous European visitors. All the world is 
 now seeking distinction in the same way, only with more of 
 the same things fine clothes, a large house, many servants, 
 painted carriages, rich carpets, easy chairs, soft beds, rich 
 wines, costly banquets. Suppose even that we reach perfection 
 in this laudable " end and aim" of our existence, where shall 
 we ultimately arrive ? We might rival George the IV. per- 
 haps, who was the most perfect gentleman in Europe, as far 
 as such things could make him !* 
 
 According to Emerson, " We thus spend our incomes, for 
 paint and paper, and not for the things of a man. Our ex- 
 pense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we run in 
 debt ; 'tis not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not 
 worship, that costs so much. Why needs any man be rich ? 
 Why must he have horses, and fine garments, and handsome 
 apartments, and access to great houses and places of amuse- 
 ment? Only for want of thought. Once waken in him a 
 divine thought, and he flees into a solitary garden or garret to 
 enjoy it, and is richer with that dream than the fee of a country 
 would make him." "It is true," he says, " we dare not 
 trust our wit for making our house pleasant to our friends, and 
 so, we buy ice-creams." And again, " Parched corn eaten to- 
 day that I may have roast fowl to my dinner on Sunday, is a 
 baseness ; but parched corn and a house with one apartment, 
 that I may be free of all perturbations of mind, that I may be 
 serene and docile to what God shall speak, and girt and ready 
 for the lowest mission of knowledge or good will, is frugality 
 for gods and heroes." True freedom requires that we should 
 be unshackled in our bodily powers, in our affections, in our 
 
 * " But this George what was he ? I look through all his life, and recognize 
 but a bow and a griu. I try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, 
 padding, stays, a coat with frogs and fur collar, a star and blue ribbon, a 
 pocket-handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt's best nutty-brown 
 wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth, and a huge black stock, under-waistcoats, 
 and then more under-waistcoats, and then nothing." Thackeray.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 437 
 
 understanding, in our reason and will, that the highest powers 
 and influences of our nature may have full play ; and depend 
 upon it we are in the wrong path for this, and we have 
 become slaves to the very worst kind of "necessity," to the 
 hardest of all task-masters conventionalism. Like Gulliver, 
 the Lilliputians have tied us down with innumerable small 
 strings, and if we make any effort to free ourselves, they let 
 fly a perfect shower of their tiny arrows upon us. 
 
 What we have to seek is not wealth, and the bondage it 
 confers, but the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The 
 present slaving after wealth is but selling our souls to the devil 
 for what is falsely considered worldly prosperity. " All these 
 things will I give yon, if you will fall down and wor- 
 ship me/' and how many unconsciously do so, as every high 
 and noble and true human feeling is gradually obliterated 
 in the all-engrossing and all-absorbing pursuit ! Truly " how 
 hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven." As Mill tells us, " Capacity for the nobler feelings 
 is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only 
 by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance." Exclu- 
 sive attention to business or money-making, or to any passion 
 or sensual pursuit, absorbs all the nervous " force ;" and it is 
 difficult, if not impossible, to revive the esthetic and more 
 refined susceptibilities, when this has been long continued. 
 Considering the sustained attention that the daily calling 
 requires in the great majority, to maintain the due balance is 
 almost impossible ; still a complete character developed on all 
 sides is what we have to aim at. The too great predominance 
 of the assthetic would unfit us for the commoner and coarser 
 duties of life : and yet constant activity, steady, habitual, 
 persevering occupation in the path of duty,* is the secret of 
 
 * "We are made up of activities nine parts and passivities one being capa- 
 ble of only one part in pleasure to nine parts in duty ; and unless we prey 
 upon something external, internal cravings will prey upon us. In other words, 
 the satisfaction of active and benevolent exertions is almost inexhaustible; 
 whereas pleasui'es cloy, and by repetition souring, turn to pain. Labour is the 
 doom of all. You may avoid the manual, but you increase the mental. You 
 may avoid the burden of the shoulders, but you increase the burden of the 
 heart and spirits." " Elkerton Rectory," by the Rev. James Pycroft, p 415.
 
 438 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 happiness. We all desire success, and that is dependent upon 
 strenuous effort, and effort upon mental training. No kind of 
 excellence is easy of attainment. Then 
 
 " Into life's goblet freely press, 
 The leaves that give it bitterness ;" 
 
 and let us not forget in this conduct of ourselves, that " There 
 are no birds in last year's nests." We have our Spring, Sum- 
 mer, Autumn, and Winter, and when we have arrived at the 
 Autumn or Winter of life, we cannot go back to Spring or 
 Summer, as too many fondly hope to do who spend all their 
 early life in making a fortune ; putting off the enjoyment of it 
 till their old age. They find too late that the tastes and pur- 
 suits that belonged to their youth cannot be renewed. 
 
 The faculties have each a distinct and diverse action upon 
 the body and health. The predominant action of the moral 
 and aesthetic feelings produces an internal sunshine which 
 adverse circumstances can scarcely cloud : 
 
 " What nothing earthly gives, or can destroy, 
 The soul's calm sunshine and the heartfelt joy," 
 
 is the immediate result. It : 
 
 " Lays the rough path of peevish nature even ; 
 And opens in each heart a little heav'n." 
 
 As our feelings increase in strength with exercise, this state 
 ought to become habitual as we grow in years, replacing 
 the more active pleasures of youth. On the other hand, the 
 objects of the propensities fail as we grow older, and if we 
 have trusted to them, we have the full sense that " all is 
 vanity and vexation of spirit." The abuse of the propensities, 
 or these feelings in excess, constitute envy, hatred, malice, 
 jealousy, anger, fear; and all act injuriously on the bodily 
 system. Pale with fear, sick with love, bowels of com- 
 passion, &c., are no metaphors, but indicate the different ways 
 in which the body is affected. It is better not to " bottle up" 
 such feelings, but to let them off as harmlessly as possible; as 
 the Apostle says, " Be ye angry, but sin not." We should dis- 
 charge our anger and grief in talk or muscular exercise, or else
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 439 
 
 they cloud the mind, and keep out mental sunshine for hours. 
 As Jean Paul Richter says, " for a little indignation, ' The 
 devil!' or ' All the devils !' is sufficient; but for the splenetic 
 fever of anger, I would prescribe, ( Satan and his hellish 
 grandmother !' and go on increasing the power of the remedy 
 by the addition of a little ' thunder' and ' blasting,' since the 
 healing power of the electric fluid is so well known." 
 
 Each feeling or set of feelings has its natural term of 
 greatest activity, the propensities in early life, the sentiments 
 at its close. Thus it has been beautifully said, " Love is the 
 shadow of the morning, which decreases as the day advances : 
 friendship on the contrary, is the shadow of the evening, which 
 strengthens with the setting sun of life." With respect to the 
 sentiment of love which moralists so much exalt, to the exclu- 
 sion almost of all others, we must not forget that we are as 
 much called upon to hate the evil as to love the good, and that 
 probably the former feeling played the more useful part in the 
 earlier ages of the world ; again, also, we must not forget that 
 love, hate, faith, belief, are no more voluntary than the tooth- 
 ache is ; they are not therefore the proper subjects of com- 
 mand. We cannot love that which appears hateful, or hate 
 that which appears loveable, or believe that which appears 
 incredible. We are commanded to love God and our neigh- 
 bour, but we cannot love God if his character is drawn only to 
 excite fear, nor our neighbour from a sense of duty. He must 
 be loveable if we are to love him. Consequently, as Mr. H. J. 
 Slack says, "A mere revulsion from that which is wrong 
 would never make a fine people ; and the scarecrow method of 
 frightening folks from sin is in every way below the natural 
 method of making them love goodness and virtue."* 
 
 Happiness is about equally dependent upon our own selves 
 and external circumstances, and attends the legitimate exercise 
 of every mental function, both in rich and poor. Our true 
 interest then is to maintain the due balance between them, and 
 to keep all our faculties in exercise with as little labour and 
 
 * "Philosophy of Progress in Human Affairs," p. 197.
 
 440 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 trouble as possible. If we duly cultivate the subjective 
 elements of our nature, we may well do without the costly 
 objective, for our surroundings are felt according to the quali- 
 ties which we, not they, possess, and the most essential elements 
 of happiness, like air and water and sunshine, are God's free 
 gifts.* We may be satisfied with less than " society" at present 
 considers a respectable position ; we could do even without 
 " society" itself by the aid of daily intercourse in our libraries 
 with the great and good of all past ages. We must learn to 
 look up to worth rather than to wealth, and to choose our 
 acquaintance and friends from their talent and refinement 
 and sympathy with our higher qualities, and not for their mere 
 social status. In fact, we must emancipate ourselves from the 
 slavery of conventionalism, and we may then begin to live a 
 really honest life, in harmony with the circumstances requisite 
 for the development and exercise of our best feelings. In this 
 
 * " There was, and we believe still is, in the Massachusetts Institution for 
 the blind, an inmate, Laura Bridgeman, who has been blind, deaf, and dumb, 
 since she was about a year old. Her only knowledge from without must 
 accordingly have been communicated through the sense of touch and taste. 
 Our information as to her natural condition is defective ; but after some years' 
 training she is delineated as ' much improved in personal appearance as well 
 as in intellect ; her countenance beams with intelligence, she is always active 
 at study, work, or play, she never repines, and most of her time is gay and 
 frolicsome. She is now very expert with her needle, she knits very easily, 
 
 and can make twine bags, and various fancy articles very prettily 
 
 She is very docile, has a quick sense of propriety, dresses herself with great 
 neatness, and is always correct iu her deportment. She can spoak by means 
 of the manual alphabet with great facility and rapidity ; her vocabulary com- 
 prehends the names of all common objects ; she uses adjectives expressive of 
 positive qualities, such as hard, soft, sweet, sour ; verbs expressive of action, 
 such as give, take, ride, run, in the present, past, and future tenses. She 
 connects adjectives and nouns to express their qualities ; she introduces 
 verbs into sentences and connects them by conjunctions, &c.' In short, it 
 would be difficult to find a child in possession of all her senses and the ad- 
 vantages that wealth and parental love can bestow, who is more contented 
 and cheerful, or to whom existence seems a greater blessing than it does to 
 this bereaved creature, for whom the sun has no light, the air no sound, and 
 the flowers no colour nor smell." Psychological Journal, Jan., 1863, p. 70. 
 This case admirably illustrates how much depends upon ourselves, and how 
 little upon the objects of sense. It also furnishes an excellent lesson upon the 
 innate nature of the mental faculties, and how little is required to bring them 
 into healthy and joyous activity.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 441 
 
 alone is true freedom, this alone will give us power ." to think 
 or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the pre- 
 ference or direction of our own mind :" and as mind is mani- 
 fested only under certain conditions of body, we must secure 
 as much as may be the perfection of the instrument, and keep it 
 tuned in harmony to itself and all things around us : we must 
 keep it out of the sphere of little troubles, and engaged as much 
 as possible on great, or at least, unselfish objects, if only in 
 the search for one single truth, and in making it a little more 
 bright for the world's cognizance so that not a string shall jar 
 discordantly, and then 
 
 " The meanest floweret of the vale, 
 The simplest note that swells the gale, 
 The common sun, the air, the skies, 
 To us are opening Paradise." 
 
 We must not conclude without considering what bearing 
 the principles we have laid down and applied to our know- 
 ledge of man, have also on our knowledge of God to Deism 
 or Theism. It is impossible to accept contradictions, such as 
 the doctrines of Necessity and Free-will, or the doctrine that 
 God is all in all, and man and nature something besides. 
 Neither is it necessary that such contradictions should be 
 held, except to retain ancient superstitions in Ethics and 
 Theology, which fall to the ground immediately we dare to be 
 true to ourselves and to the supreme reason given us for our 
 guidance. We have previously seen, then, that 
 
 " Nothing comes to pass without a cause. What is self- 
 existent, must be from Eternity, and must be unchangeable ; 
 but as to all things that begin to be, they are not self-existent, 
 and therefore must have some foundation of their existence 
 without themselves." 
 G G 2
 
 442 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 " Force can neither come into existence nor cease to exist. 
 Each manifestation of force can be interpreted only as the effect 
 of some antecedent force ; no matter whether it be an inorganic 
 action, or animal movement, a thought, or a feeling. Either 
 this must be conceded, or else it must be asserted that our 
 successive states of consciousness are self-created." 
 
 " When we view the world as one universal effect, we are 
 at once led to the contemplation of a Universal Divine Agency. 
 Does not the Infinite act on every atom ? * * God never 
 delegates His power : He cannot transfer divinity to a sub- 
 stance : there is no power therefore separated from Himself." 
 
 The Great First Cause mnst, therefore, be equally the Great 
 Last Cause of all things the only real and efficient power in 
 the universe. To be logically consistent, we must come to the 
 conviction that God does everything or nothing. There is no 
 such thing as Nature and God all is God. Individuality, or 
 anything separate from Him, is a mode of thought, and has no 
 real existence ; and this conclusion that man is nothing God 
 is all, is no new doctrine, only it has never been logically and 
 consistently carried out. 
 
 " Those modes of the Unknowable which we call motion, 
 heat, light, chemical affinity, &c., are alike transformable into 
 each other, and into those modes of the Unknowable which we 
 distinguish as sensation, emotion, thought; these, in their turns, 
 being directly or indirectly re-transformable into the original 
 shapes." And " these as they change, are but the varied 
 God." 
 
 " All these effects, which we commonly say are the effects of 
 the natural powers of matter and laws of motion, of gravitation, 
 attraction, and the like, are indeed (if we speak strictly and 
 properly,) the effects of God acting upon matter continually 
 and every moment" 41 
 
 " He is the universal Being, of which all things are the 
 manifestations. Every thing is a mode of God's attribute of 
 extension ; every thought, wish, or feeling, is a mode of His 
 
 * Dr. Samuel Clarke's Works, vol. 2, p. 698, folio.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 443 
 
 attribute of Thought." The whole sensitive existence is but 
 " the innumerable individual eyes with which the Infinite World 
 Spirit beholds Himself." In the constancy of what we call the 
 laws of nature, we satisfy ourselves with second causes, and 
 cease to recognize their all-sustaining source. What we call 
 the qualities or properties of matter, are mere force or power, 
 and the existence of matter itself is assumed on the supposition 
 that there must be something to which those qualities pertain 
 or belong ; but we may do without this assumption altogether, 
 if the above view be correct, for the qualities are qualities not 
 of matter, but of God. What we call " ultimate atoms," and 
 their extraordinary tendencies, may as well be mere laws of 
 force as of matter. There cannot be God and matter, for 
 that which is Infinite can have no limitation ; we cannot 
 bound or limit the infinite by anything without or beyond itself; 
 God must be all in all. No doubt we shall be accused in this 
 work of materialistic tendencies, and yet we find no room for 
 matter at all : its existence is a mere hypothesis which we can 
 do as well without, as it is not at all a necessary link in the 
 chain of sequences. We find only force or power, and that 
 not separate from its source, or from God. The only reality 
 we find underlying all things, is the Great Unknown. 
 
 " There lives and works 
 A soul in all things, and that soul is God ." COWPER. 
 
 We have seen that the world is created within our own 
 minds. The starry heavens, the blue canopy, the boundless 
 ocean, the beauties of sunshine and of the green earth, are 
 the result of some unknown cause without us, which we call 
 matter, but it is thus that God mirrors Himself within us a 
 much more perfect representation than any man creates after 
 his own image. 
 
 We thus regard the universe as the " manifestation of some 
 transcendent life, to which our separate individual life is 
 related :" and that as with it we have been from Eternity, to 
 Eternity we must remain. From God we came, and when 
 the prism of our present individuality is broken, to God we
 
 444 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 must return. Our senses give us but a glimpse of that " vast 
 chain of being! which with God began." Philosophers tell us 
 that in what appears solid, inert matter to us, the ultimate 
 atoms are separate from each other, and revolve in constant 
 motion round a centre, like our solar system, and it was Sir 
 Isaac Newton's opinion that that solar universe might present, 
 to some sense, an appearance like that which solids present to 
 us, for that the distances of the stars from each other are 
 probably not greater in proportion than the atoms of what we 
 call solid matter. As far as we can trace it, the same law, the 
 same force, pervades the whole. The universe is one : from 
 an atom to a world, from the animalcule, of which 500 
 millions are contained in a single drop of water, to the 
 " sensitive" of Reichenbach, upon whom separate stars 
 exercised a distinctly different influence. 
 
 " To Him no high, no low, no great, no small." 
 
 The differences that we make in that respect are purely sub- 
 jective, the result entirely of our own form of intelligence. It 
 is true we have nothing before us but individual phenomena ; 
 " but examine all these individual phenomena, and you will 
 find that each one exists only as a part of some whole ; you 
 will find that the whole is as necessary to the parts, as the 
 parts to the whole ; and it is this unity that brings us to the 
 great truth, that a Divine Idea lies at the origin of all 
 things."* 
 
 " The true doctrine of Omnipresence is," as Emerson says, 
 " that God re-appears in all His parts in every moss and cob- 
 web : thus the universe is alive. Everything in nature con- 
 tains all the powers of nature." All the phenomena of the 
 universe have also their counterpart in man's organization. As 
 the ancients held, "he is microcosmos, an abstract or model 
 of the world." We have the most varied mechanical, and the 
 most delicate chemical action, incessant circulating fluids, life, 
 sense, and feeling ; and thought governing the whole, like the 
 Great Soul of Nature. Thus did God make man in His own 
 * Thorndale, p. 416.
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 445 
 
 image, for it is as impossible to disconnect God from the 
 material living universe, as it is to disconnect the soul from 
 the material living body. All we see is but the vesture of 
 God, and what we call laws of Nature are attributes of Deity. 
 And now it may be asked, are we to rest here ? What of 
 Religion ? And it would appear that the principles laid down 
 do not tend to separate us from Him, but rather to bring Him 
 nearer to us ; for " we are indeed the offspring of God," direct 
 and immediate, and inseparable from Him. " In Him only 
 do we live, and move, and have our being," and " we feel 
 within ourselves His energy divine." We cannot speak too 
 modestly where the order of nature being all we can know 
 we must feel at every step beyond our depth, and where the 
 most we can say is that this or that view appears to us the more 
 probable. It is true we have little sympathy with that phase 
 of Christianity which expresses itself in the cry of " Save your 
 souls ; each man his own dirty soul for himself," which Kingsley 
 says is the cry of modern Christendom ; or with the childish 
 anthropomorphite view by which man creates God, instead of 
 God man making a sort of Jupiter Tonans in human linea- 
 ments, and invested with human passions ; but we feel ourselves 
 a part 
 
 "Of that stupendous whole, 
 Whose body nature is, aiid God the Soul." 
 
 But where so great a mystery remains still unveiled, we 
 feel that the Poets are the best theologians, and best express 
 our creed. Accordingly we say with them : 
 
 " I cannot go 
 
 Where universal love not smiles around, 
 Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns ; 
 From seeming evil still educing good, 
 And better thence again, and better still, 
 In infinite progression." THOMSON. 
 
 " What prodigies can power divine perform, 
 More grand than it produces every year, 
 And all in sight of inattentive man ? 
 Familiar with the effect, we slight the cause ;
 
 446 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 And in the constancy of nature's course, 
 
 And regular return of genial months, 
 
 And renovation of a faded world, 
 
 See nought to wonder at. * * 
 
 All we behold is miracle ; but, seen 
 
 So duly, all is miracle in vain. * * 
 
 From dearth to plenty, and from death to life, 
 
 Is Nature's progress when she lectures man 
 
 In heavenly truth ; evincing, as she makes 
 
 The grand transition, that there lives and works 
 
 A soul in all things, and that soul is God. 
 
 The beauties of the wilderness are His 
 
 That make so gay the solitary place 
 
 Where no eye sees them. And the fairer forms, 
 
 That cultivation glories in, are His. 
 
 He sets the bright procession on its way, 
 
 And marshals all the order of the year ; 
 
 He marks the bounds which Winter may not pass, 
 
 And blunts his pointed fury ; in its case, 
 
 Russet and rude, folds up the tender germ, 
 
 Uninjured, with inimitable art ; 
 
 And ere one flowery season fades and dies, 
 
 Designs the blooming wonders of the next." 
 
 COWPER Task: 6th Book. 
 
 " Cease, then, nor order, imperfection name : 
 Our proper bliss depends on what we blame. 
 SUBMIT. In this or any other sphere, 
 Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear : 
 SAFE in the hand of one disposing Pow'r, 
 Or in the natal, or the mortal hour. 
 All nature is but art, unknown to thee ; 
 All chance, direction, which thou canst not see ; 
 All discord, harmony, not understood ; 
 All partial evil, universal good." POPE. 
 
 HERALD PRINTING OFFICE, HERTFORD-STREET, COVENTRY"
 
 THfi 
 
 EDUCATION OF THE FEELINGS 
 AND AFFECTIONS. 
 
 " All declare 
 
 For what the eternal Maker has ordain'd 
 The poweis of mau." AKENSIDE. 
 
 THIRD EDITION. 
 
 EXTRACT FROM PREFACE. 
 
 " EDUCATION has been correctly defined as the developing and perfecting of 
 all our faculties. Without a definite and systematic knowledge of the human 
 faculties, education in this sense is evidently impossible, and the time has 
 arrived when, as a science, it must be inseparably blended with mental 
 philosophy. Vague generalities ought no longer to be tolerated, but we ought 
 to be able to state exactly what we wish to do what we would have or not 
 have: what feelings or intellectual faculties are in individual cases weak and 
 require cherishing ; what are too strong and require repressing ; and what 
 feelings especially we should wish to predominate in the character. The 
 knowledge to guide us in these particulars is at present very vague and un- 
 satisfactory, and based more upon custom and tradition and 'old woman's 
 tales' than upon science. It is the aim of this work to givo a more systematic 
 direction to our inquiries in this department, and we have to ask the indul- 
 gence of our readers f >r the dry nomenclature which always attends, more or 
 less, on attempts at classiBcation. * * * In the course of our own early 
 training, our immature powers were incapable of reflecting upon the nature 
 of the different feelings which influenced us; but now when we have to direct 
 others, we feel that a correct analysis of the heart is necessary. The object of 
 this present edition is not so much to assist in ttie direct education of children, 
 as in this second education of ourselves ; to aid self-knowledge and self- 
 development : or, if it were not thought too ambitious, we might say, that 
 we aim at supplying a new system of moral philosophy, based upon an 
 analysis of the use and abuse of each faculty, and its direction to its proper 
 and legitimate objects. 
 
 " If we would ascertain the purposes for which God h*s formed us, we 
 must study the nature of the faculties with which He has eudowe 1 us, and 
 make use of each faculty in the direction for which its nature shows it was 
 evidently intended." 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN. AND ROBERTS. 
 1860.
 
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 University of California 
 
 SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 Return this material to the library 
 
 from which it was borrowed. 
 
 REG-D UWJKl 
 
 JAN 15 1990 
 FEB 6 1991 
 
 MAR 2 2 1999 
 
 
 
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 MAR 1 5 2005 
 
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