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 PHILOSOPHICAL WOEKS 
 
 HON. D.C.L. OXON. 
 
 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BISHOP BERKELEY. 
 With Prefaces and Annotations, and an Account of his Life. 
 Four vols. 8vo. Revised Edition. Clarendon Press. 2, 18s. 
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 posed this edition of Berkeley's Works, and it is dilticult to conceive that idea 
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 credit alike on the University Press of Oxford and on the University of Edinburgh." 
 Edi'/iJjurgh Review, 
 
 SELECTIONS FROM BERKELEY. Witli an Introduction 
 and Notes. For the use of Students in the Universities. One 
 vol. crown 8vo. Clarendon Press. 7s. 6d. 
 
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 much care and acuteness, so much candour and familiarity with metaphysical 
 speculations, and such a capacity for presenting the most abstruse questions in 
 language which is never pedantic, but always directly and luminously expressive oi 
 the subject under discussion, as to render the present volume a typical specimen 
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 BERKELEY. "Philosophical Classics for English Readers." 
 
 New Edition. W. Black wood & Sons. Crown 8vo, Is. 
 " If all volumes of philosophical classics were, like this, literature would n 
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 STANDING. Annotated ; with Prolegomena, biographical, 
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 ,1, 12s. 
 
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 Ferrier. Fcap., Is. (id. 
 
 "An expert's work of the best kind." G'uartlian. 
 
 PHILOSOPHY OE THEISM. Gilford Lectures delivered 
 before the University of Edinburgh in 1894-00. A New 
 Edition. One vol. demy 8vo. W. Blackwood & Sons. 6s. (>d. 
 net. 
 
 "A notable contribution to philosophical and religious thought." (Quarterly 
 Review.
 
 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA
 
 BIOGBAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC! 
 
 A RETROSPECT 
 
 BY 
 
 FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY ; 
 
 HON. D.C.L. (OXFORD), 
 
 HON. LL.D. (GLASG. & EDIX.) LITT.D. (DUBLIN); 
 
 PROFESSOR (EMERITUS) OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS, 
 
 AND FORMERLY GIFFORD LECTURER ON NATURAL THEOLOGY. 
 
 IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 
 
 UT HORA, SIC VITA 
 
 SECOND EDITION 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 MCMV 
 
 All Rights reseri-ed
 
 7, 
 
 , rn 
 
 10 
 
 WIFE, 
 
 MY CONSTANT LOVING SUPPORT 
 
 FOR 
 FIFTY-FOUR YEARS.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IT may appear to some that in the following pages 
 the Biographia is too prominent, to others that 
 the Philosophia is in excess, and perhaps a larger 
 number may think that there is too much of both. 
 
 When I remembered how the modesty of David 
 Hume confined his narrative of the events of his 
 own really memorable life within about a dozen 
 pages, I was ready to agree with the first of these 
 opinions, and to resolve that this Retrospect 
 should remain unpublished. But I reflected that 
 here the Biographia was introduced for the sake 
 of Philosophia, so that it was not a story of 
 personal incidents for their own sake. The narra- 
 tive is intended partly to infuse some familiar 
 human interest into this account of a philosophical 
 endeavour to deal with the riddle of the Uni- 
 verse ; and partly to show how racial, educational, 
 and social influences, as well as changing phases of 
 thought and national sentiment, in the last eighty 
 years of the nineteenth century, have tended to
 
 Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 direct the issue of that intellectual endeavour. 
 Besides, as my former publications have been 
 largely fragmentary, it seemed that their latent 
 unity and general drift might become more ap- 
 parent through a medium which, I fear after all, 
 is too autobiographical. 
 
 The second, fourth, fifth, and eighth chapters 
 are chiefly philosophical : the rationale of theistic 
 faith and hope, in which the preceding chapters 
 converge, is presented in outline in the eighth. 
 The other chapters are more mixed. In the first 
 and seventh I have perhaps unduly indulged 
 in local and personal recollections which might 
 have been multiplied to an indefinite extent. 
 In the third chapter I was led to approach two 
 ecclesiastical revolutions, each of commanding 
 interest in the recent church history of Britain, 
 and which in some respects resemble one another 
 the Oxford Movement, inspired by Newman, 
 which still agitates the ancient historic Church 
 of England, and the Edinburgh Movement, in- 
 spired by Chalmers, which conducted to eccle- 
 siastical disruption in Scotland. 
 
 I have to thank Professor Pringle-Pattison, my 
 successor in the Chair of Hamilton, for his kindness 
 in reading the proofs, and for useful suggestions. 
 
 GORTON, HAWTHORNDKX, March 1904.
 
 PREFATORY NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 
 
 I AVAIL myself of a second edition of the ' Bio- 
 graphia' to offer thanks for sympathetic criticism 
 given to the philosophy of theistic faith in which 
 it issues. According to this philosophy, common- 
 sense experience and human science (either con- 
 sciously or tacitly) presuppose a moral or religious 
 final conception of the universe of things and 
 persons in which we participate with all that this 
 conception is found by reflection to involve in its 
 development through the ages ; so that inevitable 
 theistic faith, instead of contradicting the physical 
 order of things, is really its reasonable foundation. 
 How alien soever man may at present be from 
 his divine ideal, the truth that we have our 
 personal being in a universe eternally rooted in 
 Active Eeason or Omnipotent Goodness is thus 
 the lesson at once of religion and philosophy. 
 
 March 1905.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 IN THE LAXD OF LORXE : EARLY MEMORIES. 
 
 1819-1833. 
 
 PACK 
 
 Some awakening questions in boyhood In what, and why, 
 am I? Early environment at Ardchattan Genealogical 
 Frasers of Strichen Croy and Culloden Campbells of 
 Barcaldine and Glenure Barcaldine Castle Murder of 
 my great-granduncle, Colin Campbell of Glenure, in 1752 
 'Allan Breck' and ' Kidnapped' A metaphysical 
 Colin Campbell of Achnaba A centenarian at Gallanach 
 Ardchattan manse family My mother and Church 
 of England Evangelicalism Visit to Strathnairn in 1824 
 Johnson and Boswell at Cawdor manse Miss Macaulay 
 and her nephew "Tom" The "Comet" The sultry 
 summer of 1826 Dunollie and the lords of Lome 
 General Campbell of Lochnell Ardchattan parish school 
 in 1827 and Archibald MacCallum Bishop Corrie Sir 
 Colquhoun Grant My desultory education 'Edinburgh 
 Evening Courant' Glasgow in 1829 and the Catholic 
 Relief Bill Parliamentary Reform and Lord John 
 Russell Favourite books Sir Walter Scott interdicted 
 My metaphysical aunt and John Locke Robert Owen 
 Sir Guy Campbell Ardchattan Priory and the Camp- 
 bells of Ardchattan Laurence Dundas Campbell and 
 " Junius " Inverawe and its legends Bonawe and William 
 Wordsworth Some Lome clergymen John Macleod 
 Campbell Gaelic language and literature and the Gael 
 The Land of Lome in the olden time 1
 
 X CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEE II. 
 
 IN EDINBURGH : THE ENIGMA OF THE UNIVERSE. 
 1833-1842. 
 
 My tutor in 1833 At Glasgow College Professors William 
 Ramsay, Sir Daniel Sanclford, and James Mylne Edin- 
 burgh in 1836 Professor Pillans David Ritchie and 
 Philosophy in 1835 " Christopher North " Thomas 
 Brown on "Cause and Effect" What is meant by "a 
 cause " ? - David Hume in intellectual perplexity 
 Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant Sir William Hamilton in 
 1838 His select class for young metaphysicians His re- 
 unions at 11 Manor Place- J. W. Sernple and J. F. 
 Ferrier Theories of external Perception and of active 
 Causation Commencement of theological studies Hamil- 
 ton and Chalmers Theism of Chalmers Bishop Butler 
 Jonathan Edwards and Universal Necessity What is 
 Death? "Obstinate questionings" German Idealism 
 Edinburgh College companionship John Cairns, James 
 Walker, and David Masson Essay on "Toleration" in 
 1841 , 38 
 
 CHAPTER, III. 
 
 AN ECCLESIASTICAL DIGRESSION. 
 
 1842-1816. 
 
 Church History and Doctor Welsh The Oxford Movement 
 and Anglo-Catholicism The ' Record ' newspaper The 
 Historic Church-Catholic Studies in Thomas of Aquin, 
 Pascal, and Fenelon Ecclesiastical Infallibility Biblical 
 Infallibility Hooker and the Puritans London visited 
 in 1842 House of Commons Oxford and Newman 
 Belgium, the Rhine, and Rotterdam Ecclesiastical war 
 in Scotland " Voluntaries " and national secularisation 
 Chalmers on Church Establishment in divided Christ-
 
 CONTENTS. XI 
 
 endom Ecclesiastical freedom in the national Estab- 
 lishmentThe "Veto" Act of the Church Viscount 
 Melbourne Sir William Hamilton on "Non-Intrusion" 
 Two Ecclesiastical Ideals in collision in Scotland Dis- 
 ruption in 1843 Cramond and Arthur Collier At Steeple 
 Langford in 1903 Essay on "Leibniz" in 1846 Grantoii 
 House Notable persons Patrick MacDougall Welsh, 
 Candlish, and Guthrie Sir David Brewster Hugh Miller 
 Lord Jeffrey John Stuart Blackie on "a Free Univer- 
 sity " Logic Chair in New College Tour in France and 
 England in 1846 . . . . .83 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 RETURN TO PHILOSOPHY : ' NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.' 
 
 1846-1856. 
 
 My new environment " A Scottish Pascal " John Veitch, 
 Alexander Balmain Bruce, and Alexander Nicolson 
 Hamilton's "Eeid" in 1846 Chalmers, Morell, and Ger- 
 man Pantheism Death of Chalmers in 1847 Cambridge 
 and Bath in 1848 Hamilton's reunions at 16 Great King 
 Street Doctor Logan and Lord Acton Mill's ' Logic ' 
 Comte's ' Philosophic Positive ' Essay on Hamilton's 
 "Eeid" in 1848 Studies in Aristotle's 'Organon' and 
 the ' Novum Organum ' Editorship of ' North British 
 Review ' in 1850 A summer in England F. D. Maurice, 
 Charles Kingsley, and A. P. Stanley Carlyle and Mill 
 Oxford and Herstmonceaux Some North British Re- 
 viewers Essay on Hamilton's 'Discussions' in 1852 
 Theistic causation Essay on ' The Insoluble Problem ' 
 in 1854 Is God in any way knowable by man ? Essay 
 on ' Augustinianism,' or the final Destiny of Men, in 1855 
 Essay on Ferrier's 'Metaphysics' in 1855 Principal 
 William Cunningham versus Isaac Taylor and the ' North 
 British Review' Scottish ecclesiastical theology in the 
 early and the latter part of the nineteenth century Death 
 of Sir William Hamilton in 1856 Contest for the vacant 
 Chair . 127
 
 Xll CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 IN THE CHAIR OF HAMILTON. 
 
 1856-1891. 
 
 Cousin's advice New phases of thought in the 'Fifties and 
 'Sixties Young Scotland and old Scottish Philosophy 
 Hamilton's ' Lectures ' and Hansel's ' Bampton Lectures ' 
 Hamilton's 'Unknowable Reality' Mansel's two Moral- 
 ities Mill versus Hamilton Spencer's adaptation of 
 Hamilton and Mansel Spinoza, " De Deo," and Essay on 
 Spinoza in 1863 Hegelian Theism My Philosophical Via 
 Media Essays on " The Real World of Berkeley " in 1862, 
 and on his 'Divine Language of Vision' in 1864 The 
 ultimate Spirituality and Spiritual Activity of the Uni- 
 verse An Oxford Edition of Berkeley proposed 
 Houghton Conquest The Berkeley MSS. referred to by 
 Southey Berkeley's ' Siris ' and the immanence of Deity 
 Public interest in Berkeley Logic in the Edinburgh 
 class-room Inference and Divine Intuition Psychology 
 in the class-room Special class for Metaphysics The 
 young metaphysicians and their " Philosophical Society " 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. 
 
 1859-1889. 
 
 Scottish University Reform in 1858 The University of Edin- 
 burgh reorganised by Inglis Its Academical Administra- 
 tion Brougham and Inglis successively its Chancellors 
 Gladstone and Carlyle Rectors in succession Carlyle's 
 Rectorial Address Death of Principal Lee in 185!) Sir 
 David Brewster, Principal, and his academical inspiration 
 Principal Sir Alexander Grant in 1868 Extraordinary 
 development of the ITniversity and its resources under
 
 CONTENTS. Xlll 
 
 Grant Some contemporary Professors The " Symposium 
 Academicum" Founded by Principal Robertson in 1792 
 Portrait of Robertson Symposiasts and guests at Sym- 
 posia Academical Reform in 1889 under Lord Kinnear 
 Bacon s warning to universities . . 207 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 ACADEMICAL VACATIONS. 
 1856-1890. 
 
 Samuel Johnson and Thomas Chalmers on Scottish academical 
 vacations and professors Professorial authorship Loco- 
 motion Annual visits to London Its local associations- 
 Haunted houses The Athenaeum Club and its memories 
 The " London Metaphysical Society " in 1869-81 Names 
 of members Questions discussed My last sight of 
 Herbert Spencer Parting visits to J. S. Mill and Thomas 
 Carlyle Lord and Lady Amberley Little Fife House 
 Lady Stanley of Alderley Lord John Russell at Pembroke 
 Lodge Emerson, the Grotes, J. A. Froude, Browning, &c. 
 Isaac Taylor at Stanford Rivers His dual personality 
 according to Sir James Stephen The Church and non- 
 conformity A curious dream The manor-house of Oates 
 and John Locke Cambridge andWhewell A plurality of 
 inhabited worlds ? Oxford and Lord Palmerston Stan- 
 ley, Mansel, Jowett, and Green Ireland in 1870 In the 
 episcopal palace at Cloyne ' The Querist ' Maynooth and 
 Doctor Russell Butler's ' Analogy ' or Locke's ' Essay ' ? 
 The Clarendon Press Butler at Stanhope in 1726-38 
 Locke's early life in Somerset Nynehead Court Locke 
 and Esther Masham's correspondence Locke's library 
 at Horseley Towers Tennyson at Farringford The 
 Queen's Jubilee in 1887 Summers at Rydal and Gras- 
 mere Fox How Summers in the vale of Yarrow Two 
 benevolent pastors Doctor Russell's ' Reminiscences ' 
 Scott and Wordsworth in Yarrow Life in Yarrow 
 John Veitch . 226
 
 XIV CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 IN TENEBRIS LUX. 
 1891-1904. 
 
 In retirement Hawthornden 'Locke' in 1890 An an- 
 notated Locke's 'Essay' in 1891-94 Locke's criticism of 
 "experience" Hume's Question The English Philoso- 
 phical Succession Kant's criticism of reason in ex- 
 perience Kant the complement of Locke Gifford 
 Lectures in 1894-96 Theistic Philosophy " Natural 
 causes" Science presupposes God Spencer's unde- 
 nominational Religion Comte's three stages Theism, 
 Metaphysic, and " Positive Science " in their mutual 
 relations The constituents of Theistic Faith Philoso- 
 phical rationale of Theistic Faith Development con- 
 sistent with Theistic Faith Order in Things and moral 
 disorder in Persons Can this be reconciled with Theistic 
 Faith? How things depend on persons Supreme sig- 
 nificance of persons in the Universe Natural Order 
 and personal free agency Mysteries are not necessarily 
 contradictories Human interest in Theistic Faith Must 
 Persons be immortal ? Theistic Hope Supposed signs of 
 human immortality Atheistic, Pantheistic, and Theistic 
 Philosophy Theistic Philosophy the Via Media Objec- 
 tions to the Via Media Theistic Philosophy and Christ- 
 ianity Gospel of Theistic Faith and Hope and the Gospel 
 of Christ respond to one another A final Question 
 Visit to Holland ' Life of Thomas Reid' in 1898 Isle 
 of Skye Charles Edward and the '45 Berkeley re- 
 edited in 1899-1901 The Land of Lome revisited 278
 
 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC!. 
 
 S 
 
 CHAPTER I> 
 
 IN THE LAND OF LORNE : EARLY MEMORIES. 
 1819-1833. 
 
 ' ' Those recollected hours that have the charm 
 Of visionary things, those lovely forms 
 And sweet sensations that throw back our life, 
 And almost make remotest infancy 
 A visible scene, on which the sun is shining." 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 PERPLEXITIES of religious thought have been at all 
 times springs of metaphysical reflection. It was 
 by them in crude forms that I was first attracted 
 to inquiries which have engaged my life. The 
 originating Cause of the universe in which I found 
 myself, and how I could know that this Cause was 
 God, were questions that disturbed my boyhood 
 seventy years ago. I had been wont as a child 
 to picture God as a King upon a throne, in re- 
 mote solitude in the blue sky, yet anon interfer- 
 
 A
 
 2 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 ing, in an arbitrary way and with awful severity, 
 in. the affairs of the planet which I had lately 
 entered, and which I was told had been sud- 
 denly created by God six thousand years before. 
 I wanted proof that this was so. A book of 
 theological lectures by Dwight, President of Yale 
 College, and son-in-law of Jonathan Edwards, was 
 often consulted for help, in its opening discussions 
 on natural theology. In searching my father's 
 library for some book which might relieve my 
 secret distress, on account of thoughts which 
 seemed to involve deadly sin, I had lighted upon 
 this book, and found that it touched my per- 
 plexities. It told me that God was needed to 
 explain the world, because an eternal succession 
 of finite causes was an absurdity ; and also that 
 Matter could not be the supreme cause, inasmuch 
 as it must itself have been caused by an ante- 
 cedent. This somehow aggravated instead of re- 
 lieving my difficulties. For I failed to see the 
 absurdity of an unbeginning and endless succession 
 of changes ; or at any rate why latent powers in 
 Matter might not explain everything. And this 
 arbitrary Governor of the world, living somewhere 
 in the firmament, seemed as much to need a 
 God to explain his own existence as any of
 
 IN WHAT, AND WHY, AM I ? 3 
 
 the persons or things he was supposed to account 
 for. About my thirteenth and fourteenth year all 
 this occasioned anxious thought. 
 
 Questions about birth and death followed. If 
 the conscious lives of men continue after their 
 bodies die, why do those who believe this not 
 add the years after death to those before death 
 to determine their present age, and so speak of St 
 Paul or of Csesar as now almost two thousand 
 years old? And then, in an endless life, how 
 can I, a million times a million years after this, 
 remember anything that happened in the present 
 century, or have interest in, or identity with, 
 the boy now living on this earth ? Questions of 
 this sort haunted me in indistinct forms, with 
 restless craving for settlement. 
 
 I can hardly tell when or how these thoughts 
 first rose. What am I ? What sort of universe 
 is this in which I find myself? What is to be 
 its final upshot and mine ? These questions were 
 all working in me in a dim, half-conscious way. 
 Perhaps this is common among the young. I do 
 not find, in my early surroundings, or in family 
 antecedents, how, so early and so long, they came 
 to occupy my thoughts. But influence of place 
 and race must not be overlooked.
 
 4 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 My father was a minister in the Church of 
 Scotland. I first saw light in 1819, l in the manse 
 of Ardchattan, on the shore of the north side of 
 Loch Etive, in the romantic Land of Lome in 
 Argyllshire. Lome is bordered on one side by the 
 Western Sea, and the Grampians guard it on the 
 east a region mostly of green undulating hills of 
 moderate height. Its northern part consists of 
 two peninsulas one the country of Appin and of 
 Jacobite and Nonjuror Stewarts, opening to the 
 east through the awful defile of Glencoe ; the 
 other the peninsula of Benderloch, possessed 
 by Argyll, Breadalbane, and Cawdor Campbells, 
 separated from Appin by Loch Creran, and from 
 south Lome by Loch Etive. Oban was the 
 local metropolis, eighty years ago a modest sea- 
 side village, now a summer resort of fashion. 
 Cruachan is the mountain monarch of this his- 
 toric region. 
 
 The manse of Ardchattan in Benderloch, isolated 
 from the world on three sides by the sea, and on 
 the east by pathless mountains, was an ideal 
 home for meditative seclusion. It was circled by 
 hills, varied by valleys and clear streams, with 
 luxuriant vegetation like Westmoreland or Wales. 
 
 1 On September 3.
 
 ARDCHATTAN. 5 
 
 Early impressions of this sublime panorama, un- 
 folded around the manse, are now more vivid 
 in my imagination than any later experience in 
 this world of sense. Benderloch was full of 
 mythical traditions and historic memories. Pictish 
 myths of regal state at Beregonium, the fabled 
 capital of the Picts, and Ossianic dreams of 
 Uisnach and his sons ; in more credible history, 
 encounters of Bruce with the Lords of Lome ; 
 later still, tragic incidents in the wars of Mon- 
 trose ; also relics of mediaeval faith in the ruined 
 priory of Ardchattan, or of feudal life in the castle 
 of Barcaldine. In its insular isolation Benderloch 
 was seldom visited by travellers, although in 
 September 1803 Wordsworth and his sister passed 
 through it in their Scottish tour; and in 1824 
 MacCulloch described in glowing language the 
 route from Connel to Loch Creran. " Every- 
 thing," he says, " is beautiful on the road between 
 the two lochs. It is but five miles, but it is a 
 day's journey to a wise man ; and the castle of 
 Barcaldine, with its freshness and its avenue of 
 living trees, carries one back into the past with 
 a startling vividness." 1 To-day a railway from 
 
 1 The old castle is now (1904) in process of restoration by Sir 
 Duncan Campbell of Barcaldine.
 
 6 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Connel to Glencoe traverses the two peninsulas 
 of Benderloch and Appin, opening to the world 
 some of the grandest scenery in Britain. 
 
 My family inheritance was Celtic. My father 
 traced his descent from a branch of the Frasers 
 of Strichen, who in the seventeenth century pos- 
 sessed a small property at Tyrie in Aberdeen- 
 shire. Ardent support of the House of Stuart 
 was their ruin. Soon after 1715, shattered in 
 fortune, they migrated to Stratherrick on Loch 
 Ness, to the lands of their kinsman, Fraser of 
 Foyers ; and some years before Culloden they 
 had moved to Croy in Strathnairn, where my 
 great-grandfather and grandfather held land on 
 Kilravock. Culloden is in the parish of Croy, 
 and my great - grandfather, lame at the time 
 through an accident, told how he watched the 
 scene, before the battle began, in a shower of sleet 
 which soaked the ground ; how the battle when 
 it came lasted only for a short half hour ; then 
 how he saw the tide turn, the Highland army 
 in retreat to Inverness or to the mountains, 
 and the Prince with a few companions in flight 
 over the moorlands to Stratherrick. 
 
 My grandfather, unlike his Jacobite and Non- 
 juror ancestors, was an evangelical prcsbyterian,
 
 CAMPBELLS OF BARCALDINE. 7 
 
 although his grandmother was a daughter of John 
 Gordon, the last bishop of Galloway before the 
 Eevolution, who was afterwards a convert to 
 Eome, and is still remembered as the subject of 
 the Decision of Pope Clement XI. in 1704, which 
 disallowed Anglican ordination for the Roman 
 communion. The fervid Calvinism of Calder, the 
 good minister of Croy, converted my grandfather 
 to Presbyterianism ; and so it was in the Puritan 
 atmosphere which sheds awful solemnity over 
 human life that my father passed his youth in 
 the last two decades of the eighteenth century. 
 
 My mother was a daughter of Alexander 
 Campbell, laird of Barcaldine and Glenure, who 
 was descended from the knights of Kilchurn, and 
 was head of one of the families that divided 
 among them the peninsula of Benderloch. Her 
 granduncle, Colin Campbell of Glenure, a younger 
 son of Barcaldine, and of Lucia, daughter of Sir 
 Ewan Cameron of Lochiel, was the victim in 
 the celebrated Appin murder by gunshot in the 
 wood of Lettermore, in May 1752, which inspired 
 Gleig in his novel of * Allan Breck,' Stevenson in 
 ' Kidnapped,' and Neil Munro in ' Doom Castle.' 
 The mystery of this murder touched my im- 
 agination in those early years. The murdered
 
 8 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Campbell was in 1752 factor of estates in Appin 
 forfeited by the Stewarts after Culloden, and was 
 obnoxious as the agent in evictions. James Stewart 
 at Acharn, in Appin, was condemned as a con- 
 spirator, and was hung in chains at Ballachulish ; 
 Allan Breck, the reputed actor, escaped to France. 
 In my childhood I knew an aged native who re- 
 membered the ghastly spectacle of the skeleton 
 under the moon, on winter nights the terror 
 of her youth. The ' Scots Magazine ' tells that 
 it was blown down in a hurricane three years 
 after the execution, and by order of the court 
 in Edinburgh was again suspended. The end of 
 Allan Breck is told by Scott in the Introduction 
 to ' Kob Roy ' ; but unless Mr Andrew Lang has 
 the key to the mystery, the murder of Glenure 
 is likely to retain a secret for ever. 
 
 A more remote maternal relative than Glenure 
 was Colin Campbell, laird of Achnaba, a son of 
 the first laird of Barcaldine, and minister of 
 Ardchattan from 1667 till 1726 ; in repute among 
 contemporary mathematicians, intimate with the 
 Gregories, and a correspondent in Latin of Sir 
 Isaac Newton. He was a metaphysician too. He 
 produced for his own satisfaction a ' Demonstra- 
 tion of the Existence of God/ before Samuel
 
 GLENUKE AND ACHNABA. 9 
 
 Clarke's ' Demonstration ' was given to the world ; 
 likewise an 'Essay on the Divine Trinity in 
 Unity.' Both were privately printed a century 
 and a half after his death. They suggest know- 
 ledge of Descartes and Spinoza and Locke's 
 ' Essay.' What one of Campbell's correspondents 
 calls his " vicious modesty " has concealed him 
 from fame. I well remember his granddaughter 
 in the summer of 1826, a few months before 
 her death, in the beautiful home of her old 
 age, at Gallanach near Oban. She was then 
 in her hundredth year ; born when George I. was 
 king and Walpole Prime Minister, when Newton 
 and Clarke were still alive, before Berkeley had 
 seen Rhode Island, when Locke and Leibniz were 
 lately dead, and when the romance of the '45 
 was far in the future. A brother of my vener- 
 able friend was killed at Culloden. 
 
 Campbell's ' Demonstration ' is not uninteresting 
 in metaphysical theology. It turns in one part 
 on our conception of Power and in another on 
 our conception of Infinity. That everything 
 which had a beginning must have had a producer, 
 or " that there must be something before every- 
 thing that began," is one of his postulates. That 
 whatever is limited must at last be limited by a
 
 10 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Being that is unlimited, is another. And the in- 
 finite Being must be uncompounded, for other- 
 wise each part of the compound would limit the 
 other parts and the whole. Finally, whatever is 
 uncompounded must be Spirit. But a human 
 conception of infinity must, he confesses, be in- 
 adequate. " The indivisible Infinite or Perfect, 
 who out of nothing made all except Himself, 
 hath not possibly in His own nature this and 
 that, nor now and then in His duration ; albeit 
 our weak faculties attribute to Him different 
 faculties and times : these are all in His infinity 
 an indivisible point, whose circumference is no- 
 where, and whose centre is everywhere. Therefore 
 we cannot know God in His infinity, albeit we 
 know what finitude can know of Him. Our 
 finite knowledge of God may be true, but cannot 
 be perfect with respect to its infinite object, 
 while both true and perfect with respect to the 
 finite subject ; and this not for defect of God's 
 power to reveal, but from defect in the nature 
 of the subject to whom the revelation is made. 
 I certainly see that God is, and yet I see that He 
 is infinitely more than I can see. If we intend 
 more in rising to these sublime thoughts than 
 the raising of our devotion to the object of our 
 thoughts, and presume curiously to pry into the
 
 MY MOTHER. 11 
 
 Divine Majesty, we shall be confounded with the 
 glory, as the eye is blinded by looking on the 
 sun." In the tract on triune Deity Campbell 
 argues that God must be triune from the im- 
 possibility of His having existed in solitude 
 prior to the creation of the universe. "There- 
 fore God did eternally beget God ; and this 
 eternal Issue could not but reciprocally love and 
 be loved ; while this mutual Love, proceeding 
 from the producer and the produced, we may 
 be allowed to call the Eternal Spirit." Hence 
 the need in reason for triune Deity. All this 
 touches the imagination, when we recollect the 
 troubled time and the rude surrounding society. 1 
 
 My mother was the chief early influence in my 
 life. I was devoted to her in childhood with a 
 romantic affection. In my first seven years she 
 was my only teacher. She had been educated in 
 England, and afterwards lived much in the South ; 
 for years at Clapham, where she formed lifelong 
 
 1 Campbell's courage was shown when he volunteered to declare 
 the parish of Ardnamurchan vacant, after the deposition of the 
 popular "Mhaighstir Alasdair," who refused to conform to pres- 
 bytery. " Dressed in the kilt, and armed with a sword in one 
 hand and a cocked pistol in the other," Campbell, we are told, 
 "defied the stormy audience and delivered his message." See 
 'Among the Clanranalds' (p. 140), by the Rev. Charles Macdonald, 
 priest of Moidart (Oban, 1889).
 
 12 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 friendships with Cecils, Elliotts, Venns, and Clark- 
 sons of the " Clapham sect" of evangelical church- 
 people, commemorated by Sir James Stephen, 
 representatives of the gracious religious philan- 
 thropy which transformed English society and the 
 English Church in the early years of the nineteenth 
 century. She inspired my childhood with her 
 own Anglican enthusiasm. Dulwich and Norwood 
 and Balham, Clapham Common, with its lawns and 
 cedars as they were before Greater London had 
 submerged them, also the Thames at Reading, all 
 seemed, when I first saw them in later years, to 
 be part of the familiar experience of childhood. 
 My favourite nurse-maid, Anne M'Coll, who had 
 been with my mother in England, and shared 
 her affection for its life and Church, added her 
 influence. It was encouraged by books given to 
 me Goldsmith's ' History,' ' Robinson Crusoe,' 
 ' Sandford and Merton,' tales by Hannah More and 
 by Legh Richmond, and the 'Fairchild Family/ 
 with its curious pictures of evangelical life in 
 the Church of England, and of scenery in 
 Worcestershire and Berkshire. The sunny lands 
 of the South were in this way invested with a 
 lasting halo in the fancy of a dreamy child in the 
 Land of Lome. When the 'Tales of a Grand-
 
 THE MANSE FAMILY. 13 
 
 father' appeared in 1827, the Scotland of Scott 
 was a rival inspiration, at a time when faint echoes 
 of Culloden were still reverberating among the 
 Highland mountains. 
 
 I was the eldest in a family of twelve. We 
 lived a self-contained home-life of Spartan frug- 
 ality. The modest income of a parish minister 
 in the Church of Scotland was reduced by my 
 father's generosity to a brother. In consequence 
 the ten sons had a strong motive for testing the 
 law which confers survival in the battle of life. 
 Like the vicar's family described by Goldsmith, 
 "we loved each other tenderly, and our fond- 
 ness increased as we grew older. We had no 
 revolutions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo ; 
 all our adventures were by the fireside, and all 
 our migrations from the blue bed to the brown. 
 And it is needless to attempt describing the 
 characters of young people that had seen but 
 very little of the world." 
 
 My own experience was confined within the 
 isolated peninsula of Benderloch during my first 
 fourteen years, except a few weeks in Strathnairn 
 in 1824, and a few days in Glasgow in 1829. I 
 grew up a shy, awkward boy ; unobservant of 
 what lay outside some strong individual tastes ;
 
 14 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 physically educated by lonely walks, work in the 
 manse garden or oaring in a boat ; and with no 
 outside youthful companionship. 
 
 My earliest recollections go back to 1822. In 
 August of that year an English clergyman and 
 his wife visited the manse. I have now a distinct 
 mental picture of their arrival, an uncommon 
 event in that solitary region. They had come from 
 seeing George the Fourth keep Court at Holyrood. 
 Their report of the doings in the Scottish metro- 
 polis, prolonged in family talk, as of a great event, 
 exercised my fancy, and Edinburgh was pictured 
 as the New Jerusalem, and King George moving 
 about with a golden crown upon his head. A 
 visit of the Rev. Lcgh Richmond, author of the 
 ' Dairyman's Daughter,' is a more dimly remem- 
 bered incident, I think also in 1822. 
 
 A memory which belongs to the following year 
 is due to talk at the time about the murder of 
 Weare, a London gentleman, by Thurtell, son of 
 an alderman in Norwich, under singular circum- 
 stances of treachery and atrocity, in Gill's Hill 
 lane in Hertfordshire. The particulars so affected 
 me that half a century afterwards I spent a 
 summer day in and around that Hertfordshire
 
 JOHNSON AND BOSWELL. 15 
 
 lane, comparing the localities with the evidence 
 taken in the trial. It was this Gill's Hill lane 
 murder that suggested to Thomas Carlyle a defi- 
 nition of " respectability." At Thurtell's trial 
 occurred the following colloquy : " What sort of 
 person was Mr Weare ? He was always a respect- 
 able person. What do you mean by respectable ? 
 He kept a gig" Carlyle long rejoiced in "gig- 
 manity" as a synonym. Thurtell also figures in 
 De Quincey's essay on " Murder considered as 
 one of the Fine Arts." 
 
 The visit to Strathnairn in August 1824 is 
 prominent among these relics of childhood. A 
 steamboat was then a novelty in the Highlands. 
 We travelled to and from Inverness in the 
 " Comet," the earliest experiment in Highland 
 steam navigation. The " Comet " was memorable 
 for its tragic fate in the following year, when in 
 a dark October night it was suddenly submerged 
 in collision with another steamer, at the entrance 
 to the Clyde, and more than sixty passengers 
 were drowned. As many of them inhabited 
 Argyll and Inverness, families around us were 
 mourners, and faith in steam as a motive force 
 was for a time suspended in the Highland mind. 
 
 In Nairnshire we were entertained at the manse
 
 16 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 of Cawdor by Mr Grant, the old minister, who 
 had helped to entertain Johnson and Boswell 
 more than half a century before, when his manse 
 was occupied by a Macaulay. Boswell tells how 
 he had "dreaded a whole evening" at Cawdor 
 manse for Johnson, as likely to be " heavy," 
 but that " Mr Grant, an intelligent, well-bred 
 minister in the neighbourhood, was there, and 
 assisted us by his conversation." Their host 
 that evening was Lord Macaulay's uncle ; and 
 when he died our host Grant succeeded him. 
 It happened too that early in that summer an 
 aunt of Lord Macaulay visited my father's 
 manse. I remember a picnic on our glebe and 
 various encounters with Miss Macaulay, as well 
 as the tradition of her pride in her young 
 nephew " Tom," then at Cambridge, soon to 
 become famous through his essay on Milton in 
 the 'Edinburgh Review.' The Macaulays are 
 connected by birth with Ardchattan, for the 
 historian's grandmother was a daughter of Camp- 
 bell of Inveresragan, whose small family property, 
 in the eighteenth century, was within a mile of 
 my birthplace ; their home was among the yew- 
 trees of Blarcreen, and their tombs are in the 
 chapel of the ruined priory at Ardchattan.
 
 THE SULTRY SUMMER OF 1826. 17 
 
 The summer of 1826 was, I believe, the hottest 
 and driest in the nineteenth century. Almost no 
 rain fell from May till August. I recollect the 
 long-continued sultry haze over the mountains of 
 Lome, Loch Etive daily a sea of glass, the smoke 
 of kelp-burning ascending from its rocky shores, 
 and the sunsets reflecting the hills of Mull and 
 Morven in purple and crimson and gold. I can 
 picture a sultry Sunday in that year in the 
 quaint, rudely furnished, crowded parish church, 
 then beside the manse, and the welcome given 
 to the sublime imagery of the Apocalypse in 
 the words which formed the text: "These are 
 they which came out of great tribulation, and 
 have washed their robes and made them white 
 in the blood of the Lamb. They shall hunger 
 no more, neither thirst any more ; neither shall 
 the sun light on them, nor any heat." That 
 whole summer of 1826 is now the beautiful 
 dream of childhood 
 
 " Heaven lies about us in our infancy." 
 
 Dunollie is another memory. It was early in 
 that sultry summer that I was first taken to visit 
 this romantic home of the MacDougalls, once Lords 
 of Lome. Their ivy-clad castle, which guards the 
 
 B
 
 18 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 entrance to Oban Bay, is the most picturesque 
 ruin amono- the Hebrides. We were entertained 
 
 CD 
 
 by the mother of the chief; her son was in 
 England on the eve of his marriage. Scott 
 describes a meeting with this distinguished High- 
 
 <o o o 
 
 land lady when he visited Dunollie, on his way 
 home from the Orkneys in 1814. "She was 
 then in deep mourning for her eldest son, who 
 had fallen bravely in Spain under Wellington, a 
 death well becoming a descendant of so famed 
 a race. The second son was a lieutenant in the 
 navy. Mrs MacDougall spoke with melancholy 
 pride of her eldest son, and with hope of the 
 survivor." That second son was now the laird, 
 later on distinguished as Admiral Sir John 
 MacDougall, for forty years lord of Dunollie, a 
 familiar figure and friend in my early years, a 
 gallant officer, erect, alert, with an air of com- 
 mand, proverbially hospitable, " tenacious of his 
 dignity," not unlike the Lochbuie described by 
 Samuel Johnson, who, when the celebrated Eng- 
 lishman was introduced to him in Mull, conde- 
 scendingly asked him whether he was a Johnston 
 of Glencoe or a Johnston of Ardnamurchan. 
 
 I have a faint remembrance of the parlia- 
 mentary election in July 1826. The contest in
 
 THE PARISH SCHOOL. 19 
 
 Argyllshire was between Campbell of Islay and 
 General Duncan Campbell of Lochnell. The 
 General was the chief magnate of Benderloch, the 
 patron of the parish, a dignified gentleman, with 
 the ceremonious courtesy of the old school, long 
 a member of Parliament, and nearly related to 
 the House of Argyll. In 1794 he raised the 91st 
 Eegiment, soon after served at its head in South 
 Africa, and early in last century held a com- 
 mand in Ireland. The last thirty years of his life 
 were spent at Lochnell, a centre of active benevol- 
 ence in all those years. His wife was a sister of 
 Sir George Murray, the friend of the Duke of 
 Wellington, and Secretary for the Colonies in the 
 Duke's Cabinet in 1828. An influx of dis- 
 tinguished visitors at Lochnell enlivened the 
 summers at Ardchattan. 
 
 In 1827 I began Latin, and during most of that 
 summer I went for an hour or two daily to the 
 parish school. This was all the experience I have 
 ever had of school-life. In autumn typhus fever 
 put an end to it, and almost put an end to 
 my life. In the five following years Latin was 
 administered to me privately at the manse before 
 breakfast, by Archibald M'Callum, our worthy 
 schoolmaster, a man simple and pious, of the
 
 20 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 old-fashioned sort, narrow in his views of life, 
 gratefully remembered for his goodwill. But 
 Caesar and Virgil, mechanically taught, awoke 
 little human response, and my faculty for lan- 
 guages was not strong. Although Virgil and 
 Lucretius and Tacitus have charmed me in later 
 life, these five years of philological drudgery 
 did little for head or heart. I lounged over 
 Latin lessons, and at the end could construe 
 in a slovenly way classic books through which 
 I had travelled unsympathetically. This waste 
 in the morning of life has been an irreparable 
 loss. 
 
 The parish school at Ardchattan in the eigh- 
 teenth century, like others in Scotland at that 
 time, was resorted to by all ranks the 
 sons of the laird and the sons of the cottar. 
 In the later years of the century it was taught 
 by Mr Corrie, afterwards a parish priest in the 
 Anglican Church, whose son Daniel, born in Ben- 
 derloch, was seventy years ago the first Bishop 
 of Madras, a friend of Henry Martyn and of 
 Heber. One of his father's pupils at Ardchattan 
 was Colquhoun Grant, a son of the minister of the 
 parish, afterwards Sir Colquhoun Grant, and a 
 distinguished figure at Waterloo. He succeeded
 
 'EDINBURGH EVENING COURANT.' 21 
 
 Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, in the command of 
 the 15th Hussars. Asked by his Eoyal Highness 
 about the place of his nativity, Grant said 
 that his father was "minister at Ardchattan." 
 " Minister at Ardchattan ? Ardchattan ? I never 
 heard of that Court," was the Duke's rejoinder. 
 The numerous sons of the laird were among 
 Colquhoun Grant's schoolfellows. 
 
 During those five years of Latin under the old 
 schoolmaster I was educated chiefly by influences 
 outside Latin. Eye, imagination, and reason were 
 much in my own keeping ; teaching was incoherent 
 and desultory. The ' Edinburgh Evening Courant ' 
 was an educating factor. It came to the manse 
 on three days of each week, when it was three 
 days old. I used to meet the runner to antici- 
 pate its delivery the first to get longed-for news 
 about the far-off world beyond the mountains. 
 The struggle of Greece with Turkey in 1827 
 was, I think, what awoke me to contemporary 
 history, and the battle of Navarino in October 
 was an absorbing interest. In home politics I 
 remember the announcement one morning of the 
 resignation of Lord Liverpool, and interest felt 
 afterwards in the brief rule of Canning, then 
 of Lord Goderich, and in the following winter
 
 22 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 in the formation of the Wellington Cabinet. 
 The war of Russia with Turkey in 1828-29 was 
 an endless excitement, and I could long after 
 recount the successive movements of the armies, 
 with the battles and sieges, in more exact detail 
 than any recent history. The gloomy fore- 
 bodings of the worthy ministers in Lome, when 
 the Catholic Relief Bill was passing in 1829, 
 were somehow heard with mixed regard. On 
 the journey to Glasgow with my parents in 
 that year, I well remember our landing at the 
 Broomielaw when the newsboys were announcing 
 that the Bill had passed the House of Lords, 
 and the dismay of a clerical party at the house 
 of our host their lurid prognostications of 
 bloody persecution, as the lot of the new genera- 
 tion. In 1830 the death of George the Fourth, 
 whom I had been wont to think of as part of 
 the unchanging system of nature, was like the 
 disappearance of the sun out of the heavens. 
 But the cabinet -making of Earl Grey, and the 
 great Reform Bill struggle under Lord John 
 Russell, with predictions of a terrible Revolu- 
 tion, awoke new interests, and I found my- 
 self suddenly in a new world. The debates 
 from March 1831 till June 1832, the successive
 
 FAVOURITE BOOKS. 23 
 
 general elections, the Bristol riots, withal the 
 invasion of cholera, give a tragic aspect to a 
 vivid retrospect of the early 'Thirties. Yet the 
 political development was watched, not in a 
 partisan spirit, but as an absorbing dramatic 
 spectacle ; for I do not remember having sided 
 either with Sir Robert or with Lord John. 
 
 My mother trained me in the Bible. Old Testa- 
 ment history filled my imagination. Genesis was 
 a constant delight ; and when a child I could not 
 listen without tears to the story of the death of 
 Absalom, or of David and Jonathan. The charm 
 of the Gospel biographies and the grand pictures 
 in the Apocalypse softened the rigid ritualism 
 of the Highland Sabbath. Job and Ecclesiastes 
 were attractions of a later day. 
 
 Books of history of all sorts were favourites, 
 Rollin for the ancient world, Walter Scott for 
 Scotland, Hume for England, and Robertson for 
 America. I remember a long summer day in 
 1830 spent at a public sale of the library of 
 Captain Campbell at Kilmaronaig one of the 
 numerous captains and majors, as well as soldiers 
 from the ranks, who abounded in Lome in the 
 generation after the French war. I exhausted 
 my pocket - money in buying three books of
 
 24 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 history Hume's 'England,' Ferguson's 'Roman 
 Republic,' and the * General History ' by Lord 
 Woodhouselee, all proudly carried home. It was 
 my introduction to the name of David Hume, 
 since more familiar as the sceptical metaphysician 
 than as the old-fashioned Tory historian. Adam 
 Ferguson, too, I have since learned to associate 
 more with philosophy in Edinburgh than with 
 Roman history. And Woodhouselee is a place 
 associated with some of the happiest social 
 experience of later life. 
 
 Books of travel were a frequent indulgence, 
 the adventures of Parry and Franklin in the 
 Polar regions, pictures of South America by 
 Humboldt, and of India by Bishop Heber } the 
 many volumes of the ' Modern Traveller ' and of 
 Constable's 'Miscellany.' The 'Arabian Nights' 
 and ' Gulliver ' were less easily accessible. Or- 
 dinary novels were under interdict, those of 
 "Waverley" being pre-eminent for bad report. 
 My worthy schoolmaster repeatedly warned me 
 against Sir Walter, with an ominous foreboding 
 of his final destiny, on account of the " books 
 of lies which the devil had tempted him to 
 produce." The liberal education implied in 
 intercourse with Scott was thus out of my
 
 MY METAPHYSICAL AUNT. 25 
 
 reach, although I got Scottish history from his 
 'Tales of a Grandfather' in and after 1828. 
 
 Popular astronomy above all was enchanted 
 ground. I was strangely moved by the idea of 
 the human family as fellow-passengers on a huge 
 material ball, navigating boundless space, subject 
 to the incalculable possibilities of the crowded 
 heavens, and my own loneliness emerging as a 
 stranger on this revolving globe. Exercise of 
 fancy upon astronomical manuals for children 
 helped, I daresay, to raise those questions about 
 the Power at the heart of the universe, and our 
 destiny in it, which disturbed my boyhood, and 
 relaxed the faith of childhood in a way that the 
 novels of Scott or Bulwer could never have 
 done. 
 
 My aunt, Caroline Campbell of Barcaldine, 
 was, with the starry heavens, an expansive in- 
 fluence in those years. She was less emotional 
 and more argumentative than most women ; given 
 to theological argument, a defender of Arminian 
 and Pelagian theories, and fond of criticising Cal- 
 vinistic orthodoxy at the manse. It was in her 
 hands that I first saw Locke's ' Essay,' too soon 
 to appreciate it, studied afterwards with a sym- 
 pathetic sense of its healthy realism. My aunt
 
 26 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 was a visitor at the house of Robert Owen, the 
 celebrated socialist of New Lanark, Owen's wife 
 being our cousin. Partly for the pleasure of the 
 argument, she used to plead for the dreams of 
 this benevolent enthusiast, disturbing my childish 
 ideas of the human world, as the books of astronomy 
 disturbed ideas of the material universe. Also 
 her reports of the family of her cousin, Sir 
 Guy Campbell, who married a daughter of Lord 
 Edward Fitzgerald, the famous Irish patriot, 
 added interest to the reports of contemporary 
 Irish agitation, led in the early 'Thirties by 
 Daniel O'Connell, and in the affairs of Ireland, 
 to - day administered by the great - grandson of 
 Lord Edward Fitzgerald. 
 
 o 
 
 Local history and its educating influence must 
 not be overlooked in a retrospect of those far- 
 off days. On the shore of Loch Etive, a quarter 
 of a mile from the manse, are the picturesque 
 ruins of the Priory of Ardchattan. The prior's 
 house was the modern mansion of the laird. 
 The Priory, the charming well -timbered parks 
 which surround it, and the well and chapel of 
 St Modan on the hill, were my favourite haunts. 
 They awakened dreams of bygone centuries, when
 
 ARDCHATTAN PRIORY. 27 
 
 monks, devout and learned, were charitably sup- 
 posed to occupy this holy ground, with " savage 
 clans and roving barbarians" in all the surround- 
 ing country. In 1216 Malvoisin, Bishop of St 
 Andrews, carried into Scotland the Order of Bene- 
 dictine monks of Vallis Caulium in Burgundy, and 
 establishments of that order were founded at 
 Pluscardine, at Beaulv, and at Ardchattan. The 
 
 / * 
 
 early records of Ardchattan Priory were destroyed 
 in the wars of Montrose, and little is known of 
 its history before Alexander Campbell, of the 
 House of Cawdor, the last prior. It was dis- 
 solved in 1602, and by royal charter this Alex- 
 ander Campbell became laird of Ardchattan. His 
 successor in the first forty years of the nineteenth 
 century was Eobert Campbell " Ardchattan," or 
 " the prior " as he was affectionately called whose 
 humour and kindness diffused happiness around. 
 He had served in the army of the East India 
 Company in Bengal before Warren Hastings re- 
 turned to England, and when Sir Philip Francis 
 led the opposition ; and his tales of Indian 
 adventure opened a new world to us all. A 
 large family of brothers served their country 
 like himself. One was killed in the battle of 
 Camden in the American war, and another at
 
 28 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 the siege of Pondicherry. Two others fought 
 in different parts of the world, and a third was 
 lord of the manor of Gatcombe, in the Isle of 
 Wight. The youngest of all, Laurence Dundas 
 Campbell, after a short military service, turned 
 to literature. He was editor of the ' Asiatic 
 Eegister ' in the first years of the century, 
 and published books on Indian policy ; but 
 my attraction to him was for his ' Life of Hugh 
 Boyd,' intended to vindicate a claim for this 
 wayward Irishman to the authorship of Junius. 
 Accordingly the mystery of Junius later on be- 
 came one of my hobbies, like the Appin murder ; 
 but I reached only the negative conclusion, that 
 it had not been solved by Campbell. He died 
 in middle life in 1809. His wife was a daughter 
 of John Courtenay, member for Appleby, a dis- 
 tinguished parliamentary follower and friend of 
 Fox. The last years of her widowhood were 
 spent at the Priory, and this accomplished lady 
 is another attractive figure in the recollections 
 of my childhood. 
 
 Inverawe is a paradise of sylvan beauty on 
 the south side of Loch Etive, on the bank of the 
 river Awe. "With its legends it has associations 
 with those years. Then a home of the Campbells
 
 INVERAWE AND ITS LEGENDS. 29 
 
 of Monzie, it was possessed by General Alex- 
 ander Campbell, and in succession by his son, 
 the chivalrous and accomplished member for 
 Argyll, a leader of the Free Church move- 
 ment in the 'Thirties and 'Forties. In the eigh- 
 teenth century Inverawe was held by another 
 Campbell family, of which the last male repre- 
 sentative was killed at the siege of Ticonderoga 
 in 1758. The legend of the vision which years 
 before warned Inverawe of his fate, took the 
 fancy of Dean Stanley, and was given by him 
 in ' Fraser's Magazine,' and by Lord Archibald 
 Campbell in his ' Records of Argyll.' Inverawe, 
 it seems, had unwittingly rescued the murderer 
 of his foster-brother, who came to him for pro- 
 tection, hiding him in a cave on Ben Cruachan. 
 The ghost of the murdered man appeared once 
 and again to Inverawe, demanding the murderer, 
 but in vain, for the laird's honour was pledged ; 
 the vision finally disappeared, bidding him "be- 
 ware of Ticonderoga," a fortress in America, then 
 unknown by name in Scotland. Years afterwards 
 Inverawe was ordered to join his regiment in 
 the Franco- American war. There he was engaged 
 in storming a fort, which he was told was Fort 
 St Louis. He was wounded fatally, and before
 
 30 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 he died he discovered that the name of the fort 
 was Ticonderoga. But my cousin, the late Mrs 
 Campbell of Monzie, is my happiest association 
 with Inverawe. 
 
 Bonawe, on the opposite side of the river 
 Awe, was the headquarters of a company which 
 for a century after 1753 imported iron- ore from 
 Ulverston to be transformed into pig - iron at 
 Bonawe, in a furnace supplied with timber from 
 the surrounding forests of Muckairn, redolent of 
 birch-wood and bog-myrtle. Wordsworth was a 
 visitor at Bonawe House, I think in 1833. It was 
 then that I first heard his name, but without the 
 associations which have since gathered round it. 
 This was his second visit to Bonawe ; the first was 
 in 1803. 
 
 Life in the manse on the isolated peninsula in 
 Lome was now and then varied by visits of 
 neighbouring ministers. The Church of Scotland 
 there, as elsewhere, presented, on one side, the 
 religious fervour, sacerdotal temper, and dogmatic 
 severity, and, on the other, the tolerant and 
 humane, albeit less other-worldly and more accom- 
 modating spirit, which distinguish its two schools 
 one dominant in the seventeenth, the other in 
 the eighteenth century contrasted as Evangelical
 
 SOME LOKNE CLERGYMEN. 31 
 
 or High, and Moderate or Broad Church. The 
 one was the complement of the other; each pre- 
 dominating, as religion was regarded chiefly in 
 its divine or chiefly in its human relations. 
 Controversies between the ministerial representa- 
 tives of each enlivened presbyterial life in Lome. 
 Ministers of both parties are associated in my 
 retrospect with kindness and goodness in that 
 quaint old-world life. 
 
 Alexander Stewart, afterwards minister of 
 Cromarty, is prominent among the ecclesiastical 
 personalities of my childhood. He was then a 
 licentiate of the Church, who had come to 
 Benderloch from the Lowlands to learn Gaelic. 
 The droll unconventionalism of this recluse stu- 
 dent, who used to share my childish gambols on 
 winter evenings in the manse, are still vivid in 
 my memory after the lapse of eighty years. 
 I have not met him since. According to Hugh 
 Miller, who was one of his parishioners at 
 Cromarty, Stewart was " one of the most original 
 thinkers and profound theologians," and, " with 
 the exception of Chalmers, the sublimest of 
 Scottish preachers." He died in middle life, too 
 modest for authorship, and indifferent to fame. 
 A posthumous volume of sermons hardly justi- 
 fies the affectionate eulogy of Miller ; and the
 
 32 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHTCA. 
 
 quaint analogies in which they abound have 
 little affinity with modern religious thought. A 
 picturesque figure in the ecclesiastical life of 
 Lome was Patrick MacDonald, for almost seventy 
 years minister of Kilmore. He died in 1824 in 
 his ninety-sixth year. His genius lay in music, 
 in which he was an original composer, and he 
 edited a rare collection of " Highland Vocal Airs," 
 of which I think there is a copy in the Bodleian 
 Library at Oxford. More tolerant of religious 
 differences than was common, a "Nathanael in 
 whom there was no guile," this good man married 
 an excellent lady of the Roman communion, who 
 in all their married life never joined in prayer 
 in church or in the family with her husband. 
 He occupied his manse at Kilmore when Johnson 
 and Boswell travelled through the parish on their 
 journey from their " tolerable inn " at Oban over 
 Midmuir to Inveraray, on a tempestuous Satur- 
 day in October 1773 : the young man who had 
 been their guide was an old man living near us 
 in my youth. A contemporary of MacDonald was 
 Joseph M'Intyre, for almost sixty years minister 
 of Glenorchy, a friend of Scott, and also of 
 " Christopher North," who was a summer visitor 
 in Lome in the 'Twenties ; also of Zachary Mac-
 
 JOHN MACLEOD CAMPBELL. 33 
 
 aulay, who with his son " Tom " spent part of 
 1813 at Soroba near Oban. In a letter to 
 Hannah More, he records a pleasing incident of 
 the venerable pastor of Glenorchy and Man- 
 sel, Bishop of Bristol. Another notable among 
 the presbyters was John Stewart, minister of 
 Lismore in the first three decades of the nine- 
 teenth century, thus described by one who knew 
 him well : " A curiosity in his way ; of the shortest 
 stature ; rubicund ; his capacious vest bepowdered 
 and embrowned with snuff; his silver snuff-box 
 in one hand, in the other the ready pinch ; the 
 shortest arms ; nether limbs in proportion, sunk in 
 top-boots which covered almost all of them that was 
 visible ; a generous nature ; hospitable to a pro- 
 verb ; a lover of peace and laissez faire ; yet 
 withal a party man who never failed to answer 
 the ecclesiastical war-cry of his ' Moderate ' friends 
 when it arose." Stewart was the successor at 
 Lismore of Donald M'Nicol, a Celtic poet, re- 
 membered as the caustic critic, whose ' Remarks,' 
 published in 1779, on Johnson's 'Journey to the 
 Hebrides ' helped to relieve the temper of sensitive 
 Gaels who were offended by the free speech of 
 the English traveller. 
 
 The Land of Lome became about that time un- 
 
 c
 
 34 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 wittingly an agent in the expansion of religious 
 thought in Scotland. John MacLeod Campbell, 
 the friend of Thomas Erskine, Alexander Scott, 
 and Frederick Denison Maurice, was a son of the 
 minister of Kilninver. This good man, minister 
 of Row, excommunicated in 1831 as a heretic by 
 both parties in the Church, is now recognised as 
 a forerunner of the larger charity by which the 
 churches of Scotland have been characterised in 
 later years. I remember his sermon on the love 
 of God in the old parish church of Ardchattan, 
 more than seventy years ago. 
 
 My faculty of observation was too little exer- 
 cised in those years upon things and persons. 
 Experience came to me chiefly through books. 
 Natural reserve among strangers was increased 
 by what Celts consider culpable ignorance of 
 Gaelic, the key to the life of the Lome peasantry. 
 Gaelic is interesting to the philological specialist, 
 and the language is full of the poetry and 
 romantic story of the Scottish Highlands. But 
 with no exceptional linguistic faculty, and no 
 urgent need for exercising it in that way, I grew 
 up almost as ignorant of Gaelic as of Chinese. 
 In later years available strength has necessarily 
 been given to literatures more connected with
 
 GAELIC AND THE GAEL. 35 
 
 favourite studies. The mystical enthusiasm of 
 the Celt is apt to react against the cold severity 
 of Baconian induction of experience and logical 
 conditions of proof; and intense tribal patriotism 
 is averse to cosmopolitan views of life. Gaelic 
 literature contains little that is directly auxiliary 
 to science, or in affinity with philosophical specu- 
 lation, unless through the fondness of the Celt for 
 problems of Calvinistic theology and for ecclesi- 
 astical differences. The sermons of Jonathan 
 Edwards, Boston's ' Fourfold State,' and books 
 of English Puritans, especially those of Bunyan, 
 were in those days favourites in my native 
 peninsula. ' A Vision of Heaven and Hell/ 
 appended to an old edition of the 'Pilgrim's 
 Progress,' was in demand. The pictures terrified 
 my childish fancy. I have not seen it since. 
 It was there that I first encountered the name 
 of Hobbes, who was found by the seer, in his 
 imaginary journey through the place of torment, 
 expiating his guilt for having written the 
 ' Leviathan.' 
 
 It is curious now to recall that dreamy life 
 in the isolated peninsula of Lome, with its old- 
 world society, in the days when George IV.
 
 36 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 was king ; its Campbell lairds of Lochnell, 
 Ardchattan, and Barcaldine ; at home with their 
 families for nine months in the year, travelling 
 in winter to Edinburgh to share for three months 
 the social gaieties of the Metropolis a three days' 
 journey or more in the family coach all of them 
 long ago travellers in the sable car that carries us 
 all to Hades ; uniting Highland pride with much 
 Highland hospitality ; still in sympathy with their 
 clansmen, the simple peasants, in whom the grace 
 and chivalry of the Gael then survived, unspoiled 
 by the Saxon stranger, all of them accepting the 
 claims of rank with childlike deference. The cir- 
 culation of news and the means of locomotion were 
 slow; the packman of Wordsworth's "Excursion" 
 did duty for the local newspaper which now 
 enlightens Lome ; an occasional ' Courant ' or 
 London ' Morning Herald,' with tidings of the 
 world beyond the mountains, passed from the 
 house of the laird to neighbouring houses ; visits 
 of the postboy on two and latterly on three 
 days each week were not seldom interrupted by 
 storms ; at least a shilling paid by the recipient 
 for a letter from London, and tenpence for one 
 from Edinburgh ; the ' Courant,' in size a minia- 
 ture of one of our halfpenny dailies, cost seven-
 
 LORNE IN OLDEN TIMES. 37 
 
 pence ; and the window-tax was an impediment 
 to the light and air of heaven in our houses. 
 In summer and in winter the rudely furnished 
 bi - weekly or weekly steamer from Oban was 
 the only public communication with the civilis- 
 ation of the Lowlands. At home the picturesque 
 garb of the Gael, on the very old and on the 
 young, was a familiar sight ; while the coloured 
 coat and embroidered vest, instead of gloomy 
 black, brightened the five-o'clock dinner-parties of 
 the lairds, advancing afterwards to six, according 
 to the fashion of the South. On Sundays the 
 lairds and the peasantry for many miles round 
 gathered, with their families, in the parish church, 
 then happily one visible centre of the whole 
 parochial community ; supplemented at summer 
 " Sacraments " by hundreds from other parishes, 
 to be addressed in Gaelic by fervid preachers, 
 in church and in the open air, till the day 
 was far spent. Those who then shared in that 
 remote life are now withdrawn from this world 
 of sense ; the social revolution in the reign of 
 Victoria has dissolved the old society ; and the 
 wave of democratic equalisation, coming at first 
 from France, has touched the shores of Lome. 
 
 264423
 
 38 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 IN EDINBURGH : THE ENIGMA OF THE UNIVERSE. 
 1833-1842. 
 
 "When I survey the dumb Universe, and find myself as it were lost in 
 this corner, not knowing what has placed me here, what I have come to do, 
 and what will become of me in the end, I feel like one carried in his sleep 
 into a desert island, who should awake wholly ignorant of his whereabouts, 
 and with no means of escape. Assured that there must be more in the 
 universe of reality than is revealed to sense, I set myself to try to find 
 whether that Something is anyhow revealed to me." PASCAL. 
 
 IN November 1833 I left my isolated peninsula in 
 Lome to spend the winter at Glasgow College. It 
 was in those days the custom in Scotland to enter 
 the university thus early in life ; happily the 
 fashion is different now. 
 
 During the preceding summer, in preparation 
 for this change, instead of the good schoolmaster, 
 I was placed along with my brothers under a 
 resident tutor, Mr John Mackail, a man lovable in 
 no ordinary degree, pious and studious, always 
 remembered by me with gratitude : his son, the 
 accomplished biographer of Morris, is widely
 
 MY TUTOR IN 1833. 39 
 
 known in the English world of letters. My 
 brothers afterwards followed paths which led 
 some of them to distinction in military or medical 
 service in the army abroad, others to colonial 
 life in Australia ; while I followed the strong bent 
 of nature in the home country, with little change 
 of scene or picturesque adventure. 
 
 Through my tutor the classics of Rome came to 
 me inspired with human interest, especially when 
 the accustomed monotony of Livy was exchanged 
 for the pregnant sentences of Tacitus. He also 
 encouraged me to read some of Dugald Stewart's 
 philosophy, and spoke about Reid and Berkeley 
 with such effect that Horace and Tacitus declined 
 into a second place ; so in the end Stewart was 
 withdrawn as a dangerous companion. But 
 Berkeley had taken hold enough to raise doubt 
 about my childish thought, that matter might 
 explain everything, instead of needing itself to 
 be explained. 
 
 The publicity and social collision of a Glasgow 
 classroom came as a shock to a shy, sensitive boy, 
 emerging for the first time from the lonely manse 
 in Lome. This, along with inadequate Latin and 
 Greek, habits of desultory reading, and indif-
 
 40 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 ferent health in the surroundings of Glasgow, 
 depressed me, and I felt myself a foreigner 
 among my new associates. In May I returned 
 to Loch Etive with the ideal formed in the pre- 
 vious summer clouded. Of my fellow -students 
 I distinctly remember one, Alan Ker, born 
 in Greenock, who indulged me with a speak- 
 ing acquaintance. He was the most brilliant 
 scholar in the Latin class; in after -years the 
 brother-in-law of Tennyson, and in high office in 
 Jamaica, where he died more than thirty years ago. 
 Another, unknown by me at the time, now an 
 honoured friend, was James Hutchison Stirling, 
 whose ' Secret of Hegel ' is a landmark in the 
 history of philosophic thought in Scotland in 
 the second half of the nineteenth century. 
 Educated as I had been in solitude, I was dis- 
 posed to silence and self - consciousness, and 
 averse from varied intercourse or collision with 
 mankind. 
 
 Notwithstanding, I now fondly cherish the 
 memory of college life, on the old High Street of 
 Glasgow, in that far-off winter in quaint dingy 
 courts, on dark winter mornings, as we gathered 
 soon after seven to the sound of the college bell. 
 Those old courts with their historic charm have
 
 GLASGOW COLLEGE. 41 
 
 since been exchanged for the modern splendour 
 of Gilmorehill. I found William Ramsay newly 
 placed in the Latin Chair, which he occupied with 
 distinction for more than thirty years. I see him 
 in his opening career, full of ardour, a gracious 
 and accomplished young graduate from Cambridge. 
 And I still seem to hear the songs of Anacreon, and 
 the martial music of Homer, inspired by the tones 
 of Sir Daniel Sandford, the eloquent Professor of 
 Greek. It was Sandford's last winter of purely 
 academic life. Political ambition carried this dis- 
 tinguished scholar, in March 1834, into the House 
 of Commons as member for Paisley. After an in- 
 effectual attempt to unite parliamentary with col- 
 lege work, the brilliant professor returned to Scot- 
 land, where he died in the prime of life. His father 
 was Bishop Sandford of Edinburgh, who was de- 
 scribed by Coleridge as " a thorough gentleman, 
 upon the model of St Paul, whose manners were 
 the finest of any man's upon record." But per- 
 haps the professor I looked at with most interest 
 was James Mylne, the successor of Reid in the chair 
 of Moral Philosophy, a venerable personage, with 
 an air of philosophic abstraction. I used to watch 
 him on winter mornings, on his way from his 
 house in the Professors' Court to the lecture-room.
 
 42 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 In 1833 Mylne was probably the most inde- 
 pendent thinker in the Scottish philosophical pro- 
 fessoriate, although he makes no appearance in 
 histories of philosophy, or even in the philosophical 
 library. He was, I believe, inclined to the school 
 represented by Hartley in England and Condillac 
 in France, rather than to the spiritual realism of 
 Reid. A book of lectures by Professor Young of 
 Belfast, who was one of his pupils, is said to be a 
 recast of the prelections of the Glasgow professor. 
 In politics Mylne was a philosophical Radical, and 
 he offended many by going to a Glasgow public 
 dinner in honour of Daniel O'Connell, when the 
 Irish liberator visited Scotland. Besides watching 
 the movements of Mylne, I sometimes in my 
 solitude contemplated the children of the pro- 
 fessors at play. I believe that one of those I 
 used to see is now Lord Kelvin, whose father 
 then filled the chair of Mathematics in Glasgow. 
 In that spring, too, I saw at Paisley Sandford's 
 election under the newly extended franchise of 
 the great Reform Bill ; and on another day I 
 travelled in a steam - carriage on the highroad 
 between Glasgow and Airdrie, this locomotive 
 agency being then and there experimented on, 
 before steam on railways was known in Scotland.
 
 EDINBURGH IN 1834. 43 
 
 In November 1834, after a rather aimless 
 summer in Argyllshire, I was transferred to the 
 University of Edinburgh, and first saw the city 
 which was to be the home of my public life. 
 From Loch Etive to Edinburgh was a three days' 
 journey, in an open cart over rain-swept roads 
 under a sullen October sky to Inveraray ; then 
 another night at Glasgow, after a voyage down 
 Loch Goil ; and from Glasgow in a crowded canal- 
 boat drawn by horses. In that and the nine 
 following winters I lived in Edinburgh : the 
 intermediate summers were passed in study or 
 relaxation on the island peninsula in Lome. 
 
 The influence of Edinburgh upon a student is 
 surely not confined to its university. Modern, 
 like ancient, Athens is in itself a liberal edu- 
 cation, with its extraordinary natural charm, its 
 historic significance, and its literary tradition. 
 For almost a century before 1834 it had 
 been associated with men whose names live in 
 history ; raising this remote northern city to an 
 eminence not unlike that of Paris in the time 
 of Voltaire, or Weimar when it was the abode 
 of Goethe. David Hume's ' Treatise of Human 
 Nature ' and Adam Smith's ' Wealth of Nations ' 
 are among the ever memorable books of the
 
 44 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 modern world. One of them was the spring of 
 the greatest philosophical and theological revolu- 
 tion since Bacon and Luther, and the other is 
 the chief authority in this era of industrial 
 civilisation. Hume and Smith were both citizens 
 of Edinburgh, and both were charming person- 
 alities ; Hume is now buried on the Calton Hill, 
 and Smith in the Canongate churchyard. Walter 
 Scott had invested Scotland with a halo of 
 medieval and Jacobite romance, and personified 
 Edinburgh to the world. Jeffrey in the ' Edin- 
 burgh Review,' and Wilson in ' Blackwood,' 
 had made periodical criticism an important 
 agent in literature and politics. In 1834 the 
 lights were fading. Scott had disappeared 
 two years before, and others still alive were 
 withdrawn by the increasing attraction of Lon- 
 don. But Chalmers, the most eloquent of Scot- 
 tish preachers, was at the head of a revived 
 ecclesiastical life, through which Edinburgh was 
 to become the centre of Church and State 
 conflicts and disruptions, of which the final 
 issues are still remote. The city itself was 
 a bankrupt city, when I first saw it, on a misty 
 afternoon in the end of October. Its popula- 
 tion is now multiplied threefold, and in material
 
 SOME EDINBURGH PROFESSORS. 45 
 
 wealth, if not in wealth of reason and imagina- 
 tion, it has increased in a still greater degree. 
 
 But the romance of Edinburgh was not at all 
 in my mind when I entered the Latin class-room 
 of its university. James Pillans, the Latin pro- 
 fessor, was a graceful writer, the friend of Jeffrey, 
 and an Edinburgh Reviewer who had not been 
 overlooked in the satire of Byron. Pillans made 
 Roman classics an agreeable text for introducing 
 the uncultured youth of Scotland to the classics 
 of English literature, otherwise neglected by the 
 university, and through his humanising inspiration 
 I found new attractions in the literature of Rome. 
 His occasional lectures on the philosophy of gram- 
 mar encouraged a metaphysical interest that was 
 depressed in the experience of the preceding 
 year. The genial kindness of Pillans, then and 
 always, I recollect with gratitude, and it was 
 a true pleasure, nearly a quarter of a century 
 later, to be welcomed by him as one of his 
 colleagues in the academic Senate. Dunbar, the 
 Professor of Greek, was an industrious pedagogue, 
 who repelled me from Greek literature, so that 
 its inspiration was unfelt, until in later years 
 ^Eschylus and Plato touched a chord. 
 
 I entered the logic class in the following winter.
 
 46 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 It was taught by Doctor David Ritchie, one 
 of the ministers of Edinburgh, and was treated 
 more as an appendage to his ministerial charge 
 than as the professor's supreme interest, after 
 a fashion not uncommon in philosophical pro- 
 fessorships in Scotland about that time. The 
 winter of 1835 was Ritchie's last, in a professorial 
 reign of twenty-eight years, during which he had 
 delivered to undergraduates in a diluted form the 
 psychology of Thomas Reid and the logic of Watts 
 and Duncan. Tall and gaunt, a powerful athlete 
 in middle life, he was now the ghost of his former 
 self. I seem to see the pale anxious face of the 
 feeble old man as he made his daily entrance into 
 the riotous classroom. Two volumes of sermons 
 on Romans was, I think, his only contribution 
 to the world's stock of books. 
 
 In 1836 philosophy was at a lower ebb in Scot- 
 land than at any time since the advent of Francis 
 Hutcheson from Ireland to Glasgow, rather more 
 than a century before, when the country was 
 becoming diverted from ecclesiastical warfare, and 
 turning to literary pursuits. In the seventeenth 
 century Drummond of Hawthornden was almost 
 the solitary representative of its literature, and 
 Leigh ton of its religious philosophy. In 1836
 
 SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY IN 1836. 47 
 
 Thomas Brown had passed away sixteen years 
 before, Dugald Stewart eight years, and Sir James 
 Mackintosh nearly four. The Scottish chairs of 
 philosophy were no longer occupied by philoso- 
 phers. Sir William Hamilton was the anonymous 
 author of two essays afterwards famous, then 
 known only to a few experts one on man's ignor- 
 ance of Infinity and the other on man's per- 
 ception of Matter. It was the year in which 
 James Mill died, and before his son with larger 
 humanity had risen above the horizon. England 
 was mourning the death of Coleridge, who had 
 left no philosophical successor. It was differ- 
 ent abroad. Cousin had awakened enthusiasm 
 for metaphysics by his brilliant lectures at the 
 Sorbonne, and was the chief living representa- 
 tive of philosophy in France ; and Schelling 
 was sustaining the great tradition of Germany 
 in his chair at Munich. Hegel was lately dead ; 
 Schopenhauer in Germany and Comte in France 
 had not yet come into view. Cousin, Schelling, 
 and Hegel were all unknown in the Scottish 
 universities. 
 
 I now returned to metaphysics and its ulti- 
 mate questions. Thomas Brown, not Ritchie, was
 
 48 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 at first my chief teacher. In the previous summer 
 by accident I found his lectures on mental philo- 
 sophy in the manse library ; they led me to his 
 ingenious book on the relation of Cause and Effect. 
 Brown recalled at a new point of view the enigma 
 of the universe that was so distressing years be- 
 fore. The Power at work in the strange world in 
 which I found myself was what I wanted to be 
 assured about. What I ought to mean by the 
 words "Cause" and "Power" was what I was 
 now led by Brown to consider. It was a pre- 
 liminary to the other question ; and for a year 
 or two after I left the logic class my thought 
 was centred on this more abstract inquiry. I 
 was for a time fascinated by the simplicity of 
 Brown's superficial explanation. I had been 
 wont to suppose that a " cause " meant a mys- 
 terious something, also called " power," somehow 
 contained within things, but distinct from the 
 visible things in which it was believed to reside. 
 Abstract power itself was of course incapable of 
 being presented to any of our senses. 
 
 Brown's analysis dissolved this conception as 
 an illusion. The " powers " of things, he argued, 
 must be the very things themselves which we 
 see and feel ; these, however, only when looked at
 
 WHAT IS MEANT BY A "CAUSE"? 49 
 
 as the invariable antecedents of changes which, 
 under given conditions, make their appearance, 
 and which we call " effects " of the antecedents. 
 Causation, in short, is a relation of constant 
 sequence, under which one group of phenomena 
 is transformed into another group. All sequence, 
 he of course insisted, is not causal sequence. 
 Many sequences are only coincidences, and occur, 
 as we say, by chance ; the supreme purpose of 
 scientific inquiry is to detect those sequences in 
 nature that are really invariable, and to note 
 the marks which separate them from those that 
 are only casual. On its surface nature looks like 
 a chapter of accidents ; deeper insight discloses 
 an inherent steady order or cosmos into which 
 the chaos may be resolved. And progress of 
 science consists in gradual resolution of accident- 
 ally connected events into their inherent orderly 
 or causal articulation. This deeper conception 
 of the universe is conception of a network of 
 orderly changes, unfolding themselves as it were 
 under laws imposed by a lawgiver, laws which 
 we believe to be steady, and in which we trust. 
 A cause is not an invisible something called 
 power, contained in a visible object. It is 
 simply a relation of priority, which the things 
 
 D
 
 50 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 called causes bear to changes called their effects; 
 a relation not of accidental priority, but of in- 
 variable priority. The individual things and 
 persons that exist in the universe are in fact all 
 that really exists ; for this aggregate compre- 
 hends the Divine Being and all inanimate and 
 living creatures. But in all this the concep- 
 tion of power as active and originative, under 
 teleological motives, was absent. 
 
 Brown's conception of the universe, akin to 
 what has now taken the name of Positivism, 
 satisfied me at first. It seemed wonderfully to 
 clarify the aim and meaning of science. To 
 search, by observation or experiment, for 
 sequences that are constant or dependable, so as 
 to distinguish them definitely from all mere 
 coincidences, seemed more intelligible than 
 search for an unpicturable ignis fatuus called 
 " power." But by degrees the prospect clouded. 
 I felt, after all, that something was want- 
 ing in this unexplained invariableness, somehow 
 accepted in blind trust. How r am I justified by 
 reason, when I believe that a sequence in the 
 universe is inexorably constant ? It may have 
 occurred a million times, or a million times a 
 million, in past experience ; but no one can have
 
 DAVID HUME IN DARKNESS. 51 
 
 experienced what is still future. "What assur- 
 ance, therefore, have I that a sequence will 
 be repeated when the (hitherto constant) ante- 
 cedent makes its appearance again ? Do I, a 
 stranger till lately in the universe, know enough 
 about its sequences to warrant trust that any 
 given sequence will be invariable ? So Brown's 
 supposed world of constant orderly antecedence 
 and consequence gradually gave rise to a mood 
 of universal uncertainty. The very tie which 
 makes the universe a universe seemed to be 
 loosed. 
 
 About this time I met somewhere Hume's 
 ' Treatise of Human Nature.' Through Brown's 
 dissolving view of causation, I seemed bound to 
 surrender to the total doubt of Hume, and the 
 last chapter of Hume's ' Treatise ' described the 
 situation. " I am now ready," he declared, 
 "to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look 
 upon no opinion on any subject as more probable 
 than another. Where am I, or what ? From what 
 causes do I derive my existence, or to what condi- 
 tions shall I return ? Whose favour shall I court, 
 and whose anger must I dread ? What beings 
 surround me, and on whom have I any influence, 
 or who have any influence on me ? I am con-
 
 52 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 founded with these questions, and begin to fancy 
 myself in the most deplorable condition imagin- 
 able ; environed with the deepest darkness, and 
 utterly deprived of the use of every faculty." 
 Nor did Hume's account of his own way of 
 escape from this mental paralysis satisfy me. 
 He thus describes it : " Fortunately since reason 
 is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature 
 suffices. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I 
 am merry with my friends ; and when, after three 
 or four hours' amusement, I would return to these 
 speculations they appear so cold, strained, and 
 ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter 
 into them any further." But this blind way 
 of appealing to " nature," with scepticism still 
 latent in the heart of nature, seemed a thin and 
 hollow philosophy. 
 
 In this uncertainty, having already made 
 acquaintance with the ' Methode ' of Descartes, 
 I adopted his rule for not remaining paralysed 
 in action, although pure reason only admitted 
 doubt. Like him I thought I could not do better 
 than follow meantime the opinions of those among 
 whom I lived ; and prefer, among their dis- 
 cordant opinions, the most moderate, as probably 
 the best, since extremes are commonly erroneous.
 
 BERKELEY, COLERIDGE, AND KANT. 53 
 
 In the circumstances I found help and guidance 
 in this Cartesian maxim. 
 
 The summer of 1838 was an era in my life. In 
 the preceding winter I had graduated. The ex- 
 amination for the master's degree had introduced 
 me to Sir William Hamilton. In the spring of the 
 year I read an essay in the Diagnostic Society 
 on "Cause and Effect/' the subject which then 
 filled my mind. This was the beginning of uni- 
 versity companionship ; for shy reserve had hither- 
 to kept me aloof and silent in college coteries. In 
 that summer, too, I increased my acquaintance 
 with Berkeley, and was introduced to Coleridge, 
 besides listening to echoes of Kant. 
 
 Berkeley helped to make living mind instead of 
 dead matter prominent. I began to think of the 
 world as rooted in living mind, with matter 
 subordinate ; and also to feel the insufficiency of 
 mere invariableness in sequences of events as 
 the final interpretation of causation. The moral 
 philosophy lectures of Wilson had called attention 
 to free agency of intending will, as involved in 
 moral responsibility ; thus showing that some- 
 thing more and other than "invariable sequence" 
 was involved in active causation. This was
 
 54 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 ably reinforced by Coleridge, whose 'Aids to 
 Eeflection ' was a favourite companion that 
 summer, serving more than any other influence 
 to disenchant the shallow causal conception of 
 Brown. Mere invariable antecedence seemed not 
 enough to realise the ideal of an active or veri- 
 table cause ; an invariable antecedent is not 
 as such responsible for effects : responsible acts 
 must be independent of the necessitation of 
 nature. We all disclaim responsibility for what- 
 ever we cannot help being or doing. If I 
 cannot help my volitions being what they are, 
 because I am not their originating cause, I can 
 neither be praised nor blamed for them, nor for 
 their resulting good or bad consequences. The 
 conception of an originating cause, as essentially 
 efficient and teleological, exemplified only in acts 
 of intending Will, was thus beginning to super- 
 sede the mechanical conception due to Brown 
 and Hume. 
 
 It was in this summer of 1838 that I discovered 
 the two essays of Sir William Hamilton in the 
 ' Edinburgh Review,' on our negative conception 
 of Infinity, and on Perception of what is external. 
 Hamilton was now in the Logic chair. I had 
 heard his inaugural address in November 1836.
 
 SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON. 55 
 
 It was on the scepticism of David Hume, which 
 he took as the origin of the great European 
 conservative reaction, seen in Reid's appeal to 
 common - sense, and in Kant's critical analysis 
 of the rationale of human experience ; but I 
 heard this with little intelligence. Kant was 
 an unknown name, and the technical terms of 
 his philosophy were to me empty sounds. As 
 early as 1803, indeed, Thomas Brown had given 
 in the ' Edinburgh Review ' a superficial and 
 forgotten exposition of the ' Kritik of Pure 
 Reason,' based not on the German text, but on 
 the French translation of Villiers ; Stewart's 
 Dissertation on modern philosophy in 1821 con- 
 tained an unsympathetic chapter on Kant ; this 
 was followed in a more eclectic spirit by Sir 
 James Mackintosh in his review of Stewart. But 
 Hamilton was the first in Scotland to appreciate 
 the historical magnitude of the German intellectual 
 reformer. 
 
 I had now completed the usual course of study 
 in literature and philosophy. It was time to 
 forecast a professional career. Devotion to the 
 theological problems of metaphysical thought 
 attracted me to Chalmers, then in the chair of
 
 56 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 theology at Edinburgh, and the most illustrious of 
 Scottish theological professors. In the same year 
 Hamilton proposed to inaugurate a select class 
 for metaphysical devotees, an attractive novelty 
 in the university. A combination of the meta- 
 physic of Hamilton with the theology of Chalmers 
 seemed exactly to suit my case ; so, without 
 foreclosing questions about a future career, it 
 was settled that these two were to be my chief 
 studies in the winter of 1838-39. 
 
 This new class for metaphysics was the occasion 
 of a public controversy, characteristic of Hamilton, 
 which lasted during that winter and entertained us 
 all. The Town Council of Edinburgh was then 
 intrusted by law with the superintendence of the 
 university, and this expansion of the new pro- 
 fessor's work, prompted by his philosophical zeal, 
 had been undertaken without previous sanction 
 by the civic administrators. The Council, jealous 
 of their authority, threatened the professor with an 
 interdict. A prolonged correspondence followed. 
 Letters full of elaborate definitions, and syllo- 
 gisms worthy of Scotus or Lombardus, were con- 
 temptuously hurled by Hamilton at the muni- 
 cipal authorities ; all in curious contrast to the 
 simplicity and brevity of the rejoinders by the
 
 CLASS FOR METAPHYSICS IN 1838. 57 
 
 city clerk, in the name of the Council. In the 
 end, while the professor claimed a logical victory, 
 the magistrates were victorious in fact. Unfor- 
 tunately for philosophy, that winter was the first 
 and the last of Hamilton's special provision for 
 metaphysicians. The "Correspondence" forms a 
 semi-philosophical brochure of forty-one pages. 
 
 Being a graduate, I preferred to attend Hamil- 
 ton's lectures as a private student ; with leave to 
 share in work, while not competing for honours. 
 That winter in this class was the happiest in 
 my student life. The lectures attracted a select 
 audience. Never, I suppose, were the ultimate 
 questions about man and the universe, which 
 constitute metaphysics, approached in. a Scottish 
 university in a more disinterested and earnest 
 temper than by the band of students then united 
 through common sympathy in the morning of 
 life ; inspired by the directing intelligence of one 
 who unfolded before our wondering eyes the 
 ancient, medieval, and modern world of thought. 
 Intercourse in the classroom by day was fol- 
 lowed by frequent reunions in the evening at 11 
 Manor Place, then the abode of Hamilton, where 
 all were encouraged to express difficulties and to 
 debate doubts. I remember one discussion in
 
 58 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 which Sir William engaged, prolonged far into 
 night, in which his own theory, as well as the 
 causal conceptions of Hume and Brown, were 
 under criticism. I remember his patient responses 
 to crude objections, the issue, nevertheless, of 
 sincere anxiety. I owe more to Hamilton than 
 to any other intellectual influence. He moved 
 us all to think out questions for ourselves. At 
 the end of that winter he gave me a beautiful 
 edition of the philosophical works of Leibniz, of 
 which I have more to say in the sequel. 
 
 Two young Edinburgh philosophers, then rising 
 into fame, made occasional appearance at those 
 evening reunions in Manor Place. One was John 
 William Semple, a member of the Scottish bar, 
 whose translation of Kant's ' Metaphysic of Ethics ' 
 opened some German philosophy to English readers. 
 Semple was a Greek and German scholar, a lively 
 humorist, with a monomania for the Konigsberg 
 professor, and corresponding contempt for home- 
 bred " philosophy of the human mind." His 
 death soon after in the West Indies, where he 
 went to recover health, disappointed sanguine 
 hopes. The other welcome interlocutor was 
 James Frederick Ferrier, the most picturesque 
 personality in the succession of Scottish philo-
 
 A DUALISM. 59 
 
 sophers, then becoming known as the author of 
 subtle essays on " Consciousness," which were 
 making their way into the world through 
 ' Blackwood's Magazine.' 
 
 That metaphysical winter helped me in many 
 ways. It was the beginning of congenial com- 
 panionship with students, and of the lifelong 
 friendship of Hamilton. At the end the world 
 of the senses had receded ; the world of liv- 
 ing mind appeared to reduce it to subordinate 
 reality. Causes independent of physical nature 
 began to take precedence of the caused causes 
 that depend mechanically upon certain anteced- 
 ent phenomena. A dualism, partly suggested by 
 Kant, was now coming dimly into view. There 
 are two things, as Kant saw, which the oftener 
 and the more steadfastly we consider them, fill 
 the soul with an ever-rising wonder and reverence 
 the Starry Heaven around us, and the Moral 
 Law with its implicates supreme. The Starry 
 Heaven departs from the spot in space which 
 my body occupies, in the world that is realised 
 in sense, and then expands beyond human con- 
 ception into the Immensity which cannot have 
 limits. Yet when I try to conceive its illimit- 
 ableness I become involved in innumerable con-
 
 60 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 tradictions, which as it were punish me for 
 making the attempt. The Moral Law departs 
 from my invisible spiritual Self, and reveals an 
 originating activity that is independent of my 
 animal system, and of the mechanical causation 
 empirically exemplified in nature ; and it issues 
 at last in the mystery of teleological instead of 
 mechanical causation finally in the heart of the 
 universe. It was thus that I was led to reflect 
 upon our conception of the infinity that is 
 latent in all that is real. In being involved as 
 each of us is in space and time, we seemed 
 to be involved in a wonderful dilemma. It 
 was impossible to believe either space or time 
 limited : it was equally impossible to understand 
 their unlimitedness. Unless I can rise into Om- 
 niscience I must, in this predicament, be satisfied 
 with incompletable knowledge. 
 
 It was now, too, that I began to see in our 
 Common - Sense or Common Reason a reservoir 
 which holds for us in a latent state the rationale 
 upon which human action and knowledge at 
 last depend, and which it is the work of the 
 philosopher to interpret. I found this in- 
 sisted on by Berkeley as well as by Hamilton, 
 although their philosophical interpretations of what
 
 A QUESTION RAISED BY DESCARTES. 61 
 
 is implied in the common-sense perception of the 
 material world might seem to disagree ; and at 
 one time I was disposed to regard the difference 
 here between Berkeley and Hamilton as more in 
 words than in the implications of their thought. 
 But it was to this Common- Sense, philosophically 
 criticised, that I now began to look for relief 
 in the ultimate uncertainties about the universe 
 in which I formerly found myself a stranger. At 
 first I was apt to confound uninterpreted with 
 interpreted Common- Sense. I was also inclined 
 to ask for logical proof of the trustworthiness 
 of this offered guide. For inexperience is too 
 ready to assume that propositions drawn forth 
 as conclusions from premisses are alone worthy 
 of being received as knowledge. 
 
 Above all, I was thus early haunted by a ques- 
 tion which Descartes suggested, although his own 
 answer to it seemed to involve a circular fallacy. 
 Do I know enough about the Power supremely at 
 work to be reasonably assured that my faculties 
 may not deceive me ? Have I any guarantee 
 that the universe, notwithstanding its present 
 apparent natural orderliness, may not finally turn 
 out to be a chaos which a deceiving Supreme 
 Power is imposing upon me ? Here Descartes
 
 62 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 found relief in the argument that God is no 
 deceiver, and consequently cannot permit error in 
 the foundations of human belief. So he might 
 safely infer the truth of nature's dictates. This 
 was put by Descartes as an inference. It 
 seemed to involve a circular fallacy. Suspected 
 faculties in a suspected universe cannot be trusted 
 to demonstrate the goodness of the Supreme 
 Power. Not seeing my way here, I continued to 
 adhere to the other maxim of Descartes already 
 mentioned. I accepted provisionally inherited con- 
 victions, and adjourned the endeavour to justify 
 to reason my faith in the moral trustworthiness 
 of the Power that is universally at work. 
 
 In this and the four following years I looked 
 much to Chalmers for light on the founda- 
 tion of our beliefs, especially those involved in 
 natural theism and Christian theology. Two men 
 more remarkable than Hamilton and Chalmers 
 have never, I suppose, occupied chairs simultane- 
 ously in a Scottish university. Hamilton was 
 perhaps the most learned Scot that ever lived ; 
 he was also able to resolve abstract principles into 
 their consequences, and to redargue objections, 
 with the elaborating subtlety of a medieval School-
 
 HAMILTON AND CHALMERS. 63 
 
 man. Chalmers atoned for comparative mediocrity 
 of learning by the eloquence and moral fervour 
 with which he delivered magnificent conceptions, 
 and diffused a fresh glow of intellectual light and 
 spiritual life through the frozen orthodoxy of 
 Scotland. The restrained rhetoric and grave 
 eloquence of Hamilton, his rigid economy of 
 well-measured language, delivered in the class- 
 room word for word from manuscript, in defect of 
 easy command of extempore expression, was a con- 
 trast to the brilliant effusiveness and fervid, if 
 sometimes superfluous, iteration of his illustrious 
 theological colleague. The theology of Chalmers 
 was coloured by the philosophy of Brown, which 
 had dominated in Scotland in the two decades 
 that preceded and followed his death in 1820 ; 
 but Brown was the bete noire of Hamilton, who 
 pursued him with relentless logic as a faithless 
 representative of the tradition of Reid. 
 
 Notwithstanding moral reverence and personal 
 enthusiasm for the man, I somehow failed to find 
 in the lessons of Chalmers the expected satisfying 
 settlement of perplexities of religious thought. 
 It was so as to several articles of his philosophical 
 theism. To rest belief in the existence of God 
 upon the total absence of historic record of
 
 64 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 the existence of the world prior to the Book 
 of Genesis, was surely a slender basis for the 
 infinite conclusion. It seemed to imply that the 
 fundamental fact or principle of all religion de- 
 pended upon empirical proof that the world had 
 a beginning ; although the inconsistency of theism 
 even with an unbeginning universe seemed not 
 self-evident. On the other hand, the irrationality 
 of dogmatic atheism as the creed of a finite intel- 
 ligence was curiously illustrated. The attitude 
 of those who are now called agnostics was viewed 
 even with complaisance, as a step towards faith, 
 although not the final position. Yet it was 
 difficult to sympathise with this provisional 
 agnosticism, as a hopeful beginning. Dogmatic 
 atheists were pressed to hold provisionally in 
 suspense their dogmatic conclusion that there is 
 no God on the empirical ground that although 
 God may not be found on this planet, or even on 
 any of the orbs of our solar system, He may, for 
 aught we can tell, be found on one of the innumer- 
 able stars or planets that occupy immensity. One 
 was apt to think that a God thus located could 
 not be the omnipresent and omnipotent Power 
 in whom the universe has its being. Then, too, 
 an inductive inference of the perfect goodness of
 
 THEISM OF CHALMERS. 65 
 
 the Supreme Power, on the basis of our experience 
 on this planet of a strange mixture of evil and 
 good, seemed to involve the fallacy of resting an 
 infinite conclusion upon a finite experience in- 
 volving contradictory facts. When the solitary 
 datum is a suffering and morally disordered 
 world, how can we infer from this an omnipotent 
 and perfectly good God? This paralysed some 
 postulates in the natural theology of Chalmers ; 
 nor was full relief got from Bishop Butler, or 
 from Jonathan Edwards, two theological heroes 
 of the professor. 
 
 Butler's reverential submission to reality was 
 always refreshing. "Things are what they are; 
 why then should we desire to be deceived ? " 
 His constant refrain of Supreme Moral Power 
 in the heart of things was the expression of 
 profound yet troubled faith. But the attempt to 
 release Christianity from the pressure of intel- 
 lectual and moral difficulties, by arguing that 
 similar difficulties are found in abundance in the 
 universe itself, as presented in our ordinary ex- 
 perience, was apt to aggravate instead of reliev- 
 ing the theistic perplexity. For the fundamental 
 difficulty was, the existence in the universe of 
 
 E
 
 66 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 the very facts to which Butler's analogical argu- 
 ment appealed for relief. He who asks for reason- 
 able justification of faith in the goodness of the 
 Power universally at work, in a world in which 
 sin and suffering abound, is not induced to accept 
 a professed remedial revelation because it multi- 
 plies the lurid facts. Such analogies strengthen 
 instead of weakening the position of an agnostic, 
 to whom the universe is "a riddle, an enigma, 
 an inexplicable mystery"; with "doubt, uncer- 
 tainty, and suspense of judgment " the only 
 result of our scrutiny into the origin, meaning, 
 and destiny of human life. 
 
 I found more lasting satisfaction in Butler's 
 deep sense of the inevitable final ignorance of 
 man. This ignorance disables him from reject- 
 ing absolutely propositions which (through the 
 demonstrable finitude of his intelligence and 
 experience) can be only incompletely understood ; 
 but which, nevertheless, may be sustained in 
 faith by the spirit that is in man. What a 
 finite intelligence can only imperfectly compre- 
 hend, must be distinguished from that in which 
 even finite intelligence finds express contra- 
 diction. Man may accept the mysteries that 
 are involved in intellectual finitude ; but he
 
 BISHOP BUTLER. 67 
 
 cannot, under any conditions, accept what he 
 clearly perceives to be irrational. This logical 
 maxim opened the way, I thought, to a larger 
 conception of intellectual and moral possibilities 
 in the constitution of the universe. It encouraged 
 a larger conception, too, of the domain of "law" 
 in the universe than either ordinary science or 
 dogmatic theological systems were accustomed to 
 assume. Mysteries, including those involved in 
 Christianity, might disappear under the light of 
 reason, if our intelligence could carry us fully 
 within the "supernatural" order, to which the 
 empirical cosmos discovered by inductive experi- 
 ence of external nature is subordinate. I found 
 Butler himself countenancing this. In a remark- 
 able paragraph of the ' Analogy/ he supposes that 
 "there may be beings in the universe whose 
 capacities and knowledge and views may be so 
 extensive as that the whole Christian dispensa- 
 tion may to them appear natural as natural 
 as the visible course of things appears to us." 
 Whether the intellectual progress of mankind 
 in this mortal life can ever reach this ideal 
 may be considered by any who anticipate 
 human Omniscience as the possible goal of 
 human progress.
 
 68 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 "We were told by Chalmers that Jonathan 
 Edwards was the "prince of modern theologians." 
 Yet the wholly necessitated universe of Edwards 
 seemed to resolve the wicked volitions of persons 
 into necessitated sequences, thus making an 
 evil act an effect for which the apparent agent 
 could not be responsible. Nevertheless this Neo- 
 Calvinism was gladly accepted by Chalmers, as 
 relief under theological difficulties. Assuming the 
 necessary universality of mechanical causation, 
 Edwards argued logically enough that all moral 
 and immoral acts, like other events in nature, 
 are produced in us by natural antecedents, and 
 could not originate finally within the indi- 
 vidual person to whom they are attributed. On 
 the other hand, one asked how a person could 
 justly be responsible for volitions, whether called 
 good or bad, which he could not help having, 
 because they did not originate in his intending 
 will. Edwards proposed an answer to this ques- 
 tion which satisfied Chalmers. The goodness or 
 badness of a volition lies, we were told, not in 
 its origin but in its quality, as felt by us after 
 it has been produced. The taste of an apple 
 or the colour of a rose are what our senses feel 
 them to be ; and are what they are, without
 
 EDWARDS AND UNIVERSAL NECESSITY. 69 
 
 regard to the causes which have made them 
 what they are. In like manner human volitions, 
 Chalmers argued, are good or bad according to our 
 feeling of what they are ; with as little regard to 
 their origin as in the case of the apple or the 
 rose. We call a man " wicked " if, by an in- 
 tending act of will, he has committed murder; 
 but this because the quality of the volition is 
 offensive to our moral sense, and not because 
 the act supernaturally originated in the man : 
 it was the natural issue of his inherited organ- 
 ism. The unhappy subject of the volition 
 naturally suffers for its badness, and questions 
 about its origin were dismissed as irrelevant or 
 meaningless. 
 
 If I accept this, I was apt to ask, Am I not 
 adopting a conception of human activity which 
 empties it of moral character ? How can a voli- 
 tion, which I could not help having, be justly 
 attributed to me as personal sin ? A person who 
 was the subject of an evil volition might feel 
 regret, but how could he feel remorse ? An 
 "agent" who could be justly blamed must surely 
 be more than a passive conductor of causal influ- 
 ence. Moral responsibility for " acts " that were 
 determined independently of the so-called agent
 
 70 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 must disappear; and along with this, by logical 
 necessity, all moral government of the living 
 portion of the universe. It seemed impossible to 
 distinguish the position of Edwards from that of 
 Spinoza, expressed in the language of a different 
 school. But some perhaps see in these objections, 
 strongly felt at the time, only the rash conceit of 
 inexperienced youth. 
 
 Sin and guilt inherited on account of the mis- 
 deed of another, accordingly, seemed to remain a 
 difficulty, not got rid of at least by this expedient 
 of Edwards. For it appeared to contradict the 
 moral axiom that individuals cannot be respon- 
 sible for what they did not originate. That 
 the human inhabitants of this planet fail to 
 reach the divine ideal of goodness was a fact 
 of experience ; but then this way of accounting 
 for the fact seemed to absolve them of responsi- 
 bility for it, by making sin a physical disease, 
 naturally transmissible. Also the endless exist- 
 ence of wicked persons, implied in endless punish- 
 ment, was a mystery which the philosophy of 
 Edwards seemed to aggravate, by making the 
 conversion of a few of them to goodness the 
 issue of arbitrary divine selection, instead of a 
 universal divine love. Faith in omnipotent good-
 
 WHAT IS DEATH? 7l 
 
 ness seemed (at the Calvinistic point of view at 
 least) to imply faith in restoration to goodness 
 of all persons in the universe who were bad ; and 
 this not because the bad deserve happiness, but 
 because the endless existence of wicked persons 
 is inconsistent with hostility to moral evil in the 
 divine determining Agent. The wickeder persons 
 are, whether men or devils, the more certain it 
 seemed that God, who is perfectly good, would 
 make them good either by sudden conversion 
 or by a gradual process. Indeed the endlessness 
 of wicked persons, not the endlessness of their 
 suffering, as long as they continue wicked, has 
 always been my difficulty. 
 
 The mystery involved in Death, and in a 
 second endless life for men after their physical 
 death, were much in my thoughts in those years 
 with Chalmers. Emergence at birth as strangers 
 in this world of sense ; conscious life on earth 
 conditioned by our bodies ; emergence again into 
 self-conscious life unconditioned by conceivable 
 embodiment, when the present body is dissolved, 
 were conceptions fruitful in questions. I re- 
 member Chalmers expressing with characteristic 
 vehemence his indifference to speculations of
 
 72 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 this kind, and how he disclaimed sympathy with 
 his " friend " John Foster, the eminent English 
 Nonconformist essay- writer, " for whom distasteful 
 speculations about the dead had a fascination." 
 Somehow the fascination seemed less unnatural, 
 if less healthy, than indifference. I used to put 
 the case to myself in this way. If I knew that 
 in the near future I was to be transported to 
 the most inaccessible spot upon this globe, to 
 remain there till I died, it would surely be 
 natural to me to forecast this prospect. With a 
 more solemn interest I would naturally look 
 forward to being transported, still in the body, 
 to another planet in our solar sphere ; or, more 
 mysterious still, to a planet in another solar 
 system. But how insignificant even this last 
 imagined exile from my present home, in com- 
 parison with continued self - conscious life and 
 experience, after cessation of sense relation to 
 the material world, in a more than ghostly life 
 of spiritual disembodiment. Was it unnatural 
 to forecast this prospective miracle of finding 
 myself alive after I have died ? So I sought 
 for light. Isaac Taylor's ' Physical Theory of 
 Another Life ' came in my way, and attracted 
 me to the author; for his "theory" interested
 
 "OBSTINATE QUESTIONINGS." 73 
 
 me by its ingenuity, although it seemed too 
 " physical " in its postulates. 
 
 Such were some of the aspects in which the 
 enigma of the universe, and of human life that 
 gleam of self-consciousness between two eternities 
 presented itself to me in years that were fruitful 
 in "obstinate questionings of sense and outward 
 things." The questioning was perhaps excessive, 
 and activity of intellectual digestion out of pro- 
 portion to the amount of food that had been 
 collected in experience. But Bacon says that 
 "the registering of doubts saveth philosophy 
 from errors ; the entry of doubts being as 
 so many suckers or sponges to draw increase 
 of knowledge " ; and I sometimes found this 
 true. 
 
 Hamilton encouraged us to raise questions, 
 as well as to discuss freely with him his own 
 speculations and those of other philosophers. 
 Chalmers, I think, was in this respect hardly so 
 indulgent, and perhaps some of us transgressed 
 the limit of toleration. Our metaphysical studies 
 had brought us into contact with Kant and Fichte, 
 and this led to our adoption of a philosophical 
 dialect, and also of Kantist and Neo-Kantist
 
 74 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 points of view, which were strange to his Scottish 
 philosophy. So years afterwards, in one of his 
 prelections as Principal of the Free Church Col- 
 lege, he referred thus to this state of things : 
 " For those who are not inclined to study German 
 philosophy, I do not recommend that they should 
 suspend for it their ordinary readings. Their 
 very ignorance of the German idealism, the very 
 confinement of their mental philosophy to the 
 doctrines and metaphysics of the Scottish school, 
 are guarantees in themselves against the deleteri- 
 ous influence of these outlandish speculations. I 
 do recollect of some students who, before our 
 Disruption, were a good deal carried, as if by a 
 sort of fashionable infection, which might have 
 been seen in the phraseology of their discourses ; 
 and who, however mortifying to one's self-love, 
 gave forth the symptom which I am now about 
 to describe, in their obvious inattention to the 
 lessons of the chair, as if they had only been plain 
 Scottish boluses, having vastly too much in them 
 of the homely and the commonplace to be at all 
 suited for these high appetencies which nothing else 
 can satisfy but the more exquisite and recherche 
 articles of a foreign preparation ; just as if we had 
 been serving up milk for babes instead of strong
 
 GERMAN IDEALISM. 75 
 
 meat for men of a full understanding, or were 
 speaking from the outer court to those who had 
 already been initiated in the mysteries of the 
 inner temple. What I want to make out is 
 that the unintelligible does not alway imply the 
 solid or even the profound ; and, far more moment- 
 ous than this, that the simple verities of the 
 Christian faith rest upon a foundation strong 
 enough to uphold them against the ever-shifting 
 philosophy that now sets in upon us from abroad." 
 This expresses then prevailing Scottish sentiment, 
 especially ecclesiastical, to aspects of philosophical 
 thought which are now welcomed in the ecclesi- 
 astical world of Scotland. They also illustrate 
 the attractive simplicity that marked the noble 
 genius of Chalmers. 
 
 In the years after 1838 the awkward reserve, 
 that was encouraged by years of seclusion on 
 the isolated peninsula in Lome, gradually abated, 
 in the society of young men who largely moulded 
 my education. I met them in Societies organ- 
 ised for discussion then the chief opportunity for 
 familiar intercourse among Edinburgh students, 
 and always a valuable factor in its acad- 
 emical life. My earliest friend outside the manse
 
 "76 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 was Robert Couper Black, with whom I was 
 intimate as early as 1835, when we lived in 
 the house of our Edinburgh tutor, Doctor James 
 Gardner. Black was an enthusiastic admirer of 
 Coleridge and Kant. Our discussions in walks 
 in spring in the Meadows did more for my 
 philosophy than Ritchie, or even the discursive 
 eloquence of " Christopher North." Black and I 
 were joint presidents of a Metaphysical Society, 
 which was formed in 1838 by Hamilton's select 
 class for metaphysical devotees. Indifferent health 
 frustrated a philosophical career that was full 
 of promise, and shortened a life that was 
 latterly devoted to God in the Church of 
 England. Another of my benefactors was John 
 Cairns, a massive and masterly thinker, eminent 
 among all Edinburgh alumni of the nineteenth 
 century, whose speculative power was held in 
 restraint then, and more in after - life, by the 
 superior attraction of philanthropic endeavour to 
 promote divine life among men through the 
 Church in the end Principal of a Theologi- 
 cal College. A purer and nobler character I 
 have never met. There was also James Walker, 
 abundant in dogmatic vigour and fruitful sug- 
 gestion, although in after-life ill health, and
 
 COLLEGE COMPANIONS. 77 
 
 confinement of energy at Carnwath, left the world 
 ignorant of a strong personality. Along with these 
 was "William Welsh, later on the genial pastor 
 and laird of Mosfennan ; John Nelson, afterwards 
 a doctor of divinity in the Free Church of 
 Scotland ; and William Garden Blaikie, one of 
 its professors. To George Wilson, later on pro- 
 fessor of Technology in the university, and 
 Samuel Brown, both chemists of metaphysical 
 genius, and Daniel Wilson, versed in archaeology, 
 afterwards Sir Daniel Wilson, President of Toronto 
 University, I was then gradually approximating ; 
 intimacy came afterwards. Death has taken them 
 all away. One remains, long in the front rank : 
 David Masson was the most striking figure among 
 those who then listened to Chalmers ; his brilliant 
 career since is known to the world. His friend 
 Alexander Bain, since eminent as an Aberdeen 
 professor and in the history of British psychology, 
 whom the world has lately lost, was at that time 
 in Edinburgh and much in our companionship, 
 though not an alumnus of Edinburgh. All of 
 them I recollect with a romantic interest. Deep 
 questions debated in the morning of life, with 
 the sanguine naivete of youth and inexperience ; 
 ready to return with hope to the encounter after
 
 78 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHTCA. 
 
 each repulse ; none of us much alive to utili- 
 tarian considerations or to policies of parties. 
 
 Most of them worshipped Thomas Carlyle. 
 When the Chair of History was vacant in 1842 
 there was a movement among the students, led 
 by some of my set, to have it offered to Carlyle ; 
 but in the end it was given to Ferrier. I was 
 then untouched by Carlyle : Coleridge, Words- 
 worth, and Newman had been my heroes ; the 
 'Aids to Reflection' and the 'Excursion' took 
 the place of ' Sartor Resartus ' and the ' French 
 Revolution.' 
 
 In 1841 "Toleration" was announced as the 
 subject of essay for the year for the University 
 Prize, which the students were in those days annu- 
 ally invited to compete for. The subject suited 
 my state of mind. It was in harmony with my 
 strongly felt revulsion from the lack of charity 
 apparent in the ecclesiastical controversies which 
 then disturbed Scotland ; and it was also akin 
 to habitual thoughts about the finitude of human 
 understanding, the very various degrees of indi- 
 vidual intelligence, and the narrow opportunities 
 for experience, that are within reach of man- 
 kind. The summer of that year was accord-
 
 ESSAY ON "TOLERATION." 79 
 
 ingly much given to the society of John Locke 
 and Jeremy Taylor, and to meditations which 
 have left their mark upon my life. 
 
 How ought persons differenced as we all are, 
 to behave themselves towards those who profess 
 beliefs contrary to their own ? and how ought 
 State and Church to treat members of their 
 respective societies in this regard ? Was it 
 their duty to restrain inquiry, or to punish 
 inquiring men, for professing religious beliefs 
 that were perhaps inevitable at their point of 
 view ? Would restraint of this sort at all 
 help the victories of truth under the actual 
 conditions of human life ? On the contrary, 
 when life is looked at from the individual 
 point of view, does it not appear that duty to 
 truth demands social security for outspoken ex- 
 ercise of each person's share of reason, left to 
 be determined by evidence alone ? Is it not in 
 this way that individual errors or half-truths, 
 by correcting one another, gradually extend our 
 knowledge ; the one-sidedness of each man giving 
 place to the many - sidedness of authoritative 
 mankind ? These were some of the questions 
 I found involved in Toleration. " Justitia, et 
 veritas, sed in omnibus caritas." "We all have
 
 80 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 erred : men may, I find, be honest, though they 
 differ." Lessons like these I was now assimilating. 
 A difficulty which embarrassed me was, how to 
 reconcile toleration of individual belief and indi- 
 vidual conscience with the social cohesion of either 
 Church or State ; also the just relation between 
 Church and State. The " religious equality " 
 claimed for individuals seemed charged with 
 elements of social disintegration and anarchy. 
 If States or Churches must be limited in legis- 
 lative action by the judgments of their indi- 
 vidual members ; if no law can be justly en- 
 acted by the State that is inconsistent with 
 absolute equality in its treatment of all the con- 
 sciences that are alive in the community must not 
 this lead to paralysis of government, or at least to 
 the abnegation by the State of all its higher func- 
 tions ? And are elaborate articles of faith consist- 
 ent with progressive exercise of reason by each 
 member of the Church ? A great national or 
 a great ecclesiastical community must include 
 discordant opinions, conformist consciences and 
 nonconformist consciences, and if the action of 
 the social organism ou^ht to conform to the 
 
 O O 
 
 moral judgments of all its individual members, 
 little room seems to be left for organic action.
 
 RELIGIOUS EQUALITY. 81 
 
 To maintain religious equality must not the State 
 be wholly neutral or agnostic in its relation to the 
 religions of the world ? 
 
 The duty of toleration in religion and in politics 
 was an undeveloped novelty before the middle of 
 the seventeenth century, although the idea of 
 religious toleration has been traced in germ to 
 the Council of Toledo. Intolerance, whether in 
 theory or practice, is no distinctive peculiarity 
 of the Eoman Church, which indeed might main- 
 tain its spiritual claims without using this instru- 
 ment to support them. Scottish presbyterians 
 were later in acknowledging this part of social 
 ethics than conformist and nonconformist English- 
 men. The " Larger Catechism " of the West- 
 minster Assembly includes " toleration " among 
 sins forbidden by the second commandment. 
 John Owen, the Independent divine, was a warm 
 advocate of religious toleration, but on grounds 
 different from Chillingworth and Jeremy Taylor, 
 or even from Locke, who " esteemed toleration 
 to be the chief characteristical mark of the true 
 Church, as it is of that faith which works, not 
 by force, but by love." 
 
 I am sure that these questions were not treated 
 in an adequate manner in my essay, but the 
 
 F
 
 82 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 favourable award of the judges was an encourage- 
 ment at the time. The controversy then active 
 about the morality of support given to the 
 Christian Church by a Christian State, followed 
 by actual collision of the Church with the State 
 in Scotland in which I now found myself as a 
 student of theology in a manner involved in- 
 fused reality of life into speculative arguments 
 about religious Toleration. The subject was a fit 
 prelude to the ecclesiastical storm which raged 
 around me during the next stage of my journey.
 
 83 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 AN ECCLESIASTICAL DIGRESSION. 
 1842-1846. 
 
 "Nothing doth so much keep men out of the Church, and drive them out 
 of the Church, as breach of unity." BACON. 
 
 IN 1840 and 1841, contemporaneously with the 
 prelections of Chalmers, I attended the lectures of 
 David Welsh, the Professor of Church History. 
 Welsh was an acute and sagacious analyst of the 
 human mind, inclined to the philosophy of Thomas 
 Brown, in alliance with the phrenological psycho- 
 logy which was then fashionable in Edinburgh. 
 He was neither deeply learned nor much endowed 
 with historical imagination ; but he was ecclesiastic- 
 ally candid and inquisitive, liberal in political 
 sentiment, and tolerant in religious belief, while 
 
 7 O 3 
 
 firmly established in his own evangelical creed. 
 I was attracted to him as the friend and affec- 
 tionate biographer of Brown, whose book on 
 causation had been so considerable an influence
 
 84 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 in my early education. I was first introduced 
 to Welsh on one of the evenings at Sir William 
 Hamilton's in Great King Street. Notwithstand- 
 ing keen controversial hostility to Brown, and 
 other differences, Hamilton and Brown's biographer 
 were close allies. I used to meet them in their 
 walks together in the environs of Edinburgh. 
 
 Ecclesiastical interest had been awakened in 
 me before I began to study the history of 
 Christianity and the Church systematically in 
 the academical class - room. The story of the 
 advent and gradual extension through the ages 
 of a revelation of God, that claimed to have 
 entered into human history by ways beyond 
 "nature," in the ordinary meaning of that am- 
 biguous word, and which also promised practical 
 relief under the distressing pressure of the 
 mystery of human life, was congenial to my 
 state of mind. The Church, as the visible organ 
 of an extraordinary operation of God in the his- 
 tory of our planet, promised to provide a much- 
 needed director in the search for certainty in 
 matters of religion. 
 
 The attraction first came to me from the con- 
 temporary condition of the Church of England. 
 I had been more or less interested in the " Oxford
 
 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. 85 
 
 movement" almost from its beginnings in 1833. 
 The ' Eecord ' newspaper, representative of Angli- 
 can evangelicalism, made its way to the manse, 
 in addition to the ' Courant.' Through its hostile 
 criticism I became in some degree familiar with 
 the 'Tracts for the Times.' But in the end the 
 * Record ' repelled me from itself more than from 
 the ' Tracts.' I disliked its dogmatism. Besides, 
 sentiment and fancy were touched by the ideal 
 of Christendom united in the historical con- 
 tinuity of its visible Episcopal development- 
 Roman, Greek, and Anglican. The idea seemed 
 to enlarge and glorify the individualism of Clap- 
 ham evangelical life, inherited from Moravians 
 and Methodists, that had been favoured in my 
 early training by my mother. Newman, who 
 tells us that he was one of the founders of the 
 'Record' in 1828, was now the inspired leader 
 of the Anglo - Catholicism which the ' Record ' 
 denounced. Gradually I began to see in the 
 Church of England a via media; in continuity 
 with the undivided Church Visible, patristic if not 
 medieval, yet with room for those well affected 
 to the doctrines of Geneva a Church Catholic 
 yet Protestant unique in Christendom. It had 
 a sort of fascination. There was risk of disrup-
 
 86 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 tion, no doubt, when the opposed factors were in 
 full spiritual life. Temporary adjustment of the 
 conflicting elements formed the Elizabethan settle- 
 ment ; followed by fresh conflict in the Great 
 Rebellion, and resettlement at the Restoration, 
 with expulsion of "the sectaries" and consequent 
 rise of Anglican Dissent, all threatened now by 
 demand for " religious equality," in a nation no 
 longer identical with its historic Church. Is dis- 
 integration inevitable under the strain, or may 
 Anglo - Catholicism even become the reconciling 
 medium in a united Christendom ? 
 
 I was revolving questions of this sort in a 
 crude way when I was in the church history 
 class. Welsh's lectures were hardly in touch 
 with this state of mind. He seemed to dis- 
 parage unduly the hierarchical historic Church 
 which had conquered Pagan Rome, maintained 
 itself through the rise and fall of empires, and 
 was still standing before the world as the visible 
 guarantee of Christian faith and life. He de- 
 scribed its record as one of gradual departure 
 from apostolic purity into spiritual despotism and 
 ecclesiastical corruption, culminating in Hilde- 
 brand and medieval Romanism ; instead of the 
 gradual evolution of a divine organisation which
 
 ONE VISIBLE CHURCH. 87 
 
 benefited the world. The history of organised 
 Christianity for fifteen centuries was pictured 
 as a history of the growing unfitness of the 
 organism for transforming morally disordered 
 humanity into a spiritual kingdom, in which the 
 tremendous mystery of human life was to receive 
 its practical solution. This disastrous ecclesiastical 
 evolution, we were told, was followed in the 
 sixteenth century by a cataclysm a revolution- 
 ary return to original simplicity and purity, in 
 those parts of Western Europe which then 
 separated from the Eoman organisation, and 
 multiplied as independent sects ; rival and com- 
 peting, according to the various interpretations 
 they put upon books of ancient authorship which 
 were accepted as infallible. 
 
 This interpretation of the fortunes of the 
 Visible Church throughout the centuries was 
 perplexing. About 1840 Kanke's ' History of the 
 Popes ' and Macaulay's brilliant criticism attracted 
 me. The hierarchical Church of Hildebrand, 
 under which pagan Kome was transformed into 
 the more comprehensive empire of Christen- 
 dom, seemed the most majestic and persistent 
 of human institutions, with its record in a 
 long succession of self - sacrificing saints and
 
 88 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 missionaries, who exemplified and extended the 
 religion which they professed. The ancient uni- 
 versities of Europe were evidence of its zeal 
 for learning, and its members were illustrious 
 in the literature of theology and philosophy. 
 The ' Summa Theologise ' of Thomas Aquinas 
 took its place beside the 'De Civitate Dei' of 
 St Augustine and the ' Institutes ' of Calvin, as 
 magna opera of Christian theology ; like those 
 of Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hegel in the library 
 of philosophy. Aquinas, indeed, was one of my 
 favourites at this time, and in the face of 
 opposition I got his works, in some twenty-eight 
 volumes, into the theological library of the Uni- 
 versity. And in modern philosophy, I had found 
 no books more congenial than those of Male- 
 branche, Arnauld, Fe'nelon, and, above all, Pascal, 
 representatives at once of spiritual philosophy 
 and of Catholicism in France. 
 
 It was during one of those winters that with 
 my friend Walker I went to hear some lectures 
 by Dr Gillis, the Koman Bishop of Edinburgh, 
 given on Sunday evenings in the Catholic Church 
 in Broughton Street, in rejoinder to the stric- 
 tures of Macaulay on the Papacy in his "Kanke" 
 article in the ' Edinburgh Review.' The lectures
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL INFALLIBILITY. 89 
 
 checked instead of encouraging any disposition to 
 look for the basis of religious certainty in the 
 fallible hypothesis of an infallible ecclesiastical 
 organisation. The promised certainty had to be 
 reached, as it seemed, through an avenue of 
 uncertainties. I ventured to express some of 
 these difficulties in an anonymous letter to the 
 bishop, which he good-naturedly made the sub- 
 ject of criticism at his lecture on the following 
 Sunday. 
 
 The spirit of Descartes and Locke, as well 
 as meditation upon the duty of private judg- 
 ment, as our final resort, in connection with 
 the essay on " Toleration," were now dissolving 
 my ecclesiastical dreams in a return to the 
 modern temper, after an aberration chiefly due 
 to the poetry of religion, of which the medi- 
 eval spirit was full. The former disposition to 
 welcome an ever-at-hand infallible authority in 
 religious controversies, which discordant Christen- 
 dom seemed so much to need, was checked by 
 reason. It was, indeed, one phase of the craving 
 for certainty, religious or other, in the presence 
 of the awful enigma of the universe, by which 
 I was haunted. 
 
 I was now invited to apply reason to another
 
 90 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 claim for infallibility. The essay on Toleration 
 was hardly out of my hands, when the theological 
 professors proposed a vindication of the infallible 
 authority of the Bible, for the subject that year 
 of the Pitt Prize essay, then annually open to 
 competition among theological students. The 
 subject seemed in natural sequence to questions 
 raised by Toleration, and likewise to recent in- 
 terest in the claim of ecclesiastical organisation 
 to divine inspiration and consequent infallibility. 
 Books produced long ago in Judea had, in the 
 sixteenth century, exclusively taken the place, in 
 the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon world, of the con- 
 tinuous ecclesiastical inspiration to which Europe 
 had looked, as the basis of religious certainty, 
 in the " ages of faith." What could be said in 
 favour of the infallibility of this collection of 
 revered books, as a substitute for the abandoned 
 infallibility of the living Church ? I was attracted 
 by the question, and some of the following sum- 
 mer was devoted to the essay. I did what I 
 could to unfold the rationale of faith in Scrip- 
 ture, as the ultimate ground of certainty in ques- 
 tions of religion, a dogma that was pressed with 
 emphasis in the lectures of Chalmers, and in 
 books of popular Protestantism within reach in
 
 BIBLICAL INFALLIBILITY. 91 
 
 my seclusion at the manse in Lome. My essay, 
 presented in winter, hardly touched the root of 
 the great question involved, and as it obtained 
 the prize, the other competitors must have been 
 slenderly endowed. 
 
 The infallibility of a series of books, written 
 long ago, ostensibly by fallible men, taken in 
 these latter days as the ultimate criterion of 
 religious truth, doubtless affords wider room for 
 the interpreting judgment of the individual 
 than that afforded by a living infallible author- 
 ity, constantly at hand to direct us all ; but 
 this with greater risk of erroneous interpretation. 
 The dead book, open per se to innumerable 
 varieties of interpretation, is otherwise provided 
 with an infallible interpreter always ready to 
 correct individual mistakes, and to guide the 
 faithful. The loss of this ever-present resource 
 explains the horror with which the Protestant 
 watchword of " the Bible alone the religion of 
 Protestants," when first proclaimed, was regarded 
 by Catholics, and the tragic aspect of the revolu- 
 tion in the sixteenth century, which seemed to 
 throw mankind hopelessly back upon the final 
 mystery, which the Church had been supposed 
 able to relieve.
 
 92 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Infallible fundamental assurance, so it seemed 
 in the end, could be secured neither through an 
 inspired Church nor an inspired Book, if it was 
 rested in either case only upon historical evidence. 
 I can be no surer of what I prove than I am of 
 the evidence which is supposed to prove it. 
 Historical evidence gives only probability. Even 
 proved physical miracles are not an absolutely 
 certain foundation, as long as the moral character 
 of the Supreme Power in the universe is un- 
 certain ; for then the miracles may be meant to 
 mislead us. Christendom, too, is divided among 
 various sects, and which sect is invested with 
 infallibility? The books of Scripture present an 
 analogous difficulty ; the canonicity of each con- 
 stituent part is open to doubt and criticism. 
 What books in Jewish and Christian literature 
 are infallible ? Above all, the inspired Book, and 
 even the dicta of the inspired Church, must be 
 interpreted. That interpreters are apt to err is 
 evident in the innumerable variations of inter- 
 pretation. It seemed, then, that neither the 
 living Church nor the dead book could be the 
 final and exclusive foundation of religious cer- 
 tainty. Eacli needs to rest on something deeper 
 and more comprehensive. Hooker, who was one
 
 HOOKER AND THE PUEITANS. 93 
 
 of my favourites at this time, seemed to show 
 conclusively, as against the Puritans, that neither 
 Church nor Book could be ultimate, or the sole 
 reservoir of religious knowledge and divine revela- 
 tion. Either must presuppose the co-operation of 
 other factors of theology. When included in a 
 wider philosophy, both may be of immense prac- 
 tical value ; but the reasonableness of faith in 
 either needs vindication, and this carries us back 
 to faith in the perfect goodness of the Power 
 dominant in the universe. " Unto the upright 
 there ariseth light in the darkness." Inter- 
 course with men in the endeavour to make 
 them good, seemed in the meantime my prac- 
 tical way of gaining spiritual light and life. 
 
 The essay on Biblical Infallibility had brought 
 me much in contact with Chillingworth, and I 
 found congenial thought and temper in Cudworth 
 and other Cambridge Platonists, as well as direc- 
 tion from Hooker. 
 
 In 1842 I spent part of the summer in England, 
 realising early dreams, and enlarging a very pro- 
 vincial experience. One of my brothers had been 
 offered an Indian cadetship, and I went with him 
 and my father to London. After parting from them
 
 94 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 there, I made a solitary pilgrimage to Oxford and 
 then on the Continent. We travelled to London 
 in the steamer from Leith, and I can recall the 
 enthusiasm inspired by the scenery of Kent and 
 Essex in ascending the Thames in the sunshine of 
 an English summer morning, the landing at Black- 
 wall, and the interminable seven miles' journey 
 through crowded streets, under a sultry sky, to 
 Bloomsbury, my headquarters in London, in the 
 house of my mother's early friend, a sister of 
 the late Sir Edward Ryan, whom we had come 
 to visit. 
 
 London of that day was still the Old London 
 of the Georgian era, little affected by the social 
 forces which have transformed it during the reign 
 of Queen Victoria. It was before the era of 
 palatial hotels, and even the omnibus was then 
 a novelty. I remember Sir John MacDougall, a 
 few days before we left the Land of Lome, 
 describing as a wonder this new means of loco- 
 motion, of which he had some experience a few 
 months before in the metropolis. My first ramble 
 in London was on the day we landed. It was 
 from Bloomsbury to St James's Park, through the 
 once famous Seven Dials. As it happened there 
 was commotion in the Park. It was the after-
 
 LONDON IN 1842. 95 
 
 noon on which Francis fired at the Queen, as 
 she and Prince Albert were driving on Consti- 
 tution Hill. 
 
 In London I found chief attraction in West- 
 minster Abbey and in the Houses of Parliament. 
 The Abbey seemed to embody the romance of 
 English history in Church and State to which 
 I had been introduced in old days at the manse, 
 and its mysterious proportions and dim religious 
 light awakened a response that was unfelt when 
 I visited St Paul's. 
 
 The existing palace of the Legislature at West- 
 minister was then only a project, and the old historic 
 houses had been destroyed by fire a few years 
 before. Almost my first evening was spent in 
 the House of Commons. It helped to satisfy a 
 desire awakened long before, by reading debates 
 on Catholic Disabilities and the Reform Bill, 
 and by watching in the solitude of Benderloch 
 the fortunes of Lord Grey and Lord Melbourne. 
 The mean appearance of the temporary home of 
 the Legislature was unexpected, but the personal- 
 ities were an absorbing interest. On that first 
 evening I heard Sir Robert Peel, then Premier, 
 and Lord John Russell, who led the Opposition. 
 Peel's fluency, dexterity in debate, and command
 
 96 BIOGEAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 of the House were memorable in his light waist- 
 coat, and watch-chain with its conspicuous bunch 
 of seals, as I now see him in my mind's eye, 
 as well as the moral strength in physical lassi- 
 tude of Lord John ; unpretentious oratory and 
 utilitarian common-sense in Joseph Hume ; vol- 
 uble argument of Eoebuck, the philosophical 
 Radical ; and the massive head, genial face, and 
 reckless humour of Daniel O'Connell, the Irish 
 Liberator, are still vivid memories of this first 
 night in the House of Commons. But of all 
 the speakers my chief interest was in Gladstone. 
 I was already familiar with his book on Church 
 and State, and with Macaulay's certificate, that 
 he was a "young man of unblemished character, 
 the rising hope of the stern and unbending 
 Tories, who follow reluctantly a leader whose 
 experience and eloquence are indispensable to 
 them, but whose cautious temper and moderate 
 opinions they abhor." Gladstone's speech at the 
 Glasgow^ banquet given to Peel by Scottish Con- 
 servatives in 1837 was not forgotten by me, with 
 its condemnation of proposals to dissolve the 
 union with Ireland, or to reduce the Irish Church 
 establishment. His youthful countenance, hand- 
 some figure, fervid earnestness, and the music
 
 OXFORD AND NEWMAN. 97 
 
 of his voice, are all associated with that mem- 
 orable evening. 
 
 A week of beatitude in Oxford more than 
 realised the Oxford vision of preceding years. It 
 was to me the most notable event in the history 
 of that summer. Less than two hours on the 
 Great Western carried me to Steventon, and 
 another hour by coach to Oxford, on a sultry 
 afternoon in June. This was followed by an 
 evening in Worcester College and its pleasant 
 garden, my Oxford home during this Commemor- 
 ation week, when I contemplated the city of 
 colleges from day to day, in the radiance of a 
 perfect English summer. The picturesque life of 
 the place was invested with a halo of medieval 
 romance and poetry. For the first and last time 
 I saw Newman. He was standing in a crowd 
 in the old quadrangle of the Schools, on the 
 day of the meeting of Convocation which cen- 
 sured Hampden. The atmosphere of Oxford in 
 1842 was densely charged with Newmanism, and 
 the ' Tracts ' had formerly brought me for a 
 time under this influence. Reverence led me to 
 touch the hem of his academic robe. He was 
 then living at Littlemore, and three years later 
 he went over to Rome. I always regret that I 
 
 G
 
 98 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 missed an opportunity long years after of visit- 
 ing him at Birmingham. Pusey, Keble, and 
 Palmer were also among the historic figures seen 
 on that far-off summer day in the Oxford quad- 
 rangle. My personal intercourse was confined 
 to undergraduates. Through my Edinburgh 
 friend Black, now resident in Oxford, I was 
 introduced to Burgon, then an undergraduate at 
 Worcester, afterwards the genial and eccentric 
 Dean of Chichester, whose continued friendship was 
 a happiness in later years. Another interesting 
 personality I found in Henry Skeffington, brother 
 of Lord Massareene, a fervid Newmanite, inspired 
 by faith in the supernatural authority and con- 
 tinuous life of the Visible Catholic Church, with 
 its sacramental symbolism and regenerating effi- 
 cacy, as the noblest of social organisations. I 
 was attracted by the beautiful enthusiasm of this 
 young man in our walks around Oxford, and in 
 his correspondence after I left the place, to see 
 him no more. His early death four years later 
 disappointed sanguine hopes. 
 
 It was with a heavy heart that on the day 
 following the Encaenia in the Sheldonian Theatre 
 I saw the colleges and towers of Oxford disappear, 
 when I was returning on the coach to London. I
 
 BELGIUM AND THE RHINE. 99 
 
 would gladly have made the fascinating city my 
 home, but I saw no way open ; and, indeed, the 
 farewell seemed final. The railway was then a 
 novelty. I remember how my father, accustomed 
 to the quiescent isolation of Argyllshire, had ad- 
 vised me to profit by this experience of England, 
 as it would probably be the only English ex- 
 perience of my life. Yet I have visited England 
 some sixty times in the intervening sixty years ; 
 and I could not then foresee the ties which, in ways 
 unexpected, have in later years connected me with 
 the most beautiful academic city in the world. 
 
 After leaving Oxford I made a short solitary 
 excursion to Belgium and the Ehine. Sweet 
 Bruges, a summer day in stately Ghent, followed 
 soon after by a Sunday devoted from early morn- 
 ing till late evening to church services in Cologne, 
 are among its lasting pictures. A day at Bonn 
 was devoted to the university ; but Bonn was to 
 me under an eclipse caused by pathetic remem- 
 brance of the glories of Oxford. I wandered into 
 the church history class, where I heard with im- 
 perfect intelligence a German lecture on Hilde- 
 brand. It was followed by another on Xenophon, 
 by the venerable Brandis, addressed to an audience 
 of about sixty. The unbroken stillness of the
 
 100 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 students was a novelty to one accustomed to 
 unrestrained demonstrations in an Edinburgh 
 lecture - room. Of the return journey I recall 
 a night on the deck of the steamer between 
 Cologne and Rotterdam. Under the light of a 
 full moon, I watched in solitude the windings 
 of the Rhine, through scenes curiously foreign, 
 which somehow revived strongly that sense of 
 the foreignness of all experience on this strange 
 planet, that had so often haunted me at home. 
 The sight of Holland from the summit of a tower 
 in Rotterdam was tantalising. The country was 
 for me associated with Descartes, and Locke, 
 and toleration ; and this transient outlook was 
 attractive. But my finance was exhausted, and 
 Holland remained unexplored for more than fifty 
 years. The house in which Erasmus was born, 
 and his monument on the Boomjees, was an 
 interest in Rotterdam. In those days I was 
 apt to sympathise with the ecclesiastical policy 
 of Erasmus. 
 
 I returned to the land of Lome when Scotland 
 was in the crisis of an ecclesiastical conflict, which 
 in one form or another had been going on for 
 nearly ten years. None of the parties engaged
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL WAR IN SCOTLAND. 101 
 
 i 
 
 in it were guilty of the sin of Erasmus ; the 
 perfervidum ingenium Scotorum was conspicuous 
 in all. Ecclesiastical war had arisen in Scotland 
 contemporaneously with the Anglo - Catholic re- 
 vival in Oxford in 1833. Each was at first the 
 issue of revived religious life, in reaction against 
 the increasing secularism or religious agnosti- 
 cism of the State, promoted by ideas of political 
 and religious equality that were born of the 
 French Kevolution. After our political Eeform 
 in 1832, these ideas threatened the ecclesiastical 
 establishments of England and Scotland, which 
 were regarded as inconsistent with equality in 
 religion. The ecclesiastical revival came in both 
 cases from the seventeenth century, inspired in 
 England by Andrews and Laud, and in Scotland 
 by Henderson and the Covenanters. 
 
 In Oxford Newman had recalled the Church to 
 a sense of its supernatural strength, conveyed 
 through apostolical descent, and consequent com- 
 munity with the one continuous divine organisa- 
 tion in Christendom ; while it was nevertheless 
 the religious organ of the English nation in 
 protest against the claims of the Bishop of 
 Eome. In the early Thirties the Church of Eng- 
 land seemed to Arnold immediately doomed as an
 
 102 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 establishment. The Oxford ecclesiastical revival 
 falsified the prediction. In Scotland ecclesiastical 
 life under Chalmers was Puritan in spirit, and not 
 yet politically democratic, indeed strongly con- 
 servative in temper. Indifferent to the modern 
 theory of religious equality, and its consequent, 
 national religious neutrality, Chalmers regarded 
 the highest welfare of man as the common end 
 of State and Church, and saw in the establish- 
 ment of a Church by the State, a relation in 
 which the superior religious wisdom attributed 
 to ecclesiastics was sustained by the superior 
 secular resources of the Christian State ; but 
 with these two factors of human progress still 
 related as allies, absolutely independent of each 
 other in their spheres ; not identified, according 
 to the ideal of Hooker, in which the Church 
 is the Christian State in religious action. But 
 while each was independent in its own depart- 
 ment, a religious establishment was with Chalmers 
 indispensable for making the ministrations of the 
 Church territorially coextensive with the increas- 
 ing population of the nation, as well as for 
 checking the growing religious neutrality or in- 
 difference of the modern State. This raised in 
 Scotland what has been described as "the hardest
 
 NATIONAL SECULARISM. 103 
 
 of all human questions " the right relation of 
 the nation to the aggregate of religions embraced 
 within its domain ; a problem ultimately akin to 
 that of body and soul in man, or of nature to 
 spirit in the constitution of the universe. 
 
 Against this idea, what was called " Voluntary- 
 ism" tended to total secularisation of the State. 
 It was argued that an adequate fulfilment of the 
 national duty of religious toleration forbids national 
 encouragement of any of the competing or con- 
 flicting sects into which modern Christendom has 
 transformed itself, as unjust to the others, and to 
 all who are outside Christendom. Friendship to 
 one was hostility to the rest : a perfectly tolerant 
 State must as such be equally friendly to all 
 religions, or, rather agnostically equally indiffer- 
 ent to all. Action by the State, it was argued, 
 cannot be truly spiritual action : national legisla- 
 tion involves physical compulsion, while religion 
 appeals to individual freewill, and ought to rest 
 upon this as the only legitimate motive for sus- 
 taining and extending itself. Even if Christen- 
 dom, united in One Catholic Church, were to 
 include the whole nation, the spiritual motive 
 power of the Church ought to be separate from 
 the secular motive power of the State ; but all the
 
 104 BIOGKAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 more when Western Christendom has declined in 
 each nation into an aggregate of conflicting sects. 
 
 I seem still to hear the din of this angry polemic, 
 " Voluntaries " at war with the Church Establish- 
 ment, which sounded during my undergraduate 
 years in Glasgow and in Edinburgh. My first 
 experience of a public meeting was of one to 
 support the Establishment. I was repelled rather 
 than attracted by it. I remember how one 
 reverend orator asked the audience to witness that 
 his opponents were not rightly called " volun- 
 taries"; for instead they were the "vermin" of 
 society, noxious parasites at work for its destruc- 
 tion. Perhaps a claim for national religious estab- 
 lishment was never urged in a more high-handed 
 temper than by its leading advocates in the 
 Church of Scotland at that time. Most of them, 
 among others this speaker, were themselves cast 
 upon the goodwill of the faithful a few years later. 
 
 It was in his own philanthropic spirit, but with 
 characteristic one - sided intensity, that ecclesi- 
 astical Establishment and its expansion was 
 argued for by Chalmers. The high - water mark 
 was reached in lectures which he gave in London 
 in 1838, of which we got the substance in the 
 Edinburgh class-room. It is curious to recall his
 
 CHALMERS AND CHURCH ESTABLISHMENT. 105 
 
 position in the light of later ideas. He pressed 
 the duty of the Christian State to "select" one 
 Christian sect out of the national multitude of 
 sects, for its agent in securing that Christianity 
 should be presented to all within the nation, 
 under a parochial arrangement which national 
 legislation alone could command. But how could 
 this be accomplished by a nation divided eccle- 
 siastically into sects ? Chalmers saw no difficulty 
 either in England or Scotland. Free trade, or 
 the economical law of supply and demand, appli- 
 cable to human demand for bodily food, for 
 which the appetite is always active, could not 
 apply to religion, for which human demand is 
 feeble and irregular. Protection, propulsion, by 
 the steady support of the Christian State, and this 
 not in the special interest of the protected sect, 
 but for the sake of the community at large, was 
 the inevitable alternative. For religion, as the 
 highest of human necessities, must not be impeded 
 by any multiplication of sects, or by imagined 
 difficulty in selecting one of them as the religious 
 organ of the State. The State must begin, Chal- 
 mers curiously assumed, by summarily excluding 
 the one ecclesiastical organisation which has the 
 allegiance of nearly half of Christendom. The
 
 106 BIOGKAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 question as between "Protestantism and Popery" 
 was one about which, it seemed to him, only " an 
 incompetent and vulgarised Parliament could have 
 any doubt." For him the question was, whether 
 infallible Scripture or fallible men should direct 
 faith and conscience. As between the innumer- 
 able sectarian varieties of Protestantism Chalmers 
 saw little room for difficulty. A selection ought 
 to be made because of " the territorial principle." 
 The parochial economy could not be sufficiently 
 secured through the collective action of Protestant 
 sects, each locally overlapping the other. There- 
 fore all ought to agree, on the ground of common 
 patriotism, to permit the territorial establishment 
 of one among the many ; with ample toleration 
 for all the others outside. In selecting, the nation 
 would naturally prefer the Church already in pos- 
 session Episcopal in England and Presbyterian in 
 Scotland. To advocates of religious equality, who 
 ask why, when the reasons for difference among 
 the Protestant sects are insignificant, they should, 
 nevertheless, be treated thus, the reply of Chal- 
 mers was, " Why, when the differences are insig- 
 nificant, do the sectaries keep aloof, for instance, 
 from the Church of England, on considerations 
 which are insignificant and paltry ; caprices or
 
 CHALMERS AND ECCLESIASTICAL EQUALITY. 107 
 
 whimsical peculiarities in which, through the very 
 wantonness of freedom in this land of toleration, 
 men have chosen to besport themselves? Sub- 
 stantially they are all right ; and the State is 
 justified in keeping to the sect already in pos- 
 session, for the sake of the territorial principle, 
 with its mighty benefits, which can only thus be 
 enjoyed by all." 
 
 It was difficult to reconcile this philanthropic 
 ideal of Chalmers with all that is implied in 
 an equal national treatment of the aggregate of 
 religions of which a nation is composed. On 
 the other hand, agnostic religious indifference in 
 all national functions, in a nation which had 
 been converted for ages to a profession of Chris- 
 tianity, seemed a retrograde movement an ebb- 
 tide of religion as the supreme social force which 
 must arrest national action in promoting the edu- 
 cation of the community in any form, if religion 
 is to be recognised as at all an agent in the 
 education of mankind. Indeed mere financial 
 endowment seemed not the most objectionable of 
 the ways in which religion had received, or might 
 receive, national countenance. The dogma of 
 religious equality seemed to forbid national ac- 
 knowledgment of a divided Christendom in any
 
 108 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 conceivable way. The Coronation Oath, or un- 
 denominational religion, as in the Irish national 
 schools of those days, seemed not less, perhaps 
 more, a contradiction to religious equality than 
 a mere endowment given to one of many sects. 
 I was apt to think that the advocates of re- 
 ligious equality had not touched the bottom of a 
 deep question. The State could neither act in re- 
 ligion, nor refrain from acting, without conflicting 
 with a Conformist or a Nonconformist conscience. 
 The dilemma seemed inextricable. I remember 
 how in our College Debating Society the noncon- 
 formist members objected to opening its meetings 
 with prayer, as inconsistent with the duty of 
 religious neutrality in a national university. 
 
 Thus assailed by Nonconformists, the Scottish 
 Establishment, led by Chalmers, sought to popular- 
 ise itself; and this, in evidence of its ecclesiastical 
 autonomy, through its own independent agency, 
 and without concert with the Legislature. In 
 the generation which passed the Reform Bill 
 appointment of ministers to parishes by un- 
 conditional patronage was to many a distasteful 
 anachronism. It seemed also inconsistent with 
 the ecclesiastical duty of guarding the faithful 
 against the "intrusion" of ministers into particular
 
 THE ECCLESIASTICAL VETO ACT. 109 
 
 parishes, contrary to the "will" of the people, 
 and was, so it was argued, contrary to Scripture. 
 Chalmers claimed for the Church power to forbid 
 the scandal, and this solely in the exercise of 
 its own divinely given autonomy. An ecclesi- 
 astical Act had in 1834 embodied this rule 
 of Non - Intrusion. The civil courts, as normal 
 interpreters of the conditions of Establishment, 
 pronounced this ecclesiastical Act illegal. There- 
 upon the Church was divided about its duty, 
 as between compromise and collision divided, 
 in short, between two opposite ideals of religious 
 duty. 
 
 Tangled negotiations with statesmen when Lord 
 Melbourne was Premier, and then under Sir Eobert 
 Peel, an ambiguous bill by Lord Aberdeen, ten- 
 tative legislation by the House of Argyll, contro- 
 versial pamphlets without number, the Scottish 
 people in an ecclesiastical fever, sustained by 
 clerical orators and actions in courts of law, all 
 inflamed by the ' Witness ' newspaper, the organ 
 of the movement party, are among the memories 
 of those troubled years, at the outlook in the 
 Lome manse. At first I contemplated the 
 struggle with a sort of dramatic interest ; later 
 on with an interest more personal and ethical.
 
 110 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPH1CA. 
 
 " In this world," as Bacon says, " God and angels 
 only may be spectators " ; at any rate, one who 
 is involved by his surroundings in the actions of 
 a divided society cannot always retain a position 
 of speculative neutrality and criticism. 
 
 Among the parliamentary utterances I remember 
 a curious interest I somehow felt in those of Lord 
 Melbourne : his philosophic laissez faire I be- 
 lieve concealed not a little recondite knowledge of 
 theological debates. The fever-heat of the pres- 
 byterian ministers now and then ruffled even his 
 placid temper ; and on one occasion he expressed 
 a hope, in prospect of an interview with a depu- 
 tation of negotiators, that " that damned fellow 
 Chalmers was not among them." And when Lord 
 Aberdeen was disappointed by the inflexible ten- 
 acity of the ministers, Melbourne was surprised 
 that one who knew Scotland so well as the noble 
 earl, seemed not to know that in ecclesiastical 
 arrogance the Presbyterian ministers were any 
 day more than a match for the Church of Rome. 
 He was a bete noire of the ministers. One of 
 them told me with horror that in 1831, when 
 the Edinburgh Church History professorship was 
 vacant, and Melbourne, as Home Secretary, had 
 the appointment, his patience tried by friends
 
 VISCOUNT MELBOURNE. Ill 
 
 of candidates, " Hang it," he said to the last 
 clerical interviewer, "let us give it to the Devil. 
 He must know something about Church history." 
 In the end it was given to Welsh. 
 
 In the mass of ephemeral tracts produced by 
 this conflict, a few are of more permanent in- 
 terest. Hugh Miller's ' Letter to Lord Brougham ' 
 is memorable for vigorous thought by a homely 
 self-educated Scot, endowed with a mastery of 
 English style seldom reached by his countrymen. 
 And a few days before the Disruption, the ecclesi- 
 astical world was surprised by an announcement 
 that Sir William Hamilton was about to address 
 a letter of remonstrance to the recalcitrant min- 
 isters, who were preparing to withdraw from the 
 Establishment. Few in Scotland were aware of 
 Hamilton's eager interest in problems theological 
 and ecclesiastical, or of his rare learning in this 
 department, which had gained for him a doctorate 
 in theology from the University of Leyden. A 
 leading Scottish ecclesiastic seemed to resent as 
 intrusion the interference of a philosophical lay- 
 man, notwithstanding his theological doctorate. 
 Indeed it is curious that with us custom confines 
 this academical distinction to those ecclesiastically 
 ordained ; as if theological science was the ex-
 
 112 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 elusive perquisite of the clergy, instead of being 
 a truly human pursuit, not less suited for indis- 
 criminate academical encouragement than natural 
 science, or jurisprudence, or philosophy. 
 
 Hamilton's " Letter," as he explains, was ad- 
 dressed only to "those not neologically disposed." 
 He had nothing to say to ecclesiastics who re- 
 garded the Non- Intrusion legislation of the Church 
 as an innovating reform in its constitution, 
 enacted by the spiritual power without concert 
 with its ally : the righteous course for all such 
 was, he insisted, secession from the Establishment. 
 But for those who desired "to walk in the old 
 paths," he set himself to show that through 
 ignorance they had unconsciously forsaken it, and 
 were about to become "schismatics and martyrs 
 by mistake." In fifty-nine pages of expostulation 
 he offered what professed to be "A demonstration 
 that the principle of Non-Intrusion, so far from 
 being fundamental in the Church of Scotland, is 
 subversive of the principles of that and every 
 other Presbyterian Establishment." The "demon- 
 stration " turns mainly upon an alleged ambiguity 
 in the term "will," which, "according to a distinc- 
 tion fundamental in philosophy," is contrasted, 
 instead of being identical, with sentiment and
 
 SIR W. HAMILTON AND NON-INTRUSION. 113 
 
 desire or aversion. A " unilateral " ecclesiastical 
 rule had made the sentimental aversion of a 
 majority in a congregation a bar to the settle- 
 ment of a minister who had been nominated by 
 a patron ; and this Sir William tried to prove, 
 by a large induction of instances, was in contra- 
 diction to the authority of every Presbyterian 
 communion in Europe. The "Non-Intrusion Act" 
 of the Church of Scotland was in short based 
 upon a mistaken assumption, and so its con- 
 tinued maintenance implied rebellion against 
 statutory obligation. 
 
 Hamilton's argument seemed scarcely to touch 
 the high position of those to whom it was 
 addressed. Chalmers claimed for the Church of 
 Scotland the full liberty of a voluntary noncon- 
 formist society in its discipline, and (by implica- 
 tion) in evolving its theological doctrine, in the 
 light of progressive knowledge ; always, of course, 
 with the risk of the privileges of Establishment 
 being withdrawn by the State ; or by spontaneous 
 separation, in whole or in part, of the Church, if 
 its autonomous ecclesiastical action seemed to the 
 Legislature to involve a sufficiently important 
 " neological " departure from its original con- 
 stitution. " I feel it an injustice to the sacred 
 
 H
 
 114 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 cause of the Headship of Christ," Chalmers said, 
 "to be condescending to deal with the State on 
 the specific question of Non-Intrusion. I would 
 never even ask from the Legislature a recog- 
 nition of Non- Intrusion. A far greater thing 
 is at stake, even the right of giving effect 
 to this and every other principle of a purely 
 spiritual nature which seemeth to us a sound 
 one." With national support always contingent, 
 the " selected sect," in short, claimed freedom to 
 modify its discipline and transform its doctrine 
 according to its own free will. 
 
 It is strange, even pathetic, now to revive in 
 memory those echoes of stormy controversy in 
 a past generation. 
 
 I had now finished the necessary theological 
 studies in the university. Neutrality and criticism 
 were no longer open, with disruption imminent, if 
 I was to make the experiment of an ecclesiastical 
 career. The choice lay between the ideal of the 
 remanent majority, with its modified ecclesiastical 
 autonomy, and the ideal of the minority, about 
 to separate from the Establishment because its 
 unconditional liberty had been disallowed by the 
 British Legislature. Present work for the good
 
 TWO RIVAL IDEALS. 115 
 
 of others, instead of continued solitary encounter 
 with " obstinate questionings," might help, one 
 hoped, to practical answers ; and although neither 
 of the rival paths was wholly acceptable, perhaps 
 the more obvious self - sacrifice involved, com- 
 mended one of them to some inherited share of 
 Puritan temper. I remembered too the maxim 
 of Descartes, which enjoined acceptance of one's 
 spiritual inheritance, until some good reason for 
 rejecting or modifying it should appear. The 
 "crede, ut intelligas " of St Augustine was here 
 to be preferred to the " intellige, ut credas " of 
 the rival maxim. Then, as between the disrupt 
 portions of the Church of Scotland, progressive 
 theological science and philanthropic enterprise 
 seemed to juvenile enthusiasm to find their 
 most hopeful home in a religious organism that 
 was self-contained, and independent of the con- 
 tingencies of national support. Family feeling, 
 too (for the manse family were among the 
 separatists), the personal magnetism of Chalmers, 
 and sympathy with those who made apparently 
 the larger sacrifice, were all, I think, auxiliary 
 motives. 
 
 I was at the manse in Lome during May 1843, 
 contemplating the Disruption at a distance. I
 
 116 BIOGKAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 had a few weeks before been admitted to the 
 ministry. Later in that summer I accepted the 
 invitation of the authorities to work in the 
 beautiful parish of Cramond in Mid-Lothian. My 
 early home at Ardchattan was after this unvisited 
 for more than thirty years, during which I was a 
 stranger, returning to it after this long interval 
 surrounded by another generation, as our family 
 retreat in two successive summers of academical 
 holiday in 1876 and 1877. 
 
 Beneath the surface of this Scottish Disrup- 
 tion, obscured by provincial technicalities, argued 
 with scholastic subtlety and fanatical fervour, one 
 found perplexing questions which underlie political 
 action in all countries, in a Christendom rent by 
 sectarian divisions, and with its deepened inter- 
 pretation of the duty of religious toleration. It 
 was the issue of an experiment which tested 
 Chalmers's theory of selection by the State of 
 one out of the aggregate of Protestant sects, as 
 the organ of the nation for its own religious 
 education ; the selected sect continuing absolutely 
 self - governing in discipline and doctrine. The 
 excluded rival sects resented the confinement of 
 national countenance to one ; and the nation, 
 through its Legislature, claimed a right to re-
 
 DISRUPTION. 117 
 
 strain the discipline and doctrine of the chosen 
 sect within alleged statutory conditions of sup- 
 port. The remanent Establishment was satisfied 
 with a more modified freedom, in return for the 
 advantage to religion of national support, and in 
 order to arrest the modern tendency to agnostic 
 secularisation of the State. 
 
 Thus in England and in Scotland the ideal 
 of the Church as a visible organised society was 
 revived in the nineteenth century, but in each 
 under a different conception. For the Anglican 
 movement the note of the Church was visible in 
 its hierarchical continuity, embracing Catholicism 
 Roman, Greek, and Anglican and excluding 
 the protesting sects. Under the Scottish ideal, 
 in its extreme form, unconditional autonomy ab- 
 solutely independent of Popes, Kings, or Parlia- 
 ments was an essential note of ecclesiastical 
 organisation ; logically excluding the Roman com- 
 munion, and the Greek and Protestant religious 
 establishments of Europe. The Anglican criterion 
 would thus unchurch nearly one-fourth of Christen- 
 dom ; the Scottish test would unchurch three- 
 fourths, finding its organised visible Church in the 
 unestablished sects of Europe and America. 
 
 In my new home in Mid-Lothian I desired to
 
 118 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 resume favourite studies in union with philan- 
 thropic work, not in collision but in friendly re- 
 lations with the remanent Establishment, which, 
 not without painful sacrifice, had followed its 
 own ideal of Christian duty. 
 
 As it happened, I had about this time been 
 pleased by the picture of Arthur Collier, the 
 rector of Steeple Langford in Wiltshire early 
 in the eighteenth century, as he appears in his 
 life by Benson. Collier's ' Clavis Universalis, or 
 Demonstration of the Non-Existence of an Ex- 
 ternal World/ somehow touched my imagination 
 by the romance of its origin and fortunes, while 
 it exercised my understanding by its metaphysical 
 acuteness. Collier was a self-reliant Anglican 
 thinker, an Arian of the school of Clarke, and 
 an Apollinarian, " a high churchman on grounds 
 which high churchmen could not understand," 
 withal a religiously devoted parish priest. Per- 
 haps the self-contained life of religious thought 
 could be realised in a rural parish in Scotland 
 as well as in Wiltshire. At least I liked to think 
 of him in his intellectual and philanthropic work 
 in the rural English parish which I hoped 
 some day to visit. That hope was fulfilled in 
 the summer of 1903, after the lapse of sixty
 
 CRAMOND AND COLLIER. 119 
 
 years, when I was taken by Mr and Mrs Edward 
 Tennant to see the church in which Collier offici- 
 ated, and the rectory with its garden in which 
 he mused, all fitted for meditative purposes, in 
 its beautiful valley, seven miles from the rectory 
 of Bemerton, in Collier's day occupied by John 
 Norris, "the English Malebranche," and not far 
 from the Wiltshire home of Richard Hooker. 
 
 I soon found that an Arthur Collier-like life, 
 in a rural parish in Scotland, in the heat of a 
 Scottish ecclesiastical war, was an illusion of one 
 inexperienced in life. The convulsion, with its 
 obscure consequences in the far-off future, touched 
 men too deeply. Even social intercourse was re- 
 pulsive to both parties. Enthusiasm exults in 
 martyrdom, but to practise charity is less easy. 
 The intense polemical temper dissolved former 
 dreams of the unity of Christendom ; and one 
 found that individual liberty might be in in- 
 verse ratio to the freedom of the social organ- 
 ism in which the individual is included. Yet 
 there is now romance and pathos in the memories 
 of that troubled year, and the '43 opened a new 
 era in the ecclesiastical life of Scotland, as the 
 '45 in the previous century did in its social 
 civilisation.
 
 120 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 One has to be one's self in order to be or do 
 anything, whatever the character of the self may 
 be, and my bent was too strong to be turned 
 aside. War about non-intrusion under the shadow 
 of an unsettled final problem seemed like Nero 
 diverting himself when Rome was burning. In 
 the spring of 1845 Berkeley was again in my 
 hand, and with the ' Leibniz/ Hamilton's gift 
 years before, revived grave interest in the ultimate 
 meaning of life in the strange universe, and this 
 with a practical regard much more than as a specu- 
 lative adventure. 
 
 While thus disposed, an unexpected letter re- 
 ceived one morning encouraged this philosophical 
 revival, and became a turning-point in my life. It- 
 was a request by the editor of the ' North British 
 Review' for an article "on some philosophical 
 subject." The ' North British ' was a lately 
 founded literary and scientific quarterly, in design 
 more hospitable to religious interests than the 
 ' Edinburgh ' was supposed to be, but professedly 
 independent of sectarian influence. It began its 
 course in the year before, with the countenance 
 largely of Free Churchmen of liberal tendencies. 
 Welsh, the Church historian, was editor in its first 
 year ; but the letter was from Edward Maitland,
 
 LEIBNIZ. 121 
 
 afterwards Lord Barcaple, who had succeeded 
 Welsh. Sir David Brewster was a constant con- 
 tributor for science, and Chalmers for theology and 
 social economy. It appeared that Hamilton 
 had spoken indulgently to Welsh and others of 
 my philosophical inclination, which explained the 
 unexpected proposal. I had been attracted to 
 the ' Keview ' as a reader, but I had not appeared 
 even in the humblest form in print, nor conceived 
 the possibility of already sharing in this enterprise. 
 At last I ventured to suggest " Berkeley " or 
 "Leibniz," as alternative subjects for an article. 
 MrMaitland preferred "Leibniz," with prominence 
 given to his personality instead of to abstract 
 philosophy. The eclecticism of the German, his 
 curious learning, not unlike Hamilton's, the optim- 
 ist conception of the universe in the ' Theodicee,' 
 and his negotiations for a comprehensive union 
 of divided Christendom, were full of interest, and 
 my juvenile essay, inadequate as it now appears, 
 was received with unmerited consideration. It 
 opened the way to wider social intercourse and 
 other consequences. 
 
 Already the months at Cramond had been 
 enlivened by occasional intercourse with Patrick 
 MacDougall, years before a notable in the class-
 
 122 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 room of Chalmers, now a master in the Edin- 
 burgh Academy. He had already produced, in 
 the ' Presbyterian Eeview,' criticisms of Jonathan 
 Edwards and of Samuel Clarke, in an involved 
 style of sombre rhetoric, but with a moral fer- 
 vour and intellectual promise which justified his 
 appearance in 1836 as a competitor with Hamil- 
 ton and Isaac Taylor for the Chair of Logic. 
 His powerful personality and Johnsonian table- 
 talk, sustained by a magnanimous spirit, now 
 added attraction to Edinburgh life. The sensitive 
 organism that is often associated with genius in 
 the end impaired his power. His juvenile essays 
 on freewill and theism, and the memories of 
 students and friends, are the remaining justifica- 
 tion of the enthusiastic admiration of Chalmers. 
 In later years he was one of my academical 
 colleagues, as Professor of Moral Philosophy. 
 
 Granton House, in the neighbourhood, was 
 occupied by Graham Spiers, Sheriff of Mid- 
 Lothian, one of the best and wisest among the 
 leaders of the Free Church, whose hospitality and 
 advice were always open to me when I was 
 at Cramond. There I met persons of note, 
 mostly Free Church clergymen and laymen : 
 Welsh, my old professor, in the last year of his
 
 SOME NOTABLE PERSONS. 123 
 
 life ; Candlish, the brilliant and versatile ecclesi- 
 astic, next in succession to Chalmers ; and 
 the philanthropic Guthrie, along with Chalmers 
 and Caird, one of three illustrious Scottish 
 preachers in the nineteenth century. Among the 
 laymen Sir David Brewster was foremost. He 
 was then Principal at St Andrews, threatened 
 with expulsion from his office as a Free Church 
 seceder the Church Establishment claiming ex- 
 clusive possession of the university chairs. Sir 
 David was my constant friend in the remaining 
 quarter of a century of his long life. A scientific 
 discoverer and a brilliant expositor of science, 
 whose charm of conversation, single-handed or in 
 the social circle, was curiously arrested when it 
 came to public speech. He exchanged the Prin- 
 cipalship at St Andrews for that in Edinburgh in 
 1859, when he came to us with a reputation for 
 pugnacity belied by nine years of benignant rule. 
 It was, I think, in the course of these two 
 years at Cramond that I first met Hugh Miller, 
 the creator of the ' Witness ' newspaper, in which 
 the severity of sectarian controversy was happily 
 relieved by essays written in the English of 
 Goldsmith. Some of them afterwards formed his 
 ' Schools and Schoolmasters ' and his ' First Im-
 
 124 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 pressions of England/ a book delightful in the 
 freshness of its survey of scenes apt to lose 
 their charm by familiarity, charged for him with 
 the imaginative sentiment of a stranger who 
 
 o O 
 
 was familiar with Shakespeare, and Shenstone, 
 and Cowper. The gentle voice and modest de- 
 meanour of this remarkable man surprised one 
 who had associated him with the polemical in- 
 vective of the ' Witness ' ; and his endless con- 
 versational store, gathered by original observa- 
 tion, individually directed reading, and some- 
 times whimsical inference, made his talk always 
 interesting. 
 
 One of my last days at Cramond, partly spent 
 with Lord Jeffrey in his home at Craigcrook, 
 supplies a pleasant reminiscence of a celebrated 
 Scot, whose temper of benignity and sweet 
 reasonableness and warmth of kindness in his 
 old age, was unlike what one looked for in the 
 supercilious editor of the 'Edinburgh Review.' 
 
 Not long after the appearance of the " Leibniz " 
 in the ' North British/ an announcement was 
 made which was even more surprising than Mr 
 Maitland's letter. A professorship of logic in 
 the New College of the Free Church was pro-
 
 AN IDEAL UNIVERSITY. 125 
 
 posed to me. It had been offered, I was told, 
 to Isaac Taylor, and when he declined to Henry 
 Kogers, still without acceptance ; and then, on 
 the motion of Brewster, the electors turned thus 
 graciously to an untried student of philosophy, 
 whose youthful questionings, it was hoped, 
 might in this capacity awaken thought in other 
 students. 
 
 Not without misgiving, in the end I grate- 
 fully closed with an offer which might relieve 
 an embarrassment. It suited the state of mind, 
 inquisitive rather than dogmatic, in which I 
 still found myself; and the rigid enforcement of 
 the test which bound the Chairs of Philosophy 
 in the national universities to the Church of 
 Scotland was a bar otherwise to a professorial 
 career. The idea of a liberated university for 
 Scotland had been already suggested by John 
 Stuart Blackie. " With this threatened enforce- 
 ment of tests," so he argued, "I do not 
 see anything to hinder Free Churchmen from 
 erecting a separate literary and scientific Col- 
 lege, as they have already done a theological 
 one. I do not wish to see such an issue. Never- 
 theless, if these proceedings are followed up by 
 the bigoted presbyteries who shall be declared to
 
 126 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 have power over the old universities, then I 
 hesitate not to give this advice to Free Church- 
 men and all Dissenters : If these men drive Free 
 Church professors out, take your students along 
 with them, and build a great College for your- 
 selves. You will thus perform an essential service 
 to Scotland, and reap no small glory to your- 
 selves, by erecting a Free University in this 
 country, founded on the broad and deep principle 
 of humanity and fraternity ; a university with 
 religion and with Christianity, but without 
 monopoly and without tests." It was some 
 thought like this that I had in my mind when in 
 1846 I resumed a philosophical career. 
 
 That summer was partly spent in England and 
 in France, for recovery of health and spirit, and 
 in preparation for the future. Paris was interest- 
 ing for Pascal and Malebranche among; the dead, 
 
 o o 
 
 and for Cousin and Remusat among the living. 
 In England I saw Bedford and Elstow, places 
 associated with Bunyan ; Olney and the haunts 
 of Cowper ; and Kugby, with its memories of 
 Arnold.
 
 127 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 RETURN TO PHILOSOPHY: 'NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.' 
 
 1846-1856. 
 
 " I confess that in philosophy I am a seeker." 
 
 JOSEPH GLANVILL. 
 
 THUS unexpectedly I seemed to have escaped 
 from ecclesiastical strife into the tranquil if 
 obscure region of philosophy. In making this 
 transition I was inspired by the idea of a 
 " great free university, founded on the broad 
 and deep principles of humanity in union with 
 Christianity," and I returned with enthusiasm 
 to questions which had been an absorbing in- 
 terest in earlier years. 
 
 In the first winter I was surrounded by 
 ninety students. I tried to provide them with 
 aids to reflection chiefly by discussing questions 
 proposed by Descartes and Locke and the Scot- 
 tish philosophers, especially Hume, Reid, and 
 Hamilton. The colleagues by whom I was especi-
 
 128 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 ally incited were Chalmers, who was Principal, 
 still teaching theology, whose gracious words in- 
 troduced me to the students ; John Duncan, 
 eccentric Hebraist and mystical thinker, a good 
 man in pursuit of truth, " Pascal in Scotland," 
 whose pregnant fragments of thought have been 
 fitly preserved by Professor Knight in ' Colloquia 
 Peripatetica ' ; and, not least among them, Patrick 
 Macdougall, who had invigorated me at Cramond, 
 and was now unfolding ethical philosophy in 
 lectures charged with Celtic fire. 
 
 Among the students I was particularly at- 
 tracted to three. One was John Veitch, after- 
 wards well known as Professor of Logic at St 
 Andrews and at Glasgow, and as a destructive 
 critic alike of transcendental and descendental 
 philosophies, who realised life in the spirit of 
 Wordsworth, my firm friend till death withdrew 
 him half a century later. I found this youth 
 already touched by the scenery and traditions 
 of his native Borderland, which inspired the best 
 work of his later life. Another was Alexander 
 Balmain Bruce, already an intrepid thinker, in 
 the last quarter of the century a theological pro- 
 fessor in the College of the Free Church at 
 Glasgow, a notable leader in the historical criti-
 
 MY NEW ENVIRONMENT. 129 
 
 cism and liberal religious thought, for which his 
 Church has been distinguished in this generation. 
 The creed of Christendom at a future date, more 
 or less remote, was thus summed up in anticipation 
 by Bruce in later life : " Faith in one Supreme 
 Will, good and for ever working for good, at the 
 heart of the universe ; man's chief end to serve 
 this Will in filial freedom ; life on earth on 
 these terms worth living; life beyond the tomb 
 an object of rational hope, if not of undoubt- 
 ing certainty." This formula of faith is sug- 
 gested in the closing chapter of his Gifford 
 lectures in 1899. The third in the academical 
 trio was Alexander Nicolson, a Celtic genius, 
 awakened and spiritually nourished by the scenes 
 and historic legends of his native Isle of Skye, 
 full of promise, but whose promise in early life 
 was disappointed by an easy disposition and 
 desultory habits that paralysed his undoubted 
 power of imagination. 
 
 A considerable event in the history of philo- 
 sophy in Scotland occurred in 1846. This was 
 the publication of Hamilton's annotated edition 
 of the works of Thomas Reid, the representative 
 of a method of dealing with ultimate questions 
 
 I
 
 130 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 that is distinctively Scottish. The homely text 
 of Reid was enriched by his editor with an extra- 
 ordinary accumulation of Greek and medieval 
 as well as German erudition, which, along with 
 Hamilton's own comments, raised questions till 
 then unconceived in the limited psychology of 
 Scotland. In expanding its scope, and thus 
 tending, more or less consciously, to transform 
 inductive science of mind in man into ultimate 
 philosophy of the universe, Hamilton, as I have 
 said, found allies not only in Coleridge and 
 Thomas Carlyle, but in the eminent philosophers 
 who were making Kant and Hegel familiar to 
 students in the Sorbonne. Victor Cousin, their 
 leader, had been adversely criticised by Hamilton 
 in 1829. In the interval Cousin's eclectic temper 
 had more than conciliated his critic, who be- 
 came one of his warmest eulogists. Through 
 Cousin the thoughts of Kant and Fichte and 
 Schelling were conveyed to Edinburgh students 
 with less intellectual strain than in the severe 
 technical dialect of Hamilton under a sunny 
 haze, in the expositions of the eloquent French- 
 man. Through these channels the new wine of 
 Germany was beginning to find its way into the 
 old bottles of Scottish philosophy.
 
 CHALMERS AND MORELL. 131 
 
 To Chalmers, philosophically educated almost 
 exclusively in the school of Reid and Brown, the 
 Germans, and even the Frenchmen, were for 
 him names portending a revolution that some- 
 how menaced the foundations of Christian faith. 
 In 1846, for the first time, he believed he 
 had found a way to face the dreaded evil. 
 Morell's ' History of European Philosophy in the 
 Nineteenth Century ' made its appearance, and in 
 luminous English did for English readers partly 
 what Cousin had done for French. In the summer 
 of 1846 Chalmers revelled in the book, and began 
 with juvenile enthusiam, almost in his seventieth 
 year, to study Kant and Hegel through Morell. 
 Thus faced, the dreaded spectre seemed to dis- 
 solve before his eyes. Instead of formidable 
 heresies he could see in the German systems only 
 empty abstractions for which high-sounding words 
 did duty. He resolved to make his discovery 
 known in a short course of public lectures, in 
 the winter of 1846. The substance of them was 
 reproduced as a sort of manifesto in the ' North 
 British Review.' The Morell incident is bio- 
 graphically interesting as characteristic reaction 
 of impetuous genius against forces which have 
 since issued in a revolution of our insular philo-
 
 132 BIOGKAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 sophical and religious thought. It was the first 
 half of the nineteenth century in Scotland in a 
 preparatory encounter with the second. 
 
 It was impossible to accept this fervid and 
 personally interesting protest as a sufficient 
 critical estimate of the far-reaching conceptions 
 to which Chalmers had been so lately intro- 
 duced, and now encountered with a beautiful 
 simplicity and enthusiasm. The article in the 
 ' North British ' was his last work in author- 
 ship : it appeared only a few weeks before his 
 death. " Had there been no perverse metaphysics 
 to bewilder men, there would have been no need 
 for metaphysicians," was its watchword : like the 
 spear of Achilles, the only service of metaphysics 
 was to heal the wounds itself had made. " The 
 child sees an apple on the table, and affirms a 
 real apple to be there. A Berkeleyan phil- 
 osopher labours to disprove the assertion. A 
 second metaphysician arises and repels the soph- 
 istry of the first. But it is not this second 
 metaphysician who gives the law to the child ; he 
 but recognises and respects the law already planted 
 in his mental constitution by the hand of nature." 
 Chalmers, in all this, takes for granted that the 
 " Berkeleyan " philosopher, instead of merely in-
 
 CAMBRIDGE IN 1848. 133 
 
 terpreting anew the common- sense that obliges us 
 all to find reality in the data of sense, means to 
 rebel against common-sense, and insanely to deny 
 that the material world has any sort of real exist- 
 ence. Inductive science of mental phenomena in 
 man was the highest conception of metaphysics 
 with Chalmers ; not the divine rationale of the 
 universe, which Berkeley alone among British 
 metaphysicians approached, and which German 
 philosophers were labouring to articulate. 
 
 This disparagement of metaphysics, in the 
 form of an assault upon what Chalmers called 
 the " nihilism " of Hegel, was rather a discour- 
 agement in his first professorial winter to an in- 
 experienced youth, called to awaken metaphysical 
 reflection in other young men. The mental tension 
 of this winter was followed next year by reaction, 
 and it was not till 1848 that I felt at home. I 
 passed some months of that summer in England, 
 with social opportunities less limited than those 
 imposed by existing ecclesiastical restraint in Scot- 
 land. I saw Cambridge for the first time, with 
 introductions to Carus and Sedgwick, also from 
 Brewster to Mr Thomson, now Lord Kelvin, and 
 to Stokes, soon after in the chair of Newton, and 
 lately Gifford lecturer on natural theology in Edin-
 
 134 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 burgh. Cambridge interested me by its associa- 
 tions with Bacon and Newton, Cudworth and his 
 allies, and in later years Paley and Simeon. Some 
 weeks at Bath seemed to carry one into the 
 eighteenth century. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and 
 Arnold made me feel already among familiar 
 scenes, in a first visit this year to Westmoreland, 
 which became a summer home in later life. 
 
 Hamilton's " Reid " supplied me with a text for 
 an essay in the 'North British.' It was the first 
 of a series of essays suggested by Hamiltonian 
 philosophy. It dealt with Hamilton's account 
 of our direct intercourse, through sense, with 
 reality in the form of matter ; this used in ref- 
 utation of fundamental scepticism. It was an 
 opportunity for illustrating Hamilton's enlarge- 
 ment of Reid's argument against the dogma 
 " that nothing can be perceived but what is within 
 the mind which perceives it," which Reid had 
 assailed as the root of philosophic doubt. 
 
 Perception of what is outside the individual 
 percipient is, moreover, correlative to faith in 
 the free agency in which our individual per- 
 sonality is revealed to us. I was thus led to 
 consider Hamilton's way of dealing with the 
 suspected contradiction between free agency and
 
 INTERCOURSE WITH HAMILTON. 135 
 
 natural necessity in the economy of the universe. 
 In regard to this last he wrote to me thus : 
 
 " If I were to specify any part of your article, it 
 would be your notice of my doctrine, undeveloped 
 as it is, touching the counter schemes of Liberty 
 and Necessity. I am convinced that nothing 
 would more contribute to the furtherance of 
 theological charity than the application of the 
 principle of the Conditioned to this question. If 
 correct, it is an Irenicon of a bitter and undecided 
 controversy, which has always divided theologians 
 and philosophers. It is a doctrine of humility, and 
 also the true biblical doctrine." 
 
 Intercourse with Sir William Hamilton in these 
 years was strength and encouragement in my 
 isolation. His library at Great King Street, its 
 shelves richly laden with medieval and foreign 
 books of philosophy and theology, and the social 
 reunions of which it was the scene, are abid- 
 ing memories of happy hours. Among others 
 whom I then met there was Doctor Logan, 
 a learned priest of the Roman communion, 
 then living in Edinburgh with his pupils, the 
 late Lord Acton, and another, I think after- 
 wards Cardinal Howard. The society of philo- 
 sophical Catholics is attractive, as it commonly
 
 136 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 unites reverential temper with acute speculative 
 treatment of the awful questions which underlie 
 human life. Dr Hanna, too, then the accom- 
 plished head of the Edinburgh Academy, after- 
 wards Archdeacon of Chichester, was often of 
 the party at Sir William's. 
 
 In the meantime Comte was gradually super- 
 seding Cousin in France, although the ' Phil- 
 osophic Positive ' was treated by Hamilton as 
 unworthy even of contemptuous allusion. When 
 I once mentioned Comte he said he did not 
 know any claim he had to be named among 
 philosophers. An intellectual agent in Britain, 
 akin to Comte, was also at work, for whom 
 Hamilton professed equal indifference. After 
 1843 J. S. Mill's 'System of Logic' gradually 
 came to play a leading part in the spiritual 
 history of that and the two following decades. 
 Mill's idea of causation and power resembled 
 Brown's and still more Hume's, also Berkeley's 
 on its negative side. And Mill connected logic 
 with pressing social questions, in a way that 
 was acceptable to Anglo-Saxon taste. He dealt 
 chiefly with a part of logic which Hamilton 
 neglected. In Hamiltonian logic the rationale 
 of probable evidence was subordinate. He was
 
 COMTE AND MILL. 137 
 
 chiefly concerned with elaborate articulation of 
 abstract logical forms, in obedience to his favour- 
 ite principle of express and unrestrained quanti- 
 fication of the predicate in propositions, a prin- 
 ciple which he claimed to have discovered. 
 
 It was in this state of the philosophical atmo- 
 sphere in Scotland that I was engaged in philo- 
 sophical work in the 'Forties. I could now reflect 
 at leisure upon the articles of the Hamiltonian 
 creed, comparing them with those of J. S. 
 Mill. Our perception of reality in sense ; 
 interpretation of perceived phenomena in the 
 physical sciences ; the ultimate foundation of 
 human interpretation of natural phenomena ; 
 and the sphere within which our interpretation 
 is inexorably confined, all this, intrepidly 
 pursued, led at last to the perennial antithesis 
 between empiricism and idealism as ways of 
 thinking about the universe we live in. My 
 old questions about the trustworthiness of any 
 interpretations of the appearances with which 
 we come into contact in sense again became 
 urgent. This led to more careful study of the 
 ' Novum Organum ' and the ' De Augmentis/ and 
 to comparison of both with the ' Organon ' of
 
 138 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Aristotle. The main question of his ' Essay ' 
 made Locke a favourite companion, supplemented 
 and corrected by Kant. My inclination was to 
 an English manner of treatment, so far as it 
 keeps firm hold of what is given in concrete 
 experience, under conditions of place and time, 
 and refuses to pursue a unity that is possible 
 for men only in a world of abstractions. I 
 seemed to find that in philosophy things must 
 at last be " left abrupt," as Bacon puts it. 
 
 A difficulty much felt by me about this time 
 was how to reconcile the universality implied 
 in science with the particularity which belongs 
 to its empirical data. I wanted to see what 
 rational assurance there was for the trustworthi- 
 ness of inductions from experience. What secur- 
 ity have we in arguing from the past to an 
 unknown future, or what reason for indulging in 
 expectation of any sort ? I seemed to be face 
 to face with a dilemma between total scepticism 
 and total credulity. Without postulates one 
 cannot move at all intellectually ; yet may not 
 the postulates be only illusions of individual 
 imagination ? So I was perplexed between the 
 profound need for final faith on the one hand, 
 and the difficulty of vindicating final faith on
 
 THE 'NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.' 139 
 
 the other. Crede, ut intelligas seemed to con- 
 tradict instead of being the necessary counter- 
 part to Intellige, ut credas. It was later on 
 that I found more light on these searching 
 questions. 
 
 In the winter of 1849-50 an incident occurred 
 which helped to determine my career. I was asked 
 by the proprietors of the ' North British Review ' 
 to undertake the editorship of that journal, 
 which Doctor Hanna, a liberal and accomplished 
 Free Churchman, the son - in - law of Chalmers, 
 had conducted successfully for two years. The 
 proposal was adapted to my circumstances. The 
 College had been deprived by death of the 
 magnanimous enthusiasm of Chalmers, and the 
 cosmopolitan conception of a "Free University" 
 was disappearing, in the interest of a Theolog- 
 ical College, now out of sympathy with the phil- 
 osophical temper. Under these conditions the 
 office which I held was out of place ; and with 
 the prospect of the removal of tests in the 
 national universities, its raison d'etre might soon 
 be taken away. In the meantime the ' Review,' 
 with its benignant purpose, might afford a 
 counteractive influence. So I accepted the offer,
 
 140 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 and for the next seven years tried to pursue an 
 editorial ideal along with academical work. 
 
 The condition of Scotland at that time was un- 
 favourable to a dispassionate treatment of ecclesi- 
 astical and theological opinions, in the way with 
 which we are familiar, for instance in the 'Nine- 
 teenth Century ' and the ' Contemporary,' or in 
 the ' Hibbert Journal.' But it was in this spirit 
 that I wanted to guide the ' North British.' So 
 I had to look for articles concerned with religion 
 and ecclesiastical sects, not exclusively to Scottish 
 ecclesiastics, with most of whom criticism and in- 
 terpretation of Scripture were dogmatically taken 
 as stereotyped for all time in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury. Then for national politics, Edinburgh was 
 less in touch with public affairs than when the 
 centripetal action of London upon the provinces 
 was less powerful. 
 
 Moved by these ideas, I spent part of the summer 
 of 1850 in England, happily uniting with my 
 marriage tour literary negotiation on behalf of 
 the 'North British Eeview.' 
 
 In London I found a sympathetic friend in 
 Frederick Denison Maurice. He was inspired by
 
 LONDON IN 1850. 141 
 
 a noble philanthropy, and was then intent upon his 
 experiments in Christian Socialism. Chalmers 
 was gone, and I found in him a larger human- 
 ity than in the abstract theology and ecclesi- 
 astical polemic of Scotland. He introduced me 
 to Charles Kingsley and Arthur Stanley, and 
 to J. W. Ludlow, who all afterwards co-operated. 
 Kingsley and Ludlow were steady contributors. 
 Bunsen, the Prussian ambassador, was a cordial 
 friend. 
 
 Two figures are prominent in the London 
 memories of that year. My first meeting with 
 Thomas Carlyle was at his house in Chelsea, where 
 I spent an evening in company with David 
 Masson, then settled in the metropolis. I seem 
 to see, in a lurid firelit chamber, the weird-like 
 figure of the sage, now and again replenishing 
 the fire, while discharging merciless denuncia- 
 tion of the political and religious vices of his 
 generation, and the unreality of its literature 
 all for the benefit of a young and inexperienced 
 editor ; the turgid monologue now and then re- 
 lieved by occasional coruscations of Mrs Carlyle's 
 ready wit. On another day I saw J. S. Mill for 
 the first time. He was in his room at the India 
 Office in Leadenhall Street. Mill was at the oppo-
 
 142 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 site pole to Carlyle. He was calm and luminous 
 in discourse ; an easy flow of well-fitted words and 
 compact sentences ; reasoned opinions, all ready 
 and freely expressed on many interesting subjects 
 incidentally suggested ; sweetness of temper and 
 philosophic modesty ; a disposition to see good 
 in religious and philosophical ideas different 
 from his own, all attracted one to this typical 
 representative in the middle of the nineteenth 
 century of English method in philosophy. 
 
 A fortnight at Oxford in that summer made 
 no abatement in the Oxford enthusiasm of 1842. 
 Days at Pembroke College with the Jeunes, the 
 hospitalities of Stanley and Conington at Uni- 
 versity College, and of Thompson, afterwards 
 Archbishop of York, at Queen's, where Edward 
 Freeman was also met, Mansel at St John's 
 and Sewell at Exeter, as well as breakfasts with 
 Church, Burgon, Marriott, Poste, Earle, and Chase 
 at Oriel, on bright mornings in June, are among 
 the unfading pictures of Oxford in those days. 
 Oxford was still medieval Oxford ; the quaint 
 old college life was undisturbed by the changes 
 which began in 1854, then only heralded by the 
 voice of reformers like Jeune and Stanley. But 
 the omnipresent Newmanism of 1842 had disap-
 
 OXFORD AND HERSTMONCEAUX. 143 
 
 peared, superseded for many by J. S. Mill and 
 the ' Philosophic Positive.' 
 
 Another experience in that summer was at 
 Herstmonceaux Rectory in Sussex, the beautiful 
 home of Archdeacon Hare, where we passed days 
 of much enjoyment, amongst literary treasures and 
 works of art, while the ardent conversation of our 
 host opened surprising vistas of thought and liter- 
 ary enterprise. It was a charming rural parsonage 
 in the woodlands of Sussex ; an uncommon home- 
 life within ; outside was expanse of English land- 
 scape, the ruined Castle of Herstmonceaux, with 
 Pevensey Level in the foreground, and the English 
 Channel in the distance. Well remembered by 
 two persons still living are " the late breakfast 
 in the sunny book-built room, with the scent of 
 the orange-trees and geraniums wafted through 
 open doors of the conservatory, the vehement 
 declamation over the newspaper, the frequent 
 interpolations of a reading from Wordsworth, or 
 Coleridge, or Goethe." Five years later this ideal 
 family life was dissolved by death. 
 
 I returned to Scotland desiring to inspire 
 the ' North British Review ' with some of this 
 spirit. Other coadjutors gathered round as
 
 144 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 time went on. Bonamy Price, the favourite 
 colleague of Arnold at Rugby, was spending the 
 winter of 1850 in Edinburgh, my warm friend 
 in the forty years that followed till his 
 death. His ardent spirit helped me in many 
 ways. Through Price I secured the political 
 insight of W. R. Greg, after visiting him at 
 his villa on Windermere, a host in himself and 
 a constant contributor on domestic and French 
 politics, in the years of coalition Cabinets (when 
 he earned the name of the "Cabinet-maker"), 
 Napoleonic rule, and Crimean war. Archbishop 
 Whately was another intimacy due to Price, 
 fruitful in characteristic letters and otherwise 
 helpful by articles. The genial hospitality of 
 Nassau Senior in his house at South Kensino-- 
 
 O 
 
 ton, and the social interest of his contributions 
 to the ' Review,' must not be forgotten. Then 
 there was Abraham Hayward, redolent of London 
 life at Lady Palmerston's reunions and at break- 
 fasts with Monckton Milnes; Madame Blaze de 
 Bury, with her Parisian experience and ready 
 pen ; J. W. Kaye, versed alike in Indian politics 
 and the morals and manners of English rural 
 life ; Whewell of Cambridge, an occasional con- 
 tributor, long familiar as a philosophical analyst
 
 SOME 'NORTH BRITISH' REVIEWERS. 145 
 
 of science in rivalry to J. S. Mill, now as the 
 ingenious author of ' The Plurality of Worlds ' ; 
 Isaac Taylor, the admired author of the ' Natural 
 History of Enthusiasm ' ; Herbert Spencer, 1 
 then emerging into public view, since a conspic- 
 uous figure in the philosophical world ; greatly 
 valued among them all David Masson, my early 
 friend, now a potent literary ally. In Scotland 
 the incomparable " Kab " was always a wise and 
 warm supporter. I gained the help of John 
 Tulloch, after a visit to his manse of Kettins 
 in 1854, a few months before Lord Palmer- 
 ston placed him in the Principal's chair at St 
 Andrews ; and the powerful literary influence of 
 the Duke of Argyll. Each number had an article 
 by Brewster. 
 
 My own writing in the ' Keview ' was con- 
 fined to a few philosophical essays outlets for 
 thought that happened to be dominant at the 
 time. 
 
 1 Herbert Spencer contributed a characteristic essay on " The 
 Art of Education" in May 1854, which evoked remonstrance from 
 some, as at variance with their canons of educational orthodoxy, 
 but it seemed to express ideas likely to encourage thought. The 
 same number of the ' Keview ' contains articles by Brewster, Greg, 
 Masson, Tait (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury), and Coventry 
 Patmore.
 
 146 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 Hamilton's ' Philosophical Discussions ' led me 
 in 1852 to reconsider the meaning of Causation, 
 and the origin of our mental determination to 
 
 O 
 
 refund all changes into causes. This Hamilton 
 explained as the consequence of finite intelligence 
 holding necessarily inadequate intercourse with 
 infinite Reality. This implies, he argued, our 
 inability to conceive change as added reality, or 
 as more than a new phase of eternally identical 
 Being. The determination to refund a change into 
 its cause is thus virtually a refusal to regard it 
 as something contributed to the already infinite 
 aggregate of existence. This negative view of 
 Causation seemed unduly to attenuate the con- 
 ception, and to take no account of \vhat is implied 
 in active originating Power. So I ventured to 
 dissent in favour of a conception of which I was 
 not then fully master. I was beginning to think 
 that the mental demand for the physical cause of 
 an event is a consequence of the inability of 
 the human mind to suppose that nature is fin- 
 ally unintelligible, and therefore uninterpretable. 
 Are we not, as intelligent beings, I asked myself, 
 somehow inspired by the faith that we are liv- 
 ing and having our being in an ever -evolving 
 cosmos, not in eternally changing chaos ? And
 
 THEISTIC CAUSATION. 147 
 
 does not this mean that we are all having our 
 being in Mind ; that the Universe in which we 
 participate through our experience is in its heart 
 Universal Mind ? The inexorable demand for a 
 cause when we see change was thus ultimately our 
 recognition of the immanence of Omnipotent Mind. 
 How we have this faith, and also faith in the 
 Goodness of the Universal Mind, I did not then 
 fully see. But a connected question here arose. 
 
 Is this Omniscient Agent, this background of the 
 Universe, intelligible to finite human mind ? Is 
 God knowable by man ? Can Mind that is Uni- 
 versal have anything in common with, or analogous 
 to, the mind we find in ourselves ? This question, 
 which seemed to grow out of the foregoing idea 
 of the Active Reason with which the Universe 
 is always charged, was expressly suggested by 
 Calderwood's ' Philosophy of the Infinite,' in 
 the following year. That Infinite Quantity, in 
 the form of infinite space, infinite time, or infinite 
 causal succession, must be inconceivable, under the 
 conditions by which intelligence is limited in man, 
 had been the last word of Hamilton ; with its 
 corollary, that God, because infinite, must be ul- 
 timately inconceivable ; so that it is blasphemy
 
 148 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 to suppose that we can fully realise God in our 
 thought. Calderwood's argument was apparently 
 directed against this. 
 
 In an essay on " The Insoluble Problem," in 
 the 'North British/ I pondered over this su- 
 preme part of Hamilton's philosophy. While the 
 language in which it was expressed was para- 
 doxical, I believed that it was in intention only 
 an expansion of what is involved in the ques- 
 tion in the Bible "Who by searching can find 
 out God, who can find out the Almighty unto 
 perfection ? " An exhaustive explanation of the 
 mysteries in the Divine Reality seemed possible 
 only in Omniscience ; but man is not and 
 cannot become omniscient. Yet this intellect- 
 ual helplessness was not inconsistent with a 
 progressive human knowledge of the Active 
 Eeason that is (so far) revealed in all the 
 facts and laws of the physical and spiritual 
 universe. Nor would Hamilton, I daresay, have 
 denied this ; although his point of view led him 
 to lay an emphasis upon the ultimate incom- 
 prehensibility, not upon this practical revelation 
 of the Universal Mind or Will. Thus God was in 
 one sense revealable and actually revealed ; yet in 
 the highest sense concealed in a reality deeper
 
 "THE INSOLUBLE PROBLEM." 149 
 
 than human knowledge can go, yet enough 
 known to sustain human hope and charity. 
 
 I found, too, that " the unknowableness of 
 God" was an old doctrine among thinking men, 
 aggravated in discussion by the ambiguity of 
 language. It underlay the philosophy of Plotinus 
 and Scotus Erigena, and in the modern world it 
 was debated between Bishop Berkeley and Bishop 
 Browne. May we not regard the ever-changing 
 universe as an embodiment of God ; in analogy 
 to the finite bodily organisms through which 
 mind in our fellow-men is revealed to our senses ? 
 Or is this analogy forbidden by its human limi- 
 tations, so that man is for ever excluded from 
 knowledge of the ineffable Divine mystery? Is 
 all this only a controversy about the meaning of 
 the word " knowledge " ? If real " knowledge " 
 must exclude all mysteries, the term is inap- 
 plicable to an intelligence that in the end must 
 become faith, or incomplete knowledge. On the 
 other hand, if the term is confined in its appli- 
 cation, as it is by those who recognise no other 
 "knowledge" than physical, should we not, with 
 the mystics, speak of our divine experience as 
 ecstatic vision, or else as theistic faith ? Questions 
 like these were now rising in my thought.
 
 150 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 In a letter regarding this article Hamilton 
 explained his meaning thus : "I cannot acquiesce 
 in the statement that I hold an extreme 
 view in regard to ' The Insoluble Problem.' 
 I maintain that man is cognisant of God 
 inasmuch, and in as far, as God is revealed 
 to the limited human faculties ; and I further 
 anxiously maintain that Belief is the organ 
 by which man specially and appropriately com- 
 passes what he is unable adequately to com- 
 prehend. I am anxious to see the work of 
 Bishop Browne to which you refer. I have his 
 ' Procedure and Limits of Human Understanding,' 
 and also his 'Answer to Toland,' but not his 
 ' Divine Analogy.' ' Hamilton, I am convinced, 
 would have been the last to say that total re- 
 ligious nescience or agnosticism, on the part of 
 man, was the logical issue of the "unknowable- 
 ness," or rather the incomprehensibility, of God. 
 
 If the universe of reality, given in physical and 
 in spiritual experience, experience non-Christian 
 as well as Christian, is our revelation of God, 
 what are we to say about the contents of this 
 revelation ? What especially about the moral 
 character of the universe thus unfolded ? In
 
 DIVINE PREDESTINATION. 151 
 
 this divine revelation of the Supreme Power evil 
 is strangely intermingled with good. With a 
 revelation like this of the Power that ultimately 
 animates and regulates the universe, how dare 
 we assert that that Power is omnipotent and 
 omniscient Goodness impersonate ? But if God 
 is not perfectly good, there is practically no 
 God at all. Mozley's book on ' Augustinian 
 Predestination/ published in 1855, fell in with 
 this train of thought. I made it the subject of 
 a few pages in the ' Review.' It went to con- 
 nect the suffering and moral evil presented in 
 our experience of God with the two ultimate 
 mysteries which Kant loved to ponder the 
 Starry Heaven and the Moral Law. The first 
 departs from the spot where I stand on earth, 
 expands beyond the bounds of imagination, worlds 
 rising beyond worlds, and systems blending with 
 systems, into illimitable Space. The other departs 
 from my responsible personality in its invisible 
 unity, in which Moral Law reveals a spiritual 
 life that must be independent of animal nature, 
 and of the whole material 1 world, conceding no 
 compromise to any external necessitation. This 
 raises the question of the correlation of these 
 two opposites the faith that we are personally
 
 152 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 responsible for our evil acts, so far as they are 
 our own, and so not due to Nature, or rather 
 to God, by whom Nature is animated ; and, 
 in seeming contradiction to all this, our faith 
 in the universality of physical order. In theo- 
 logical language we have here to show the 
 possibility of independent will in persons being 
 consistent with universal predestination in God. 
 Are these opposites necessarily contradictories ? 
 Can man know enough of either to justify the 
 assertion that they must be absolutely incon- 
 sistent? Does the moral judgment destroy the 
 judgment of physical causality, or vice versa, when 
 both are rightly interpreted ? I wanted to show 
 that each of these principles must at last retire 
 into an incomprehensible mystery the one into 
 the mystery of an infinite causal regress, and the 
 other into the mystery of unconditioned origina- 
 tion. They may be harmonious in Omniscience, 
 as they are in human life. Therefore if there is 
 otherwise evidence for each, we are bound to believe 
 both ; although their consistency cannot be fully 
 articulated in a human understanding. So the 
 suffering and sin contained in the universe may 
 be finally due, not to Nature, which universally 
 obeys God, but to man, by his independent im-
 
 FERRIER'S THEORY OF BEING. 153 
 
 moral agency, which introduces evil at least for 
 a time. Unless the existence of a moral agent 
 is, so to speak, an unrighteous Divine experi- 
 ment, evil may enter the universe, and still God 
 be omnipotent and perfectly good. I have since 
 followed this line of thought further. 
 
 Ferrier's ' Theory of Knowing and Being ' made 
 its appearance in the same year. In the ' Re- 
 view' I tried to do justice to its artistic charm 
 and subtle reasoning, as well as to its paradoxical 
 conclusions and perverse criticism of " common- 
 sense" philosophy. The proper function of the 
 metaphysician, according to Ferrier, is to main- 
 tain a perennial war with the common-sense of 
 mankind, which is only an original dowry of 
 error. It was the office of the true philosopher to 
 substitute for this misleading guide an awakened 
 consciousness of the Absolute Reason that ap- 
 pears in the necessities of thought. Reason thus 
 identified with real existence had a superficial 
 resemblance to the Berkeleyan conception of 
 Divine Reality. This disappeared after considera- 
 tion. With Ferrier philosophy was logical devel- 
 opment of abstract conclusions involved in abstract 
 principles ; the contingent world of change was
 
 154 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 irrelevant. Berkeley, on the other hand, in the 
 spirit of Bacon and English philosophy, kept 
 hold of the concrete and ever-changing universe, 
 in its experienced relation to human life and to 
 God. Ferrier moreover seemed illegitimately to 
 identify the critically interpreted common -sense 
 of the true philosopher with the crude common- 
 sense of philosophically uneducated persons. I 
 was now beginning to see in the " common- 
 sense" which the philosopher has to interpret 
 nothing less than the inspiration of God, who 
 gives man a share of the Universal Reason. 
 God was truly immanent in the spirit of man : 
 Universal Reason was present in human experi- 
 ence, under finite conditions; sub -consciously or 
 semi-consciously, in all human beings with more 
 or less articulate consciousness in those who 
 reflect. To interpret this Divine Revelation by 
 reflection seemed to be the raison d'etre of 
 metaphysical philosophy. 
 
 I was glad to be confirmed in my estimate of 
 Ferrier's speculation by Hamilton, who wrote 
 to me as follows : "I presume that I am not 
 wrong in attributing the article on Ferrier in the 
 1 North British Review ' to yourself. It strikes me 
 as by far the ablest review of that work which I
 
 FAITH AND INTELLIGENCE. 155 
 
 have seen. It does justice both to the author's 
 ingenuity and to his baseless paradoxes. I was 
 particularly pleased with what you say as to the 
 far wider compass of our Belief than of our Know- 
 ledge. It seems to me that through Belief we lay 
 hold of many of the most important objects which 
 we are unable to know, or even to conceive. And 
 certainly if we were reduced to admit only what 
 we are able to cognise directly or through a con- 
 tradiction we should be compelled to surrender 
 much, indeed the most, of what it is principally 
 important for us rationally to acknowledge. I 
 am convinced that what you say of the ' counter- 
 propositions ' is punctually correct. As far as I 
 know, they are merely imaginary absurdities, 
 gratuitously attributed to previous psychologists." 
 That " Belief is wider than Knowledge " need 
 not, I thought, imply that Belief is mere senti- 
 ment, empty of intelligence. I began to see that 
 faith is inseparable from finite intelligence, and 
 that some degree of intelligence is inseparable 
 from faith. Intellige, ut credas is not incon- 
 sistent with Crede, ut intelligas. They must 
 coexist in finite mind and experience ; they 
 actually coexist in various proportions in in- 
 dividuals, or in the same individual, according
 
 156 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 to the objects with which intelligence is engaged. 
 This correlation is chiefly striking when God is 
 the object to which a human understanding is 
 directed. And so-called human knowledge, being 
 
 O ' O 
 
 at last necessarily incomplete and incompletable, 
 may be called knowledge or ignorance, according 
 to the way in which it is looked at, and the 
 meaning associated with these two terms. 
 
 These Essays in Philosophy, contributed to the 
 "Review," were republished in a small volume 
 in 1856, as juvenile aids to reflection on our 
 perception of, causal interpretation of, and moral 
 faith in the Universe in which we find ourselves. 
 
 About this time the ' North British Review ' 
 encountered antagonism of a sort which remark- 
 ably illustrates the difference between the state of 
 religious thought and ecclesiastical toleration in 
 Scotland now and in the earlier half of the nine- 
 teenth century. Then Christianity was supposed 
 to depend upon the verbal infallibility of the 
 Bible, and the Bible had then to be interpreted 
 in obedience to intellectual formulas of the 
 seventeenth century. Historical criticism is now 
 modifying this conception of the Bible ; science,
 
 CHALMERS AND THEOLOGY. 157 
 
 conceiving Nature as ultimately under evolutionary 
 law, is correcting the old conception of the physical 
 universe ; metaphysic is introducing the idea of 
 immanent and omnipresent Deity, instead of the 
 remote occasionally interposing Governor ; and a 
 more deeply ethical religion sees the perfect good- 
 ness as well as the judicial severity of the uni- 
 versally operative Power inspiring man with faith 
 and hope, and nourishing charity. The middle of 
 the nineteenth century was a transition time. I 
 had hoped that the ' North British ' might serve 
 religious thought in a degree, as the 'Edinburgh 
 Review ' had served in politics in two preceding 
 generations. Theology, as far as it is a human 
 interpretation of divine revelation, must be subject 
 to change and development, although the revela- 
 tion which it interprets is constant. Theological 
 formulas depend upon prevalent philosophical 
 conceptions. When these change the formulas 
 become anachronisms. Explanations which satisfy 
 at one stage in the intellectual progress of man- 
 kind, become unintelligible in the thought of a 
 later time. 
 
 The disposition of the ' Review ' to recognise 
 this, and to give expression to reasoned advocacy 
 of progressive as well as of conservative religious
 
 158 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 thought, had already called forth hostile strictures 
 from those who looked upon the traditional form 
 of theology as superior to change. Articles which 
 encouraged progressive thought, or which recom- 
 mended to missionaries in non-Christian countries 
 sympathy with what is good in non-Christian 
 religions, had raised remonstrances. A crisis 
 came when, in 1856, the appearance of the 
 Life and Posthumous Works of Chalmers sug- 
 gested an independent estimate of his place as a 
 philanthropist and religious thinker, for the subject 
 of an essay in the ' Review.' In the still pre- 
 vailing ecclesiastical heat in Scotland, it seemed 
 impossible to find north of the Tweed an informed 
 critic who was likely to preserve judicial impar- 
 tiality. So I turned to Isaac Taylor, the recluse 
 of Stanford Rivers. He had been educated in 
 English Nonconformity ; he was now a devout 
 member of the Church of England ; he had been 
 long studying the morbid and healthy phenomena 
 of religious life. So I asked him to express 
 freely his thought about Chalmers. He did this 
 in a critical essay which filled more than seventy 
 pages of the ' North British.' 
 
 Very soon this performance encountered the un- 
 compromising hostility of the chief Scottish repre-
 
 IN COLLISION WITH TRADITION. 159 
 
 sentative of traditional theology. Dr William 
 Cunningham was the successor of Chalmers, as 
 Principal of the Free Church College. In this 
 capacity he published an address to the students, 
 warning them against the reviewer and the ' Ee- 
 view.' Taylor's criticism was described as " most 
 erroneous and injurious in its whole spirit and 
 tendency ; there being few things," so he added, 
 " which I should regard as worse for you and for 
 the Free Church than that you should be influ- 
 enced by the views set forth in that article ; and 
 upon all grounds I feel it to be an imperative 
 duty publicly to testify and solemnly to warn 
 you against it." 
 
 The justification offered for this judgment is 
 interesting, because it shows the condition of 
 ecclesiastical thought in Scotland in the middle 
 of last century. 
 
 One fault alleged was, that the article put a 
 higher estimate on Chalmers as a magnetic living 
 influence than as a theological thinker. It pre- 
 dicted that his books would undergo "a sifting, 
 which at no distant date must consign to ob- 
 livion most of what he had produced " ; and this 
 notwithstanding the stimulus which they had ad- 
 ministered in Scotland to the generation in which
 
 160 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 they appeared. This opinion has been more than 
 confirmed, by what I cannot but regard as their 
 undue neglect and disparagement in this genera- 
 tion. For they have already almost disappeared, 
 in the ever -widening torrent of printed matter, 
 which makes literary fame more and more ephem- 
 eral in each new generation. 
 
 The suggestion that Chalmers had misgivings 
 about aspects of Calvinism that seemed incon- 
 sistent with perfect goodness in God was another 
 offence. Perhaps Taylor would have found more 
 support for misgiving in the adoption by Chal- 
 mers of the jVeo-Calvinism of Jonathan Edwards, 
 than in the expressions on which he rests ; for 
 the universal necessity of Edwards seems incon- 
 sistent with the moral agency verbally recognised 
 in the Westminster Confession. Opinions in the 
 article on " the infallibility of the Bible " were also 
 among those which were pronounced "utterly un- 
 worthy of respect and confidence." The Scrip- 
 tures, Cunningham said, assert their own inspir- 
 ation and infallibility, and we may reasonably 
 receive this upon their testimony. The proposed 
 alternative of " a doctrine of inspiration which, 
 while it should save the authority of Scripture, 
 should allow scope for or invite the freest methods
 
 SCOTTISH ECCLESIASTICAL THEOLOGY. 161 
 
 of historical criticism," was dismissed as " crude, 
 inadmissible, unintelligible." But censure fell 
 chiefly on Taylor's hopeful anticipation of a 
 "biblical theology" ready to recognise in an 
 open spirit the mysterious facts in divine rev- 
 elation, liberated from "superannuated logical 
 or deductive theology." This theology, Taylor 
 might have said, was apt to forget Bacon's warning 
 that "perfection or completeness in divinity is 
 not to be sought," inasmuch as in a human inter- 
 pretation of divine revelation "many things must 
 be left abrupt." Cunningham's rejoinder is an 
 assertion that the deductive theology of the 
 Reformation, "in its whole substance and leading 
 features, is far too firmly rooted in the Word of 
 God, and has been far too conclusively established, 
 to be ever again seriously endangered." 
 
 Although Scotland has been, I daresay, the 
 most theologically disposed country in the world, 
 it has in the last three centuries contributed 
 almost nothing to theological science, in con- 
 sequence of the aversion of its ecclesiastical 
 rulers to development of religious thought, 
 and the restraints which till lately they have 
 put upon criticism. Its range, too, in what is 
 ambiguously called "natural theology" has been 
 
 L
 
 162 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 narrow. And it has tried to assimilate Augus- 
 tinian conceptions, dominant in the Western 
 Church, while it has been indifferent to Origen 
 and the Greek thinkers. Deductive arguments, 
 founded on ideas of limited sacrificial atonement, 
 and limited divine predestination to final good- 
 ness, with unlimited moral impotence in man, 
 have largely superseded thought about Triune 
 Deity and Divine Incarnation, which engaged 
 the early and medieval Church, as well as modern 
 Protestant communions. That Chalmers had not 
 risen enough above those restraints is implied 
 in Taylor's belief in his ephemeral place in the 
 history of religious opinion. Christianity pre- 
 sented in its full spiritual integrity, not artifici- 
 ally adapted to human assumptions, rather with 
 due acknowledgment of its intrinsic superiority 
 to all finite forms of thought, was Taylor's 
 proposed way of escape from the fetters by 
 which it had been confined, through dogmatic 
 
 o o 
 
 assumption of book infallibility instead of reli- 
 ance on spiritual self-evidence. Half a century 
 has seen a change. That is now received even 
 as evidence of spiritual wisdom, which accepted 
 ecclesiastical guides then consigned to a Scottish 
 
 o O 
 
 Index Expurgatorius.
 
 DEATH OF HAMILTON. 163 
 
 As the proprietors of the ' North British 
 Eeview ' adopted the literary policy of Cunning- 
 ham, I withdrew from an editorship which could 
 be retained only by acknowledging the sin of 
 having invited free expression of the thought of 
 one religious genius about another ; and by a 
 promise to exclude free treatment of the in- 
 tellectual expression that was given to Christian 
 faith in the seventeenth century. The attainment 
 of my ideal required, in the circumstances, a more 
 versatile and warlike editor, not confined to philo- 
 sophical articles. New duties forbade me to en- 
 tertain a proposal, by the most influential writers 
 in the 'North British,' to inaugurate a Scot- 
 tish Quarterly which should be independent of 
 the obstructive influence. 
 
 Some years after this curious incident in its 
 history the ' Eeview ' changed its proprietors, 
 and I returned to its service as an occasional 
 contributor, on the invitation of Doctor Blaikie 
 and Mr Douglas, its enlightened editors in suc- 
 cession in the 'Sixties. In the end, under the 
 able editorship of Mr Wetherall, and with the 
 co-operation of Lord Acton, it represented liberal 
 and learned Catholicism in the Roman Church, 
 thus ending a checkered life in 1875.
 
 164 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 This collision with Scottish conservative ecclesi- 
 asticism was nearly contemporaneous with the 
 change which has since determined my career. 
 In May 1856 Sir William Hamilton died. The 
 abolition, a few years before, of the ecclesiastical 
 test which retained the Chairs of Philosophy ex- 
 clusively for the Established Church of Scotland 
 had deprived my office of its justification. The 
 project of "a Free University" had precipitated 
 this change. It was my duty to appear as a 
 candidate for the vacant chair of Logic and 
 Metaphysics ; not without misgiving when I 
 thought of its recent illustrious history, and 
 when I compared myself with competitors, among 
 whom Ferrier and Scott of Manchester wore 
 chief. But I was encouraged by the support of 
 Cousin and Remusat in France, Brandis at Bonn, 
 and high philosophical authorities in England and 
 America. A contest of unexampled severity en- 
 sued, in the end without alienation of friendship. 
 I enjoyed cordial intercourse with Ferrier and 
 Scott while they lived, and afterwards with 
 Ferrier's family, in some of the happiest experi- 
 ence of later life.
 
 165 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 IN THE CHAIR OF HAMILTON. 
 
 1856-1891. 
 
 " On earth there is nothing great but Man : 
 In man there is nothing great but Mind." 
 
 Class-room Motto. 
 
 " Our little Systems have their day ; 
 
 They have their day, and cease to be ; 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 And Thou, Lard, art, more than they." 
 
 TENNYSON. 
 
 I HAVE now traced the unlikely path which led to 
 what for thirty-five years was my academic home, 
 a welcome haven amidst Scottish ecclesiastical war, 
 the sound of which I heard in that winter in 
 Glasgow College, when I first looked out on life, 
 and which had lasted since with increasing vio- 
 lence. I was apt to think of Locke's expression 
 of relief after the Restoration from the troubles in 
 which his Puritan heritage had involved him : "I 
 had no sooner found myself in the world than I 
 found myself in a storm; and therefore cannot
 
 166 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 but entertain the approaches of a calm with the 
 greatest satisfaction. I find that a general freedom 
 
 o 
 
 is but a general bondage, and that the assertors of 
 liberty may be the greatest engrossers of it too." 
 
 1 had at last found my work, and could pursue 
 it under favourable conditions in the emancipated 
 university. 
 
 In the reaction that followed the struggle 
 of the election, and with the appalling sense of 
 responsibility involved in the succession to Ham- 
 ilton, I was encouraged by the counsel of Victor 
 Cousin, the eloquent French advocate of spiritual 
 philosophy, and then its most distinguished living 
 representative in Europe. The intellectual in- 
 fluence of Germany had inspired Cousin in his 
 early struggle against a dominant sensuous philo- 
 sophy and materialism. Schelling and Hegel, 
 viewed in an eclectic spirit, had led him to claim 
 for the true philosopher an intuition of the Infinite 
 Reality in an impersonal exercise of Reason ; and 
 this claim, a quarter of a century before, had ex- 
 posed him to the trenchant criticism of Hamilton. 
 In later years Cousin had become less enamoured 
 of transcendental speculation, and now looked to 
 the Scottish philosophers, and their introspective 
 recognition of the common-sense of humanity, for
 
 COUSIN AND SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY. 167 
 
 security against total scepticism. He seemed 
 to find in human nature a more modest and 
 appropriate pathway to reality than he had dis- 
 covered in Germany. In the preface to the third 
 edition of his lectures on the Philosophic Ecossaise, 
 published in 1857, Cousin referred thus to the 
 philosophical position in Scotland : 
 
 " La morte toute recente de M. Hamilton est 
 une calamite qui ne s'arrete pas aux bornes de sa 
 patrie : elle sera longtemps et vivement ressentie 
 par tous ceux qui d'un bout du monde a 1'autre ont 
 consacre leur vie a 1'etude de la philosophie et de 
 son histoire. L'universite a, Edinburgh vient de 
 leur donner une consolation et une esperance, en 
 confiant la Chaire de M. Hamilton a un de ses 
 disciples prefere's, qui se fera sans doute un pieux 
 devoir de suivre la tradition, de 1'illustre maitre, et 
 de maintenir I'irtegr'te de la Philosophie Ecossaise 
 devant le public Europeen. Ce qui distingue cette 
 philosophie, et lui donne un caractere et un inte'ret 
 particulier, c'est le bon sens ; et ce qui y nourrit 
 et y renouvelle sans cesse le bon sens, c'est 1'etude 
 assidue de la nature humaine le haut rang 
 attribue a la Psychologic parmi toutes les autres 
 branches de la science philosophique. Quand la 
 psych ologie dechoira a Aberdeen, a Glasgow, a
 
 168 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Edinburgh, ce jour-la, nous n'hesitons pas a le 
 predire, e'en sera fait de la Philosophic Ecossaise : 
 elle n'aura plus qu'a ceder la place a quelque 
 importation de la mauvaise metaphysique de 
 1'Allemagne degeneree. Puissent la sagesse et la 
 Constance de M. Eraser prevenir un pareil malheur, 
 et repondre a ce vceu public d'un vieil ami de 
 
 r 
 
 M. Hamilton et de 1'Ecosse." 
 
 Without an undue surrender of liberty to 
 tradition, I could respond gratefully to this 
 counsel and benediction of Cousin. I resumed 
 thought on the lines I had followed in the 
 preceding decade, in essays already described ; 
 which, as I have said, dealt chiefly with the 
 rationale of our causal interpretation of the uni- 
 verse that was at first presented to us in transi- 
 tory phenomena of sense-perception, externalised 
 for us in self - consciousness. The discussion of 
 the ultimate foundation of our beliefs and know- 
 ledge, set agoing in Scotland by David Hume in 
 1738, in which Reid, Stewart, Brown, Sir James 
 Mackintosh, and Sir William Hamilton had been 
 leading interlocutors, had to be reconsidered by 
 me now, at the novel point of view of the rising 
 scientific Agnosticism, which proposed to substitute 
 a wholly naturalistic basis of life and experience
 
 YOUNG SCOTLAND. 169 
 
 for the metaphysical and religious one. I had 
 also to deal, on the opposite side, with the all- 
 comprehensive constructive Idealism " mauvaise 
 metaphysique de I'Allemagne degeneree," accord- 
 ing to Cousin which in some minds was dis- 
 placing the native Baconian philosophy. Young 
 Scotland seemed disposed to reverse the counsel 
 and example of Cousin, who had turned in later 
 life from Germany to Scotland for weapons in 
 the encounter with agnosticism. The rising gen- 
 eration were attracted, some by the negations 
 of the sensuous philosophy which Cousin had 
 at first combated in alliance with Germany ; 
 others by the " metaphysique de I'Allemagne," 
 from which Cousin had turned to the Scottish 
 tradition that the young Scot was now learning 
 to despise. 
 
 But " Philosophic Ecossaise " itself, some were 
 beginning to say, had lately spoken with a sceptical 
 voice. Hamilton, its last and most illustrious 
 representative, was claimed by leaders of agnos- 
 tic science as a patron of agnosticism. Had he 
 not announced an " unknown and unknowable 
 God " as the last word of philosophy and religion ? 
 Professing relative knowledge, he was " confessing
 
 170 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 absolute ignorance " ; and, like David Hume, he 
 seemed in the end to leave life, and the universe 
 in which we live, " a riddle, an enigma, an inex- 
 plicable mystery." 
 
 The publication of Hamilton's lectures on meta- 
 physics and logic, soon after I was admitted 
 to his Chair, was a fresh motive to a retrospect 
 of his position. These lectures were supple- 
 mented in 1859 by Mansel's "Limits of Religious 
 Thought," which was an elaborate application, by 
 the most logical metaphysician in England, of 
 Hamilton's final nescience to the defence of 
 religion and the Christian faith. 
 
 Hamilton's " lectures on metaphysics " turned 
 out to be those which I had listened to twenty 
 years before, in the select class of metaphysics which 
 startled the civic rulers of the university. After 
 1838 they were read to students in alternate years 
 with those on logic, and the alternate courses 
 formed Hamilton's official report of the contents 
 of mind in man, delivered while he was professor. 
 "In man there is nothing great but Mind." 
 This was the motto of the class-room, " mind " 
 being a synonym for spirit or soul. But what of 
 Mind in the Universe ? Ought we to say that 
 nothing is great in the Universe but Mind ? May
 
 HAMILTON'S UNKNOWABLE REALITY. 171 
 
 we take " Mens agitat Molem " either as the fun- 
 damental postulate, or the chief conclusion, of 
 philosophy? And does metaphysic involve 
 reasoned belief in the immortality of man ? In 
 1838 Hamilton had tempted us by the prospect 
 of his lectures in metaphysics culminating in 
 a discussion of these questions. A tripartite 
 division of philosophy was then proposed. One 
 part was to deal empirically with the phenomena 
 of mind in man ; and this was meantime repre- 
 sented by the lectures on introspective psychology, 
 delivered under the name of metaphysics. In 
 another course on logic he evolved the laws of 
 thought. But the whole was to converge in 
 "metaphysic proper," concerned with "our ulti- 
 mate inferences about unknown Being," especially 
 the rationale of our conclusions, that God exists, 
 and that men are immortal. The expected dis- 
 cussions made no appearance in the published 
 lectures, and the proposed triplicity was even 
 withdrawn in favour of dual courses one on 
 psychology, or the phenomena of mind in man, 
 and the other on logic, or the absolute laws 
 of thought. The final question of philosophy, 
 whether Matter, or Mind, or Something different 
 from either, is at the root of All, and the allied
 
 172 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 one regarding man's ultimate destiny, were only 
 alluded to in occasional digressions. 
 
 By this failure of articulate metaphysical develop- 
 ment Hamilton came, I think, to be misinterpreted 
 in the collision of agnosticism. His denial of 
 infinite knowledge to man a modification of the 
 teaching of Kant was taken as denial of all know- 
 ledge of God, under the conditions of human be- 
 lief; and he was, in the sequel, accepted by Her- 
 bert Spencer and others as the parent of the science 
 which totally disclaimed religious knowledge. 
 
 The nescience of Hamilton was emphasised by 
 Mansel. The Oxford metaphysician argued for the 
 possibility of religious faith by showing the finitude 
 of human knowledge. He concluded that intellect- 
 ual objections to religion come, not from superior 
 knowledge, but from a defective conception of 
 what human knowledge must be even at its 
 highest. The preface to the first edition of his 
 lectures on the ' Limits of Editions Thought ' 
 
 O o 
 
 opened with the following quotation from one 
 of my ' Essays ' : " The theological struggle of this 
 age, in all its most important phases, turns upon 
 the philosophical problem of the limits of know- 
 ledge and the true theory of human ignorance." 
 "The present lectures," he adds, "maybe regarded
 
 MANSEL'S TWO MORALITIES. 173 
 
 as an attempt to obtain an answer to this prob- 
 lem, in one at least of its aspects, by showing what 
 limitations to the construction of a philosophical 
 theology necessarily exist in the constitution and 
 laws of the human mind." 
 
 But Mansel seemed to go beyond Hamilton, and 
 to make morality in God something different in 
 kind from morality in man. Instead of showing 
 that, notwithstanding its mysteries, the Christian 
 system is intellectually possible, this argument 
 seemed to make it impossible for man ever to re- 
 ceive any revelation of omnipotent Goodness. If 
 the ethics of Divine providence and grace differ 
 totally from our ethics, how could man trust either 
 natural or supernatural signs of a divine revela- 
 tion ? Does not this subvert science and morality 
 and even the beliefs of common experience ? I 
 seemed to be living in a morally untrustworthy 
 universe, animated by a Power whose morality may 
 be our immorality. The Christian " revelation " 
 itself may be intended to deceive. What we call 
 sin may be goodness in God. Total scepticism 
 instead of Christian faith would be the looical 
 
 O 
 
 outcome of a philosophy which thinks of the 
 Power universally at work as outside all the 
 implicates of the moral reason and righteousness
 
 174 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 that for our conscience are supreme. How can 
 one know anything, or believe anything, it was 
 asked, if the Power at the heart of the universe 
 is "good" only in a transcendental sense, a 
 sense in which all our ethical conceptions may 
 be reversed ? But this was an interpretation of 
 Hansel's teaching which he emphatically dis- 
 avowed. Soon after its publication he stayed 
 with us in Edinburgh, to receive an honorary 
 degree from the University, and I remember 
 how he complained of the curious determination 
 of popular critics to overlook the conservative 
 elements in human nature that were presupposed 
 in his argument. Yet Mansel's lanomao'e about 
 
 o o o 
 
 the difference between divine morality and human 
 morality is sometimes open to misunderstanding. 
 It is apt to suggest that what is called divine 
 action may be diabolic, putting conscience and 
 reason in man to final confusion. Faith in 
 science and in miracle are alike impossible in a 
 possibly untrustworthy universe. 
 
 The appearance of J. S. Mill's ' Examination 
 of Hamilton's Philosophy' in 18G5, brought to 
 the surface the controversy between the followers 
 of Mill and the followers of the Scottish philo-
 
 MILL, HAMILTON, AND BERKELEY. 175 
 
 sopher, which was latent in the 'Fifties of last 
 century. In an essay in the 'North British 
 Eeview 7 I tried my hand in a sort of Eirenicon, 
 as between Mill and Hamilton ; also between 
 Berkeley and Hamilton, in their common doctrine 
 of an immediate perception of phenomena practi- 
 cally external to each percipient person. Neither 
 attempt, I now think, was satisfactory. In the 
 preface to the next edition of his book Mill 
 treated my conciliatory criticism as advocacy : 
 " The review of this work in the ' North 
 British," 3 he said, "is attributed to Professor 
 Fraser, and bears the strongest internal marks 
 of that origin. This able thinker, though he 
 considers me to have often misunderstood Sir 
 "VV. Hamilton, is, on the substantial philosophic 
 doctrines principally concerned, a most valuable 
 ally, to whom I might almost have left the de- 
 fence of our common opinions." My sympathy 
 with the prominence given to our concrete ex- 
 perience by Mill, and in the English philo- 
 sophical tradition from Bacon and Locke, had, 
 I think, made me stretch conciliation too far ; 
 and the same perhaps in regard to the " im- 
 mediate perception " theories of Berkeley and 
 Hamilton. This part of my essay was the
 
 176 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 subject of an interesting criticism by Doctor 
 Hutchison Stirling in a review article. 
 
 Mill's account of the ultimate foundation of 
 man's inductive interpretation of the world, taken 
 as an argument, seemed unsatisfactory. It ap- 
 pealed finally to presupposed " uniformity of 
 nature," while he derived the conclusion that 
 nature is orderly from a preceding induction. I 
 was now coming to regard the assumption of the 
 inductive interpretability of nature as virtually an 
 assumption that Active Reason is the ultimate 
 motive principle of the world in which we have 
 our being, and of which we have immediate per- 
 ception in sense. Mens divina aniniat Molem. 
 In all percipient exercise of the senses I seemed 
 to find myself in intelligent intercourse with 
 all-pervading Mind. But was this fundamental 
 faith in Mind immanent in nature an issue of 
 logical proof? Was it not a presupposition that 
 is necessary to any intelligent intercourse with the 
 ever -evolving universe? It might well be that 
 there was no scientific proof of this theistic pre- 
 supposition : the presupposition itself seemed to be 
 the primary postulate of all proof of any absent 
 fact. And this growing unwillingness to accept 
 anything without physically scientific proof was
 
 'PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE.' 177 
 
 unphilosophical, if all proof must rest at last on 
 the theistic postulate. Take for granted the exist- 
 ence of God ; assume that interpretable nature is 
 virtually significant language in which the Uni- 
 versal Mind is addressing man. Do we not find 
 the physical universe in harmony with this postu- 
 late that Divine Order is innate in its evolution ? 
 To argue scientifically for the inevitable presup- 
 position of all inductive science is to reason in a 
 circle : but the theistic postulate, on the other 
 hand, I thought, might be logically vindicated, as 
 the alternative to a reductio ad absurdwn in 
 the form of total nescience or mental paralysis. 
 
 Before Mill's ' Examination of Hamilton ' ap- 
 peared in 1865, other influences were inclining 
 in a like direction. Comte's ' Philosophic Positive ' 
 had, as I have said, been recommending the physi- 
 cally scientific conception of the universe as the 
 only one suited to the manhood of the human 
 race. It was certain, we were told, to take 
 the place of the metaphysical categories, which 
 engaged the race in its youth, and, above all, 
 of theology which was the philosophy of the 
 infancy of mankind. In the progress of the ages 
 man had outgrown explanation of the universe 
 by metaphysical categories of thought, and could 
 
 M
 
 178 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 still less return to second childhood, by referring 
 the phenomena of the world to the arbitrary 
 agency of a Being external to the whole pheno- 
 menal universe. True science was inevitably 
 confined to facts given in sense, and their sensible 
 relations ; all beyond this must be illusion. Ee- 
 ligion and metaphysics were anachronisms. Pro- 
 gress in the future was to be found through 
 suppression of ultimate questions about the 
 "Why" or the "Whither." 
 
 The negation alike of absolute and infinite 
 knowledge, argued for by Hamilton and Mansel, 
 was adopted (but without their inadequately ex- 
 plained substitute called "belief") in the 'First 
 Principles ' of Herbert Spencer, which made its 
 appearance in 1862. This was an introduction 
 to the elaborate ' Synthetic Philosophy ' that 
 followed, in volumes that have played a significant 
 part in Britain and America in the latter part 
 of the nineteenth century. The atmosphere was 
 charged with Spencer's synthetical exposition of 
 the universe as an evolutionary manifestation of 
 Unknowable Power, integrating and disintegrating 
 in endless change. The evolving phenomena were 
 blindly assumed to be interpretable, so that their
 
 SPENCER'S 'FIRST PRINCIPLES.' 179 
 
 sciences could be articulated in a concrete phil- 
 osophy ; but the Power itself, supposed to be 
 behind the whole, we were told, must be for ever 
 " unknown " an occasion, it might be, of ignor- 
 ant sentiment, but not of intelligent faith. The 
 attempt to think about it must issue in in- 
 tellectual confusion. We cannot suppose it to 
 be Matter with the atheist ; nor Mind with the 
 theist ; nor Substance transcending both Matter 
 and Mind with the pantheist. Our true wisdom 
 is not to think about it at all. It is utterly 
 inscrutable. Yet, I was apt to say, how can this 
 be, if I can have so much science of its mani- 
 festations ? And how can the " Unknowable " 
 be known to be a "Power"? 
 
 Thus forms of philosophy, agnostic in religion, 
 which, in combination with the evolutionary con- 
 ception of the universe, were favoured by the 
 temper of the age, seemed ultimately absurd, 
 because they led to universal uncertainty. 
 
 They were met in Britain and America, in the 
 second half of the nineteenth century, by a con- 
 structive Idealism, which professed to articulate 
 the rational constitution of the universe according 
 to its divine ideal. The more sublime efforts of 
 human reason in the past had tended to this.
 
 180 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 The spiritual impulse of Plato led to the archi- 
 tectonic work of Aristotle. Augustinian meta- 
 physic was followed after a long interval by the 
 ' Summa Theologise/ in which St Thomas devel- 
 oped philosophically the Christian conception of 
 the universe. The introspection of Descartes was 
 the antecedent of the mathematically reasoned 
 gnosticism of Spinoza. And in 1865 Doctor 
 Hutchison Stirling; disclosed the ' Secret of 
 
 O 
 
 Hegel ' to the Anglo-Saxon world, while Absolute 
 Idealism was expounded in new forms, with elo- 
 quence and moral fervour, at Oxford and Glasgow. 
 
 Constructive philosophies engaged me in the 
 early 'Sixties, as in contrast with the agnostic 
 empiricism of Comte and Mill and Spencer. 
 I made Spinoza the subject of an essay in the 
 'North British' in 18G3, when I was beginning 
 to make his acquaintance, before the expositions 
 of Pollock and Caird and Martineau had reinter- 
 preted his philosophy. The intellectual atmo- 
 sphere had become charged with Spinozism, for 
 the first time in Britain, unless the ' Panthe- 
 isticon ' of Toland in 1720 was a sort of ex- 
 ception. Spinozism is elastic interpreted by 
 some as a gospel of pantheism ; by others as the
 
 SPINOZA, DE DEO. 181 
 
 rationale of scientific agnosticism. Its central 
 idea seemed to be consubstantiality of all finite 
 things in One Infinite Substance, with mathe- 
 matical deduction of finite relations, in space ex- 
 tended and thought, under this supreme principle. 
 The true happiness of man was looked for in 
 the contemplation of the infinite variety in the 
 all-including unity of God ; neither rejecting the 
 one consubstantiating substance like the atheists, 
 nor admitting in its geometrically necessary uni- 
 verse any independent agency of persons, as the 
 theistic conception does. Sensuous imagination 
 and discursive thought could not satisfy Spinoza. 
 Tranquillity was to be found only in an intuition 
 of reality, in which all was seen sub specie, eterni- 
 tatis, above the misleading limitations of time, 
 in God and as God, God the only reality. 
 
 De Deo was in words the key-note of Spinoza's 
 conception of the universe. But I pleaded that, 
 according to his report, it was a statical and 
 mathematically necessitated, not a dynamical and 
 morally constituted, universe that I was living 
 in. Finite persons disappeared in the unity of 
 impersonal, undifferentiated Substance. When I 
 tried to realise the Spinozistic Unity, either the 
 infinitude of the Divine Reality or the reality
 
 182 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 of the manifold finite was lost. His consub- 
 stantiating conception seemed to be either empty 
 abstraction, or subversive of postulates of moral 
 reason on which all human experience must 
 depend. Either all finite persons and personal 
 responsibility vanish, or else the philosophical 
 unity of Spinoza is an incoherent incomprehensible 
 unity. It seemed, on one alternative, to be 
 rightly likened to a lion's den, to which roads 
 may lead, but from which none return ; or, as 
 by Hegel, to a formless abyss, in which actual 
 human experience is swallowed up. On the 
 other alternative, God was so identified with the 
 finite universe that every act of every person 
 must be divine the actions attributed to the 
 thief or the murderer equally with those of the 
 philanthropist and the saint. To work out our 
 own salvation, and to work out our own sin, 
 was alike God working in us. 
 
 So, not without admiration, I turned from 
 the vast intellectual construction of Spinoza to 
 the all-comprehensive idealism of Hegel, which 
 in the nineteenth century dealt with Spinoza's 
 problem at the point of view partly opened by 
 Kant. Did Hegel's articulation of the Universal
 
 HEGELIAN THEISM. 183 
 
 Eeason, innate in the universe of reality, relieve 
 the darkness which I found in the consubstan- 
 tiating unity of Spinoza, as well as in agnostic 
 natural science with its background of total 
 nescience. Was the Hegelian dialectic able to 
 explain the mysteries which seemed necessarily 
 to arise in any finite intelligence of the infinite 
 universe ? Was the rational necessity involved 
 in abstract "categories" to be taken as the ade- 
 quate intellectual interpretation of all things and 
 persons in the concrete contingently presented 
 universe ? 
 
 So I was led to consider whether our philo- 
 sophical conception of the universe into which we 
 enter at birth, as into an unbeginning and endless 
 stream of events, must not become at last a moral 
 venture in faith. Must it not deal with the in- 
 finite reality as visible by us only at the side-point 
 of a finite intelligence, not at the divine centre 
 with the perfect vision of God ? A professed 
 intellectual articulation of the real universe in- 
 completely revealed to us in time, emptied by 
 philosophy of all mysteries, seemed open to like 
 criticism with Spinoza's cruder attempt to con- 
 substantiate the finite and the Infinite the many 
 and the One individual things or persons and
 
 184 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 God, who is through them "in part" revealed. 
 A final human interpretation of experience surely 
 could not, even at its best, be infinite science of 
 the origin and destiny of the universe that is now 
 evolving in time, and in which I am involved. 
 Human systems can reflect God and the universe 
 only in "broken lights," and the highest lesson 
 and issue of philosophy must be the transforma- 
 tion of pure reason at last into intelligent faith. 
 
 During the thirty-five years in which I was 
 in the Chair of Hamilton, I had to steer my 
 course through the conflicting phases of thought 
 which I have now described. On the one hand 
 there was scientific Naturalism, with its dogmatic 
 assumption of progressive and regressive evolu- 
 tion as final synthesis, all beyond this, the 
 darkness of the Unknowable. On the other side 
 was the new gnostic Idealism, bound by its pro- 
 fession to eliminate all mysteries, and at last to 
 reach infinite science of Reality. 
 
 Through defect of speculative genius, or for some 
 other reason, I was unable to follow these guides. 
 " Mens infinita, in ordine molem infinitam et nos 
 agentes in mole, semper agitans," might express 
 the causal conception of my early Essays. But
 
 AGNOSTICS AND GNOSTICS. 185 
 
 unless morally trustworthy " Mens agitans " was 
 presupposed as the root of all, I was left in a 
 totally uninterpretable universe, and the phil- 
 osophy which thus proclaimed unknowableness 
 was suicidal. If agnosticism went so far as to 
 assume its own scientific postulates, it seemed 
 bound to go further in vindication of those postu- 
 lates : ethical or religious faith in the Universal 
 Power seemed to be involved by implication. If 
 the universe was not moved animated by Active 
 Keason, the so-called laws of nature might be 
 untrustworthy, and nature wholly uninterpretable. 
 But if agnostic Naturalism, ignorant of Universal 
 Mind, claimed too little, gnostic Idealism seemed 
 to claim too much if it meant that man could 
 see the universe from the divine centre as God 
 does ; that the attainable ideal of human phil- 
 osophy is perfect intellectual vision of All from 
 this centre ; instead of vision " in part," as it 
 were from a side-point of view, but with a finite 
 perspective absolutely attainable there. I found 
 that I could not say, " eyo sum Mens immanens 
 et infinita." But I was perhaps too ready to 
 suppose that all who are called Hegelians mean 
 to identify human agency and intelligence with 
 the infinite agency and intelligence of God. Yet
 
 186 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 many seemed to imply either this, or else that 
 "God" was after all only consciousness as found 
 in each man, the " Universal Mind " only the 
 aggregate of finite minds. 
 
 In this way I found myself on a Via Media, 
 repelled alike from an agnostic science wholly 
 ignorant of God, and from a gnostic science 
 which implied Omniscience. But can a human 
 knowledge of existence that is only "in part" 
 be reliable or real, even as far as it professes to 
 go with its infinite residuum of the Unknowable, 
 and consequent incalculable possibilities ? How 
 can I be said truly to know anything unless I 
 know everything f Unknowable Power may 
 disturb all my scientific calculations. What if 
 the " Mens agitans molem " should be a Mens 
 dialolica, not Mens divina ? What if I have 
 to deal, not with trustworthy but with mis- 
 leading language of the Supreme Mind, when I 
 venture to proceed upon a trustworthy uni- 
 formity of physical sequence, and so treat my 
 perceptions in sense as an interpretable Book 
 of God ? 
 
 The thought grew upon me that the reason- 
 able human attitude towards the universe, in the
 
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL VIA MEDIA. 187 
 
 apparent contingency of the appearances in which 
 it presents itself to us, must have at its root not 
 speculative reason only, but rational faith-venture, 
 the " faith " composed of the entire complex 
 constitution of man man emotional, and man 
 morally responsible, as well as man finitely in- 
 telligent the venture involving an assurance that 
 this complex constitution of man need not be 
 finally put to confusion in the universe in which 
 he lives and moves and has his being. This 
 was a reasonable Venture ; unless it was found to 
 involve some express contradiction, leading to 
 total nescience and moral paralysis. For vin- 
 dication of the Venture took the form of a 
 reductio ad alsurdum Nescience or Omnisci- 
 ence for each of the extremes between which it 
 was a via media. If I must be wholly ignorant 
 of the Universal Mind, because I cannot com- 
 prehend infinite reality, I cannot have even the 
 positive science which Naturalism claims ; for it 
 rests upon the Venture that the Mind univer- 
 sally at work is perfectly Good, and therefore 
 sure not finally to deceive. On the other hand, 
 the gnostic assumption that infinite reality is 
 comprehensible in finite intelligence all its 
 mysteries fully resolved is self -contradictory,
 
 188 BIOGKAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 and leads to the absurdity implied in human 
 Omniscience. So what is presented in the 
 visible world and in self- consciousness must be 
 taken as a trustworthy discourse, constantly 
 addressed to us by the Eternal Providence that 
 animates the universe, directing its unbeginning 
 and unending evolution, under perfect intellectual 
 and moral ideals ; but in terms which, while 
 progressively interpretable, cannot be infinitely 
 interpreted, either in the generalisations of physi- 
 cal science, or through the final categories of 
 philosophical system. 
 
 I think it was Berkeley's unique problem that 
 first sent me in this direction of thought. It 
 was promoted by Locke and Kant and Hegel. 
 I expanded Berkeley's divine language of vision 
 into a universal sense-symbolism, and our moral 
 consciousness of our own free agency into perfect 
 moral agency at the heart of the Whole. Impli- 
 cates of pure reason, which with Kant make 
 human experience possible, led to implicates of 
 moral reason, which presuppose the universe of 
 reality to be morally constituted reality, although 
 by us incompletely interpretable. I gradually 
 came to think of this theistic faith, not as an
 
 "REAL WORLD OF BERKELEY." 189 
 
 infinite conclusion empirically found in finite 
 facts, but as the necessary presupposition of all 
 human conclusions about anything. 
 
 In 1862 I wrote a few pages for ' Macmillan's 
 Magazine' on "The Real World of Berkeley," 
 intended to present his " idealism " somewhat in 
 this light as a philosophy of the Active Causation 
 with which the universe is charged rather than as 
 Immaterialism, which had been misinterpreted and 
 then ridiculed ; and this was followed by an article 
 on his " Divine Visual Language," which I gave 
 to the 'North British Review.' I had long before 
 found awakening in Berkeley's juvenile dialogues, 
 but now rather in his { De Motu,' ' Alciphron,' 
 and ' Siris,' which seemed to reveal his real drift, 
 freed from the paradoxical language in which it 
 was at first concealed. For more than a century 
 the world had in consequence hardly taken this 
 theistic philosophy seriously. He had been treated 
 as a sceptic, who refused to trust his senses ; an 
 unpractical dreamer, who discarded as unreal all 
 that we see and handle, calling that illusion 
 which every man at every moment of his life 
 is obliged to treat practically as something real. 
 And this caricature was called " Berkeley's ideal-
 
 190 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 ism." If "idealism" means this, Berkeley, I saw, 
 was no idealist. I found in his works, taken 
 collectively, germs of theistic philosophy more 
 fruitful than elsewhere in our insular literature ; 
 especially appropriate at a time when the spiritual 
 conception of the universe was under criticism, 
 because in collision with the "advanced" con- 
 ception that things and persons all appear and 
 disappear in continuous blind evolution, without 
 beginning or end or purpose. 
 
 My articles on Berkeley gained more atten- 
 tion than I expected. In the following year 
 the delegates of the Oxford Clarendon Press 
 proposed a Collected Edition of Berkeley's Works, 
 w r hich they asked me to edit. I was at the time 
 considering a proposal by Macmillan of a phil- 
 osophical text-book ; but this, for which on con- 
 sideration I did not feel ripe, was readily 
 abandoned for the enterprise to which I was 
 now invited. I have never resumed the proposed 
 manual. Increased experience has not encouraged 
 the idea of philosophy being taught dogmatically 
 from a book, instead of being thought out by 
 the student for himself, aided by the intellectual 
 stimulus of the university. 
 
 The Oxford ' Berkeley ' became my chief liter-
 
 OXFORD EDITION OF 'BERKELEY.' 191 
 
 ary employment in the later 'Sixties and after. 
 At the outset I remembered the following sen- 
 tences in Southey's ' Omniana,' which appeared 
 in 1812: "Bishop Berkeley. A journal of his 
 travels in Italy and many of his papers remain 
 unpublished. His grandson, George Monck 
 Berkeley, had he lived, would have given them 
 to the world. I know not what is become of them 
 since the family has been extinct, but of such a 
 man not a relick should be lost." To search for 
 those manuscripts was the duty of Berkeley's 
 editor. I found in a volume of ' Poems ' by 
 Monck Berkeley, published by his mother after 
 her son's death in 1793, that "several stone- 
 weight of manuscript " had been left to her care ; 
 I found that after her death, early in the nine- 
 teenth century, the precious documents had been 
 transferred to Grimston Hall, in Yorkshire, to the 
 custody of friends of the family ; and that through 
 them they had passed on to Hugh James Eose, the 
 eminent principal of King's College, London. 
 After his death in 1838, it appeared that they had 
 been given by his widow to her brother-in-law, 
 Archdeacon Eose, rector of Houghton Conquest, in 
 Bedfordshire. After some negotiation the collec- 
 tion was kindly placed at my disposal by the
 
 192 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Archdeacon, for the proposed Oxford edition of 
 Berkeley. 
 
 A Christmas week at the rectory of Houghton 
 Conquest made a delightful beginning of my work. 
 My friends Mansel and Burgon were invited to 
 meet me there, the wit of Mansel and the quaint 
 humour of Burgon mingling in the evening with 
 metaphysical discussion in the genial hospitality 
 of that beautiful home. I revelled all day among 
 the manuscripts to which I had been directed by 
 Southey. Among them I found a treasure which 
 Southey had not mentioned, in the form of two 
 closely written volumes, forming a sort of Common- 
 place Book, in which Berkeley, at Trinity College, 
 Dublin, between his nineteenth and twenty-third 
 year, had entered his occasional thoughts in meta- 
 physics and ethics, as they rose freshly, and 
 charged with Celtic ardour, on his mind. Here 
 were the fervid speculations concerning the riddle 
 of life of one emerging from boyhood, set down to 
 await mature consideration afterwards, but without 
 a presage that they might be opened to all in a 
 future generation. As I followed them I traced 
 the rising consciousness of a new spiritual con- 
 ception of the universe a brave and enthusiastic 
 genius in the pain of spiritual birth, exulting in
 
 HOUGHTON CONQUEST. 193 
 
 the discovery of what promised to be a practical 
 interpretation of the riddle. He was beginning to 
 see that " the material world," as perceived by 
 us, is only an interpretable succession of sense- 
 presented signs ; in themselves wholly impotent, 
 for " nothing visible or tangible is known to be 
 the active cause of anything " ; and God alone as 
 the immediate agent in the changes presented in 
 sense ; through which, as intermedia, each person 
 can communicate with other persons, on which 
 pleasures and pains depend, and which science 
 enables us to adapt to our convenience, in obed- 
 ience to its laws. 
 
 This Commonplace-Book, with this revelation of 
 Berkeley's mind in early life, made me turn with 
 renewed interest to the revelation of his mind in 
 old age, in ' Siris,' and earlier in the ' De Motu ' 
 and ' Alciphron.' I compared them with the 
 Commonplace-Book, and with the three youthful 
 treatises on which the tradition of his philos- 
 ophy had hitherto rested. In ' Siris ' I found a 
 basis of Platonism instead of the empiricism of 
 his less guarded youth. In the later works, too, 
 there was a reticence of the Immaterialism, at 
 least in the paradoxical form that "things are 
 only ideas." The things we immediately perceive 
 
 N
 
 194 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 in sense were no longer called ideas. In ' Siris ' 
 this misleading name was exchanged for "phen- 
 omenon." I also found a spiritual conception of 
 power dominant, corresponding with my own habit 
 of thought. The total passivity of the things of 
 sense was contrasted with the voluntary activity 
 of all - pervading Reason, " the only really active 
 agent in existence." So philosophy in Berkeley 
 began to take the form of an answer to the ques- 
 tion about the Power at work in the universe, which 
 had perplexed me when I was a child. " I have 
 as much reason," I found Euphranor arguing in 
 Berkeley's 'Alciphron,' "I have as much reason 
 to think the Universal Agent, or God, speaks to 
 our eyes as you can have for thinking any par- 
 ticular person speaks to your ears." We can as 
 little see the spirit of man the conscious spirit 
 really is the man as we can see the Spirit that 
 animates the universe. Both are revealed through 
 significant signs of sense, which are objects to us 
 all in common, immediately presented to each 
 different person, and which all can simultane- 
 ously perceive and interpret. The world reveals 
 God in the same way as the world reveals the 
 man I see before me. The Mens divina is virtu- 
 ally incarnate in the universe, as the spirit which
 
 IMMANENCE OF DEITY IN SENSE. 195 
 
 is the man is incarnate in his bodily organism. I 
 pictured the universe as moved or animated by 
 omnipotent and omniscient Mind. It formed a 
 sense-symbolism, which was a sufficient medium 
 of intercourse between finite embodied minds, be- 
 sides largely forecasting their pains and pleasures 
 in this life. On the ultimate relation between 
 the natural regularity of sequence, which converts 
 appearances presented in sense into reliable signs, 
 material for scientific physics, and the spiritual 
 freedom for which persons, or moral agents, are 
 justly responsible, I daresay Berkeley was satisfied 
 to think that 
 
 " Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
 Our wills are ours, to make them Thine." 
 
 He sees Divine Active Reason even in what are 
 sometimes called our sub - conscious or semi- 
 conscious acts. "We are not conscious of the 
 systole and diastole of the heart, or the motion 
 of the diaphragm. But it must not," he says, 
 " be thence inferred that unknowing nature can 
 act regularly. The true inference is, that the 
 self-thinking individual, or human person, is not 
 the real author of those natural motions. And 
 (as a proof of this) no man blames himself if 
 they are wrong, or values himself if they are
 
 196 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 right. The same may be said of the fingers of 
 a musician, which some object to be moved by 
 habit, which understands not ; it being evident 
 that what is done by rule must proceed from 
 Something that understands the rule : therefore, 
 if not from the musician himself, from some other 
 Active Intelligence ; the same perhaps which 
 governs bees and spiders, and moves the limbs 
 of those who walk in their sleep." This is the 
 omnipresent or immanent Reason that animates 
 the universe of things and persons, and in which 
 self-conscious persons participate. 
 
 Editing Berkeley's Works, with the relative 
 bibliographical and biographical research, and the 
 occasional thoughts embodied in the annotations, 
 engaged my available time during the five years 
 preceding 1871. The success of the attempt to 
 make him an interlocutor in contemporary de- 
 bate, between the ultimately sensuous concep- 
 tion of the universe and the ultimately moral 
 or religious conception, far exceeded expectation. 
 Berkeley now met with appreciative criticism in 
 the chief British, Continental, and American re- 
 views, and in many books of philosophy. Among 
 others J. S. Mill, Mansel, Huxley, T. H. Green, 
 Sir Alexander Grant, A. J. Balfour, Leslie Ste-
 
 BERKELEY REDIVIVUS. 197 
 
 phen, T. Collyns Simon, Dr Hutchison Stirling, 
 Macguire, Professor T. K. Abbott, Professor 
 Van der Wyck, M. Penjon, Ueberweg, Ulrici, 
 Janitsch, Eugen Meyer, Professor Hoffding, Noah 
 Porter, and Kranth, in consequence delivered 
 their thought. In 1874, at the request of the 
 Clarendon Press, I prepared a Students' Berkeley 
 of annotated "Selections" from his philosophical 
 books, for use in colleges, which has gone through 
 five editions, and is used in British and American 
 universities for exercise in reflective thought. It 
 was followed in 1881 by the 'Berkeley' in Black- 
 wood's " Philosophical Classics." Nearly twenty 
 thousand copies of these three publications have 
 found readers. In 1899 I was asked by the 
 Oxford delegates to prepare a fresh edition of 
 the Collected Works. In that and the next year 
 I was recasting the edition of 1871, in the light 
 of later thought and research. It appeared in 
 four volumes in 1901. So Berkeley pursued me 
 for more than thirty years. 
 
 Simultaneously with these operations in meta- 
 physical literature I was delivering "[lectures on 
 logic and psychology and metaphysics for those 
 who were learning in the class-room to think for
 
 198 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 themselves. In philosophy I had still to confess 
 myself "a seeker." Perhaps the thought in the 
 lectures and my solitary thought were kept too 
 much apart. Perhaps I ought to have admitted 
 the main current, some of which was finding 
 occasional exit in essays and annotations, more 
 fully into speech. I might in this way have 
 engaged the undergraduates in a greater degree 
 as helpful fellow-thinkers. On the other hand, 
 the final problems which lay in the heart of my 
 literary work seemed hardly appropriate for those 
 who came to college to begin to think. They 
 still needed to have " the mist and veil of words " 
 removed, their sense of logical consistency made 
 more acute, and themselves made more awake to 
 the difference between probability and fancy in 
 estimating evidence. One remembered that the 
 path of human life was strewed with fallacies 
 and sophisms, and that these were apt to be 
 multiplied on the part of the path frequented by 
 abstract thinkers. 
 
 The duty of the teacher in these circumstances 
 was first of all to prepare the young philosophers 
 to encounter fallacy and sophism, by analysing valid 
 reasoning. Logic formed accordingly our preamble 
 to psychology and metaphysics. But it was of
 
 LOGIC IN THE CLASS-BOOM. 199 
 
 course the elementary logic which proposes scien- 
 tific forms for the unabridged expression of reason- 
 ing, deductive and inductive ; lessons in definition 
 and method ; and criteria for testing interpreta- 
 tion of nature in daily life and in physical 
 science not logic, in the high Hegelian or even 
 Kantian meaning, concerned with the ultimate 
 categories of thought. It bore more immedi- 
 ately on opening life than that. All men are 
 daily occupied in drawing conclusions from pre- 
 misses, by use or abuse of deductive or inductive 
 methods, each concerning the subject of his own 
 particular business. And we have had bequeathed 
 to us a Greek Organon and a Novum Organum, 
 for testing the consistency of our reasonings with 
 their premisses, and also their consistency with 
 order in nature but without discussing the ulti- 
 mate premisses of reasoning. Syllogism, whether 
 according to the Aristotelian or the Hamiltonian 
 articulation of its forms, was used as a sort of 
 demonstrator's table, for exposure and dissection 
 of concrete fallacies placed upon it for the pur- 
 pose. I wanted to employ logic as the vestibule 
 of philosophy, dealing with concrete fallacies, as 
 illustrated in Aristotle's book of sophisms, in the 
 idola of Bacon, or in Whately and Mill.
 
 200 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Logic studied in this spirit and with this prac- 
 tical aim warns the student of the aptness of men 
 unconsciously to produce fallacies in the guise of 
 valid reasoning ; but it does not pretend to satisfy 
 the desire for absolute certainty in our actual 
 reasonings about things. Obedience to its legis- 
 lative enactments secures non - contradictoriness 
 or self -consistency, as between conclusions and 
 their premisses : it provides no final warrant for 
 the truth of the premisses themselves. Premisses 
 are concluded from preceding premisses, and so 
 on, in an indefinite regress. Where does this 
 chain begin, and on what does it finally hang ? 
 As a fact, we all accept most of our premisses 
 on the authority of tradition or of experts. 
 But what claim has tradition or the expert to 
 infallibility? On what must human reasonings 
 all rest at last ? Why is the pathway to ultimate 
 reality obstructed by an accumulation of error 
 and fallacy ? 
 
 Lectures and exercises on the practice of reason- 
 ing naturally raised those questions. They led 
 us onwards from formulas of syllogism, and 
 methods of inductive trial, to a reflective study 
 of the spiritual constitution of the human rcasoner 
 in a word, from Logic to Psychology ; and
 
 INFERENCE AND DIVINE INTUITION. 201 
 
 through this to Metaphysics or ultimate philo- 
 sophy, and analysis of religion. 
 
 Here it appeared that although evolution of 
 conclusions from premisses was a characteristic 
 and daily employment of all men, it was a 
 mark of limited intelligence and experience. A 
 mere animal cannot syllogise or generalise. 
 Divine intelligence, comprehensive of the uni- 
 verse of reality, does not need to syllogise and 
 generalise. Intuition of all things and events 
 past, distant, and future as well as present, in 
 all their relations would supersede inferential 
 interpretation of what enters into the narrow 
 experience of each man, or even into the col- 
 lective experience of mankind. Under our 
 limiting cosmical and intellectual data, we have 
 to employ discursive thinking, in order to reach 
 the significance of the sensuous and spiritual 
 realities that are presented to us in our external 
 and internal perceptions. For these two fountains 
 of concrete experience present only an infini- 
 tesimal portion of the universe of reality to 
 each individual, or even to the race of man. 
 Then all this has to be intrusted to a power 
 of mental reproduction and elaboration that is 
 still more limited in its recollections ; losing
 
 202 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 much of what is intrusted to it, reviving only 
 in fragments what it reproduces ; subject to 
 habits of mental association that are often per- 
 mitted to take the place of calculated reason- 
 ings ; this, too, in combination with disturbing 
 passions of the ill -governed soul and resulting 
 unreasoned prejudices. Locke speaks in this con- 
 nection of " the narrowness that human minds are 
 confined to here, of having their ideas revived 
 only by succession and not all at once ; whereas 
 the several degrees of angels may have larger 
 views, and be endowed with capacities to re- 
 tain together and constantly set before them, as 
 in one picture, all their past knowledge at 
 once, . . . wherein no one of their thoughts that 
 they have ever had may slip out of their 
 minds. The Omniscience of God, who knows 
 all things, past, present, and to come, and to 
 whom the thoughts of all men's hearts always 
 lie open, may satisfy us of the possibility of 
 this." Human language is an indispensable, but 
 after all an imperfect, auxiliary in abstract reason- 
 ing, and our interpretation of the universal lan- 
 guage of God, contained in the signs which make 
 their appearance in our senses. The students 
 found by experience that names did not long re-
 
 PSYCHOLOGY IN THE CLASS-ROOM. 203 
 
 tain their defined meanings, but almost all became 
 ambiguous, often did not stand in their minds 
 for any meaning ; so that words which were 
 supposed to reveal realities were the curtain that 
 concealed them. 
 
 Introspective psychology thus became a lesson 
 reminding us of our human state intermediate 
 intellectually between two extremes. We found 
 that man was neither omniscient nor wholly ignor- 
 ant ; although, strictly speaking, unable, as Pascal 
 says, to know the parts without knowing the 
 whole, or to know the whole without know- 
 ing the parts. In introspective study of hu- 
 man intelligence, we found that we had to con- 
 template " human souls in this low situation, 
 in which they bear the weight and see through 
 the dusk of a gross atmosphere, gathered from 
 wrong judgments daily passed, false opinions 
 daily learned, and early habits of an older date 
 than either judgment or opinion. Through such 
 a medium the sharpest eye cannot see clearly. 
 And if by some extraordinary effort the mind 
 should surmount this dusky region, and snatch 
 a glimpse of pure light, she is soon thrown 
 backwards and depressed by the heaviness of 
 the animal nature to which she is chained. And
 
 204 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 if again she chanceth, amidst the agitation of 
 strong fancies and wild affections, to spring up- 
 wards, a second relapse speedily succeeds into 
 this region of darkness and dreams." 
 
 Religion and metaphysics presented themselves 
 as the two ways in which the spirit of man 
 finds satisfaction, in the "region of darkness 
 and dreams" in which it is left by logical under- 
 standing, when confined to the meagre data of 
 empirical science. In religion the complex con- 
 stitution of man emotional, active, and intelligent 
 is found in ultimate practical relation to the 
 Power universally at work, the Mens divina 
 agitans molem, the Spirit that animates the 
 universe. In metaphysic, intellect in man tries to 
 express in thought our ultimate relation to the 
 Supreme Reality. The sceptical negations and 
 ideal constructions which appear in the history of 
 philosophy are the inadequate issues of this trial. 
 
 Exercises in logic and in psychological intro- 
 spection thus brought us at last into the meta- 
 physical region in which the perplexities of hu- 
 man thought converge. The exercises were meant 
 to place the student in the attitude that is 
 appropriate to a limited experience and finite in- 
 telligence. Consciously or unconsciously, we must
 
 THE YOUNG METAPHYSICIANS. 205 
 
 all be metaphysicians. Not least those who treat 
 metaphysic as illusion ; for if they are reasonable, 
 they must do this for a supposed reason, and 
 this reason is their unconscious metaphysic. But 
 all need not be metaphysical experts, who think 
 out their final intellectual position. Most persons 
 are contented to accept their ultimate premisses 
 on authority. A few desire to test the author- 
 ity. So in 1865 I opened separate lectures for 
 any so disposed. In the following quarter of a 
 century more than 400 students entered in this 
 class. In those lectures I avoided final system, 
 and unfolded some of the great philosophies of 
 the past, destructive and constructive ; in the 
 faith that human thinkers differ, not totally, but 
 in the degree of their approach to the perfect 
 philosophy that is fully reached by none. The 
 history of metaphysics is in much like the history 
 of poetry or art ; yet the collisions of meta- 
 physicians represent gradual advancement on the 
 whole. And now the young aspirants, by going 
 into the river, and " moving up and down in 
 its depths and shallows," each bestirring himself 
 as he best could, were able in the end to dis- 
 cover something. 
 
 This attempt to educate independent thinkers
 
 206 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 was not unsuccessful. The young metaphysi- 
 cians of the university soon formed themselves 
 into a Society for weekly discussions, and the 
 class-room, aided latterly by this " Philosophical 
 Society," has sent not a few professors and books 
 of philosophy into the world, in the later decades 
 of the nineteenth century. It has given two 
 professors of philosophy to Edinburgh, two to 
 Glasgow, three to Aberdeen, two to St Andrews ; 
 one to Oxford, and another to Cambridge ; besides 
 a still larger number to American universities, and 
 to colleges in India and Japan and Australia. 
 Others are distinguished in Parliament, or on the 
 judicial bench, and in the Church. The young 
 metaphysicians were occasionally encouraged and 
 directed by addresses delivered, among others, 
 by Mr Balfour, the present Prime Minister, Sir 
 Alexander Grant, Professors Henry Sidgwick, 
 Knight, Bosanquct, Jones, and the late Pro- 
 fessor Wallace of Oxford. 
 
 But I must leave the class-room, to look at 
 the University of Edinburgh, as it was in those 
 years.
 
 207 
 
 CHAPTEE VI. 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH. 
 
 1859-1889. 
 
 ' ' If we were asked for what end endowed Universities exist, we should 
 answer, To keep alive Philosophy. All things in which the public are ade- 
 quate judges of excellence are best supplied when the stimulus of individual 
 interest is most active ; and that is where pay is in proportion to exertion. 
 But there is an education of which it cannot be pretended that the public are 
 competent judges, the liberal education by which great minds are formed. 
 To rear up minds with aspirations and faculties above the common herd, 
 capable of leading their countrymen to greater achievement in virtue, in- 
 telligence, and social wellbeing ; and likewise so to educate the leisured 
 classes generally that they may participate in the qualities of these superior 
 spirits, and be prepared to appreciate them, and follow their steps these are 
 purposes that require educational instructions placed above dependence on 
 the immediate pleasure of the very multitude whom they are meant to ele- 
 vate." J. S. MILL. 
 
 MY class for metaphysicians was inaugurated 
 under happier academical conditions than when 
 Hamilton made the experiment in 1838. The 
 'Sixties and the two following decades of the 
 nineteenth century are memorable in the history 
 of Edinburgh University. They saw the " Town's 
 College," till then a chaotic aggregate of students 
 and professors governed by the Town Council,
 
 208 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 transformed into a self-governed society of gradu- 
 ates, and reconstituted on this foundation. In 
 the middle of the nineteenth century gradu- 
 ation in the fundamental or Arts faculty had 
 been dormant in Edinburgh for more than 
 a hundred years, and graduation in law and 
 divinity was unknown. The European fame of 
 the undeveloped university rested on the emi- 
 nence of the professors in two preceding cen- 
 turies, in mathematics, metaphysics, and medicine ; 
 and on the occasional emergence of a literary, 
 scientific, or political celebrity from the ranks 
 of its alumni. Monro, Cullen, Black, Bell, Christi- 
 son, and Simpson were names of European re- 
 pute among its medical teachers. The Gregories, 
 Colin Maclaurin, Playfair, and Leslie were cele- 
 brated mathematical professors. Ferguson, Dugald 
 Stewart, Brown, and Hamilton were historical 
 figures in psychology and ethics. The College 
 had enrolled David Hume, Walter Scott, Thomas 
 Carlyle, and Charles Darwin, also Brougham and 
 Palmerston, Lord John Russell and Lord Henry 
 Petty, among its students. Robertson, an eminent 
 representative of historical literature, had pre- 
 sided over professors and students as Principal. 
 Nevertheless, with the advance of the nineteenth
 
 UNIVERSITY REFORM IN 1858. 209 
 
 century, there were symptoms of decline, aggra- 
 vated by a chronic war between the professors 
 and the Council of the city ; probably, too, by 
 the ecclesiastical war in Scotland which preceded 
 and followed the convulsion of 1843. The influx 
 of students, which was about two thousand annu- 
 ally in the first quarter of the century, had fallen 
 in the second quarter to little more than half 
 this number. 
 
 Yet in the end the Disruption of the Church of 
 Scotland served Edinburgh and the other Scottish 
 universities well. The prospect of "a great 
 Free University," supported by the claim of 
 a large portion of the Scottish people now 
 outside the Established Church, as well as the 
 intellectual value of an open field from which 
 to choose professors, produced the Act of Parlia- 
 ment which in 1853 relaxed the tests that had 
 hitherto bound the chairs to the Established 
 Church, and opened them to the intellect 
 of the world. Popular interest in the uni- 
 versities accordingly revived ; there was an or- 
 ganised movement for reform, in which James 
 Lorimer was a leader ; and the memorable Act 
 of 1858, which made Lord Advocate Inglis the 
 greatest benefactor of the Town's College since
 
 210 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 its foundation in the days of James VI., was 
 brought into operation in the four following 
 years, by the Commission over which Inglis 
 presided. 
 
 Neglect of graduation, especially in the faculty 
 of literature, science, and philosophy, was taken as 
 the root of the ailment from which the College 
 was suffering. A self - governing academical 
 Society had to be organised. As baptism is to 
 the visible Church, so is graduation to the 
 university. It is the sign and seal of member- 
 ship. The few extant Edinburgh graduates in 
 Arts, and (provisionally) all who had been reg- 
 ularly enrolled as Arts students for a term of 
 years, were formed under the new law into a Uni- 
 versity Council, over whom a Chancellor was to 
 preside. The professorial Senate, or Educational 
 Executive, was in many ways strengthened and 
 developed. A University Court was instituted in 
 place of the Town Council in the administration ; 
 and the patronage of the chairs was transferred 
 to a joint Board of Curators. The undergraduates 
 were to be organised and brought into touch with 
 academical life as constituents of a Rector, who 
 was to preside in the University Court. Thus 
 academically constituted for the first time in its
 
 EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY ORGANISED. 211 
 
 history, the University of Edinburgh was launched 
 on its new career. 
 
 In 1859 the first Chancellor was chosen by 
 the Council, and the first Rector by the under- 
 graduates. Brougham was made Chancellor and 
 Gladstone Rector. Council and Court then began 
 to exercise their functions. We all felt that it 
 was the morning of a new life in the old College, 
 now connected with the great world by this associ- 
 ation with an omniscient celebrity of the past 
 generation, and with the chief statesman of the 
 coming age. Brougham's early ties with Edin- 
 burgh, by birth, as an old alumnus, and as the 
 grand - nephew of Principal Robertson, were not 
 forgotten. 
 
 Another change was coincident. In 1859 
 Principal Lee died, a learned and eccentric eccles- 
 iastic. The era of lay principals opened. The 
 most eminent man of science in Scotland was 
 made Head of the College. Sir David Brewster, 
 then in his seventy-ninth year, diffused academic 
 spirit and a benign social influence among us, 
 with the added lustre of his name, during nine 
 following years. One of his first public duties 
 was to preside at the inaugural addresses of the 
 Chancellor and the Rector, and over the associ-
 
 212 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 ated festivals, events never to be forgotten by 
 those who witnessed or took part in them. They 
 were followed six years later by the impressive 
 inauguration of Thomas Carlyle, who succeeded 
 Gladstone as Rector, and later still when Lord 
 President Inglis, our great benefactor, succeeded 
 Brougham. Carlyle's discourse was heard with 
 respectful attention by the students, but later 
 experience makes his reception unique in the 
 history of Edinburgh rectorial addresses. 
 
 In 1859 my colleagues in the Faculty of Arts 
 made me their Dean, and I continued in this 
 office for thirty -two years. In 1877 I was also 
 sent by the Senate to the University Court, in 
 succession to Sir Robert Christison, who had rep- 
 resented the Senate from the first constitution of 
 the Court, and I retained this office also till I 
 retired from the Chair of Hamilton in 1891. I 
 was now for the first time in my life involved 
 in administrative work, complex and important, 
 especially during a period of rapid and extensive 
 academical evolution. Although, perhaps, non 
 natus rebis agendis, this afforded healthful oc- 
 casional diversion in a life too exclusively intro- 
 spective. The policy of the university and 
 its administration alternated in my regard with
 
 ACADEMICAL ADMINISTRATION. 213 
 
 the ultimate mysteries of the Universe. Indeed 
 the University has been almost the only depart- 
 ment of public affairs in which I have actively 
 participated. I have always been deeply inter- 
 ested in evolutions in Church and State, yet 
 the isolating influences of early life, meditative 
 habit, lack of invitation or opportunity, and 
 withal mental paralysis in public speech, have 
 kept me, I daresay, too much aloof from the 
 service of society in Edinburgh, in extra- 
 academical ways. 
 
 Arrangements for adapting the new constitu- 
 tion to undergraduate studies, and development 
 of graduation, occupied me in the 'Sixties. In 
 this I was especially helped by Professor Aytoun, 
 a congenial comrade in giving life to the new 
 organism, whose kindly humour was combined 
 with strong common-sense and faculty for affairs. 
 The first public graduation in Arts was in the 
 Assembly Hall, on the Castle Hill, in April 1861, 
 when it was my duty to deliver the address. 
 
 The life of the university, uiiprecedentedly 
 active in the thirty years which followed the 
 legislation of Inglis, owed much of its vigour and 
 charm to the personality of Sir David Brewster 
 and of Sir Alexander Grant, who successively pre-
 
 214 BTOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 sided as Principals. Brewster breathed the aca- 
 demic temper into the newly organised society ; 
 as a scientific chief he shed lustre on Edinburgh, 
 as Robertson had formerly done in literature, and 
 as Leighton, a remoter predecessor, had done in 
 religious thought. 
 
 Brewster was a brilliant converser, and his 
 genial presence was always a social inspiration. 
 But his easy flow of speech deserted him in 
 public oratory. In this regard he might be 
 described as a man of few words and many 
 works. I remember him once for a wonder on 
 his feet at a Senate meeting, his eyes fixed on the 
 table before him, giving utterance to a single, 
 apparently extempore, sentence expressing objec- 
 tion to a proposal to confer a theological decree 
 which he conscientiously disapproved of. On 
 passing his chair after the meeting, I saw on the 
 table in manuscript the few words he had spoken. 
 They were after all read, not extemporised. 
 
 When Brewster died in 1868, the rival claims 
 of two eminent members of the medical profes- 
 soriate to the succession menaced prospective 
 harmony in the University. Either of them 
 would have added dignity to the office, but to 
 appoint either, as it seemed, would endanger the
 
 BREWSTER AND GRANT. 215 
 
 peace of the College. In the circumstances one 
 was led to look elsewhere for a Principal who 
 might reconcile all. It so happened that when 
 Macdougall died, in the beginning of the winter 
 of 1867, the moral philosophy class was intrusted 
 to me by the Senate for that session, in addition 
 to my own classes. In defect of full lectures, 
 I made use of books, including Grant's ' Ethics ' 
 of Aristotle, attracted by its philosophical learn- 
 ing and many - sided humanity. Inquiry dis- 
 covered Grant's signal success in directing high 
 education in India. It seemed that if he could 
 be induced to come to Edinburgh as Principal, 
 an embarrassment might be advantageously re- 
 lieved. The idea grew in my mind, till one 
 evening, on our way home from a meeting of 
 the Eoyal Society, I suggested it to Lord 
 Neaves, who at once gave it an encouraging 
 response, and advised communication with the 
 Chancellor and others. This led to further 
 inquiry, and to correspondence with Grant, who 
 with some reluctance consented to be nominated, 
 and in the end he was made Principal. The 
 fatigue and anxiety connected with this affair, in 
 which I was unexpectedly involved, along with 
 the extra work among the young moral philoso-
 
 216 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 phers, lectures to an outside class of logic newly 
 instituted for women, and the pressure of the 
 Clarendon Press for the 'Berkeley,' combined to 
 make 1868 and 1869 the busiest years in my life. 
 
 Grant was an academical statesman and ad- 
 ministrator of a high order, able to direct and 
 inspire the newly organised university. In the 
 nineteenth century he accomplished on a greater 
 scale, and under more auspicious conditions, a 
 work not unlike that attempted in less fortunate 
 circumstances by his predecessors, Carstairs and 
 Kobertson, in the preceding century. By him 
 the Act of 1858 was made a signal success. The 
 University Council, which numbered some 1800 
 members at the outset in 1859, expanded to some 
 8000 at the close of his reign. Instead of 1200 
 students the now autonomous University had at- 
 tracted more than 3000. Almost a million of 
 money was poured into its coffers, from voluntary 
 gifts as well as grants by Parliament. New build- 
 ings, which doubled the accommodation for study, 
 fellowships and scholarships to encourage original 
 research, and the new professorships, tutorships, 
 and examinerships, were a magnificent testimony 
 to the place which the University had taken in 
 public regard, and to the wise policy of the
 
 CONTEMPORARY PROFESSORS. 217 
 
 Principal. His administration fitly culminated in 
 1884, in the Tercentenary Festival, organised and 
 directed by him, which attracted to Edinburgh 
 scholars and philosophers from the chief seats of 
 learning in the world, in a congregation unpre- 
 cedented in Britain. A few months later the 
 University was mourning for his death. 
 
 I have lived under five British Sovereigns, 
 and I have seen six Principals in the College of 
 Edinburgh. When I was an undergraduate, 
 George Husband Baird was the Head of the 
 College, a philanthropic ecclesiastic, who reigned 
 for nearly half a century. He was a pro- 
 fessorial colleague of Robertson, and afterwards 
 his successor in the principalship, thus connecting 
 the Edinburgh of my youth with the Edinburgh 
 of David Hume and Adam Smith. So genera- 
 tions are linked and pass away. 
 
 I recall with pathetic regard those now departed 
 to the silent land, who were colleagues when 
 I held the Chair of Hamilton. Their welcome 
 and confidence are remembered with gratitude. 
 In 1856 I found in the Senate Pillans and 
 Forbes, who had guided me as a student in 
 their class-rooms nearly a quarter of a century 
 before ; Macdougall, my early associate, who had
 
 218 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 succeeded Wilson in Moral Philosophy ; and the 
 genial Kelland, one of my truest friends in middle 
 life. William Gregory, the latest academical repre- 
 sentative of a name long famous in British uni- 
 versities, was still in the Chair of Chemistry ; 
 Simpson and Goodsir, Christison, Bennett, and 
 Syme (who was followed by Lord Lister), more 
 than sustained the ancient glory of the Medi- 
 cal School ; and Playfair (afterwards Lord Play- 
 fair), the successor of Gregory, was foremost in 
 academical administration, till he transferred his 
 great gifts to the House of Commons in 1869. 
 The incisive logical faculty and admirable debat- 
 ing power of Piobert Lee were conspicuous in the 
 Council and Senate of the University as in the 
 Assemblies of the Church. The loss of Aytoun 
 in 1865 was repaired by the advent of Masson, 
 my oldest friend, who was for the next thirty 
 years the official representative of literature in 
 Scotland. Then there was Fraser-Tytler, grandson 
 of Lord Woodhouselee, beloved by all, a law 
 professor and our legal adviser, and Campbell 
 Swinton, who revived the Symposium of which I 
 have still to speak. In the benignant activity 
 of Calderwood the University found no unworthy 
 successor of those who had made the chair of
 
 THE SYMPOSIUM ACADEMICUM. 219 
 
 morals illustrious. Scholarship and philosophy 
 were allied in the many - sided personality and 
 singular personal charm of Sellar. Tait main- 
 tained the fame of the chair of Playfair and 
 Forbes, and the versatile genius of Blackie 
 awakened enthusiasm, and rebuked undue regard 
 for convention followed in the Greek chair in 
 1882 by Butcher, our academic light in all the 
 intervening years. These are some among many 
 not less worthy of regard. I have shaken hands, 
 I think, with about 90 professors as colleagues, in 
 the years in which I had a place in the Senate. 
 
 Then and formerly the professoriate owed not 
 a little of its human amenity to an institu- 
 tion which has not, I believe, been hitherto 
 recognised by historians of the university. In 
 March 1792, the year before he died, Principal 
 Robertson asked Andrew Duncan, a professor of 
 medicine, to call a meeting of their colleagues 
 for forming " a social annual convention of prin- 
 cipal and professors for convivial purposes." The 
 meeting was accordingly held, "at the Star and 
 Garter tavern," for the College in those days 
 had no accommodation for convivial entertain- 
 ments. The senators so summoned resolved them- 
 selves into a professorial club. They resolved
 
 220 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 " to dine together annually in March, in a 
 tavern, dinner to be on the table at four o'clock, 
 and to adjourn for tea and coffee at seven." 
 This was the beginning of the " convention " 
 which in the nineteenth century was known as the 
 " Symposium Academicum," at which for a few 
 hours in each year grave professors were trans- 
 formed into playful symposiasts, by whom 
 "wisdom was worn lightly as a flower," instead of 
 being carried gravely as a burden. A venerable 
 minute - book contains a faithful record of the 
 proceedings at each annual festival. It was an 
 axiom among symposiasts that the prosperity of 
 the Symposium was an infallible index of the 
 prosperity of the university. The record so far 
 verifies the axiom. From 1792 till 1833 the 
 feasts were held with annual regularity, and 
 were well attended ; the bill of fare and the 
 bill of costs at each meeting were registered in 
 artistic form, and salient occurrences were duly 
 chronicled. From 1833 till 1850 the Symposium 
 was in a state of suspended animation, the cause 
 or the effect of the languid academical life in 
 those years. There were siinis of returning 
 
 J O O 
 
 animation in the 'Fifties, under the genial con- 
 venership of Campbell Swinton the Conditor.
 
 PRINCIPAL ROBERTSON. 221 
 
 From 1860 until the Tercentenary in 1884 was 
 the golden age of the Symposium, when 
 Aytoun and Douglas Maclagan were successively 
 " Symposii Conditores." 
 
 The minutes yield some interesting gleanings. 
 "At the Star and Garter" in 1792, on the 
 motion of Dugald Stewart, Robertson, the 
 Principal, was asked " to sit to Mr Raeburn, 
 limner, for his portrait, to be hung in the 
 library, in consideration of the great reputation 
 he has obtained by his excellent writings." The 
 portrait now in the Senate hall was the issue. 
 The minute further tells that " thirty guineas 
 were paid by the professors to Mr Raeburn, 
 the limner, for the portrait, and seven guineas 
 to Mr Liddle, carver, for the frame." The names 
 of those who dined at successive meetings are 
 recorded. Dugald Stewart I find was only once 
 absent till his health failed in 1809. Thomas 
 Brown, his successor, appeared only once as a 
 symposiast during his ten years in the Moral 
 chair. David Hume, professor of Scots Law, 
 a nephew of the philosopher, was hardly ever 
 absent during his long professorship. John 
 Playfair was constant, so was Finlayson, pro- 
 fessor of Logic, and Ritchie the athlete, his
 
 222 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 successor ; but Adam Ferguson was almost always 
 missing. "Christopher North" was pretty con- 
 stant, Chalmers attended several times, and 
 Hamilton too, when he was in the chair of 
 History, for in the later years both of Chalmers 
 and Hamilton the " Symposium " was dormant. In 
 its later and golden age all professors were sym- 
 posiasts, and most of them shared in the festival. 
 
 In that " golden age " differences were for- 
 gotten, and in my memory the story through- 
 out brings back times of joy. The minute for 
 January 1860 records that as "a peculiarly 
 joyous" festival, "being the first which had taken 
 place since the University received an inde- 
 pendent constitution ; that glorious event having 
 occurred on the loth of October 1859, at which 
 date the Ordinances came into operation." In 
 the following April the symposiasts dined in 
 the Physicians' Hall, to entertain " the Eight 
 Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer, who in the forenoon had been installed 
 as Rector of the University," and " who re- 
 sponded to the toast of his health in an eloquent 
 speech." On the 18th of the next month we 
 again dined in the Hopetoun Rooms, to en- 
 tertain " Lord Brougham, who was that day in-
 
 GUESTS AT SYMPOSIA. 223 
 
 stalled as Chancellor." The minute also tells 
 that " in the course of the evening the Book 
 containing the records of the Symposium Aca- 
 demicum was produced, and was examined by 
 the Chancellor with the deepest interest." It 
 contained the history of an institution which 
 originated with Principal Robertson his grand- 
 uncle. Later minutes illustrate the growing 
 prosperity of the University, and the return of 
 harmony between "town" and "gown." In 
 1864 Prince Alfred, then a student in the Uni- 
 versity, was a guest at our dinner. Mr Gladstone 
 dined again in his second rectorship, and suc- 
 cessive Rectors afterwards, including the present 
 Duke of Devonshire. Chancellor Inglis was 
 made an honorary symposiast and was always 
 with us ; and latterly the dinners were favoured 
 by successive Lord Provosts and other civic 
 dignitaries, as well as by Sir David Baxter, 
 Doctor John Muir, and other eminent benefactors. 
 The minute-book closes on the eve of the Ter- 
 centenary Festival. I fear that the Symposium 
 has since returned to a state of suspended ani- 
 mation, not this time I trust coincident with 
 academical decline. The record of the quarter 
 of a century after 1859 takes up more than half
 
 224 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 of the Book. Bills of good fare and statistics 
 of matriculation are common features in this 
 curious record. Echoes of songs emanating from 
 the muse of Aytoun or Blackie or Maclagan, and 
 of converse in which wisdom was sometimes hid 
 in parables, at a time " when 'twas good to be 
 merry and wise," all seem to reach me, when I 
 turn to this fading minute-book. 
 
 Notwithstanding external prosperity in the pre- 
 ceding thirty years, the hand of reform was again 
 applied by Parliament to Edinburgh and the other 
 Scottish universities in 1889. In its educational 
 policy the reform of 1858 had proceeded upon 
 traditional lines in the fundamental faculty of 
 Arts. It retained a curriculum of study that was 
 more adapted to exercise the higher faculties of 
 the student than to encourage modern lang;uao;es 
 
 o o o 
 
 and physical science, subordinating regard for 
 man merely as a productive instrument, and aim- 
 ing chiefly at increase of intellectual wealth for 
 its own sake in an industrial age, impatient of 
 ancient learning, and of religion and philosophy. 
 The changes inaugurated in 1889, under Lord Kin- 
 iiear, have opened a wider field, giving more room 
 to the literatures and sciences of the modern world,
 
 BACON'S WARNING. 225 
 
 thus bringing the University into closer sym- 
 pathy with utilitarian interests and life. My 
 work in the University lay in a period of less 
 radical change, between 1860 and 1890. It 
 is too soon to forecast the new era. May it 
 be even more prosperous than the last ! The 
 University, as the social organ of liberal study 
 and progressive learning, is a constant element 
 in every civilised community ; but, like the 
 Church, which ought to be the social organ 
 of spiritual life, it is apt to lose true con- 
 sciousness of its high ideal, and to decline into 
 worldliness. The warning of Bacon is never 
 irrelevant : "If men judge that learning should 
 be referred to action, they judge well ; but in 
 this they may fall into the error described in 
 the ancient fable, in which the other parts of 
 the body did suppose the stomach had been idle, 
 because it neither performed the office of motion, 
 as the limbs do, nor of sense, as the head doth ; 
 but yet, notwithstanding, it is the stomach that 
 digesteth and distributeth to all the rest. So 
 that if any man thinks Philosophy and Univers- 
 ality to be idle studies, he doth not consider 
 that all professions are from thence served and 
 supplied."
 
 226 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 ACADEMICAL VACATIONS. 
 
 1856-1890. 
 
 "To spend too much time in studies is sloth." 
 
 BACON. 
 
 l: Philosophy, methinks, at fancy's call, 
 Might deign to follow him through what he does 
 Or sees in his day's march." 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 WHEN Samuel Johnson visited the Scottish 
 universities in his tour in 1773, he found a low 
 standard of learning among the students. "Men 
 bred in the universities of Scotland cannot," he 
 said, " be expected to be often decorated with the 
 splendours of ornamental erudition ; but they 
 obtain a mediocrity of knowledge, intermediate 
 between learning and ignorance, not inade- 
 quate to the purposes of common life. The 
 students for the most part go thither boys, and 
 depart before they are men ; they carry with 
 them little fundamental knowledge, and there- 
 fore the superstructure cannot be lofty." Yet
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 227 
 
 he acknowledges that in one respect these uni- 
 versities excel. "Their division of the academ- 
 ical year into one session and one recess" 
 seemed to him " better accommodated to the 
 present state of life than that variegation of 
 time by terms and vacations, derived from dis- 
 tant centuries, in which it was probably con- 
 venient, and still continued in the English 
 universities. So many solid months as the 
 Scottish system of education joins together allow 
 and encourage a plan for each part of the year ; 
 but with us in England, he that has settled 
 himself to study in the college is soon tempted 
 into the country, and he that has adjusted his 
 life in the country is soon summoned back to his 
 college." This vacation in Scotland also secures 
 for professors, who have to act as tutors as well 
 as lecturers during the session, time needed for 
 spiritual recreation, and for fulfilling their im- 
 portant duty of extending the boundary of 
 knowledge, by original research in the depart- 
 ments which they profess. This is overlooked 
 by utilitarian critics, who demand a tale of visible 
 work that can be measured arithmetically, and 
 who regard the invisible operations of the 
 meditative mind as a form of culpable self-
 
 228 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 indulgence. The summer vacation, which earned 
 
 O ' 
 
 the applause of Johnson, is a scandal to secularist 
 critics. 
 
 In the seventeenth century, when the academ- 
 ical session in the northern universities lasted 
 for ten months out of twelve, the educational 
 executive was exhausted by the drudgery of ele- 
 mentary teaching. Accordingly the universities 
 then added little to the common stock of know- 
 ledge, or to the literature by which the world is 
 educated. In the eighteenth century the long 
 vacation, with its " solid months " in summer, 
 was introduced in the philosophical classes, and 
 so Scotland became the nursery of the philosophy 
 which was adopted by Cousin. " Greatly more 
 than half the distinguished authorship of our 
 land is professorial," Chalmers reminded his 
 countrymen eighty years ago, " and, till the 
 present generation, we scarcely remember, with 
 the exception of Hume in philosophy and 
 Thomson in poetry, any of our eminent writers 
 who did not achieve, or at least germinate, all 
 their greatest works while labouring in their 
 vocation of public instruction in one or other 
 of our universities. They have not only taught 
 philosophy ; they have also both rectified its
 
 VACATIONS AND AUTHORSHIP. 229 
 
 doctrines, and added their own views and dis- 
 coveries to the mass of pre-existent learning. 
 They have been the chief agents in enlarging 
 our country's science ; and it is mainly to them 
 that Scotland is indebted for her high estima- 
 tion in the republic of letters." It was in the 
 academical vacations that this work was done. 
 It is also through the physical movement and 
 spiritual recreation of the solid academical holi- 
 day that the philosophical professor is able to 
 vitalise and humanise his science in the class- 
 room. I am indeed far from supposing that in my 
 own case sufficient use was made of the thirty-five 
 summer vacations for which I am responsible. 
 The retrospect is an occasion for self-reproach. 
 
 Locomotion amidst new scenes, and study in 
 a select rural retreat, divided between them 
 each of my thirty - five " solid " academical 
 vacations. 
 
 Notwithstanding opportunities, I have seen only 
 a small portion of the planet which I must 
 soon leave. A few visits to France and the 
 Low Countries, and a rapid tour in Italy and 
 Switzerland, have formed my personal experience 
 of Continental Europe. I have never seen Amer-
 
 230 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 ica. I have followed Berkeley over Mont Cenis, 
 which he found " one of the most difficult and 
 formidable parts of the Alps ever passed over 
 by mortal man " ; but his transatlantic home, 
 with its " still air of delightful studies," is un- 
 visited. Descartes and Spinoza I have traced in 
 Holland ; but Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, the 
 fountains of the religion, philosophy, and politics 
 of civilised mankind, are known to me only 
 through report. In the locomotive weeks of 
 these thirty -five summers I have been 
 
 " In London chiefly harboured, whence I roamed, 
 Tarrying at will in many a pleasant spot 
 Of rural England's cultivated vales, 
 Or Cumbrian solitude." 
 
 My thoughts about things and persons are the 
 thoughts of one who has seen little and observed 
 less. 
 
 Occasional visits to London, the civic marvel 
 of the modern world, helped to enlarge this 
 narrow experience. In itself and its associations 
 it was to me an epitome of the history of 
 England ; and its unresting activities, as the fin- 
 ancial, commercial, and philanthropic centre of 
 the world, represented the manifold activity of 
 mankind. Its growth in population during my
 
 LONDON. 231 
 
 lifetime, and in complexity of social and inter- 
 national relations, is a signal historical phen- 
 omenon of the nineteenth century. In childhood, 
 at the old manse in the land of Lome, I had 
 been taught by Goldsmith that its population 
 was " nearly a million," and I was long wont 
 so to think. When I first saw London in 
 1842 this number was doubled, and now it is 
 above five millions. To share even for a little 
 and superficially in this extraordinary social 
 aggregation, without parallel in the past, was 
 a spiritual education, as well as physical refresh- 
 ment, after the nervous tension of the class- 
 room. Somehow London had a pathetic side. 
 Macaulay's New Zealander was apt to appear 
 in the mind's eye, seated on the ruined arch 
 of London Bridge, with desolation all round, 
 the disintegrated issue of centuries of human 
 labour. And then one was led on to imagine 
 a more awful disintegration still, in a remoter 
 future, when the planet itself shall be dissolved, 
 and when the race of man, with all the spiritual 
 riches accumulated by its successive generations, 
 has disappeared, leaving no record or trace of 
 their transitory existence, on one of the lesser 
 orbs in the illimitable starry heaven.
 
 232 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 One favourite resort was the library of the 
 British Museum, among the silent readers, 
 through long summer days in the 'Sixties and 
 'Seventies, when I was collecting materials for 
 the Berkeley and the Locke, entangled in the 
 meshes of that cosmopolitan collection of the 
 issues of mind in man. Things revolve upon 
 each other. Some things in one book led one 
 to turn to something in another, and the con- 
 catenation among the books was endless. It 
 suggested the unprecedented literary outcome of 
 mankind, for of making books there is no end. 
 What is their destiny in the thirtieth century ? 
 Will any of the names even of those among our 
 literary countrymen most illustrious in the last 
 hundred years be remembered then ? At any 
 rate, how will it be in the thirty millionth 
 century, in the unpeopled if not disintegrated 
 planet, when all record of the intellectual labour 
 of our human race through all its centuries shall 
 have disappeared from the universe, after the 
 foundering of the ship in which we now navigate 
 the ocean of space ? How many worlds, with their 
 cargoes of self - conscious persons, have already 
 disappeared, none of them able to transfer their 
 record to occupants of other planetary orbs ?
 
 ITS LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS. 233 
 
 I found in leisure hours what was apt to touch 
 imagination, in visiting the homes or haunts of 
 departed philosophers and other memorable per- 
 sons, whose lives were more or less connected 
 with the metropolis. Around the Museum, 
 Bloomsbury was haunted by Dickens and Rus- 
 kin, as well as by Macaulay, Darwin, and Car- 
 lyle ; and it was in Queen's Square, and after- 
 wards in Russell Square, that I used to visit 
 Frederick Denison Maurice in the 'Fifties and 
 'Sixties. The gardens of Gray's Inn, and the 
 gravel walks on which, as Charles Lamb says, 
 " Bacon has left the impress of his foot," were 
 within an easy distance. Their spreading elms 
 are said to have been planted by Bacon ; and 
 their " Mount," like the one in his Essay on 
 " Gardens," is " of some pretty height, leaving 
 the wall of the enclosure breast - high, to look 
 abroad into [what were then] the fields." From 
 this home of Bacon's middle life one crossed to 
 his birthplace " at York House in the Strand," 
 or travelled to the site of Lord Arundel's house 
 in Highgate, where he died. Fetter Lane, too, 
 was near Gray's Inn, and there Thomas Hobbes 
 settled himself in 1651 "in a small house, for 
 the advantage of intellectual society," removing
 
 234 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 later on to Salisbury House, then to Queen 
 Street, then to Newport House, and in one of 
 the years after the Restoration, Sydenham " met 
 old Mr Hobbs walking one day in the Pall 
 Mall," not long before he left London for good, 
 to die in the Derbyshire house of his patron 
 the Earl of Devonshire. Exeter Hall in the 
 Strand, now a centre of missionary philan- 
 thropy, was another attraction. It was the site 
 of Exeter House, which in the middle of the 
 seventeenth century was the abode of the first 
 Earl of Shaftesbury, and thus for years the 
 home of John Locke, when he was the medical 
 adviser and confidential agent of that mysterious 
 politician. Then there was Thanet House in 
 Aldersgate, to which Shaftesbury and Locke 
 moved after the Restoration ; also associated 
 with the third Earl, famous in the history 
 of English Ethics as author of the " Charac- 
 teristics." One followed Locke to " Channel 
 Row, in Westminster, where he lived for 
 two years " on his return from exile in Hol- 
 land, " in hired apartments, in the house of 
 Mrs Smithsby " ; years in which the ' Essay 
 on Toleration,' the ' Treatises on Civil Govern- 
 ment/ and the famous ' Essay concerning Human 
 
 * / o
 
 HAUNTED HOUSES. 235 
 
 Understanding ' issued from the press ; and then 
 to Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he lodged on occa- 
 sional visits to London in his old age, during 
 the idyllic years with the Mashams at Gates 
 on the border of Epping Forest. At another 
 time I found myself with Berkeley, among 
 his patrons and literary allies, when he lived in 
 "Portugal Street" (now Piccadilly) in 1713, on 
 his first visit to London, calling for Swift in 
 Bury Street when Swift was writing his journal 
 to Stella, going with him to dine at Mrs Van- 
 homrigh's, or to the Court at Kensington, or 
 meeting Addison and pastoral Philips in the 
 Mall, ready to walk with him in St James's 
 Park ; or in Albemarle Street, where some years 
 later Berkeley lodged " at Mr Fox's, an apoth- 
 ecary," when he was negotiating with Sir Robert 
 Walpole about the Bermuda Mission ; or again 
 after his return from Rhode Island, when he 
 passed nearly two years in " Green Street, 
 Leicester Square," not left till he went to occupy 
 the episcopal palace at Cloyne. Addison, too, 
 was seen in imagination, first in " apartments 
 in the Haymarket," in 1710, and after that in 
 the quaint recesses of St James's Place, till he 
 moved to Holland House, after the ambitious
 
 236 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 marriage with Charlotte, Countess of Warwick. 
 Pope, the philosophical poet of his time, I could 
 see in his boyhood, "near Hyde Park Corner, 
 at Mr Deane's academy, where he helped to 
 get up the play founded on an adventure in 
 Homer, when the gardener appeared as Ajax"; 
 or afterwards " at 9 Berkeley Street," and again 
 "at Mr Digby's, next door to y e Golden Ball 
 and y e second terrass in St James's Street." 
 I visited the metaphysician Samuel Clarke in 
 his rectory at St James's Church in Picca- 
 dilly ; likewise the Rolls Chapel, in which Joseph 
 Butler, placed there through Clarke's influence, 
 delivered himself of those " deep and some- 
 times dark discourses" which formed a turning- 
 point in the history of moral philosophy in 
 England ; and Butler could also be found in 
 Hampstead, where he lived long after, often 
 visited by Seeker, in what was once the residence 
 of Sir Henry Vane, with its rich gothic sculpture 
 and painted glass, not far from the house in 
 Highgate in which, in the following century, 
 Coleridge discoursed about "object" and "sub- 
 ject" to wondering listeners. Sir Isaac Newton 
 I could see in Jermyn Street or in St Martin 
 Street, and Milton in any of his many London
 
 THE ATHENAEUM. 237 
 
 houses, one of them not far from the tombs 
 of Bunyan and Watts and Defoe in Bunhill 
 Fields. 
 
 For many years the Athenaeum Club has been 
 my favourite London home. Like Matthew 
 Arnold, I have found it "a place in which one 
 could enjoy something resembling beatitude." The 
 still recesses of the magnificent library are haunted 
 by the shades of almost all the great Englishmen 
 of the nineteenth century. Mark Pattison thought 
 this " the most delightful room in the world." 
 In the history corner Macaulay wrote his Essays 
 and his English history ; Thackeray sent his 
 proof-sheets to the press from the table in the 
 south-west corner, Lord Lytton composed his 
 novels at another, and Hallam, "much renowned 
 for Greek," consulted a schoolman, a jurist, or a 
 moralist at a third. I picture dear old Doctor 
 Chalmers, elected a member of the Athenaeum 
 in his later years, visiting it for the first and 
 last time only a few days before he died, when 
 he met Whewell of Cambridge on the outside 
 steps, and then sat with him " at our little table, 
 where we talked and took our respective soda- 
 waters"; unable to find "kale and beef" for din-
 
 238 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 ner, and reduced to accept as a substitute "for the 
 kale a plateful of mock-turtle soup, and calf's foot 
 for the beef " ; then hurrying in a cab to Chelsea 
 to the Carlyles, " she remarkably juvenile-looking 
 still," he a " strong-featured man, of strong sense," 
 where " we were all most cordial and coalescing ; 
 his talk not at all Carlylish, rather the plain and 
 manly conversation of good ordinary common- 
 sense, with a deal of hearty laughing on both 
 sides." Of the Athenaeum Club it has been said 
 that there are few soluble problems which could 
 not be solved at once by some one to be found 
 between four and six o'clock within the confines 
 of what is one of the most delightful intellectual 
 and social centres in the world. 
 
 The "London Metaphysical Society" was an in- 
 stitution eminently representative of intellectual 
 life in England in the third quarter of the nine- 
 teenth century, when physical evolution claimed 
 to be the universal and ultimate constructive con- 
 ception of the universe, as illustrated by Darwin 
 and unfolded in the synthetic philosophy of 
 Herbert Spencer. This Society was formed in 
 1869, on the suggestion of Mr (now Sir James) 
 Knowles, in co-operation with Tennyson, Dean
 
 THE "METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY." 239 
 
 Stanley, and Mr Pritchard. It was an arena 
 for discussing principles in dispute between the 
 advocates of a finally physical, and the advocates 
 of a finally metaphysical or religious, conception 
 of the universe. Discussion was to be in the 
 spirit of inquiry and intellectual integrity in 
 which the Royal Society for instance considers the 
 problems of physics. It was to be a centre for 
 friendly exchange of ideas between scientific 
 agnostics and religious thinkers, with a view to 
 a better understanding of conclusions and prem- 
 isses on each side. The Society lived for 
 about twelve years. Here is a complete list 
 of the members, in the order of their elec- 
 tion : Dean Stanley, Prof. Seeley, Roden Noel, 
 Dr Martineau, Dr Carpenter, James Hinton, Prof. 
 Huxley, C. Pritchard, R. H. Button, W. G. Ward, 
 W. Bagehot, J. A. Froude, Alfred Tennyson, Prof. 
 Tyndall, Alfred Barry, Lord Arthur Russell, Right 
 Hon. W. E. Gladstone, Cardinal Manning, J. T. 
 Knowles, Sir J. Lubbock, Dean Alford, Sir A. 
 Grant, Bishop Thirlwall, Fred. Harrison, Father 
 Dalgairns, G. Grove, Shadworth Hodgson, Henry 
 Sidgwick, Prof. Lushington, Bishop Ellicott, 
 Mark Pattison, Duke of Argyll, John Ruskin, 
 Robert Lowe, Grant Duff, W. R. Greg, Prof. A.
 
 240 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Campbell Fraser, Sir H. Acland, Prof. F. D. 
 Maurice, Archbishop Thomson, J. B. Mozley, 
 Dean Church, Bishop Magee, Prof. Groom Rob- 
 ertson, Sir J. F. Stephen, Prof. Sylvester, Dr 
 Bucknill, Dr A. Clark, Prof. Clifford, Prof. St 
 George Mivart, M. Boulton, Lord Selborne, John 
 Morley, Leslie Stephen, Sir F. Pollock, Dr 
 Gasquet, Prof. Upton, Sir W. Gull, Prof. Clarke, 
 A. J. Balfour, James Sully, A. Barratt. In the 
 twelve years about 100 meetings were held and 
 95 papers were read, each the text for the even- 
 ing's discussion. The meetings were monthly 
 in eight months of the year. I had the honour 
 to be elected in 1871, and was for the most part 
 a silent but not inattentive listener, and this only 
 once or twice annually, as visits to London per- 
 mitted. Those evenings at the Westminster Hotel 
 or the Grosvenor Hotel, the frugal meal, and the 
 interchange of thought, are memorable in my 
 London retrospect. 
 
 In the Metaphysical Society the riddle of the 
 universe was engaged with on many of its sides. 
 Philosophy of causation in some of its numerous 
 phases ; the relativity of human knowledge ; veri- 
 fication of beliefs and the foundation of belief; 
 questions about matter and what is meant by its
 
 SUBJECTS DISCUSSED. 241 
 
 being " real " ; the conception of a human soul 
 and its personality ; natural and supernatural 
 agency, and the meaning of those ambiguous 
 words ; the personal immortality of man and his 
 future after physical death ; the meaning or mean- 
 inglessness of the term "God"; the universality 
 and necessity, or the merely occasional rise, of 
 the problems of metaphysics and theology in the 
 history of the human race ; the nature, evidence, 
 and spiritual value of physical miracle ; free 
 agency and its implied moral responsibility as 
 an ultimate spiritual fact in ethics ; the new 
 conception of evolution, in its application to 
 nature and man, and in its relation to theism ; 
 what death means, and what distinguishes the 
 soul before and after death ; the various mean- 
 ings of materialism ; the monistic and the dual- 
 istic ultimate conception of the universe ; absolute 
 truth, and the possibility of a human knowledge 
 of Absolute Being, these are examples of ques- 
 tions that were considered in the Society. 
 
 The raison d'etre of metaphysics and theology, 
 and of a metaphysical or theological Society like 
 this, came up in several forms. Are problems, 
 like the origin of the universe, its moral govern- 
 ment, the spiritual personality of the human 
 
 Q
 
 242 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 animal, and the prolongation of his existence after 
 death questions which men have been asking 
 from the beginning are these destined to be for 
 ever asked and never answered to the satisfaction 
 of all men ? Is there any essential human need 
 for continuing to ask them ? May they not be 
 the unhealthy issue of individual or racial idiosyn- 
 crasies, or of special circumstances, at particular 
 times and in particular places ? If they cannot be 
 answered, is it reasonable to persist in raising them ? 
 May we anticipate a time in the progressive evolu- 
 tion of human intelligence when men will cease to 
 raise insoluble questions, and become accustomed 
 to their absence ? Are not such questions pe- 
 culiar to savage and half - educated periods in 
 the history of mankind ? It was at the Meta- 
 physical Society that Huxley gave currency to 
 the term " agnostic," in its popular acceptation of 
 religious nescience combined, as it seemed incon- 
 sistently, with physical science. 
 
 It was worth a visit to London to hear Martineau 
 in friendly debate with Huxley, and Manning or 
 Ward arguing for supernatural faith with Tyndall or 
 Clifford, and to follow the subtle reasoning of Glad- 
 stone in an encounter with the outspoken scepti- 
 cism of some of the associates. I do not know
 
 HERBERT SPENCER. 243 
 
 that the Metaphysical Society, in the twelve years 
 of its life, solved, with the consent of all, any of 
 the many problems which were raised at its meet- 
 ings : perhaps such social meetings are not well 
 fitted to promote progress in disposing of questions 
 which appeal to the contemplative mind. But I 
 think it helped to moderate controversy between 
 the leaders of opposite sides in contemporary 
 thought, and promoted mutual respect instead of 
 mutual contempt or aversion among those who 
 desired, each in his own way, to gain a victory for 
 truth. The collision of Agnostics with Anglican 
 and Roman advocates of biblical or ecclesiastical 
 authority was always interesting, and conversa- 
 tion, for instance with Ward and Huxley, I al- 
 ways found congenial. Ward was the author of 
 the ' Ideal of the Christian Church/ notable in 
 the old tractarian days at Oxford. Newman and 
 Carlyle, J. S. Mill and Herbert Spencer, were con- 
 spicuous by the absence of their names in the 
 roll of the Metaphysical Society. Spencer I used 
 to meet occasionally at the Athenseum. I found 
 him a grave and serious converser, who might out- 
 wardly be mistaken for a nonconformist presbyter. 
 He was reserved in philosophical talk, but what 
 he said and wrote was refreshing as the honest
 
 244 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 expression of the insight of a thinker who was 
 unburdened by philosophical learning. He did not 
 seem, however, to have so sounded the depths 
 of metaphysics as to appreciate the rationale 
 of religion. As to libraries, perhaps he would 
 have said, like Hobbes, that "if he had read 
 as many books as other philosophers, he might 
 have been as ignorant as they." But the intel- 
 lectual and moral persistency that produced the 
 ' Synthetic Philosophy ' is hardly equalled in 
 English philosophical literature. I last met him 
 when he joined me at luncheon in the Athenaeum 
 some years ago. Our talk was not about " first prin- 
 ciples," but about his own pathological symptoms, 
 and his adventures in quest of health at Ardtornish, 
 and in boating on the Sound of Mull. 
 
 It was in this decade that I saw both J. S. Mill 
 and Carlyle for the last time. I dined with Mill 
 in April 1873, when he was in Victoria Street, 
 Westminster, and found the same luminous speech 
 and gentle benevolence as had appeared when I 
 was introduced to him in Leadenhall Street nearly 
 a quarter of a century before, and afterwards when 
 I visited him at Blackheath. On that last day he 
 recounted interesting talk with Jeremy Bentham
 
 LAST VISIT TO J. S. MILL. 245 
 
 in walks in and around Westminster when the 
 century was young ; and Bentham's house, he said, 
 was within a few yards of where we were seated. 
 He spoke of the current of politics, and of the 
 conservative reaction that was growing in the early 
 'Seventies, and how the natural time for a Conserv- 
 ative Cabinet, and when it was useful, was when 
 great changes were not ripe for legislation. He 
 spoke of France, and of finding more religion in 
 rural France than in rural England. The Koman 
 Church was, he thought, more successful than the 
 Anglican in sustaining popular religious life and in 
 its hold of the lowest class ; as for Positivism, it 
 had probably more disciples in England than in 
 France. Next day Mill left London for Avignon, 
 and three weeks later he was dead. 
 
 My last visit to Carlyle was some years after 
 this. I found him in solitude in the famous 
 upper chamber of the house in Cheyne Walk, and 
 w r as regaled for a full hour, in a benign spirit, a 
 contrast to the cataract of denunciation to which 
 I had listened in 1850, when I first met him. 
 He spoke tragically of early days at Kirkcaldy, 
 partly through obstructions to daily immersion 
 in the salt sea, all presented in vivid pictures. 
 The monologue was easily diverted to ex-
 
 246 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 perience in Edinburgh University, where there 
 was put before him " such philosophy as was 
 then and there dispensed, not much to profit 
 withal." Some of it was served up by "a 
 dainty gentleman, we called him Missey Brown, 
 who spoke about cause and effect, and neatly 
 divided the spiritual life of man into faculties 
 and states, and who was said to be an imposing 
 figure at tea-parties." There was more true 
 manhood, as it seemed, in " stalwart Ritchie, 
 who then professed logic, was great at curling, 
 no ingenious contriver of neat little partitions 
 of the divine spirit in man." " But a truer 
 thinking man than either, you have got now," 
 he said, " in David Masson, sincere and sure of 
 purpose ; very brave, for he has undertaken to 
 write a history of the universe from 1608 to 
 1674, calling it a ' Life of John Milton.' " Masson 
 somehow led to Mill. He had known John Mill 
 well, he said, when they were together in London 
 in the 'Thirties, but now he seldom saw him. 
 Mill was " weak in body and thin in thought, 
 satisfied with a sort of phantasmagoria universe, 
 without going to the heart of things." There 
 was too much of this nowadays. Some people 
 called " scientific " had made a great discovery,
 
 LAST VISIT TO CARLYLE. 247 
 
 so they said. They had found out that God 
 was protoplasm ; and to worship this strange god, 
 spelt with a little " g," was a great advance, 
 forsooth, upon the God of Israel. It was truly 
 an ugly spectacle, which recalled an event in his 
 own young life, when there was a sudden outbreak 
 in the Solway Moss, out of which issued loathsome 
 creatures toads, frogs, and lizards : a picture of 
 this sort rose before him when he met worshippers 
 of the god protoplasm. " The older I grow," he 
 said at last in a solemn way, "and I am now 
 near death, the oftener I return to a lesson I 
 learned when I was a boy. I was told that the 
 chief end of man was to glorify and enjoy the 
 great God. Can you give me anything better ; or 
 better than the prayer that I make every morn- 
 ing ' Thy will be done ' ? What more can any 
 man's prayer ask for than this ? " A cordial 
 grasp of the hand immediately followed these 
 words, and I saw Thomas Carlyle no more. 1 
 
 In 1860 I was asked by Lord John Russell 
 to take into my family his eldest son, afterwards 
 
 1 I mentioned some of this talk with Carlyle on the same even- 
 ing, at a dinner in London, where an American journalist was of 
 the party, and some time after I found an imperfect reproduction 
 of it in an American newspaper.
 
 248 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 Lord Amberley, with the desire that his son might 
 find in Edinburgh University a revival of his 
 own experience there. Ill -health in after years 
 disappointed the high promise of Lord Amberley, 
 who studied with ardour in Edinburgh. His 
 personal attraction, acute intelligence, and thought- 
 ful religious spirit, as well as keen political and 
 philanthropic interests, notwithstanding unusual 
 constitutional reserve, presaged an influential 
 public career, which death ended tragically in 
 1876. Two years before, Lady Amberley and 
 their only daughter, my god-child, died. Lady 
 Amberley's charm as friend and hostess, when 
 they lived at Fife House in Whitehall, the house 
 which Lord Liverpool lived in when he was 
 Prime Minister, must be a sunny memory to 
 those who shared in its brilliant reunions, in 
 1867-69, or afterwards at Rodborough and at 
 Ravenscroft. Her mother, Henrietta Maria, wife 
 of the second Lord Stanley of Alderley, in the 
 Dover Street house, is a charming figure in my 
 London retrospect, with her many-sided intelli- 
 gence, outspoken criticism, and true kindness, 
 connecting as she did the society of our day 
 with the life and personalities of two preceding 
 generations, who was able to recall meetings in
 
 LORD JOHN RUSSELL. 249 
 
 childhood with the widow of Charles Edward at 
 Florence, more than sixty years after Culloden. 
 Mention of Dover Street recalls delightful visits 
 to Alderley and to Castle Howard. 
 
 Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park revives 
 happy experience of many annual visits there after 
 1860. One sees the low rambling structure, two 
 storeys high, the walls concealed by creeping 
 plants, the windows opening on the noble terrace, 
 which commands in its near view the Thames 
 from Hampton Court to Richmond, and beyond 
 this the great plain of Middlesex with Windsor 
 in the distance. But the interest lay still more 
 within. I had heard Lord John described as 
 cold and aloof in public life, but found an un- 
 expected contrast in the genial kindness of the 
 host at Pembroke Lodge in his union of gentle- 
 ness with firmness. His early Edinburgh life was 
 not forgotten in after-dinner talk. He had lived 
 for three years with John Playfair, the celebrated 
 mathematical professor ; and he had listened to 
 the lectures of Dugald Stewart and Thomas 
 Brown in 1809-10. It was the college session in 
 which ill-health obliged Stewart to have recourse 
 to Brown for help during part of the winter. 
 When the philosophical veteran returned to work,
 
 250 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 he received an address from the students, which 
 Lord John, the students' chairman, presented to 
 him in person. He spoke with admiration of 
 Stewart, and with warm regard of Brown, the 
 "Missey Brown" of Carlyle. Then there were 
 stories of Fox, and of Holland House in the days 
 of the Regency, of Spain when he was there with 
 Wellington, and of Elba when he met Napoleon. 
 For one who, as a boy at the lonely manse 
 in Lome, had been so absorbed in details of the 
 great struggle for Reform that the speeches and 
 divisions, the contested elections and riots, were all 
 engraved on my memory as no later incidents of 
 the sort have ever been since the interest was 
 great now to have the record from the chief actor. 
 He often returned to the parliamentary eloquence 
 of Plunket, the political genius of Canning, and 
 the attractive personality of Daniel O'Connell. 
 To be a leader of the House of Commons, Lord 
 John said, "I found three rules indispensable." 
 The first rule was " Patience " ; the second rule was 
 "Patience"; and the third rule was "Patience." 
 He spoke of Sir James Mackintosh, whose phil- 
 osophical articles in the ' Edinburgh Review ' had 
 been my favourite reading in former days. I 
 asked Lord John how my intellectual hero made
 
 EMERSON. 251 
 
 so little way in the House of Commons and on the 
 official ladder. "Lord Grey," he said, "thought 
 Mackintosh too much a dreamer, and too dilatory 
 in his ways for administrative work, too ' sicklied 
 o'er with the pale cast of thought." 1 It was 
 Coleridge, I think, who used to say of Mackin- 
 tosh, that he was the king of the men of talent, 
 uncommonly powerful in his own line, but that 
 not the line of a first-rate man. 
 
 Emerson was in England in 1873. I met him 
 several times at Pembroke Lodge and in London, 
 and afterwards he visited us in Edinburgh. The 
 insinuating sweetness of his manner was a con- 
 trast to the prophetic anathemas of Carlyle, and 
 his pervading sense of the spirituality of the 
 universe brought one into moods not unlike those 
 encouraged by Berkeley in ' Siris ' or by Words- 
 worth in the c Excursion.' Mrs Grote and " the 
 historian," J. A. Froude, Browning, and Mr Lecky, 
 were also interesting apparitions in those days. 
 
 Among the cherished memories of far-off sum- 
 mers, none are more fragrant than those left by 
 visits to Stanford Rivers, for forty years the 
 secluded home in Essex of Isaac Taylor, the author 
 of the 'Natural History of Enthusiasm/ my old
 
 252 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 collaborateur in the ' North British,' the friend 
 of Chalmers, and "the bete noire of Principal 
 William Cunningham." Although Stanford Rivers 
 is only thirty miles from London, it seemed, when 
 I first saw it on a summer evening in 1859, to 
 lie as remote from the great world as an island 
 in the Hebrides, the house among green fields 
 in the vale of the almost motionless Rodon. 
 Twenty years before I was familiar with a pic- 
 ture of the place, drawn by Sir James Stephen, 
 in that delightful " imaginary autobiography " of 
 the "Historian of Enthusiasm" which first ap- 
 peared in the 'Edinburgh Review,' and was 
 republished among Stephen's ' Essays in Ecclesias- 
 tical Biography.' I entered the quaint farm cot- 
 tage with its cosy low-roofed rooms, the library 
 and passages overflowing with books promin- 
 ent among them Augustine and Origen and St 
 Thomas with his mediseval compeers ; early folios 
 of Bacon and Locke, in due subordination to 
 Fathers and Schoolmen, beside works of Anglican 
 and Nonconformist divines ; first editions of 
 Hooker and Howe, of Joseph Butler and Isaac 
 Watts. Then came the incisive questions and 
 pregnant aphorisms of the venerable recluse, as we 
 occupied the arbour in the old-fashioned garden,
 
 STANFORD RIVERS AND ISAAC TAYLOR. 253 
 
 its walks adapted "to meditative purposes, or 
 traversed the lanes of Essex to Navestock or 
 Ongar. The stillness of the leafy lanes of Essex 
 is diffused through his books, the favourites of a 
 departed generation, as they appeared in volumin- 
 ous succession in the forty years following 1822, 
 discursive and rhetorical, imagination sometimes 
 superseding dry reason. His early literary ideal 
 was a pathology of the ailments of the Christian 
 Church, in six volumes, on " Scepticism," " Cred- 
 ulity," "Enthusiasm," "Fanaticism," "Spiritual 
 Despotism," and " Ecclesiastical Morality." Only 
 three came to birth ; other themes were more 
 attractive, unlike the lifelong persistency of 
 Comte and Herbert Spencer. But some of the 
 digressive volumes, I think, formed his best work. 
 The contemplative thought in "Saturday Even- 
 ing " is full of individuality ; and the ' Physical 
 Theory of Another Life,' if too "physical" for 
 the evidence, is full of curious speculation. 
 Those who remember with affection Bemerton 
 and Olney, Rydal and Herstmonceaux, will not 
 forget Stanford Rivers and the vale of Ongar. 
 
 Although Isaac Taylor inherited nonconformity, 
 yet sentiment and imagination, combined with 
 reason, overcame inherited influence, and in the
 
 254 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 end carried him to his true home in the Anglican 
 Church. The dual personality with which Sir 
 James Stephen credited him nonconformist yet 
 Anglican had disappeared before my first visit. 
 The splendid vision of the historical Catholic 
 Church, which attracted Gladstone, had been 
 realised by Taylor with increasing force. I re- 
 member his expression of regret about his book on 
 ' Ancient Christianity ' directed against Anglo- 
 Catholicism, at the height of the Oxford move- 
 ment as too unsympathetic towards the Christ- 
 ianity of the early centuries. But the attraction 
 of the historic Church never abated charitable 
 regard for the modern sects that originated in the 
 ecclesiastical convulsion of the sixteenth century. 
 His father, in the first quarter of last century, 
 occupied " the modest yet not unornamented 
 abode " provided for the good pastors of the non- 
 conformist congregation at Ongar to whom he 
 ministered. According to report " a mild and 
 venerable man," no vindictive political partisan or 
 self-assertive sectary ; in temper I should think 
 like Watts or Doddridge, in spirituality like 
 Bunyan or Baxter. His ' Scenes of British 
 Wealth' and other books for children were 
 among my early favourites, at a time when the
 
 CURIOUS DREAMS. 255 
 
 prolific authorship of his wife was providing fav- 
 ourite reading for my mother. 
 
 One incident in the early life of these admirable 
 persons I recall, among the reminiscences with 
 which Isaac Taylor used to enliven our evenings at 
 Stanford Kivers. In the latter part of the eigh- 
 teenth century, his father, the future pastor at 
 Ongar, then newly married, lived at Islington 
 exercising; his vocation as an artist. One nio;ht 
 
 O O 
 
 his wife awoke, startled by a dream wonderfully 
 like reality a room in a quaint old house in a 
 rural village, furniture and surroundings visible in 
 minute detail ; the near outlook from the window 
 a lane, bounded by a wall, on the wall " May 
 1691," distinctly presented. The dream was re- 
 peated on successive nights, and its vividness as 
 well as the repetition occasioned much talk at 
 the time in the family. With the lapse of years 
 the dreams were forgotten. Meantime the artist 
 had become the dissenting pastor. He had been 
 asked by the congregation at Lavenham in Suffolk, 
 a place which neither he nor his wife had ever 
 seen, to settle there as their minister. He ac- 
 cepted the "call," and the pair went to Lavenham 
 to engage a house. They saw and entered a house 
 advertised "to let." On entering it, the lady to
 
 256 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 her surprise at once felt as if at home in it. The 
 furniture and surroundings all seemed strangely 
 familiar, and the outlook from the window pre- 
 sented a lane, bounded by a wall, on which "May 
 1691 " was inscribed. The long-forgotten dreams 
 at Islington were recalled. No explanation of 
 this curious occurrence had ever been suggested. 
 " If this was accidental coincidence," I was asked, 
 " can we say of any coincidence that it must be 
 the issue of design ? " 
 
 The vale of Ongar is associated with a name 
 more known to the world than that of the medi- 
 tative recluse at Stanford Rivers. John Locke 
 spent the last fourteen years of his life at Gates, 
 five miles from the home of the Taylors, in the 
 parish of High Laver. Gates was then the seat 
 of Sir Francis Masham, whose wife was a daughter 
 of Ralph Cudworth. When Locke was living in 
 " Mrs Smithsby's apartments, in Dorset Court," 
 after his return from Holland in 1689, "by some 
 considerably long visits to Gates," as Lady Masham 
 records, " he made trial of the air of this place, 
 and he thought that none would be more suitable 
 for him. His company could not but be very 
 desirable for us ; but to make him easy in living 
 with us, it was necessary he should do so 011
 
 MANOR-HOUSE OF GATES. 257 
 
 his own terms, which Sir Francis at last assenting 
 to, he resolved, if it pleased God, here to end his 
 days as he did." An excursion to Gates was 
 one of the pleasures of my first visit to Ongar, 
 repeated in later years. It was a Scot, Taylor 
 told me, that he had once before conducted 
 there, for he had made a pilgrimage to Gates 
 in 1825, with his visitor, Edward Irving, a much 
 interested companion. 
 
 The old manor - house, in which the last 
 fourteen years of Locke's life were spent in a 
 beautiful domestic life, is not now to be seen. 
 The Masham family disappeared with the death 
 of the last lord in 1776, when Gates was bought 
 by the Palmers. Thirty years later the house 
 was pulled down by a new possessor. I have 
 an engraving in which it appears as it was 
 when Locke lived in it, a square mansion, 
 in Tudor style, an ornamental lawn and open 
 pond in front, a turret above the entrance hall, 
 near it the window of the room in which the 
 philosopher wrote the many volumes of his later 
 years, next to it the window of the room in 
 which he slept, and beneath the two, the snug 
 parlour in which Esther Masham, the daughter 
 of his host, a bright girl of seventeen, used to
 
 258 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 read aloud to the family " in the winter even- 
 ings, after supper," some of ' Astrea,' then a fav- 
 ourite romance, as well as books of voyages and 
 travels of which Locke was fond. We visited 
 the tomb of Locke beside the parish church of 
 Hish Laver, a mile from Gates, and saw the 
 
 O ' 
 
 spacious pew in which he often worshipped. 
 The Father of English philosophy, and the 
 meditative Englishman with whom I was stay- 
 ing, both found their tombs within the same 
 rural expanse in Essex. The remains of the one 
 rest in the churchyard at High Laver, and the 
 other lies in the churchyard at Stanford Rivers. 
 Both were nurtured in English Puritanism and 
 Nonconformity, and both still "in communion 
 with the whole Church of Christ by whatever 
 names Christ's followers please to call themselves " 
 in the end found the freedom which they loved 
 in the Church of Hooker and Cudworth. 1 
 
 From Stanford Rivers my wife and I went 
 to Cambridge, for some days of happy experi- 
 ence in the house of my good friend Alexander 
 
 1 After Taylor's death, I retained happy intercourse with the 
 family in annual visits to his son, the fourth Isaac, at Settrington 
 rectory, where he kept the " family pen " busy, as the acute and 
 accomplished author of ' Words and Places ' and many other 
 books.
 
 PLURALITY OF INHABITED WORLDS. 259 
 
 Macmillan the publisher, then rising into fame. 
 Another visit to Cambridge followed in 1862, 
 to share in the academic festival on the instal- 
 lation of the late Duke of Devonshire as Chan- 
 cellor, and in the hospitality of Whewell at 
 Trinity, as well as Macmillan. The visit to 
 Whewell was interesting. I had made his ac- 
 
 O 
 
 quaintance through his books in controversy 
 with Mill, and also by correspondence as a 
 North British Reviewer. I had been attracted by 
 his essay on ' The Plurality of Worlds/ where 
 it is argued that our planet is probably the 
 only world in existence that is occupied by 
 intelligent and morally responsible persons ; the 
 stars of heaven being a material panorama exist- 
 ing only for the sake of the human inhabitants 
 of one small globe. This paradox, we are to-day 
 told, is fully fortified by "scientific proof" that 
 the earth is mathematically placed in the centre 
 of the limited portion of space which, according 
 to the theorist, contains the whole material 
 world. And all this is taken as an apology 
 for the faith that a divine incarnation has been 
 realised upon this apparently insignificant planet, 
 for the sake of persons otherwise unfit occasions 
 of the stupendous transaction. But I do not see
 
 260 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 how science can put a limit to the space occupied 
 by suns and their planetary systems, or how the 
 universe can be proved to have any boundary, 
 within a space whose circumference must be no- 
 where and its centre everywhere ; or even a limit 
 within time, in its unbeginning and unending 
 duration. It seems a poor theistic conception to 
 suppose God incapable of incarnation in man, 
 unless this planet were thus unique in space and 
 time. With the infinite fund of Omnipotent and 
 Omniscient Goodness, what need to exaggerate 
 the place of man, in order to justify his recog- 
 nition, even according to the full economy of the 
 Christian revelation. 
 
 In hypotheses of this sort surely physical 
 science is transgressing its own legitimate limits, 
 and making too free with our narrow experience 
 of the qualities of matter. Is science even 
 entitled to take for granted that the material 
 world must present to all sentient beings the same 
 qualities as it does to us with our few senses ? 
 I remembered the philosophic romance of Vol- 
 taire, in which Micromegas, an inhabitant of the 
 Dog Star, asks the secretary of the Academy 
 of Science in the planet Saturn, how many senses 
 the men on his globe have. " We have seventy-
 
 LORD PALMERSTON. 261 
 
 two senses," was the reply, " and we are every 
 day complaining of the smallness of the number ; 
 we are also for ever complaining of the shortness 
 of our lives, for they seldom exceed fifteen 
 thousand earthly years." "If I did not know 
 that you were a philosopher," Micromegas re- 
 plied, " I should be afraid of vexing you when 
 I tell you that our lives are seven hundred 
 times longer than yours, and that we have one 
 thousand senses." Now we have only to suppose 
 that not one of the seventy - two senses of the 
 Saturnian, not one even of the thousand senses of 
 the Sirians, corresponds to any of our five senses, 
 in order to see that their material world must 
 for them be destitute of all the qualities which 
 ours manifests, yet endowed with a thousand 
 qualities which are inconceivable by us, as colours 
 are by a man born blind. And as the planetary 
 orbs could have no inter-communication, we are 
 obliged to suppose that the issue of all intel- 
 lectual work pursued in each, however various and 
 prolonged, must disappear from the universe, when 
 each founders at last in the infinite ocean of space. 
 
 Repeated Oxford visits in those years recall 
 Pembroke College and the hospitality of the
 
 262 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 Jeunes, the Hansels in the High Street and A. P. 
 Stanley in Christ Church, at a later date week-ends 
 with Jowett at Balliol, and later still delightful 
 visits at Corpus. Pembroke recalls a meeting 
 with Lord Palmerston in 1862, when he was Prime 
 Minister. He had come to Oxford to receive a 
 D.C.L. degree, and was staying with Jeune, who 
 was then Vice-Chancellor. Palmerston's frankness 
 when I was introduced to him made talk easy, 
 and one forgot that this genial English gentle- 
 man had been a colleague of Perceval and 
 Lord Liverpool, war-secretary when Waterloo was 
 fought, and long a chief agent in the affairs of 
 Europe. He talked freely about Edinburgh, told 
 stories of his life as an Edinburgh student, when 
 he went there in the last year of the eighteenth 
 century, to spend three years in the house of 
 Dugald Stewart, at the foot of the Canongate. 
 He spoke of walks on spring mornings to St 
 Bernard's Well, then " far in the country," or 
 round Arthur's Seat, all with a recollection of 
 places, and of their history in the annals of the 
 old city, which made an Edinburgh citizen feel 
 ashamed of his own ignorance. 
 
 In the summer of 1870, accompanied by my 
 wife and eldest son, I spent several weeks in
 
 AT CLOYNE. 263 
 
 Ireland in imagined companionship with Berkeley, 
 whose life I was then writing. We visited his 
 birthplace, beside Dysert Castle in the valley of 
 the Nore ; the famous school at Kilkenny, in which 
 he was trained ; Trinity College, Dublin, in which 
 his new conception of the universe began to germ- 
 inate ; and Cloyne, where his philosophic thought 
 was consummated. We passed a night in the 
 episcopal palace at Cloyne, his home for eighteen 
 years, and also some days in the neighbouring 
 country. We saw the study from which the 
 'Querist' and 'Siris' issued, "the garden of 
 four acres, full of fruits," and "the winding 
 walk, nearly a quarter of a mile long, adorned 
 for a great part of its length by a hedge of 
 myrtles six feet high," planted by his own hand, 
 " each with a ball of tar put to its roots," 
 the walk in which he was wont to meditate, in 
 that "remote corner" of Ireland where, as he 
 said, "many modern things escape me," while 
 " ambitious projects, intrigues and quarrels of 
 statesmen, things I had formerly been amused 
 with, seem now to be a vain, fugitive dream." 
 Here, musing on the distress of Ireland, he rose 
 from the particular to the general, and anticipated 
 principles that Hume and Adam Smith afterwards 
 presented in a more elaborate form. Mr Balfour
 
 264 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 describes the ' Querist ' as " the most original of 
 all the mass of literature on the distresses of that 
 distressful country. The gospel of industry and 
 self-reliance is preached on every page." It 
 breathed love for all his countrymen, in a way 
 that unhappily was then strange in an Irish 
 Protestant ecclesiastic. He asks, " Whether a 
 scheme for the welfare of the Irish nation should 
 not take in the whole inhabitants ? " and " Whether 
 it was not a vain attempt to project the flourish- 
 ing of our Protestant gentry, exclusive of the 
 bulk of the natives ? " These are among his 
 pregnant social queries. They were illustrated in 
 his conduct ; responded to by the Catholics of his 
 diocese, during the rising in Scotland in the '45, 
 and again when he was thanked by the Catholic 
 clergy for his letter, asking for their co-operation in 
 inculcating forethought and industry among the 
 people. Mr Wyndham has legislated in the spirit 
 of the first query, but a university acceptable to 
 the Catholic majority of the nation still appeals 
 to two contradictory consciences in Britain. One 
 of the pleasant memories of our visit to Ireland 
 is the bright summer day spent at the College of 
 Maynooth, where we were entertained by Doctor 
 .Russell, the President, of whom Newman says that
 
 BUTLER'S 'ANALOGY' AND LOCKE'S 'ESSAY.' 265 
 
 he " had perhaps more to do with his conversion 
 from Anglicanism than any one else." We found 
 him, as Newman describes him, "gentle, mild, 
 unobtrusive, uncontroversial." 
 
 In 1879 I was again called to literary work 
 by the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. The 
 alternative of an edition of Bishop Butler's 
 ' Analogy ' or an edition of Locke's ' Essay ' was 
 put before me. I was attracted to the ' Analogy ' 
 by the definite moral interest of its intellectual 
 field ; but there was the early felt charm of 
 Locke, and the remembrance that Hamilton had 
 made it a matter of reproach to " Britain " 
 that " the world does not possess an annotated 
 edition of the ' Essay.' ' So in the end Locke 
 was preferred ; and by good fortune for the 
 ' Analogy,' as the Oxford edition, which has since 
 appeared, has come from one whose name is fit 
 to be associated with that of Butler. As for 
 the edition of Locke, increased academical work 
 in Edinburgh led to indefinite postponement of 
 that enterprise. But meantime I contributed the 
 " Locke " article to the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' 
 and this, with the ' Berkeley ' for Blackwood, 
 in 1881, sundry articles in reviews and ency-
 
 266 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 clopsedias, and some minor miscellaneous essays, 
 formed my scanty tale of literary work in the 
 'Eighties. 
 
 As Berkeley carried me to Ireland, so Butler 
 and Locke tempted me in those years to loco- 
 motion in England. Two sombre days in spring 
 were spent at Stanhope, in the upper valley of 
 the Wear, realising the rural retirement in which 
 Butler was buried when the ' Analogy ' appeared 
 in 1736. The pathetic solitude of that moorland 
 country, seen, as I saw it, under a clouded sky, 
 harmonised with the grave temper in which the 
 recluse thinker contemplated the mysteries in 
 the moral sfovernment of the universe, and con- 
 
 O * 
 
 eluded that although " many persons take for 
 granted that Christianity is not so much as a 
 subject of inquiry, but is now at length dis- 
 covered to be fictitious," we may nevertheless, 
 as reasonable men, " be as much assured as we 
 are of our own being, that it is not so clear a 
 case that there is nothing in it." The question 
 for a reasonable man was not, he thought, whether 
 the evidence for religion was satisfactory, but 
 whether the evidence for a religious course of 
 action was such as, " taking in all circumstances, 
 makes the faculty within us which is the guide
 
 BUTLER AT STANHOPE. 267 
 
 and judge of conduct determine that course of 
 action to be prudent." Butler asked himself at 
 Stanhope, what the wise final venture is for 
 man, under conditions which make conduct of 
 life in this mysterious universe only a balance 
 of probabilities ? That Butler struggled in vain 
 to prove by empirical evidence the conclusion 
 that the universe in which we find ourselves 
 is fundamentally spiritual and moral instead 
 of making this the necessary presupposition of 
 all proof of anything was a consequence of his 
 philosophical system, which distrusted what looked 
 like conjecture. I was not more successful than 
 preceding visitors at Stanhope, on a like mission, 
 in getting light upon this part of the life of Butler. 
 Parish books with his autograph, correspondence 
 and contracts about church repairs, levies for rates 
 with his signature, subscriptions in lists for phil- 
 anthropic enterprises, his sun-dial and its char- 
 acteristic motto, " Ut hora, sic vita, 1727," 1 are 
 scanty Stanhope relics which I saw, memorials 
 of the great religious thinker who was there, 
 " not dead, but buried." I found a few more in 
 visiting afterwards Bishop Lightfoot at Auckland, 
 a successor worthy of Butler, dignified by his 
 
 1 Butler was rector of Stanhope from 1726 till 1738.
 
 268 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 learning, and among the noblest examples of 
 the Christian life I have ever known. 
 
 With Locke the case was different. The 
 biographical material was abundant. I had 
 already mused among the scenes in Essex in 
 which the last fourteen years of his life were 
 spent. In 1879 I turned to Somerset, where he 
 was born, and where he spent his first fourteen 
 years. A short walk from Pensford, a village six 
 miles south-east from Bristol, brought me on a 
 summer evening to the farmhouse of Beluton, 
 the modest home of Locke's childhood, and the 
 centre of the little property which he inherited 
 from his father. The house stands on the slope 
 of one of the orchard-clad hills which bound the 
 fertile vale of the Chew. It was here that Locke 
 "no sooner found himself in the world than he 
 found himself in a storm." The fourteen years 
 were those ending in 1G46, when his father was 
 often away from home in the service of the 
 Parliamentary army. Wrington, a few miles from 
 Beluton, was Locke's birthplace : his mother was 
 visiting there when he was born. At Wrington 
 I found the two-storied thatched cottage, a few 
 yards from the parish church, under the shadow
 
 LOCKE IN SOMERSET. 269 
 
 of the Mendip hills. The tomb of Hannah More 
 and her four sisters was beside it in the church- 
 yard, with Barley Wood in view, where she pro- 
 vided schools for the peasants, entertained Wilber- 
 force, and helped to educate Lord Macaulay. 
 
 Locke's visits to Somerset, after he went to 
 Westminster School in 1846, were occasional and 
 short. His friend Edward Clarke of Chipley, to 
 whom his little book on ' Education ' was written 
 in the form of letters, was the chief link to his 
 native county in middle life. The Clarke family 
 is extinct, and Chipley has disappeared ; but the 
 relics of Locke which it once contained have been 
 transferred to Nynehead Court, a mile away, where 
 the Sanfords now represent the Clarkes of Chipley. 
 Through the kindness of Mr Sanford, I had oppor- 
 tunity, during a visit at Nynehead, to examine the 
 Locke and Clarke correspondence some three 
 hundred unpublished letters, many of them written 
 in Holland in the years before the Kevolution, 
 when Locke was there as an exile. At Nynehead 
 I found a curious picture of Locke, with Betty 
 Clarke, whom he called his " little wife," by his 
 side. Locke loved and was loved by children, 
 and the funniest letters and messages used to pass 
 between the two. The picture was evidently a
 
 270 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 jeu d 'esprit; but there was another of Locke by 
 Kneller, taken earlier than the common ones ; like- 
 wise another picture of Betty. Locke's attentions 
 may have helped to spoil the young lady, for she 
 gave trouble afterwards, but at last settled into a 
 humdrum life as the wife of a Bristol merchant. 
 I found in the Nynehead correspondence an ex- 
 planation of Locke's intimacy with the Cudworth 
 family, which led in the end to his rural life at 
 Gates. Mrs Cudworth, Lady Masham's mother, 
 was intimate with the Clarkes of Chipley ; and 
 her husband, the leading "Cambridge Platonist" 
 divine, was like Locke a native of Somerset a 
 region fertile beyond most parts of England in 
 men of genius. Mrs Cudworth's name, and her 
 daughter's, occur often in the letters, as living 
 with the Clarkes, either at Chipley or in London. 
 After Locke's death in 1704, half of his library 
 .and much of his copious correspondence passed to 
 his nephew Sir Peter King, now represented by the 
 Earl of Lovelace ; and after Gates was sold by the 
 Palmers (the successors of the Mashams) in 1805, 
 some remaining Locke relics, then carried away, 
 were in possession, I was told, of Miss Palmer 
 at Holme Park near Reading. During a visit 
 there I enjoyed two manuscript volumes, contain-
 
 HORSELEY TOWERS. 271 
 
 ing over two hundred letters preserved by Esther 
 Masham, most of them her correspondence when 
 Locke was living at Gates. The lively details of 
 the family life in those distant years opened the 
 Essex manor - house as it was two centuries ago, 
 and seemed to make the inhabitants, with Locke 
 a chief figure, all live again. The chair in 
 which he studied at Gates was at Holme Park. 
 It was frail and worm-eaten, suited to an invalid, 
 and one of short stature. 
 
 By Lord Lovelace (the son-in-law of Byron) I 
 was invited to Horseley Towers in Sussex, and 
 allowed to examine under his direction the treasures 
 conveyed from Gates to his ancestor Sir Peter King, 
 " A catalogue of my books at Gates," in Locke's 
 writing, was an index to his library. The works 
 of Descartes, Nicole, Malebranche, Gassendi, and 
 Pascal, with Bacon's 'Novum Organum,' were a 
 few among the books ; also Newton's ' Principia,' 
 " from the author," many others in philosophy, 
 with books of voyages and travels in great 
 number; all beautiful in dress, and Locke's auto- 
 graph in most of them. A receptacle, with twelve 
 drawers and ten pigeon-holes, which was once in 
 his study at Gates, was in the " Locke library " 
 at Horseley Towers. It contained many hundreds
 
 272 BIOGRAPHIA PH1LOSOPHICA. 
 
 of letters and accounts, carefully docketed and 
 placed as he left them in 1704, a signal example 
 of methodical habits. His books of income and 
 expenditure, from 1664 till his death forty years 
 after, gave evidence of strict and even pedantic 
 economy. A large manuscript volume entitled 
 " Intellechy," and "De Intellects Humano," and 
 " An Essay concerning the Understanding [Know- 
 ledge, Belief, Opinion, Assent] " showed the 
 " Essay concerning Human Understanding " in its 
 early growth, and the author's hesitation about 
 the title. The fascinating summer day with 
 Locke in the library at Horseley Towers so 
 carried one back into the old centuries that 
 an interval was needed to restore the sense of 
 surrounding realities. 
 
 Our summer in 1887 was interesting. It was 
 the year of Queen Victoria's Jubilee. We spent 
 the first part of June at Freshwater in the Isle 
 of Wight. Our stay there recalls a day with the 
 Tennysons at Farringford, and a walk with him on 
 the Downs. I had visited Farringford in 1860, 
 when I remember him mowing in his garden, with 
 his two boys near him at play. Now he was less 
 ready for manual work and more silent an abrupt
 
 AT RYDAL AND GRASMERE. 273 
 
 striking sentence now and then, in all a beautiful 
 picture on that summer day. I returned to 
 London for the Jubilee. A few days before, I 
 had gone to Windsor with Sir William Muir, our 
 Principal, and Sir William Turner, as a deputation 
 from the University. Our reception by the Queen 
 was preceded by a luncheon, at which my im- 
 mediate neighbours were Lord Granville and John 
 Bright. I had met Bright before at the house 
 of his brother-in-law, Mr M'Laren, in Edinburgh. 
 The gracious smile of Queen Victoria at the pre- 
 sentation which followed is an abiding memory. 
 On the Jubilee day the morning sunshine, the 
 vast assemblage in the Abbey, contemplated from 
 the front of the eastern gallery, the Queen, the 
 Prince Imperial, and the Eoyal family immediately 
 beneath, with the amenity of the great crowd 
 outside, were features in the historic scene. 
 
 Either in the vale of Grasmere or in the vale of 
 Yarrow we found our rural home in most of the 
 thirty - five academical vacations, during those 
 months that were claimed for studious retirement. 
 Rydal Lodge, and Dale End on the hillside above 
 the lake of Grasmere, with " its green island, and 
 
 s
 
 274 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 its winding shores," were in turn our centres of 
 life in the country of Wordsworth and Arnold. 
 Matthew Arnold at Fox How, the attractions of 
 Fox How and its society, including W. E. Forster 
 and Lord Coleridge, Doctor Cradock, Principal of 
 Brasenose, and our old friend Bonamy Price, then 
 an occasional resident in Westmoreland, are among 
 those now departed to the silent land who are 
 associated with our summers at Rydal and Gras- 
 mere. The poet's garden at Rydal Mount, in 
 which we were allowed to walk, the long descend- 
 ing valley from Dunmail Raise to Ambleside seen 
 from Dale End, the walks on Loughrigg, or beyond 
 to "the little lowly lake uplifted high among the 
 mountains" of Langdale, more distant rambles to 
 Keswick and Buttermere, Ulleswater and Wast- 
 water, are among the abiding memories of that 
 north-western corner of England. 
 
 Our connection with Yarrow was more pro- 
 longed. For some months in most of the thirty- 
 five summer vacations we lived there among the 
 green rounded hills of the Scottish Border. I 
 
 o 
 
 was first introduced to them during a visit to 
 Mossfennan, in the moorland pastoral country of 
 the upper Tweed, the romantic home of my old
 
 IN THE VALE OF YARROW. 275 
 
 college friend William Welsh, the laird of Moss- 
 fennan and pastor of the church at Broughton 
 a favourite resort for half a century of my life. 
 It was in 1849 that with Welsh I crossed the 
 hills that separate the Yarrow from the Tweed, 
 and first felt the pensive charm of the Border 
 vale in which a few years later we found a 
 summer home the most restful region I have 
 known in the journey of life. Its grey shadows 
 are associated with Berkeley and Locke, with 
 both of whom I lived there in thought ; but the 
 silent vale between Selkirk and Moffat is con- 
 nected still more with the friends whose visits 
 added so much to the natural charm, and with 
 neighbours in manse and farmhouse that manse 
 among the mountains, the centre of the social 
 system in the happy valley. The book of 
 ' Reminiscences ' of Doctor Russell, who was for 
 forty years the loved pastor of Yarrow, carries 
 one back into daily life in a past generation, 
 in a region that fed the historic imagination of 
 
 o o 
 
 Scott and the meditative muse of Wordsworth. 
 The author, who fitly personified the romantic 
 vale in which his life was passed, attracted his 
 flock to goodness by the power of example. 
 His gracious manner, gentle and refined, with
 
 276 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 his treasure of local legends, made companion- 
 ship charming. While other parishes in Scot- 
 land were disturbed by ecclesiastical strife, there 
 was peace in Yarrow, and Doctor Russell found 
 in my old friend Thomas MacCrindle, the Free 
 Church minister, the congenial temper which 
 united them in labour for the common good. 
 
 Sir David and Lady Brewster visited us in 
 Yarrow, I think in 1862, when we took them 
 to the famous hostelry of " Tibbie Shiel," which 
 he had not seen for forty years, a visit then 
 well remembered by the venerable hostess. I 
 remember how Sir David that day eagerly dis- 
 cussed the circumstantial evidence of murder, 
 given at one of the three famous murder trials 
 (one of them then going on) which made a name 
 for Glasgow in the middle of last century. Grant, 
 Brewster's successor, Lord Napier and Ettrick, 
 Blackie, Alexander MacMillan, and Alexander 
 Russel of the ' Scotsman,' Sellar, Jowett, and the 
 Amberleys, also Mrs Ferrier, daughter of " Christ- 
 opher North, whose humorous sallies and brilliant 
 talk kept us all in unbroken hilarity for a week, 
 are among the departed whose figures now pass 
 before me in connection with our life in Yarrow. 
 My lifelong friend, John Veitch, Glasgow pro-
 
 MEMORIES OF YARROW. 277 
 
 fessor of philosophy and Border poet, had his 
 summer home near Peebles, and was often with 
 us. Our last parting was at the Gordon Arms 
 inn in Yarrow, where we were staying in 1894, 
 a fortnight before he died. While life lasts a 
 tender pathos invests the pastoral vale. 
 
 " I see but not by sight alone, 
 
 Loved Yarrow, have I won thee ; 
 A ray of fancy still survives, 
 Her sunshine plays upon thee."
 
 278 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 IN TENEBRIS LUX. 
 1891-1904. 
 
 " Who knows not Melville's beechy grove, 
 
 And Roslin's rocky glen ; 
 Dalkeith which all the virtues love, 
 And classic Hawthornden ? " 
 
 SCOTT. 
 
 ' ' The eye by long use comes to see even in the darkest cavern ; and there 
 is no subject so obscure, but we may discern some glimpse of truth by long 
 poring on it. Truth is the cry of all, but the game of a few. Certainly where 
 it is the chief passion, it doth not give way to vulgar cares and views, nor is it 
 content with a little ardour in the early time of life ; active perhaps to pursue, 
 but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a real progress in 
 knowledge must dedicate his age as well as youth, the later growth as well as 
 first-fruits, at the altar of truth." BERKELEY in ' Siris.' 
 
 " A man's religion, if it is genuine, contains the summed up and concentrated 
 meaning of his whole life ; and indeed it can have no value except so far as it 
 does so. And it is even more obvious that the theology of a philosopher is the 
 ultimate outcome of his whole view of the Universe, and particularly of his 
 conception of the nature of man." Dr EDWARD CAIRO. 
 
 IN the spring of 1891 I resigned the Chair of 
 Hamilton, in the hope that it might be occupied 
 by one fitted to inspire academic youth at a 
 point of view better suited to the new genera- 
 tion. I had also a desire to " weigh and revise " 
 my own philosophical position, undisturbed by the
 
 HAWTHORNDEN. 279 
 
 cares of the classroom and of academical ad- 
 ministration. So I bade farewell to the university, 
 with which, as student, graduate, and professor, I 
 had been connected for almost sixty years, and 
 to the romantic city which I had enjoyed during 
 two generations. 
 
 My hope for the Chair of Hamilton, and 
 through it for the university as well as for 
 philosophy in Scotland, was happily realised in 
 the appointment of my distinguished successor, 
 who fitly represents philosophy in the city of 
 David Hume, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart, 
 Sir William Hamilton and James Frederick 
 Ferrier. 
 
 A short time before I withdrew from the 
 Chair, I had found a rural retreat at Gorton, 1 
 in the valley of the Esk, on the charming 
 woodland of " classic Hawthornden," not less 
 favourable to study than the Land of Lome in 
 which I began to think, nor for opportunity of 
 communion with Nature in the evening as in 
 the morning of life. According to Sir Walter 
 Scott, " no stream in Scotland can boast of such 
 a varied succession of the most interesting ob- 
 
 1 More than sixty years ago Gorton was the summer home of 
 'Christopher North."
 
 280 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 jects, as well as the most romantic and beautiful 
 scenery, as the Esk can." The surrounding his- 
 torical and personal associations are not less 
 attractive than the natural charm. Carberry, 
 Bullion Green, and Prestonpans awaken mem- 
 ories of what was characteristic of Scotland in 
 each of three successive centuries ; Arniston and 
 Melville recall historic names ; also Dalkeith, New- 
 battle, and Dalhousie ; Lord Woodhouselee made 
 his beautiful home the Holland House of Mid- 
 Lothian before Craigcrook was opened ; the cot- 
 tage in which Scott lived in his youth, and the 
 cottage to which De Quincey retired in age, are 
 in the valley of the Esk ; William Drummond, 
 the cultured poet in a rude and stormy time, and 
 Eobert Leighton, his contemporary, its devout and 
 tolerant religious mystic, lived, the one at Haw- 
 thornden and the other at Newbattle ; Finlayson, 
 afterwards the Edinburgh Professor of Logic, dark 
 and silent Church leader, was minister of Borth- 
 wick in the later years of the eighteenth century ; 
 Robertson, the historian of Queen Mary and Prin- 
 cipal of the university, was born in Borthwick 
 manse, in the early part of the same century ; and 
 Borthwick Castle was a residence of Mary, from 
 which she fled in disguise to Dunbar.
 
 "LOCKE" AND LOCKE'S "ESSAY." 281 
 
 In this situation it was natural and easy to 
 resume thought, and in a modest way attempt 
 to reduce arrears of that contribution to the 
 philosophical library which, I suppose, is the 
 duty of a Professor of Philosophy, as much as 
 communication of inspiration in the classroom. 
 
 The first work in which I engaged in this new 
 home was a biography of Locke for Blackwood's 
 Philosophical series. It provided an exit for 
 some of the personal incidents and critical 
 thought connected with Locke that were con- 
 sequent upon the pilgrimages already described, 
 and might, I hoped, be an atonement for in- 
 definite delay of the projected Oxford edition 
 of Locke's ' Essay.' This little ' Locke ' was my 
 chief employment in 1890. It took its place 
 beside ' Berkeley ' in the same series, and it 
 was followed some years later by a similar 
 biography of Thomas Reid. Berkeley, Locke, 
 and Reid are characteristic representatives in the 
 modern world severally of Irish, English, and 
 Scottish philosophy. 
 
 The ' Locke ' for Blackwood, as it turned out, 
 was no escape from the more formidable under-
 
 282 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 taking to which I had been invited years before 
 by the Clarendon Press. Soon after the little 
 volume had made its appearance I was asked 
 by the Oxford authorities to proceed with the 
 ' Essay.' I had some doubt whether a repro- 
 duction of Locke's ' Essay ' in the proposed 
 form would be responded to in the way the 
 collected edition of Berkeley's Works had been. 
 For Locke had already fulfilled his mission of 
 awakening philosophical criticism of human know- 
 ledge and of its limits, and of diffusing the 
 spirit of free inquiry which has since pervaded 
 the civilised world. If he had not gone deep 
 enough in his criticism of experience to meet 
 the wants of sceptical thinkers, and if the am- 
 biguity of his own philosophical position made a 
 coherent interpretation of the ' Essay ' difficult, he 
 had at least induced Hume destructively, and Kant 
 constructively, to continue what he had begun. 
 
 In the end my early interest in Locke's per- 
 sonality, and desire to promote an edition of 
 the ' Essay ' under the auspices of Locke's own 
 university, involved me, in 1891 and the two 
 following years, in what proved to be the 
 most laborious literary undertaking of my life. 
 But Locke's philosophical ambiguity not un-
 
 THE 'ESSAY' ANNOTATED. 283 
 
 natural in a work of the kind, when " written 
 by snatches after many long intervals of in- 
 terruption," by one engrossed in public affairs 
 during a troubled period could not conceal the 
 noble love for truth and intellectual liberty which 
 breathed through his work, nor its wise common- 
 sense, congenial to the Anglo-Saxon temperament. 
 But aversion to mysticism, and dread of intel- 
 lectual bondage under " innate principles," as he 
 interpreted that term, made Locke habitually 
 pause and hesitate, when he approached ultimate 
 questions about the universe and human life. 
 
 Editorial study of the ' Essay ' led me to re- 
 consider my own philosophical position, in the 
 light of Locke's discussion of the chief problem 
 of his ' Essay,' which he was the first among 
 philosophers deliberately to propose in the form 
 in which he presented it. I had become accus- 
 tomed to conceive the universe of things and 
 persons as united in their successive evolutions 
 in and through Divine Active Reason ; creation, 
 as constant and continuous, without known be- 
 ginning or end ; and external nature as essen- 
 tially and actively " supernatural," in the dialect 
 of theologians, or " metaphysical," in the language 
 of philosophers. Renewed study of the 'Essay'
 
 284 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 made me ask anew, whether this position was 
 consistent with the narrow limits of my in- 
 dividual knowledge, or even of human knowledge. 
 Should our final conception of things be a merely 
 cosmological or a teleological conception ? Is the 
 unity which makes the universe a universe, 
 a blindly physical unity, or is it intelligent and 
 moral ? Above all, is man able in any reasonable 
 way to determine this unique and transcendental 
 question ? The seeming contradictions which 
 underlie or pervade the physical and the moral 
 world, make this a strange sort of universe to be 
 claimed as divine. The darkness was not much 
 illuminated by Locke's own final pronouncement, 
 on one of the last days of his life, that the 
 Whole depends on " what, for want of a right and 
 distinct conception, is by us called Mind Eternal 
 Mind." 
 
 The ' Essay ' proposed to test the legitimacy of 
 my philosophical position. Can man discover 
 whether the universe ought to be conceived as 
 a spiritual unity? Locke told me that his great 
 enterprise originated in the conviction that " the 
 first step towards satisfying several inquiries that 
 the mind of man was apt to run into was, to take 
 a survey of our own understanding, examine our
 
 LOCKE'S CRITICISM OF "EXPERIENCE." 285 
 
 own powers, and see to what things they were 
 adapted." Till this was done, he " suspected we 
 began at the wrong end, and in vain sought for 
 satisfaction, whilst we set loose our thoughts into 
 the vast ocean of Being." This did not at first 
 sight at all encourage human conclusions or in- 
 quiries about the supreme Power in the universe 
 of reality, as to whether it is ultimately and essen- 
 tially unknowable or intelligible. In trying to 
 settle this, may we not be only " letting loose 
 our thoughts in the vast ocean of Being " ? 
 Locke himself was far from saying so ; although 
 his war against " innate principles " has been in- 
 terpreted in a way that leads to this. 
 
 That variety of appearances in which the universe 
 of reality successively presents itself to us, through 
 our five senses and in our self - consciousness, 
 forms, according to the ' Essay/ the entire ma- 
 terial of human knowledge. In observing those 
 two sorts of appearances the outward and the 
 inward we get all that a human understanding 
 can in any way concern itself with, or can at all 
 elaborate in the shape of science. "The innate 
 principles," that were dogmatically assumed by 
 Descartes and others, were for Locke illusions 
 due to prejudice or to pride of reason. Homo
 
 286 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 mensura, aut nulla mensura, was Locke's final 
 test. Human experience of phenomena, in the 
 five senses and in self-consciousness, forms man's 
 ultimate measure of what is real. Yet in many 
 parts of his ' Essay ' Locke tacitly proceeds 
 upon assumptions for which the isolated phen- 
 omena, called by him " simple ideas of sensation 
 and reflection," afford no warrant. He thinks 
 he can "demonstrate" the existence and the 
 attributes of God ; thus making the aforesaid 
 finite experience yield an infinite conclusion. 
 He finds rational necessity in apparently con- 
 tingent premisses ; unless something has been 
 added by him, without acknowledgment, to the 
 empirical data of external and internal sense. 
 Thus tacitly retaining some elements of construc- 
 tive reason and spiritual philosophy, he engaged 
 British and foreign philosophical thinkers of the 
 eighteenth century in a more profound criticism 
 of the inevitable implicates of experience. The 
 watchword of Locke's 'Essay' was "experience." 
 I found in David Hume his sceptical successor. 
 For Locke's " experience " was interpreted by 
 Hume as unmixed contingency ; without credit 
 given for the rational assumptions which dis- 
 tinguished Locke's attitude.
 
 HUME'S QUESTION. 287 
 
 As for Hume, I found the essence of his teach- 
 ing in a few sentences of his ' Enquiry Con- 
 cerning Human Understanding.' In one of them 
 he puts his main question, and in the others he 
 answers it. For he asks, as a subject worthy of 
 curiosity, " What is the nature of that evidence 
 which assures us of any real existence and matter 
 of fact beyond the present testimony of our 
 senses or the records of our memory ? " In other 
 words, is there anything in reason that explains 
 our inductive inferences regarding what is neither 
 felt sensation nor remembered sensation ? For 
 this, according to the empirical interpretation of 
 Locke's ' Essay ' (now become the current phil- 
 osophy), was the measure of the extent of 
 human knowledge. Hume's own answer to his 
 question was, that " reason " does not enter at 
 all into that " enlargement of experience " in 
 which we are wont to go beyond felt sensa- 
 tion and memory. " Whenever the repetition 
 of any particular act produces a propensity to 
 renew the same act, without being impelled by 
 any reasoning, we always say that this propensity 
 is the effect of Custom. By applying that word 
 we pretend not to have given the ultimate reason. 
 Perhaps we can push our inquiries no further, or
 
 288 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 pretend to give the cause of this cause, but must 
 rest content with it as the ultimate principle which 
 we can assign for all our conclusions from ex- 
 perience. It is sufficient satisfaction that we can 
 go so far, without repining at the narrow limits 
 of our faculties, because they can carry us no 
 further." 
 
 But could they, under these conditions, carry 
 us even so far? I asked. Could we have even 
 sense -perception or memory, in any intelligible 
 manner, to advance from ? And as the " ad- 
 vance " was described as a physical effect, not our 
 rational act, nor one that presupposed Active 
 Reason at work among the data of " experience," I 
 had no guarantee for the trustworthiness of the 
 supposed sequence ; nor could I find satisfactory 
 meaning in the "causality" attributed to "cus- 
 tom." Does not reason presuppose the imma- 
 nence of Divine Reason in the universe, to let 
 human experience work ? In a possibly insane 
 experience all who share in it may be insane 
 too ; for human sanity presupposes the sanity 
 of the universe. Blind naturalism acknowledges 
 no security for the trustworthiness of nature, 
 and the constancy of its uniformities ; yet it 
 (unconsciously) abounds in dogmatic assumptions
 
 THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHICAL SUCCESSION. 289 
 
 which it disclaims. I found that I could have 
 no cosmology without teleological postulates. 
 
 Thus I saw in Hume not in Berkeley, as 
 was commonly supposed the immediate successor 
 of Locke. It is common in histories of philosophy 
 to present Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and 
 Hume as, in chronological and logical succession, 
 the leaders of English philosophical thought. But 
 Bacon and Locke seemed unfitly classed. Both 
 find more in " experience " than phenomena, con- 
 nected mentally by the physical influence of 
 " custom." And Berkeley, the Plato of Anglo- 
 Saxon philosophy, after more than a century of 
 explicable misinterpretation, was found earnestly 
 engaged with the fundamental problem of modern 
 religious thought, the most tremendous that 
 can engage the mind of man. ' Siris,' his latest 
 expression, is much more akin to Plotinus or 
 Hegel than to Hume ; and his philosophy has 
 explained itself sympathetically in a generation 
 saturated with Kantian and Hegelian conceptions. 
 Blind Custom, Hume's ultimate constructive " in- 
 fluence," found its later English advocates in 
 Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer, and its scien- 
 tific application in physical psychology: they 
 have added little that is philosophical to the
 
 290 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 negative criticism of Hume. Nor are they the 
 only later English representatives of philosophy. 
 Coleridge, Richard Price, and Carlyle have more 
 in common with Kant and Berkeley than with 
 Hobbes, or Hartley, or Priestley. 
 
 In Scotland and in Germany I found deeper 
 and more reasonable answers than his own to 
 Hume's question, with full acknowledgment of 
 what Locke had ambiguously assumed. Reid's 
 " common sense " was common practical reason : 
 the criticism of Kant was an attempt to exhibit 
 articulately the rational implicates of experience. 
 Experience was the watchword of Kant as well 
 as of Locke, but it was looked at on opposite 
 sides by each. What is contingent in experience 
 chiefly occupied Locke : Kant was more engaged 
 with the universalities and necessities of pure 
 reason, which give meaning and cohesion to ex- 
 perience. The mind of the eighteenth century 
 was dominated by Locke, but the spirit of Kant 
 has ruled science and theology in the nineteenth ; 
 and the ' Kritik ' of Kant is complementary rather 
 than contradictory to the ' Essay ' of Locke. Each 
 died at the beginning of the century of which 
 he became the intellectual monarch ; and curi- 
 ously the same year is the centenary year of the
 
 KANT'S CRITICISM OF REASON IN EXPERIENCE. 291 
 
 death of Kant, and also the bi-centenary of the 
 death of Locke. 1 
 
 A few days after I had sent the last sheets of 
 ' Locke ' to the Clarendon Press, in April 1894, 
 I was surprised one morning by an announcement 
 that I had been chosen by my own university 
 as their Clifford lecturer on Natural Theology, 
 in succession to Professor Pfleiderer of Berlin, 
 who had just then completed his two annual 
 courses. Whilst I was grateful for the unex- 
 pected honour, I was at first indisposed to 
 undertake an office which, if interpreted by 
 the example of preceding Gifford lecturers in 
 Edinburgh and the other Scottish universities, 
 was concerned with historical Science of religions 
 more than with the Philosophy of religion or 
 of theism. Besides, the short interval of six 
 months between this announcement and the de- 
 livery of lectures, instead of the eighteen months 
 commonly given for preparation, seemed insuf- 
 ficient for recruiting my resources. 
 
 But after examining carefully the Deed under 
 
 1 Kant died in 1804, on the 12th of February, and Locke in 1704, 
 on the 28th of October. The British Academy has in 1904 com- 
 memorated the centenary of the death of Kant, and has resolved to 
 commemorate the bi-centenary of the death of Locke.
 
 292 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 which those remarkable lectureships were lately 
 founded in the Scottish universities, and also a 
 pamphlet in which Lord Gifford suggested his 
 own religious thought, I found that a Gifford 
 lecturer was expressly invited to discuss funda- 
 mental questions about the constitution of the 
 universe, and man's relations to its Supreme 
 Power, which had haunted me in youth, and 
 during my tenure of the Chair of Hamilton. 
 "Natural theology," in "the widest sense" of 
 the term natural, was the subject proposed ; 
 and Lord Gifford's writings implied that the pan- 
 theism of Spinoza was in his view, as one ex- 
 ample of what he meant by "natural theology." 
 He asked whether the Unica Substantia of the 
 Amsterdam Jew contains the final rationale of 
 existence. Is human life, and all that exists, 
 ultimately rooted in Unica Substantial Does 
 philosophy resolve itself into a monism ; and is 
 this monism mechanical ? is it moral and there- 
 fore superior to material conditions ? or does it 
 centre in Something different from either blindly 
 necessitated mechanism or active spirit ? 
 
 These, I thought, were questions about which 
 I might have something to say. As the fore- 
 going story shows, my thought had been lead-
 
 THE GIFFORD LECTURES. 293 
 
 ing up to them for the greater part of my 
 life. There was, indeed, little time for more 
 thinking, or for penetrating more deeply into the 
 enormous literature of the subject, which would 
 be more likely to confuse than to concentrate. 
 But something, it seemed, might emerge from a 
 sincere attempt to present the philosophical faith 
 to which I had made my way, and the founda- 
 tion in reason on which it was rested. So I 
 resolved, with this in view, honestly to make the 
 attempt. Consciously or unconsciously, we are 
 all metaphysicians, if not theologians ; for we all 
 act upon, although we do not actually think out, 
 an ultimate theory of things. Our ultimate con- 
 ceptions may differ theoretically, but not to an 
 equal extent practically. " A distinct universe," 
 as Thackeray says, " walks about under your hat 
 and under mine." " What a different pair of 
 universes," Carlyle suggests, " presented themselves 
 to Newton and to Newton's dog Diamond, while 
 the painting on the optical retina of both was 
 most likely the same." So, I said to myself, let 
 me present the universe under my own final con- 
 ception of it, for what in reason that may be worth. 
 
 I found a starting - point in the spiritual
 
 294 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 conception of ultimate reality to which reason 
 had seemed to lead me, and which had been 
 my sheet-anchor. MENS semper sustinet, et in 
 ordine agitat, Molem had been its formula. I re- 
 membered a query of my acute and vivacious 
 friend, Bonamy Price, proposed years before, 
 and intended to evoke argument, at a time 
 when the law of natural evolution was intoxi- 
 cating the scientific world by its magnificent 
 promise, and apparently all-comprehensive ability 
 to perform. What, he asked, is to be the 
 fate of religion and theology in the future, under 
 the prospective victories of evolutionary science, 
 which seem to be gradually withdrawing all 
 events from God, and transferring them to 
 " natural causes " ? Much of what happens 
 around us and in us has been naturally ex- 
 plained. May not the universe and all its 
 changes be naturally explicable ? But if science 
 continues to discover natural explanations of 
 things, and thus gradually expels the religious 
 explanation, what room can remain in the end for 
 any divine action ? Must not God be superseded, 
 as a superfluous abstraction, an illusion dissolved 
 by natural interpretations of all things ? 
 
 Price's question proceeded upon a common view
 
 THEISTIC PHILOSOPHY. 295 
 
 of divine action in the physical universe. God 
 was of old invoked to explain only what seemed 
 to be inexplicable by natural causes. But the 
 universal agency of Active Moral Keason, which 
 I had been led, as I thought by reason, to 
 believe in, reversed this popular conception. 
 The more fully " natural " causes were revealed 
 by science, the less was seen of God, accord- 
 ing to the old idea. That every new dis- 
 covery of a natural cause was a fresh revelation 
 of God, had become my habitual conception. If 
 all active causation or Power, as seen at our 
 point of view, must be spiritual if natural law 
 is only the grammar of the divine language of 
 nature then positive science, instead of extin- 
 guishing metaphysics and religion, must deepen 
 and enlighten both. Cosmical change is then the 
 immediate issue of omnipresent and omnipotent 
 "Will : the unbeginning and unending evolution 
 of the universe of finite things and persons is 
 the continuous miracle, or constant supernatural 
 activity, which constitutes nature : the whole 
 natural order is an orderly aggregate of divinely 
 established signs, which enable us, by their regu- 
 larity, to forecast the consequences of events, as 
 well as to refund events into their constant and
 
 296 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 continuous antecedents. Constancy of sequence 
 converts into intelligible symbols the passive 
 phenomena that are included in sequences. 
 
 Practically speaking, the physical and moral 
 Order of the universe was accordingly another 
 name for God ; for it was in and through pre- 
 supposed Order that God was revealed to us. The 
 ultimate conception of the universe, which I had 
 been gradually forming, inverted the answer that 
 was supposed in Price's question. Increased 
 knowledge of natural causes was really increased 
 knowledge of the Divine Active Reason that was 
 immanent in them all. Nature was always actively 
 supernatural. And the cosmological conception of 
 the universe postulated the teleological as under- 
 lying it in reason. So I thought my Giiford 
 lectures might present (a) an exposition of this 
 answer to Price's question ; (6) the rationale of 
 the answer; and (c) its justification, in the face 
 of one obtrusive fact which seemed to contradict 
 theistic faith. 
 
 I had found the old idea, that nature ex- 
 cludes God, here with a negative religious con- 
 clusion, in Herbert Spencer's ' First Principles.' 
 Spencer, as is known, ascended from phenomena 
 to two ultimate categories, a positive one and
 
 SPENCER'S UNDENOMINATIONAL RELIGION. 297 
 
 a negative one the Knowable and the Un- 
 knowable. He retained the former exclusively 
 for " science," and left the other exclusively 
 for "religion." Religion was agnostic sentiment 
 that naturally arises in presence of the Unknow- 
 able. This sentiment includes what is common 
 to all the religions of the world. It is " unde- 
 nominational religion," when undenominational 
 religion is treated logically. Spencer called God 
 "Unknowable Power," but without explaining 
 how he came to know enough about Unknow- 
 ableness to be able to bring it under " Power " 
 or any other category. And he failed to explain 
 how, consistently with this amount of knowledge, 
 he was otherwise ignorant of all about it ; this 
 too although he referred to the " Power behind 
 appearances " as " manifested " in the appearances 
 which his synthetic philosophy articulated. In- 
 stead of the articles of a synthetic philosophy 
 superseding all knowledge of their ultimate Prin- 
 ciple, it seemed to me that (so far as they were 
 true) they all contributed to this knowledge. 
 Without presuppositions of universal or divine 
 reason I could find no sufficient foundation for 
 any synthetic philosophy. This divine synthesis 
 must be its uniting rational principle, uncon-
 
 298 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 sciously assumed, or practically presupposed, by 
 Spencer himself. 
 
 I liad in like manner come to see in the well- 
 known three stages which, according to Comte, 
 represent the intellectual progress of mankind, an 
 inversion, instead of an exposition, of histori- 
 cal fact and philosophical reality. According to 
 Comte, it follows from the constitution of mind 
 that man's ultimate conception of the universe 
 must pass through three stages, in its gradual 
 course of evolution towards perfection. At first 
 it must exist in the theological or childish stage, 
 when men refer all phenomena to arbitrary 
 agency, and at this stage all that happens is 
 finally explained either polytheistically or mono- 
 theistically ; in the next or metaphysical stage, 
 abstract causes supersede arbitrary agency of 
 gods, and the course of nature is explained by 
 referring all events to metaphysical categories 
 or "forces" mechanical, chemical, and biologi- 
 cal in which Comte sees only empty phrases or 
 formulas : at last, in the positive or scientific 
 stage, metaphysical abstractions as well as cap- 
 ricious personal agents are ejected, and all that 
 appears or happens in the universe is con- 
 ceived as exemplifying natural law. Now I
 
 THEISM, METAPHYSIC, "POSITIVE SCIENCE." 299 
 
 asked myself whether this last stage does not 
 necessarily presuppose, and (it may be unwit- 
 tingly) proceed upon metaphysical categories ; 
 and also whether, on the homo mensura, aut 
 nulla mensura principle, those categories must 
 not be vitalised or humanised theistically. Is 
 it not the true office of positive science, not 
 to supersede metaphysical abstractions and their 
 theological correlatives, but on the contrary 
 to strengthen and illuminate both metaphysics 
 and theology ? Is not advance in positive 
 knowledge of natural laws truly advance in 
 knowledge of God, the Active Intelligence im- 
 manent in nature ; who must be presupposed as 
 the uniting Principle or Power, in and through 
 whom positive science becomes credible and intel- 
 ligible ; and who is immediately operative through- 
 out the universal and constant natural evolution ? 
 By accepting the homo mensura criterion, the 
 teleological conception becomes mans ultimate 
 conception, to which the cosmological conception 
 must be subordinate, and which it needs. 
 
 But is not all this, I might be asked, to assume 
 without proof the teleological or theistic concep- 
 tion, as at the root of experience and science ? Is
 
 300 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 not this presupposed theism a transgression of 
 the conditions of legitimate hypothesis, and hos- 
 pitality offered to an arbitrary, if not absolutely 
 unintelligible, conjecture ? Instead of accumulat- 
 ing fresh specimens of apparent design in organ- 
 ised beings, as formerly natural theologians like 
 Paley were wont to do, I was charged with 
 taking for granted the omnipresence and omni- 
 potence of Divine Active Intelligence without 
 this or any proof. Where were the facts on 
 which the stupendous conclusion of theism might 
 be rested ? How, without experience to rest upon, 
 could one go behind all experience of the universe, 
 and then pretend to explain the universe ? 
 
 The fact was that I did not think of Omni- 
 potent and Omniscient Mind as "a cause," in 
 the way so-called "natural causes" are treated as 
 causes. To think of God as one natural cause 
 among many, would be to think of God as one 
 of many finite persons in nature the greatest 
 of them, perhaps, but, like the others, Himself 
 needing a natural cause, and this cause need- 
 
 O ? 
 
 ing a predecessor, by which it too had to be 
 conditioned in turn. The infinite ground of the 
 Whole must, I thought, be presupposed; not being 
 provable by induction, yet implied in all indue-
 
 CONSTITUENTS OF THEISTIC FAITH AND HOPE. 301 
 
 tion. Moreover, the opposite, or virtually poly- 
 theistic conception seemed by implication to be 
 atheistic, as all polytheism is ; for a plurality 
 of gods needs final explanation as much as any 
 other plurality of finite persons. A finite god is 
 not God, but is only an individual, in a uni- 
 verse which still requires the presupposition of 
 the Infinite God. 
 
 In the narrow meaning of " cause," the causal 
 judgment cannot be applied beyond the limits 
 of physical experience. It does not enable us to 
 penetrate beyond the finite data, empirically pre- 
 sented, of which it is a uniting principle. But 
 causation in the highest sense must be originative, 
 not transmissive only, even if continuously trans- 
 missive. When isolated examples of special de- 
 sign, like those collected by Paley, were traced 
 by science, in its progressive interpretation of 
 nature, to natural causes, their theistic meaning 
 disappeared unless there was sufficient reason 
 for postulating design in all that is naturally 
 presented to us in the endless evolution of things 
 and persons ; and for postulating the universe 
 as throughout the expression of Active Intelli- 
 gence. Finite and contingent facts, however 
 numerous, could not, per se, by their merely
 
 302 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 finite evidence, conduct to the infinite and 
 absolute conclusion which theism requires. The 
 incomplete cannot, by itself alone, prove the 
 Absolute. 
 
 So it did not seem that the theistic presupposi- 
 tion was necessarily an irrational presupposition. 
 It might even be an assumption imposed by 
 a rational necessity. To take for granted the 
 omnipresence of Active Intelligence in nature, 
 or that omniscient and omnipotent Mind per- 
 petually and universally animates the universe, 
 was an assumption required by reason if it could 
 be shown that without making this assumption, 
 unconsciously if not consciously, man could not 
 have any science or intelligible experience. 
 
 Infer God empirically, from the phenomena pre- 
 sented in sense, and you reason in a circle : pre- 
 suppose God, and the universe at once becomes 
 interpretable. Unless the universe in which I 
 find myself is a divine cosmos, I cannot treat 
 it, either in my thought or in my conduct, as 
 absolutely trustworthy. I cannot trust in the 
 practical permanence of natural law, upon which 
 all science proceeds. The seeming cosmos, trusted 
 in ordinary human life, may become finally 
 chaotic instead of cosmic if all must at last be
 
 RATIONALE OF THEISTIC FAITH AND HOPE. 303 
 
 resolved into Unknowableness ; and our intelli- 
 gence and science may dissolve at last in irretriev- 
 able confusion. In continuing to live and act, 
 and to interpret any portion of the universe, I 
 must proceed upon the Final Venture that nature 
 in experience is really the language of God, and 
 that Divine Order is supreme and universal. I 
 must accept this as a Venture, unless I can 
 comprehend the concrete universe in its infinity. 
 But although it is a Venture, yet to refuse 
 this final Venture is unreasonable, if the refusal 
 is (unwittingly) suicide of reason. And the in- 
 tellectual and moral suicide which this refusal 
 involved formed the reductio ad absurdum by 
 which my presupposition of ultimate Divine Order- 
 was vindicated. The universe might become an 
 insane wholly incalculable universe, unless it was 
 the issue of Divine Reason. So theistic faith was 
 the ultimate implicate of all finite experience 
 an experience finite even when it includes the 
 collective experience of mankind ; infinitesimal, 
 when it means only the interpretations of an 
 individual person. 
 
 But a presupposition of Active Intelligence, 
 merely as intelligence, was not enough to secure
 
 304 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 escape from universal nescience, or from the pos- 
 sibility of this being an absurd irrational universe, 
 which, in truth, would not be a universe at all. 
 The Supreme Intelligence, merely as such, might 
 be non-moral, or even immoral, in action. So I 
 must postulate Moral Reason, or perfect Good- 
 ness with all that is implied in perfect Good- 
 ness operative at the centre of the universe. 
 Otherwise the Universal Mind revealed in and 
 through my experience, and through collective 
 human experience, may deceive me. I cannot 
 treat experience with the confidence which daily 
 life and science of nature demand. Supreme 
 Intelligence may be diabolic instead of perfectly 
 Good ; or may at least operate without purpose, 
 either good or evil, and in the end chaotically. 
 Such a final conception of the Mind universally 
 at work leads to paralysis, intellectual and moral, 
 unless it is arrested by faith in moral Mind. 
 I can no more maintain intercourse with a non- 
 moral or immoral, and therefore untrustworthy, 
 universe, than I can with a man who is un- 
 trustworthy. The universe of facts, always 
 under the theistic postulate, must be taken as 
 revelation of omnipotent Goodness. It is true 
 that any individual experience of it is minute
 
 "DEVELOPMENT" IN THEISTIC FAITH AND HOPE. 305 
 
 in degree and extent, and that the collective ex- 
 perience of mankind is only " in part." Let it 
 also be granted that human conceptions, intel- 
 lectual and moral, are in a process of progressive 
 evolution and improvement. But, on pain of 
 not thinking or acting at all, I must proceed on 
 the moral Venture, that no future " scientific pro- 
 gress " will demonstrate the falsehood of geometry ; 
 nor, so far as they go, of the law of gravitation, 
 or the still more comprehensive law of physical 
 evolution. We must also assume that " moral 
 progress " will never demonstrate the duty of 
 lying, or the duty of cruelty. And a knowledge 
 " in part " would be impossible if Perfect Good- 
 ness in the infinite Mind was not absolutely 
 presupposed, although particular applications are 
 Ventures. This was not, I thought, movement in 
 the dark, if it was reasonable movement in divine 
 light. The reductio ad absurdum to mental par- 
 alysis was the reasoned vindication of a theistic 
 faith that can thus see real knowledge in a pro- 
 gressive knowledge that is always " in part." 
 
 So, on the whole, I concluded that the theistic 
 presupposition of omnipotent and omniscient 
 Goodness in the heart of the universe was mi- 
 ll
 
 306 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 plied in the practical reliability of human experi- 
 ence. Trust in the constancy of natural order 
 was ultimately trust in a morally trustworthy, or 
 essentially divine, universe ; in which man could 
 not at last be inevitably put to intellectual and 
 moral confusion. All inductive faith was essen- 
 tially and at last ethical and spiritual faith, pro- 
 gressively expanding with human intelligence- 
 rationalised more and more articulately in the pro- 
 gressive philosophical development of mankind ; 
 but never transcending the final Venture which 
 is our indispensable substitute for Omniscience. 
 
 Still, even our narrow experience of the universe 
 presented one obtrusive fact, which seemed to con- 
 tradict the theistic presupposition of Omnipotent 
 Goodness. The contingently presented universe 
 of experience, which philosophy tries to reduce 
 to rational unity, consists of unconscious things 
 and self-conscious persons. Things are believed 
 to evolve in natural order, which is thus virtu- 
 ally divine language ; and this divine language 
 of things is (so far) scientifically interpretable by 
 persons. But persons themselves at least on 
 this planet seem to be naturally evolved in 
 moral disorder, and to live in a chaos of suffering.
 
 EVIL IN PERSONS. 307 
 
 Pain, the supposed consequence of moral disorder, 
 seems to be unfairly distributed. The constant 
 order of insentient things is in striking contrast 
 to the moral disorder that appears among living 
 persons. What ought not to be, is commonly 
 found in them. Analogous irregularity is not 
 seen among things ; which are all found punctually 
 obeying their natural, yet supernatural, laws and 
 they are not expected to involve us at last in in- 
 tellectual disorder. The material world of things 
 does not put us to final confusion, although most 
 of its phenomena remain uninterpreted, or inade- 
 quately interpreted. But the world of persons 
 seems to be continually putting us to moral 
 confusion, by its strangely chaotic appearances. 
 Can this be reconciled with the postulated theistic 
 trust, on which our natural science of things 
 ultimately rests ? Can manifested Evil be con- 
 sistent with the presupposition that Omnipotent 
 Goodness is at the heart of the Whole ? 
 
 But one hears that persons, indeed all sentient 
 beings collectively, are too insignificant in number 
 and in magnitude to be made any account of, 
 in a universe that is infinite in magnitude and 
 duration. This thought is apt to rise. The 
 seeming contradiction between the theistic pre-
 
 308 BIOGEAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 supposition of omnipotent and omniscient Good- 
 ness at the heart of the universe, and the 
 suffering and moral disorder of sentient beings 
 and self-conscious persons on this globe, led me 
 to reflect anew upon the office of persons, in a 
 universe composed of things and persons, and on 
 the mutual relations of Nature and Spirit in the 
 whole economy. 
 
 Their office seemed to be important out of all 
 proportion to their visible and tangible magni- 
 tude. " Man," as Pascal says, " is indeed only 
 a reed, weakest in nature ; but he is a reed 
 that is conscious. It needs not that the whole 
 material universe should arm to crush him. A 
 vapour, a drop of water, is enough for the pur- 
 pose. Yet even if the whole material universe 
 united to crush him, man would still be more 
 noble than that by which he was destroyed ; 
 and this because he knows that he is about to 
 die, while the material universe knoivs nothing" 
 If physical magnitude were taken as the supreme 
 test, the infinite magnitude of space, and perhaps 
 of its material contents, would no doubt reduce to 
 insignificance the human family upon this little 
 planet, and their moral disorder too. Neverthe- 
 less, in a universe which embodies omnipotent
 
 THINGS AND PERSONS. 309 
 
 Goodness, it seemed that even one wicked per- 
 son reflected as much upon the goodness of the 
 Supreme Mind as innumerable examples ; be- 
 cause God is presupposed to be omnipotent, 
 and therefore, if morally perfect, both able and 
 willing to preserve moral order universally ; or 
 at least to restore moral order, for the sake 
 of moral order, if disorder should anyhow enter. 
 Each person on the planet is indeed insignificant 
 in respect of the amount of space occupied 
 by his organism, and so too is mankind collec- 
 tively. Some fifteen hundred millions of human 
 persons are here simultaneously in life. And 
 when all past and all coming generations of 
 men are added, even these may be an infini- 
 tesimal minority of the self-conscious agents who 
 have their homes in the innumerable worlds in 
 the starry heaven ; perhaps spirits too who are 
 conscious but unbodied. Hence the world of 
 persons, even in magnitude and number and 
 duration, is not so wholly out of proportion to 
 the world of things which science is gradually 
 interpreting. 
 
 But the quantity of space they occupy is not 
 the appropriate test of the importance of conscious 
 persons in the universe. The material world,
 
 310 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 with its appallingly incomprehensible magnitudes 
 in space and time, was itself, I reflected, depend- 
 ent for its actual reality upon the percipient 
 or conscious persons, and other sentient beings, 
 who are spoken of as its inhabitants. What, 
 I asked, would become of all the things in the 
 universe, if all conscious and percipient persons 
 were suddenly annihilated ? I tried to conceive 
 a wholly material universe, totally emptied of 
 sentient intelligence and volition, and I found 
 myself face to face with what is inconceivable 
 and unintelligible. The colours, sounds, tastes, 
 smells, solidity, and extent of things disappeared, 
 in this supposed absence of all percipience or 
 living experience. The whole material world at 
 once in consequence dissolved. Although persons 
 emerge from things, men at birth from nature, 
 yet the nature by which they are conditioned, 
 and the natural order according to which they 
 make their appearance, become themselves posi- 
 tively real only in and through the percipient, 
 sentient, and moral experience of living persons, 
 with its implied intellectual and moral presup- 
 positions. Accordingly, under this deeper concep- 
 tion of the unity of the universe, the things of 
 which it consists are all dependent for actuality
 
 SIGNIFICANCE OF PERSONS. 311 
 
 upon the persons that it contains. And it ap- 
 peared that not on earth only but in the universe 
 there was nothing great but Mind. Was it not 
 also true, I further asked, that the things in the 
 universe exist for the sake of the persons in the 
 universe, not persons for the sake of the things ; 
 and that in the whole universe, as far as man is 
 concerned with it, there is nothing independently 
 real except sentient, percipient, and morally en- 
 dowed beings ? If persons in their individualities 
 are of no concern in the abstractions of physical 
 science, they are of supreme concern in all ulti- 
 mate philosophy. They are real agents : things 
 are only aggregates of significant appearances. 
 The merely natural world consists of passive signs 
 that are made real and interpretable through 
 persons. The moral world presents the wonder 
 of free agents who are able to choose what ought 
 not to be chosen, as well as what ought, and who 
 are therefore morally responsible for their choices. 
 
 So I asked whether the existence of persons, 
 able to introduce moral disorder into them- 
 selves, was a fact that demonstrably contra- 
 dicted the idea of a divinely ordered universe, 
 which I had accepted as the necessary postulate 
 of human experience ? Was it not possible that
 
 312 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 a universe totally empty of free agents and 
 therefore of their moral as well as immoral acts, 
 and thus of their disturbing abnormal influence 
 might be a less divine universe than the mixed 
 universe in which we find ourselves ; which 
 contains persons able to do what they ought not 
 to do, and who can introduce suffering as the 
 natural consequence of their sin ? If " freedom " 
 to become what one ought not to be, is implied 
 in an individual personality, and in responsible 
 agency ; and if a universe that contains moral 
 agents is more worthy of existence than a 
 wholly non-moral one the temporary existence 
 of sinners and sufferers on our planet, or else- 
 where, would even be a consequence of the divinity 
 of the Whole. Omnipotence itself cannot over- 
 come the visible contradiction that is involved 
 in persons being at once free agents and not 
 free agents. Moral agents must be able to orig- 
 inate the acts for which they are responsible, 
 notwithstanding the risks implied in this freedom 
 of their acts from divine natural law ; unless it 
 can be demonstrated that the universe in which 
 such risk is run must be an undivine universe, 
 simply because it contains moral agents upon 
 trial. The presence in it of persons who may
 
 NATURAL ORDER AND PERSONAL FREEDOM. 313 
 
 become what they ought not is otherwise no 
 disproof of theistic optimism. It does not de- 
 monstrate that the theistic presupposition, on 
 which life and experience depend, must be un- 
 trustworthy. A universe which has room for the 
 probation and education of independent agents 
 may be a better universe than one that consists 
 only of impersonal things, one containing no 
 agents on trial, or in progressive education of 
 character, through the mixture of joy and sorrow 
 that is found in human experience. 
 
 We cannot, in short, at our finite point of 
 view, know enough about the infinite universe 
 of reality to be able to show, that the natural 
 world of significant and scientifically interpret- 
 able signs divinely directed, and the world of 
 spiritual agents free (so far) to direct themselves, 
 are conceptions which must be seen by finite 
 intelligence to be absolutely inconsistent. For 
 physical nature, and the mixed moral world 
 must both at last merge in what is incompre- 
 hensible or mysterious at our side - point of 
 view. Mysteries of faith are issues of neces- 
 sarily incompletable knowledge ; they do not 
 necessarily involve contradiction. Omnia exeunt 
 in mysteria is only the consequence of human
 
 314 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 knowledge being incapable of rising into Om- 
 niscience. Omnia exeunt in contradictor ia, on 
 the other hand, would be intellectual suicide. 
 The mysteries involved in the boundlessness of 
 space and time, and in natural causation when 
 space, time, and cause are refunded into infin- 
 ity, occasion no perplexity either in thought or 
 action, as soon as we recognise that they become 
 contradictions only when we unphilosophically 
 take for granted that Infinity which transcends 
 quantity and all relations of whole and parts 
 can be dealt with as a Whole. At our side 
 view - point, time, for instance, seems divisible 
 into a past eternity and a future eternity, each 
 unlimited ; yet the past apparently always in- 
 creasing in magnitude, and the future always 
 diminishing. This increase and diminution would 
 be true if past and future were finite quantities, 
 instead of being infinite and unquantifiable. 
 Yet notwithstanding this inevitable ultimate 
 mystery, we can regulate our lives by chrono- 
 logical tables and by the clock. Ultimate 
 mysteries in space do not interfere with loco- 
 motion. And the final mystery of the cosmo- 
 logical conception does not arrest our scientific 
 interpretation of nature. So too our own crea-
 
 MYSTERIES AND CONTRADICTORIES. 315 
 
 tive agency, implied in moral freedom, is not 
 necessarily inconsistent with the Omnipotence 
 and Goodness of God. Infinity, which is another 
 name for mysterious reality, remains (for us) at 
 the root of all. 
 
 So it seemed that a scientific resolution of 
 the contingent in experience into divine neces- 
 sity of reason, and resolution of the mixed 
 cosmos of moral experience into perfect divine 
 teleology, were both impossible for man. But 
 this did not satisfy me of their absolute incon- 
 sistency, or produce sceptical paralysis, any more 
 than the mysteries into which space and time 
 retire need to lay an arrest upon thought and 
 action in daily life. 
 
 The chief human interest of theistic faith, 
 and in its philosophical reasonableness, lies in its 
 relation to the meaning and issues of physical 
 death. Notwithstanding physical death, and not- 
 withstanding the (supposed) fact that all indi- 
 vidual persons begin to be, is it true that 
 individual persons can never cease to be? Are 
 persons spiritually non-mortal, although they are 
 physically mortal, and although all merely 
 physical things are subject to dissolution ? May
 
 316 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 we reasonably believe in the non - mortality of 
 persons, in spite of the constant disintegration 
 of things, including the bodily organisms of 
 persons themselves ? 
 
 This is of course a less comprehensive question 
 than the theistic one, which concerns the ultimate 
 guarantee man has in his experience of the uni- 
 verse. Perhaps on this planet the question con- 
 cerns only man ; but it relates to all self-conscious 
 persons in the universe. 
 
 If we could not reasonably believe in the reality 
 even of this secular life without taking in the 
 theistic presupposition, I suppose that a fortiori 
 we cannot believe in a posthumous life except 
 in and through the same presupposition. But 
 the practical importance to persons of their the- 
 istic faith diminishes infinitely, if their individual 
 personality and consciousness is limited to this 
 evanescent secular life. Man's hold of existence 
 on this globe is usually confined within a cen- 
 tury, from its beginning at physical birth to its 
 ending in physical death ; ennobled as even life 
 on earth may be by conscious moral relation to 
 God during the evanescent interval between birth 
 and death. 
 
 So I was ready to ask whether the inevitable
 
 MUST PERSONS BE IMMORTAL? 317 
 
 postulates involved in theistic faith necessarily 
 require that, although individual things are 
 in constant flux, individual persons can never 
 cease to live. Would their death and final un- 
 consciousness contradict the moral character of 
 God, or necessarily imply imperfection in the 
 divine ideal of the universe of reality ? Must 
 moral beings, who have once entered into self- 
 conscious existence, retain their self - conscious 
 individuality for ever? Because we each share 
 in the Universal Reason in this embodied state, 
 must we continue individually to participate in 
 it without end ? If so, why ? We seem to 
 have been sharing it only for a few years at 
 most in the past ? 
 
 Necessity in reason, which even God could not 
 overcome, did not here appear. Yet I found in 
 books of ecclesiastical theology what seemed to 
 imply, that persons are too important ethically 
 to be permitted finally to disappear, if they 
 have once individually come into morally re- 
 sponsible existence. I could not find that this 
 needed to be presupposed, in the way the theistic 
 presupposition needed to be presupposed i.e., 
 as the indispensable foundation of the universal 
 order on which the sanity of life depends nor
 
 318 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 could I see now it was in virtue of this that man 
 was " an image " of God. Faith in immortality 
 seemed to need proof, through facts in the divinely 
 constituted universe. It could not be taken as 
 a universal presupposition, indispensable if we 
 are to have any, even secular, experience. But 
 physical facts, or spiritual facts, or both, might 
 be signs of our continued personality. Were 
 there such signs ? I asked ; and were they so 
 significant of human immortality that one could 
 say that the universe was putting us to irre- 
 trievable intellectual and moral confusion unless 
 we accepted this as their meaning? I could 
 not answer this question affirmatively when I 
 turned to the supposed signs. 
 
 In our physically scientific generation I found 
 a disposition to determine the question by 
 ordinary experimental methods of proof, through 
 what is called psychical research. There is evi- 
 dence, so some say, of social intercourse, maintained 
 through natural signs, between embodied persons 
 now on earth and persons physically dead just 
 as there is intercourse, through natural signs, 
 among persons all now living embodied on this 
 planet. Some who have died physically, we are 
 told, sometimes signify to persons still living that
 
 SUPPOSED SIGNS OF PERSONAL IMMORTALITY. 319 
 
 they are alive. I could find no sufficient evi- 
 dence of this intercommunion, unless the his- 
 torical record of Christ was an exception ; but 
 curiously the leaders of psychical research do 
 not seem to be attracted to investigation of this 
 record, the most remarkable in its historic con- 
 sequences of all reported instances in the history 
 of the world of intercourse of the living with 
 those who were believed to have died. 
 
 But what shall we say of signs in the 
 spirit of man, as these are disclosed when we 
 reflect ? What shall we say of our thought 
 that wanders into immensities and eternities, 
 and that concerns itself with the infinite riddle of 
 the universe ? Can an individual spirit that is 
 actually, or at least potentially, able for all this 
 live only during the evanescent flash of con- 
 scious life that lasts between physical birth and 
 physical death ? Is intellectual congruity and 
 sanity in the final working of the universe con- 
 sistent with an arrangement like this ? It no 
 doubt seemed mysterious, but I was not able 
 to conclude that the arrangement was necessarily 
 undivine. I did not know enough about the 
 universal economy to conclude thus. 
 
 Then what of the seeming moral chaos on this
 
 320 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 planet, on which so many persons live wicked 
 lives, and on which so many sentient beings seem 
 to suffer unjustly, or to be inequitably rewarded ? 
 Moral distinctions do not appear to be equitably 
 measured during this terrestrial period of exist- 
 ence yet may it not be true, if God is Omni- 
 potent, perfectly Good, and therefore necessarily 
 bent upon making all persons in the universe 
 perfectly good too may it not be true that this 
 moral chaos is only a brief interval in the his- 
 tory of persons? And may not the "capricious" 
 distribution of pain and pleasure be a part of their 
 moral and spiritual education ? Instead of the 
 appalling gospel attributed to Calvin, of a cap- 
 ricious selection of a few persons to be made good, 
 leaving others (or even one person in the universe) 
 to go on increasing in wickedness for ever may 
 it not be that, after due suffering in another life, 
 proportioned to the history of the life here, all are 
 in the end made spiritually good ; or, if not thus, 
 that the free agency and probation in which 
 they lived here may be continued, under in- 
 creasingly favourable conditions, after physical 
 death, education by future as well as by present 
 suffering remedial, not revengeful through all 
 which, under the divine economy, all persons
 
 ATHEISM, PANTHEISM, AND THEISM. 321 
 
 are, as their endless lives advance, sooner or later 
 gradually raised out of the life of sense into the 
 divine life of the spirit and moral likeness to 
 God? 
 
 I do not know that ecclesiastical authority can 
 produce sufficient reason for extinguishing this 
 hope ; or that it can show that the perfect Good- 
 ness of God is consistent with any persons who 
 are kept in existence being endlessly and increas- 
 ingly wicked ; or that final elevation of each into 
 goodness is too arduous an achievement for 
 Omnipotent Power. And as to the posthumous 
 life, may we not leave our terrestrial embodiment 
 in theistic faith and hope, departing like the 
 patriarch, when he went out, " not knowing 
 whither he went " ; assured at least that we live 
 and die in a universe that must be fundamentally 
 divine, and in which therefore all events, death 
 included, must co-operate for the realisation of 
 divine ideal good to those who seek the good ? 
 
 Philosophy developed out of theistic faith was 
 thus taken as the true via media between 
 atheism and pantheism. It excluded atheism by 
 the reductio ad absurdum of total Nescience, 
 or intellectual and moral paralysis, which atheism 
 
 x
 
 322 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 involves. It excluded pantheism because the 
 human Omniscience which pantheistic rationalism 
 implies, in like manner, forms its reductio ad 
 absurdum. Atheistic and Pantheistic philosophies 
 were irrational, because the one landed us in 
 the absurdity of human Nescience in a finally 
 irrational universe, and the other in the ab- 
 surdity of a possible human Omniscience of the 
 infinite universe of reality. Theistic faith gave 
 the reasonable conviction that is found under a 
 knowledge that must be ultimately incomplete. 
 In tenebris semper might be the formula of 
 Atheism ; In Luce Divina that of Pantheism : 
 In tenebris Lux was the intermediate formula 
 of Theistic Philosophy. 
 
 Among other objections to this via media, I 
 am told that it involves unreasoning dogmatism ; 
 that it lays an arbitrary arrest upon reason ; that 
 only the rational is real, and that no limit can 
 be imposed on reason. But surely the arrest is 
 not arbitrary, if it is imposed because reason 
 itself finds something in the final reality which 
 refuses to be interpreted by intelligence in terms 
 of human science. Does not practical reason 
 present facts which, in the name of reason,
 
 OBJECTIONS TO THEIST1C PHILOSOPHY. 323 
 
 refuse to submit to our theoretical solutions ? 
 Also what we call contingency, at our side-point 
 of view, may be seen in perfect rationality, at 
 the divine or central point of view ; yet it must 
 in reason remain contingent and empirical to 
 finite intelligence with its narrow experience. It 
 was thus that a reasonable absolute trust, in- 
 stead of omniscient intelligence, appeared to be 
 the final philosophical attitude for man. The 
 universe presented to us to be rationalised was 
 a universe in which (for us) " contingencies " 
 intermingle with rational necessities. While our 
 theistic faith implies the divine rationality of 
 what to us appears contingent or mysterious, 
 the faith that all is absolutely the revelation of 
 Divine Active Reason may mean, that the con- 
 tingencies and mysteries are due to our modest 
 share of this Reason. 
 
 It is also alleged that a universe in which 
 persons, who must have power to make them- 
 selves good or bad, are superior to things, which 
 have no power at all a universe in which 
 things exist for the sake of persons, not persons 
 for the sake of things must be a universe that 
 carries in it the seeds of total incoherence or 
 .self - contradictoriness. The will of God is taken
 
 324 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 as the immediate agent in nature, and, accord- 
 ingly, things only appear to act : God makes 
 moral agents, on the contrary, themselves able 
 to act, righteously or wickedly, desiring indeed 
 that they should be good, but not forcing them 
 mechanically, and thus depriving them of moral 
 agency. The natural world presents intelligible 
 divine order : the moral world is supposed able 
 to express undivine anarchy. The two are irre- 
 concilables : if free agency is let in, scientific 
 unity is dissolved. But does not this objection 
 proceed upon the dogma that the visible order of 
 nature is the final and absolute order ; and also 
 that " natural causation " is finally comprehen- 
 sible in human science, instead of at last resolv- 
 ing into a tissue of incomprchensibles ; none 
 of them, however, necessarily involving visible 
 contradiction ? In like manner, in the moral 
 world, the present freedom of persons to make 
 themselves wicked can be comprehended only 
 " in part." The moral world, like the natural, 
 lands us in ultimate incomprehensibilities, which 
 are the bar reason puts against further ex- 
 planation. With the world of things and the 
 world of persons each incompletely comprehen- 
 sible, in themselves, and also in their relations
 
 THEISTIC PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY. 325 
 
 to each other is it not presumptuous to assert 
 that their coexistence and ultimate harmony in 
 Divine Eeason is an impossibility ? 
 
 I find it likewise objected that our Theistic 
 Philosophy with its universe fundamentally a 
 universe of persons in their moral relations, not 
 merely a universe of things in physical relations ; 
 in which physical science rests on the moral 
 and religious conception, not the moral and re- 
 ligious on the physical or " scientific " ; and this 
 with an implied theistic optimism is at best only 
 a covert version of the Christian faith. The 
 implication here seems to be, that conformity 
 of a philosophy with Christianity is its reduc- 
 tion to absurdity, and it is dismissed as only 
 a less articulate expression of the offices of triune 
 and incarnate Deity that has been elaborated in 
 the ecclesiastical theology of Christendom. The 
 objection seems to proceed upon an already 
 mentioned postulate common in Butler's time 
 " That Christianity is not so much as a subject 
 of inquiry ; but that it is now at length dis- 
 covered to be fictitious." However this may be, 
 one cannot resist conclusions to which reason 
 seems to lead ; and it is to reason, not to au- 
 thoritative Christianity, that philosophical appeal
 
 326 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 is made. Indeed if Philosophy and Christianity 
 unite in taking Moral Personality as the supreme 
 human category for interpreting the universe, this 
 goes to vindicate Christianity rather than to refute 
 Theistic Philosophy. It suggests that Coleridge 
 may be right when he speaks of the Christian 
 faith as " reason in its highest form of self-affirma- 
 tion," and of Christianity as " the perfection of 
 human intelligence." 
 
 An opposite complaint to the last is that 
 the "gospel" of theistic philosophy implies a 
 presumptuous claim for reason ; as if it were 
 able to discover that divine love for man is 
 necessarily implied in the omnipotent good- 
 ness of God. Divine love that is to say, 
 divine determination to make persons good who 
 have made themselves bad, because their final 
 wickedness would be inconsistent with divine 
 goodness is assumed to be a proposition that 
 transcends divine revelation given through 
 reason and experience : it can come to us only 
 through a miraculous historical revelation. When 
 philosophy presupposes the perfect goodness of 
 God, and that divine goodness means power and 
 will to make bad persons now in existence good 
 in the end, through education of suffering, and
 
 THEIR MUTUAL RESPONSE. 327 
 
 under a gradual evolution this is condemned 
 as furtive adoption, and even exaggeration, of 
 miraculously revealed truth. It is philosophy 
 stealing without acknowledgment from the gospel 
 of Christ. " As in Adam all die, so in Christ 
 shall all be made alive." As persons in " travail- 
 ing creation " are able to make themselves bad, 
 so all must in the end be either annihilated or 
 made good, and creation be delivered from the 
 bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty 
 of the sons of God. " Then cometh the end, 
 when He shall have put down all rule and all 
 authority and power." Natural theology or the- 
 istic philosophy, it is assumed, can only see the 
 evil: it cannot even suggest this "gospel," which 
 comes from the arbitrary determination of God, 
 not from necessity of reason divine. Theistic 
 philosophy is alleged to be only a new edition 
 of " Christianity as old as the Creation." But 
 may not reason and Christianity respond to one 
 another ? May not Christianity, in its wonderful 
 historical evolution, with its claim to be the 
 universal religion, and Philosophic Theism with 
 its deductions from its rational implicate of 
 God's perfect love of good, and of divine desire 
 to make all persons good, as the indispensable
 
 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 ground of even ordinary trust in the natural and 
 the moral world, harmonise with one another ? 
 The more vague gospel of Theistic Philosophy 
 and the articulate gospel of essential Christianity 
 may here respond to one another, each practically 
 confirmed by the response. 
 
 My Gifford lectures ended in 1896, and they 
 were published in that year as the ' Philosophy 
 of Theism.' 
 
 Events and the course of thought since are too 
 near to be easily seen in true perspective. 
 
 A delightful family visit to Holland was a 
 recreation in which we indulged in 1895. I 
 had been attracted by the outlook on Holland 
 as I saw it from the summit of that church-tower 
 in the city of Erasmus in 1842, but for more 
 than half a century I had no opportunity for 
 nearer inspection. In 1895 we made The Hague 
 our headquarters for a time, and explored the 
 country, nearer intimacy adding to the interest. 
 During our stay we had the advantage of the 
 society and direction of Professor Tiele of Leyden, 
 my eminent successor in the Gifford lectureship 
 at Edinburgh, of whom Holland was justly
 
 A VISIT TO HOLLAND. 329 
 
 proud, and who, during his residence in Scotland 
 afterwards, endeared himself to many who now 
 mourn his unexpected death. In visiting him we 
 became at home in Leyden and its famous uni- 
 versity, that favourite resort of Scottish students 
 of law and theology in the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries. In Holland I had oppor- 
 tunities for visiting the haunts of Descartes 
 during his seclusion there, in that prolonged 
 meditation which opened a new era in science 
 and philosophy. The humble homes in which 
 Spinoza passed his short self - sacrificing life 
 formed another attraction, as well as the grave 
 in which his ashes lie in the Neue Kirche at 
 The Hague, beneath the pulpit, and beside the 
 tombs of the De Wetts. And I was able 
 to carry further my companionship with Locke, 
 by tracing him in his wanderings, at Amsterdam 
 and elsewhere, during his voluntary exile in 
 Holland, in the five years before the English 
 Revolution. My friend Professor Van der 
 Wyck attracted us to Utrecht ; in his absence 
 in Italy, Doctor Beets provided a delightful 
 day in that quaint city and its university. 
 After leaving Holland we ascended the Rhine ; 
 but the Rhine after Holland was a disappoint-
 
 330 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHIC A. 
 
 ment. We returned home through Belgium. A 
 long summer day spent on the field of Waterloo, 
 in trying to form a mental picture of the 
 order of the battle and the movements of the 
 armies, was my latest experience of continental 
 Europe. 
 
 The ' Philosophy of Theism ' was hardly out 
 of the press when I was asked for a biography 
 of Thomas Reid, to form one of the volumes in 
 the " Famous Scots " series. I was glad to be 
 invited to a fresh retrospect of Reid, to whom 
 I had been referred for direction by Cousin 
 forty years before, and whom I was now able 
 to look at in the light of intervening thought. 
 I found him home-bred and self-contained, a 
 sagacious Scot, whose office was, in eighteenth- 
 century spirit, to encounter philosophical scep- 
 ticism with dogmatically assumed practical rea- 
 son. In following his life I examined Reid's 
 appeal to divinely inspired data in what he 
 called the "common sense" of mankind: now 
 seen in the wider light of theistic philosophy, 
 and not merely as inductive philosophy of mind 
 in man. The theistic postulate on which human 
 experience rests could be compared with Reid's
 
 LIFE OF THOMAS REID. 331 
 
 dogmatic assumption of uncriticised " necessities 
 to believe." A pilgrimage to his birthplace at 
 Strachan, in the secluded valley through which 
 the Feugh finds its way from the Grampians to 
 the Dee at Banchory ; a visit to the parish of 
 New Machar, where he found his weapon for war 
 against Hume, not unlike the securus judicat 
 orbis terra/rum, which in another interest was 
 the watchword of Newman ; a visit to his aca- 
 demic home in King's College at Aberdeen, that 
 miniature Oxford almost under the shadow of 
 the Grampians collecting biographical material 
 by the way all formed a pleasant episode in 
 the summer of 1897. 
 
 Other days in that summer recall the Isle of 
 Skye, where a week in a family tour was spent 
 in following the footsteps of Charles Edward, from 
 his landing at Mugstock to his departure from 
 Portree, and afterwards on his return from 
 Raasay : I had traced his movements around 
 Loch - na - nuagh and Loch Morar, years before, 
 guided by Sir John and Lady Skelton. I also 
 followed Johnson and Boswell, in Eaasay and 
 then in Skye, as they moved from place to place 
 in that October of rain and storm in 1773. Two 
 romantic adventures that of the Prince and
 
 332 BIOGRAPH1A PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 that of the London philosopher, contrasts, 
 yet both apt to touch imagination, enlivening 
 Scottish annals in the eighteenth century- 
 were thus brought home by abounding local 
 associations. 
 
 The attempt of Charles Edward to upset the 
 House of Hanover by an army of hastily collected 
 Highland tribes, is among the most romantic 
 events in modern history. It is oftener looked 
 at under the light of sentiment and imagination 
 than under the colder light of practical politics 
 and philosophy. Its transitory successes are ex- 
 plained by the startling rapidity with which the 
 Adventurer w r as wafted south on a cloud of Celtic 
 enthusiasm, combined with prevailing indifference 
 to the Hanoverian dynasty in a nation that had 
 not experienced the benignant rule of Queen 
 Victoria and King Edward. Success depended 
 upon uninterrupted rapidity of movement, sup- 
 ported by immediate co-operation in England, 
 and immediate powerful co-operation of France. 
 Uncalculating enthusiasm found itself wanting 
 in these conditions. It was only indulgence 
 in curious speculation to try to forecast the 
 remoter issues, if the conditions had all been 
 favourable, and if the Stuarts had in consequence
 
 BERKELEY RE-EDITED. 333 
 
 found their way back to the throne. Even as 
 it was, the rising in the '45, commemorated in 
 song, opened a new era in the Scottish High- 
 lands and in Scotland. 
 
 A recast of the ' Philosophy of Theism ' in a 
 new edition was my chief literary employment in 
 1898. This was followed by the more formid- 
 able task of re-editing in an amended form the 
 Collected Works and Life of Berkeley, to take 
 the place of the 1871 edition, now exhausted. 
 Later thought and research had in the interval 
 modified some former opinions, and later oppor- 
 tunities had added to my store of biographical 
 matter. Berkeley's correspondence with Lord 
 Percival, for which I was indebted to the kind- 
 ness of Lord Egmont, and his correspondence 
 with Samuel Johnson of New England, to which I 
 was assisted by Dr Beardsley, had cast some fresh 
 light upon his personality and his philosophy. 
 
 Some weeks in most of those years of retire- 
 ment at Hawthornden have been spent in the 
 Land of Lome, the home of my youth. I re- 
 turned in old age to scenes, familiar in the 
 morning of life, when inquiry was beginning to
 
 334 BIOGRAPHIA PHILOSOPHICA. 
 
 move uneducated common - sense ; but I returned 
 unknown and a stranger, after the lapse of two 
 generations. The railway, the motor-car, and the 
 voice of the tourist now disturb the silence of 
 the unchanged hills. The perplexing doubts 
 about the universe, in which I newly found myself 
 in youth, have led to deeper faith in the immanent 
 Divine Spirit, transforming death from a move- 
 ment in the dark into a movement in Omni- 
 potent Goodness ; trusted when it withdraws us 
 from this embodied life, still unable to picture 
 what lies in the future. "It is not yet made 
 manifest what we shall be." And a philosophical 
 pilgrimage in this life seemed to return upon 
 itself, but to an old world presented in a new 
 light. "You see, Hylas, the water in yonder 
 fountain, how it is forced upwards, in a round 
 column, to a certain height ; at which it breaks, 
 and falls back into the basin from which it 
 arose, its ascent as well as descent proceeding 
 from the same uniform law of gravitation. Just 
 so the same principles which, at first view, lead 
 to Scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring 
 men back to Common Sense." The world of 
 sense seen in childhood was transformed in 
 old age for one about to leave it. It was
 
 THE LAND OP LORNE REVISITED. 335 
 
 connection rather than contrast. It was con- 
 nection that resembles " the subtle progress 
 by which, both in the natural and moral 
 world, qualities pass insensibly into their con- 
 traries, and things revolve upon each other. As 
 in sailing upon the orb of this planet, a voyage 
 towards the regions where the sun sets conducts 
 us gradually to the quarter where we have been 
 accustomed to behold it come forth at its rising ; 
 and in like manner, a voyage towards the east, 
 the birthplace in our imagination of the morning, 
 leads finally to the quarter where the sun is last 
 seen when he departs from our eyes; so the 
 contemplative soul, travelling in the direction of 
 mortality, advances to the country of Everlast- 
 ing Life ; and in like manner may continue to 
 explore those cheerful tracts, at intervals brought 
 back, for her advantage and benefit, to the land 
 of transitory things, of sorrow and tears," 
 
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