>
 
 A STUDY OF RELIGION 
 
 MARTINEAU 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 HENRY FROWDE 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE 
 AMEN CORNER, E.G.
 
 STUDY OF RELIGION 
 
 SOURCES AND CONTENTS 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES MARTINEAU, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 LATE PRINCIPAL OF MANCHESTER NEW COLLEGE, LONDON 
 
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 ytyovtvcu <pu/j.fv, rb <f>p6in/nov Kai apery? ir\rjpfs, ^ rb fj.r)$frepa. KfKrrjfj.fvov ; 
 
 PLAT. Legg. x. 897 B 
 
 VOL. I 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 1888 
 
 \_All rights reserved"]
 
 T' ct T'-v r - r -. T rr 
 SANTA BAJRBAUA 
 
 IN MEMORY OF AN UNBROKEN FRIENDSHIP 
 THROUGH THIRTY YEARS* COMPANIONSHIP IN DUTY AND IN STUDY 
 
 WITH 
 
 JOHN JAMES TAYLER 
 
 AND OF THE QUICKENING INFLUENCE 
 
 OF HIS RIPE SCHOLARSHIP AND TENDER PIETY 
 
 THESE VOLUMES 
 PREPARED AT HIS DESIRE 
 
 AND ANIMATED BY HIS FELLOWSHIP OF SPIRIT 
 ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 
 
 TO THE PUPILS 
 
 WHOM WE SOUGHT TO HELP ON THEIR WAY 
 TO WISE AND FAITHFUL LIFE 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 I CANNOT better introduce my readers to the main 
 purport of these volumes, than by relating a conversa- 
 tional criticism, by an eminent English Positivist, on a 
 no less eminent American representative of the Spen- 
 cerian system of thought. Friendly relations had grown 
 up between them, when Professor Fiske, of Harvard, was 
 in this country ; relations, none the less cordial from the 
 tacit assumption, supposed to be warranted by his ' Cosmic 
 Philosophy,' of their common rejection of religious beliefs. 
 On the appearance, in 1884, of his interesting Address to 
 the Concord School of Philosophy, entitled ' The Destiny 
 of Man in the light of his Origin,' a report of its argu- 
 ment, contained in a private letter, was read to his English 
 friend ; who listened attentively enough till it came out 
 that the Professor found, in the psychical evolution of 
 Man, an intimation of individual immortality ; but then 
 broke in with the exclamation, 'What? John Fiske say 
 that ? Well ; it only proves, what I have always main- 
 tained, that you cannot make the slightest concession to 
 metaphysics, without ending in a theology ! ' a position, 
 in which the speaker has no doubt been confirmed by the 
 author's second Concord Address, in 1885, on ' the Idea of 
 God.' 
 
 A more fortunate criticism there could hardly be : for, if 
 it answers the speaker's end, it certainly secures the au- 
 thor's too ; being but the naive confession, ' If once you
 
 viii PREFACE. 
 
 allow yourself to think about the origin and the end of things, 
 you will have to believe in a God and immortality.' The 
 conditions of the Agnostic case could not be more compen- 
 diously stated : to make it good, you must be careful not 
 to look beyond phenomena, as empirical facts : you must 
 abjure the enquiry into causes, and the attempt to trace 
 invisible issues : never lift the veil that bounds experience, 
 and you will need nothing and know nothing of a trans- 
 cendental world. 
 
 On the very threshold, therefore, of the ' Study of Reli- 
 gion ' we are met by the question, whether this Comtean 
 delimitation of knowledge is correct. This was my reason 
 for entering on the survey of human relations at the prac- 
 tical end, and seeking the bases of conduct before pene- 
 trating to the roots of thought ; allowing ' Ethical Theory ' 
 to rest, as long as possible, on experienced psychological 
 facts ; and holding back their apparent religious signifi- 
 cance for more effectual testing, when their interior con- 
 tents had been laid bare. And this led me to say, in 
 dismissing the former volumes from my hand, that the 
 Moral Postulates on which their exposition proceeded 
 could be tried only ' in the court of Metaphysics,' and 
 must stand over for a separate hearing. 
 
 The cause thus reserved is called on for trial in the F'rst 
 Book of the present ' Study.' But for the promise which 
 I have quoted, I would gladly have spared my readers its 
 intricate and technical pleadings ; for I am aware of the 
 tediousness of these metaphysical tribunals ; especially when 
 the whole process wins at last, through all its dizzying cir- 
 cuits, only the very position which common sense had 
 assumed at first. For this is all, I take it, that metaphy- 
 sics can pretend to accomplish by their scrutiny of the
 
 PREFACE. ix 
 
 ultimate factors of human knowledge. They discover for 
 us that, for all phenomena of experience, we are obliged 
 to supply in thought a transcendental object, as their 
 ground l . Think it, we must ; but only as the base of that 
 relation : believe it, we must ; for, if we evict it, the phe- 
 nomena cling to it and go too : but prove it, we cannot ; 
 since it is impossible for thought, however nimble, to leap 
 beyond its own laws, and see, from a foreign station, 
 whether they tell lies. The business of the metaphysician 
 is to assemble, to discriminate, to interpret, these trans- 
 cendental constants of thought, and shew how they deal 
 with its phenomenal material, and organize the relations 
 which form the contents of human knowledge. When for 
 every variable he has named its permanent, his task would 
 be complete, were it not for perverse attempts, on the part 
 of speculative simplifyers, to escape the persistent relativity 
 of nature, by cutting asunder the sides of every duality, in 
 order to make over the monopoly of the universe, either to 
 the phenomenal alone, or to the real alone : telling us, in 
 the former case, how cleverly the phenomena can simulate 
 the aspect of the real ; and, in the latter, how the real can 
 dissemble, by masquerading before the human fancy. 
 According to the first, ' the All ' is resolved into ' the 
 Many' ; according to the second, fused into ' the One.' 
 And so it comes to pass that, while Comte sets up the goal 
 of knowledge at the Law r s of Change, Schelling plants it at 
 ' the Absolute.' 
 
 This artificial breach between the inseparable terms of 
 
 1 Wir iiberhaupt einen transcendentalen Gegenstand den Erschei- 
 nungen zum Grunde legen miissen, ob wir zwar von ihm was er an 
 sich selbst sey, nichts wissen. Kant, Krit. der reinen Vernunft. 
 Rosenkranz, ii. 422.
 
 x PREFACE. 
 
 a relation is fruitful in illusions ; leaving the contents and 
 sciences of experience without their uniting tissue of living 
 thought ; and, at the opposite extreme, inflating the Reason 
 to the stretch of a monotonous infinitude, virtually emptied 
 already by preaching the nothingness of all it holds. The 
 distinction between the two factors of knowledge was, for 
 the metaphysician who pointed it out, also their harmony. 
 By an abuse of his method, it has been harassed into an 
 alienation : and he is needed again, to undo the miscon- 
 struction and effect a reconciliation. This he will attempt 
 by a simple regress to the point of first divergency. He 
 will not affect to go a step with either party on his 
 separate way. He will not flatter the one, by offering new 
 proofs of his ' Absolute ' ; or appease the other, by outbid- 
 ding him in his valuation of the law of Evolution ; and 
 then, having planted their imaginations at opposite foci, 
 try to talk them into a common centre. His task calls for 
 neither invention nor diplomacy. He has only to explain, 
 that antithesis in thought does not involve separation, still 
 less, antagonism in being ; that, as all knowledge is of 
 relations, and all relations are dualities, a theory which 
 unifies by sinking a co-ordinate term can land us in 
 nothing but ignorance. By this kind of critical metaphysics 
 alone, interpreting the text of the law of Reason, have 
 I endeavoured to save such constants of human thought as 
 are essential to religious belief, and have suffered of late 
 from sceptical disparagement. Two of these have sufficed 
 for the end in view, the intuition of Causality, as the 
 ground of Natural phenomena, and that of Right, as the 
 ground of Moral ; the one planting the Intellect, and the 
 other the Conscience, face to face with the Eternal Source 
 of wisdom and righteousness. If it be true that such
 
 PREFACE. xi 
 
 ' Metaphysics are sure to end in a Theology,' it is not that 
 they piece together new artifices of masonry for its sup- 
 port, but only that they watch the lines of hostile approach 
 to its foundation, and countermine them, ere any harm is 
 done. At least, to such defensive work alone, of simply 
 clearing and guarding the rock-base of natural faith, are 
 these volumes devoted. 
 
 For much of the Agnosticism of the age, the Gnosticism 
 of theologians is undeniably responsible. They have in- 
 considerately overstrained the language of religion till its 
 meaning breaks : and the coherent thinker easily picks up 
 its ruins to show that they can contain nothing. Whoever 
 calls God by names of highest abstraction, such as 'the 
 Absolute,' ' the Great / Ami f r tne very purpose of 
 placing Him beyond comparison, as pure Thesis, without 
 Antithesis or Synthesis, exposes himself at once to the 
 proof that such a Being can never come into human ap- 
 prehension at all ; and will be reproached for his ignorance 
 of ' the relativity of knowledge,' which denies all access to 
 ' things in themselves.' The critic's rebuke is well-de- 
 served ; and if he intends by it no more than that God, 
 so far forth as unrelated, is unknown, he should have 
 thanks for his correction. But if he means to suggest, 
 that what is only relatively known is, on that account, 
 unknown, he simply repeats the error of the theologian and 
 raises it to a higher power, by insisting, not only that an 
 absolute object may be cognizable, but that, in order to be 
 cognizable, it must be absolute. He is working against the 
 whole force of his own doctrine of relativity, until he learns 
 that both terms of a relation are known together, instead 
 of each plunging the other into the dark. As well might 
 he maintain that the interdependence of double stars pre-
 
 xii PREFACE. 
 
 eludes each from finding the presence and the path of the 
 other. Nay, his implication is even suicidal : for, if an 
 object is shut out from knowledge by standing as one 
 term of a relation, the ' Substance ' or ' Cause,' of which 
 we are thus said to be quite ignorant, is in no worse plight 
 than the correlative ' phenomenon ' or ' effect,' with which 
 we are invited to cultivate exclusive acquaintance : and an 
 Eleatic agnosticism of change is a valid reply to a Pro- 
 tagorean agnosticism of entity. When the sophists of 
 opposite type, having converted one another, become 
 logical enough to believe in neither term, the time perhaps 
 will have come for the healthy human mind to trust again 
 its natural faith in both. 
 
 Of the two sources of Religion unfolded in these volumes, 
 each has encountered antipathy and rejection from one of 
 the representative minds of the present century. Comte 
 was for expunging the language and the idea of Causality ; 
 Bentham, for ridding us of the phraseology and accepted 
 meaning of Moral Obligation. Had the two aversions 
 coexisted, a total desiccation of religion would, I suppose, 
 have naturally ensued. But, by a happy exemption, each 
 of the two men retained the element discarded by the 
 other, and, under its influence, was upheld in some of the 
 pieties of character which usually need a less scanty faith. 
 Comte, though without any adequate base for his ideal of 
 Right, was strongly possessed by moral sentiment and 
 aspiration, freely resorted to the vocabulary of Duty and 
 all its dependent conceptions, and was so susceptible to 
 the higher qualities of character as to make his reverence 
 for the possibilities of Humanity serve him as a Religion. 
 Bentham, though finding only hedonist utility in Ethics, 
 developing them simply from human self-love, and always
 
 PREFACE. xiii 
 
 irritated by the suggestion of any authority beyond, yet 
 had no quarrel with the logic of Causation, and was carried 
 by it from the Order to the Divine Ordainer of the world. 
 The humanism of the one, and the Deism of the other, are 
 but weak residual forms of natural reverence. Already, 
 the experience of their imperfection has largely provoked 
 a rejection of both, and reduced the Religion of life to a 
 blank. Ere this experiment has proceeded far on its 
 perilous way, perhaps the two dissevered sources may 
 repent of their disunion, and a reharmonized human nature 
 find itself once more in a universe and a communion that 
 are Divine. 
 
 I have not been deterred from vindicating the Teleo- 
 logical interpretation of nature, by the opprobrious 
 treatment or, at best, condescending excuse, which seems 
 to be deemed 'the right thing' for the 'Argument from 
 Design.' ' Advanced thought ' also, like dress and manners, 
 is not without its fashions and its fops ; and many a 
 scientific sciolist who would bear himself ' comme il faut ' 
 towards such questionable deceivers as ' Final Causes,' now 
 thinks it necessary to have his fling at ' Paley and the 
 Bridgewater Treatises.' He has it on the best authority 
 that Darwin has exposed their imposture ; and he must 
 show that he is not going to fall into their trap. It is 
 probable that, of those who speak in this tone, nine out of 
 ten have never read the books with which they deal so 
 flippantly ; and it is certain that the tenth is incompetent 
 to grasp the essentials of an argument, while letting its 
 separable accidents fall away. No doubt, the doctrine, pre- 
 valent in Paley's time, of impassable limits of species, the 
 immature condition of chemical and biological science, 
 detaining the mind in too great dependence on mechanical
 
 xiv PREFACE. 
 
 conceptions, the darkness in which the geological record of 
 the earth was still wrapped, the narrow limits of Time 
 within which both natural and human history were assumed 
 to be compressed, presented to his imagination a world 
 variously different from ours ; incomparably smaller ; 
 divided into autonomous, though confederated, provinces, 
 needing, through the detachment of their products, a much 
 greater multitude of Divine projects and volitions, amount- 
 ing in effect to so many separate creations. But that these 
 crude conceptions have any advantage over their successors, 
 as claimants of design, that any expression of Mind which 
 was present to Paley is lost to us, it is impossible to affirm. 
 The great difference lies in the substitution of development 
 for paroxysm of initiation. And this ' Evolution,' whatever 
 its extent, is not a Cause, or even a Force, but a Method, 
 which might be the path, either of a voluntary cause or of 
 a blind force, and has nothing to say to the controversy 
 between them. If there weje design before, so is there 
 now : if not, then has none been added. But, on the other 
 hand, if marks of Thought were truly found before, they 
 have now become marks of larger and sublimer thought ; 
 all that was detached having passed into coherence, so that 
 one intellectual organism embraces the whole, from the 
 animalcule in a dewdrop to the birth and death of worlds. 
 I see no reason to doubt that Paley would have welcomed 
 the new theory of organic life upon the globe, as a 
 magnificent expansion of his idea. He did not, I presume, 
 regard the Creator as having, virtually, taken out an 
 independent Patent for every so-called species, to be 
 jealously guarded from all encroachment. And if only the 
 inter-relation could have been shown to him between type 
 and type of being, as we are taught to see it now, he would
 
 PREFACE. xv 
 
 not have been slow to feel the grander meaning of the 
 vaster family encompassed by one providing thought. 
 
 Professor Fiske has devoted a very attractive monograph, 
 under the title ' The Idea of God,' to an exposition of the 
 order of nature according to the doctrine of Evolution, in 
 its religious bearings. He insists, with evident truth, that 
 ' the whole scheme is Teleological, and each single act in it 
 has a teleological meaning l ' ; a description, which abso- 
 lutely identifies it, upon its Theistic side, with Paley's 
 theorem, viz. that the constitution of nature, wherever we 
 can read its story, betrays the evident direction of events 
 upon a consummating end. Yet the Author, far from 
 feeling that he is only annotating and illustrating Paley, 
 turns upon him with the surprising remark, ' Herein lies 
 the reason why the theory so quickly destroyed that of 
 Paley ! ' In the same slighting tone he repeatedly refers 
 to Paley's method as 'proved inadequate,' as 'anthropo- 
 morphic,' as unwarrantably attributing ' purpose ' to God ; 
 so that the reader seems to hear the voice of a believer in 
 mere blind causation. I own my inability to reconcile 
 ' teleology ' with the denial of ' purpose.' If it be not the 
 theory which explains the prior acts of a series as deter- 
 mined by the preconception of a posterior, I know not 
 what it means. Nor is any light thrown upon what is 
 to take the place of the expelled ' design ' by the evasive 
 language now substituted for Paley's manly speech. We 
 must on no account read ' purpose ' in the make of things 
 and the story of the world : but ' a well-marked dramatic 
 tendency' is discernible throughout. We are not to 
 imagine a really contemplated end in view : but we cannot 
 
 1 The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge. London, 
 Macmillan, 1885, p. 161.
 
 xvi PREFACE. 
 
 fail to notice ' a clearly marked progress of events towards 
 a mighty goal} 'a working together of all things, through 
 boundless ages of toil and trouble, towards one glorious 
 consummation^! We may not predicate rational and 
 intending thought, of the supreme ' Cosmic Power ' : but we 
 may affirm 'the essential reasonableness of the universe,' 
 and mark ' the meaning there is in the orderly sequence of 
 events 2 .' And, in virtue of these things, we may admit, 
 in the infinite and eternal ' animating principle,' ' a quasi- 
 psychicar nature 3 . Beyond this we cannot go. 
 
 These are enigmatical phrases, till some explicit inter- 
 pretation is given of the distinction which they pretend 
 to draw. We need to be told, whether there can be a 
 ' well-marked dramatic tendency,' conducting to a regular 
 ' denouement* without any plan or design ; what sort of 
 ' mighty goal ' it is, which is not kept in view and at which 
 no one aims, what ' glorious consummation ' which crowns 
 no system preconceived ; what ' meaning ' can lie in an 
 order of things which is the expression of no thought ; 
 what ' reasonableness ' can belong to the constitution of a 
 universe wrought out by no rational insight and foresight ; 
 and, finally, whether, in the ' psychical principle ' the 
 Universal fyvyji exceeds its proper limits and borrows 
 any vovs, or whether, being only ' quasi-psychical,' it even 
 falls a little short of its own definition, and remains on the 
 confines of the animal standard. To the first of these 
 questions alone do I find some semblance of an answer in 
 the following sentence : ' While the dramatic tendency 
 cannot be regarded as indicative of purpose, in the limited 
 anthropomorphic sense, it is still, as I said before, the 
 
 1 The Idea of God affected by Modern Knowledge, p. 159. 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. 138, 139. 8 Ibid. p. 151.
 
 PREFACE. xvii 
 
 objective aspect of that which, when regarded on its sub- 
 jective side, we call purpose V So far then as it misses the 
 predicate 'purpose! it is because it has no 'subjective side'; 
 which means, I suppose, has no place in a conscious mind, as 
 the condition of its ' objective existence.' 
 
 I cannot but wonder that a thinker so strong and a writer 
 so clear and picturesque, as Professor Fiske, should find 
 any satisfactory shelter for his religious faith and feeling 
 under this frail tissue of teleological language. It is an 
 attempt, in the supposed interests of conciliation and 
 justice, to say and unsay the same propositions, without 
 becoming conscious of inconsistency. But between contra- 
 dictories it is vain to seek for intermediaries ; and the false 
 promises of vague phraseology are sure to betray them- 
 selves in the disappointments of experience. Reason has 
 been brought, by its long evolution, to a very resolute 
 constitution, finally attached to its abode on terra firma : 
 and it is too late to treat it as an amphibious creature, 
 willing to try existence, now on the land and now in 
 the water. The escape from conscious self-contradiction is 
 managed by an illusory application of what are called 
 ' symbolic conceptions.' These are familiar enough to us 
 in the case of large or collective objects of perception, 
 which our thoughts cannot at a glance embrace as a whole, 
 but to which we can refer, and be referred, by a word 
 naming them, either by some characteristic properties, or 
 by some individual sample: the word stands for the rest, 
 without having them in its definition. Here, that which it 
 symbolises is really and distinctly in our thought, because it 
 is something which has been put there by experience and 
 
 1 Ibid. Preface, p. xxiv.
 
 xviii PREFACE. 
 
 has only to be revived. But when it is said that, in pre- 
 dicating of God attributes of which we have cognizance in 
 ourselves, the terms denoting them are to be stripped of 
 their ' anthropomorphic sense ' and take on ' a symbolical,' 
 because the human attribute belongs to a finite, the Divine 
 to an infinite nature, the case is totally different. For, 
 what we lay aside is all the meaning that we know, and 
 behind the symbol retained there stands nothing but blank 
 darkness. Representing what cannot possibly have place 
 in human thought, the word is empty of meaning altogether. 
 That out of such propositions of pure nescience any one can 
 find even the phantom of a Religion emerge, is a singular 
 proof how irresistible are the needs of human faith and 
 affection, and how modest becomes the silence of Reason 
 in their presence. 
 
 The volumes with which I here part variously conflict, I 
 am well aware, with the prevailing opinions and tendencies 
 of the time. The approbation which, on this account, they 
 must forego, will at all events be replaced by the more whole- 
 some benefit of correction and disarming of their errors. 
 Possibly, there may yet be a minority, among persons 
 accustomed to reflect on the questions here discussed, who 
 may find in them the satisfaction of fellowship, if not some 
 clearing and confirmation of conviction ; and be encouraged, 
 through mere force of sympathy, to cherish and vindicate 
 the deep and simple pieties on which the sanctity of life 
 depends. 
 
 THE POLCHAR, ROTHIEMURCHUS, 
 
 Oct. 24, 1887.
 
 CONTENTS OF VOL I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. What is Religion ? i 
 
 II. Why Ethics before Religion ?....... 16 
 
 BOOK I. THE LIMITS OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CONSIDERED. 
 
 Introduction. Unsettled Boundaries 35 
 
 CHAP. I. Form and Conditions of Knowledge ... 39 
 
 i. Varieties of Consciousness distinguished . ,. . . 40 
 
 2. Analytic and Synthetic Judgments 44 
 
 3. Kant's Account of Mathematical Judgments ... 48 
 
 4. What makes Synthetic Judgments true ? . . . . 54 
 
 5. Extension of Critical Principles to Super-sensible Objects . 57 
 
 CHAP. II. Appreciation of Kant's Doctrine . . . 61 
 
 i. As a Psychology of Belief . . . . . 61 
 
 2. As an Instrument of Verification ..... 7 
 
 CHAP. III. Absolute and Empirical Idealism . . . 82 
 
 i. From Kant to Schopenhauer 82 
 
 2. Helmholtz and J. S. Mill . ... . . . 96 
 
 CHAP. IV. Belativity of Knowledge ,. 113 
 
 i. Homo Mensura ; . . 113 
 
 2. ' All we know is Phenomena ' 124 
 
 3. 'The Unknowable' 131 
 
 BOOK II. THEISM. 
 
 CHAP. I. God as Cause 139 
 
 i. Meaning of the Causal Relation 139 
 
 A. As judged by the Observer of Nature . . . 139 
 
 a. Thing as Cause 140 
 
 b. Phenomenon as Cause 145 
 
 c. Force as Cause 155 
 
 B. As conditioned by Activity in the Ego . . . 177 
 
 a. In Mediated Perception 179 
 
 b. In Immediate Perception 192
 
 xx CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 2. ' The World as a Heap of Powers ' 214 
 
 3. Will and Modes of Force 230 
 
 4. Will and Kinds of Being 250 
 
 5. Explicit and Implicit W T ill 257 
 
 6. Place of Teleology 270 
 
 7. Objections to Teleology considered 321 
 
 8. Implicit Attributes of God as Cause 398
 
 A STUDY OF RELIGION; 
 
 ITS SOURCES AND CONTENTS. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 I. WHAT is RELIGION ? 
 
 THE word ' Religion ' is here used in the sense which it 
 invariably bore half a century ago ; and a reader whose 
 conceptions are cast in the moulds of that time will know 
 what to expect from an enquiry into its ' Sources and 
 Contents.' Understanding by ' Religion ' belief in an 
 Ever-living God, that is, of a Divine Mind and Will ruling 
 the Universe and holding Moral relations with mankind, 
 he will hope, on the one hand, to be led to the innermost 
 seat of this belief in the constitution of human nature ; 
 and, on the other, to see developed from it the dependent 
 varieties of thought implicit in so fruitful a germ, and the 
 cognate truths inseparable from it by collateral relations. 
 Along just these paths of reflective insight, viz. first, to the 
 secret birth-points of conscious religion, and then, to the 
 survey of its interior volume and applied lights, it is the 
 purpose of this ' Study ' to conduct him, so far as mere 
 critical scrutiny can avail in a matter not wholly intel- 
 lectual. In the soul of Religion, the apprehension of truth 
 and the enthusiasm of devotion inseparably blend : and in 
 proportion as either is deserted by the other, the conditions 
 of right judgment fail. The state of mind in which they 
 coexist may present itself under either of two forms, 
 sharply distinguished in the language of our older writers. 
 If it be reached by reflection on the order of the physical 
 
 VOL. I. B
 
 2 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 and moral world, it is called l Natural Religion'; if it arises 
 without conscious elaboration of thought, and is assigned 
 to immediate communication from the Divine Spirit to 
 the human, it is called ' Supernatural Religion.' 
 
 The central faith in the Supreme Mind is usually at- 
 tended by several satellite beliefs (e.g. in a life beyond death), 
 which are all allowed shelter under the term Religion. 
 When regarded apart from these, the primary conviction 
 is known as Theism ; the rejection or absence of which has, 
 accordingly, appropriated the negative word Atheism. 
 
 This nomenclature, recommended by its simplicity and 
 precision, has such complete possession of our standard 
 literature, that no serious change in it can be made without 
 deplorable confusion. Yet various causes have of late 
 created a marked disaffection towards it. However ade- 
 quate it may have been to mark off from each other the 
 modes of thought hitherto prevailing, new states of mind 
 have now arisen of which, we are assured, it gives no 
 accurate account ; on which, indeed, its classification can- 
 not be forced without rudeness and offence. The vocabu- 
 lary of theology which was invented for the exigencies of 
 Christendom, and which provided each of its components 
 and opponents with a fitting name, proves too narrow for 
 our wider knowledge of foreign faiths : as may be plainly 
 seen when, in Buddhism, we come across a religion without 
 a god. Not that we need go to the far East in quest of so 
 strange a phenomenon ; we have only to open a recent 
 volume of a popular monthly review, and we are present at 
 a memorable single combat between Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 and Mr. Frederick Harrison for the prize of the best re- 
 ligion that dispenses with anything Divine. The changes, 
 at first insensible, which have at last affected the meaning 
 of important words in their very essence, and are now de- 
 manding formal recognition, need to be distinctly stated 
 and estimated at the outset of our enquiries.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 Religion, in the old sense above explained, was at once 
 a. mode of thought and a mode of Jg^ljng ; rinr ^*s it, 
 matter to their indissoluble union which of thq two you 
 put into the prior place ; whether you trust first the 
 instinct of intuitive reverence, and see the reality of God 
 emerge as its postulate: or wb^frh***-, *qv<"g fntqllffrfiial ly 
 judged that He is tfrere, yon surrender yourself to the awe 
 and love of that infinite presence. These intense affections, 
 rich in elements of wonder, admiration, reverence, culmin- 
 ate in worship ; and, breaking thus into visible expression, 
 reveal to others the invisible faith to which they insepar- 
 ably belong. It is only our artificial analysis that separates 
 the two, and insists on calling the intellectual side of the fact 
 a theology, the affectional a religion. Thence we lose sight of 
 the fact that they are not two things, any more than the 
 convex and the concave surface of a curve, but only two 
 aspects of the same thing ; and are tempted to think of 
 each as possibly existing without the other, and so to look 
 around us for a religion that may sit apart from all 
 theology. If every awakening of wonder, admiration, or 
 reverence, is to be called Religion, we need not go far to 
 find it ; for in the gaining of knowledge we have the first, 
 in the perception of beauty the second, in the presence of 
 higher character the third. So far as the last is concerned, 
 it may be freely admitted that the sentiment of reverence 
 is really homogeneous, whether it be directed upon simply 
 human excellence far abo\re our own, or upon the highest 
 of all in the absolutely Perfect. It was not without a true 
 feeling that the Latins covered by the single word pietas 
 the venerating affection whence springs the right attitude 
 towards superiors human and divine. Moral attributes, 
 being the same for the whole hierarchy of minds, are of 
 necessity contemplated with feelings not dissimilar, on what- 
 ever part of the scale they are seen ; and it is precisely in 
 the experience and history of the Conscience that (as shown 
 
 B a
 
 4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 in a former exposition of ethical theory *) we find the germ 
 and secret implication of a transcendent piety. 
 
 Of this affinity between the earthly and heavenly forms 
 of inward homage advantage is now taken to persuade us 
 that the essence of Religion is complete in the first alone ; 
 that its theologic crown is a superfluous addition, and 
 that it suffers no fatal loss, though the universe should 
 contain no spiritual being higher than man. There is 
 enough, it is said, in the nobler samples of humanity, in the 
 vindicators of right, in the saviours of nations, the purifiers 
 of private life, the martyrs of truth, to kindle the fervours 
 of aspiration, and bring us to their feet as devotees : and is 
 not this religion ? Nay, a still wider scope is given to the 
 conception, by taking away the moral limits which fix it 
 upon character alone. Beauty also sets the heart aglow 
 with its fascination, and inspires a passionate pursuit, 
 though presented by objects ethically neutral. And the 
 scientific interpretation of the world, the deciphering of 
 order in its dispositions and events, the contemplation of 
 its environing immensity and eternity, attract and subdue 
 the intellectual observer with an indescribable sense of 
 sublime humility. When all these experiences are thrown 
 into one lot, by cancelling their differences, and are set 
 forth as the contents of Religion, it becomes, and is defined, 
 ' Habitual and permanent admiration 2 ,' and retains its 
 august pretensions, on whatever object it may fasten, 
 whether dead or alive. Every form of enthusiasm, be it of 
 Science, of Art, of Morals, thus suffices to constitute a 
 religion 3 , though it should look upon the universe as a 
 mere aggregate of coexisting and successive phenomena 4 , 
 with nothing beyond, within, behind, or before them but 
 still other phenomena ad infinitum. Nor are we to con- 
 
 1 Types of Ethical Theory, vol. II. 
 
 8 Natural Religion, 1882 ; ch. iv. p. 74. 
 
 * Ibid. i. p. 3. * Ibid. iii. p. 45.
 
 INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 sider it any infringement of religion to deny the presence 
 and agency, among these phenomena, of any ordering 
 Mind, and to suppose that self-conscious intelligence and 
 will have first emerged in the development of the human 
 race. Such denial is perfectly consistent with the recogni- 
 tion of Law, i.e. determinate order among phenomena ; and 
 so long as any shred of law remains recognised, religion is 
 saved 1 , though there be no legislator but blind necessity. 
 
 This watering down of the meaning of the word Religion, 
 so as to dilute it to the quality of the thinnest enthusiasm, 
 would be less confusing, if it openly washed away with it 
 and discharged all the theological terms which it empties 
 of significance. But the reader, to his great surprise, is 
 told that this reduced religion is still Theism ; that it is 
 wrong to regard as an atheist one who sees in nature no 
 trace of ordering mind ; and that such a one, in his bare 
 recognition of law or regularity anywhere, still has his God. 
 For, to the man of Science, for whom the cosmos is all in 
 all, the word l God is merely a synonym for nature 2 '; the 
 laws of nature are ' laws of God' ; and in the field of nature 
 he stands as if ' in the presence of an infinite and eternal 
 being,' nay, a ' divine being ' ; so that he is as truly a theist 
 as one who bends down in prayer. There might be some 
 excuse for this paradoxical statement, if its author were 
 dealing with the Poet's personification of nature as an 
 infinite organism, looking with deepest expression into the 
 human soul ; for this conception does really, for the 
 moment, both unify and animate the world, and brighten up 
 its face as with a flash of inner meaning from beneath its 
 form ; and, while this vision lasts, there is a transient 
 immanence of mind with which the seer may commune. 
 But, the assertion is expressly made of that lowest view of 
 nature which, like Comte's, rids the observer of all ideas of 
 causality or power, and resolves the All into phenomena, 
 
 1 Natural Religion, ch. ii. pp. 27, 43. 2 Ibid. iii. p. 45.
 
 6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 related only in time and place, in resemblance and differ- 
 ence, and simply grouped into sets under these heads. 
 The deification of such bundles of facts (and ' laws ' are 
 nothing else), the transference of the name God to the sum 
 of them, the recognition of their study as Theism, involve a 
 degradation of language and a confusion of thought, which 
 are truly surprising in the distinguished author of ' Natural 
 Religion.' The subversion of established meanings for 
 familiar terms is already begun in the very title of his 
 book : by ' Natural Religion ' has hitherto been understood 
 ' what may be known of the invisible God through the things 
 which he has made, even his everlasting power and divinity^-' ; 
 but here it means, instead of the teachings of nature about 
 God, the substitution of nattire for God, the actual dispens- 
 ing from thought of everything but nature, and the attempt 
 to concentrate upon it the affections previously reserved for 
 him: in other words, nature-worship in place of divine 
 worship. If it be true that the title of a book carries in 
 it a virtual promise, it cannot fitly consist of a phrase 
 employed in an unheard-of sense. 
 
 Had the author fully realised what the absolute merging 
 of God in the phenomenal order of the world amounts to, 
 I hardly think he would have made a present of the dialect 
 of theology to the investigator of physical laws. He would 
 then have felt that it was impossible to invent a combina- 
 tion of terms more definitely and unconditionally negativing 
 the possibility of God, than the statement that there is 
 nothing to be known but coexistences and successions of 
 phenomena ; for it were too poor a mockery to hand over 
 the divine name to any assemblage of massed and echeloned 
 phenomena as such. Nature, it is probable, presented 
 itself to the author's imagination not in this bare positivist 
 aspect, of laws without source, of order without idea, of 
 multiplicity without unity of thought, but as the medium 
 
 1 Rom. i. 20.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 in which alone their Source, their Idea, their all-embracing 
 Subject could be sought and approached ; and accordingly 
 he speaks of nature as the ' complete and only manifesta- 
 tion of God ' ; thus, with apparent unconsciousness, contra- 
 dicting his own statement that nature is identical with God ; 
 for the acts and changes which contribute to the mani- 
 festation are not the manifesting subject, but its subservient 
 instrument of expression. If this is so, it is simply the 
 immanence of God in nature, his living energy in its powers, 
 his habits in its steadfast laws, which the author has 
 in view, and on which he dwells as the sole and suffi- 
 cient school of divine knowledge ; in contradistinction from 
 what he repudiates under the name of ' supernaturalism,' 
 i. e. miraculous events supposed to be interpolated, as 
 means of Revelation, in the midst of the regularity of the 
 world. His attention is wholly occupied with the alterna- 
 tive of miracles or laws, as exponents of the ultimate and 
 eternal secret of the universe ; and he never doubts that, 
 on the rejection of the first, he is left alone with the second : 
 that there is no other home where anything sacred can be 
 found ; and that since this is nothing else than the realm of 
 nature, beyond nature, or ' supernatural/ nothing can be. 
 It is a fallacious inference. If we were simply classifying 
 phenomena, certainly the author's bifurcate division would 
 hold good : they must come about either conformably, or 
 inconformably, with some given rule : they would be either 
 natural, or extra-natural : the affirmation of the one would 
 be the negation of the other. But the question whether 
 ' Nature ' (in the sense of all that happens] is indeed the 
 totality of existence, is a question not between one mode 
 of happening and another, but between all happenings and 
 the never-happening whence they come, between the time 
 event and its eternal ground, between the phenomenal sum, 
 from end to end, and the non-phenomenal presence without 
 which they cannot emerge into thought at all. Change
 
 8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 has no meaning, and no possibility, but in relation to the 
 permanent, which is its prior condition ; and pile up as you 
 may your ' coexistent and successive ' mutabilities, that 
 patient eternal abides behind, and receives an everlasting 
 witness from them, whether heeded or unguessed. Here it 
 is, in this intellectual presupposition of any emerging 
 world, this prior condition of the natural, that we meet a 
 persistent ' supernatural,' in the idea of which the very 
 essence of the religious problem lies, and without reference 
 to which the order of nature can tell us of nothing but 
 itself; for God is not there. Nature therefore can never 
 swallow up the supernatural, any more than time can 
 swallow up eternity : they subsist and are intelligible only 
 together ; and nothing can be more mistaken than to treat 
 them as mutually exclusive. It is no hindrance to theology, 
 if the laws of phenomena pursue their undeviating way : it 
 is no hindrance to science, if the laws of nature are laws of 
 God ; the matter of both studies is furnished by the same 
 relation ; only taken up at the opposite ends, so as to render 
 explicit in each case the term which is implicit in the other. 
 But though there is no ' antagonism ' between them, 
 antithesis there certainly is ; and nothing can be more 
 misleading than to say that ' God is merely a synonym for 
 nature.' The attributes of nature are birth, growth, and 
 death ; God can never begin nor cease to be : nature is an 
 aggregate of effects ; God is the universal cause : nature is 
 an assemblage of objects ; God is the infinite Subject of 
 which they are the expression : nature is the organism of 
 intelligibles ; God is the eternal intellect itself. Cut these 
 pairs asunder ; take away the unchangeable, the causality, 
 the manifesting Subject, the originating Thought ; and 
 what is then left is indeed ' Nature,' but, thus bereft and 
 alone, is the negation and not the ' synonym ' of God. And 
 so, I am constrained to deny the antagonism which our 
 author affirms ; and to affirm the antithesis which he denies.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 A further instance of the confusion arising from the pro- 
 posed remoulding of well-defined terms will render our 
 appreciation of it still clearer. As, in order to be a theist, 
 the only condition is that you should, somewhere or other, 
 find a bit of regularity in the succession of events, you 
 would apparently earn the name by listening for thunder 
 after lightning, or throwing paper into the fire to be burned. 
 With the qualifications reduced so low, it would seem hardly 
 possible to escape from the category ; and the search for 
 an atheist becomes, one would think, more hopeless, with 
 even the best of lanterns, than the search of Diogenes for 
 an honest man. Perhaps then this is just the conclusion 
 to which our author intends to lead, viz. that the species 
 being extinct, the name is superseded and may be erased 
 from the language. But no : consistent as this would be, 
 and accordant with the limp tendencies of our age, it is not 
 the course which commends itself to our author. He 
 determines to keep the atheist among survivals still ; but 
 in order to do so, supplies him with a new definition, or 
 set of characteristics by which he may be known. Setting 
 aside the disbelief of order as 'a mere speculative crotchet ' 
 on which it is needless to dwell, he finds ' the real atheism ' 
 not in any opinion, but in a certain form of temper and 
 character. It is ' another name,' he says, 'for feebleness* 
 induced by three causes, viz. (i) by wilfulness, or exaggera- 
 tion of the human efficiency against the resistance of the 
 world ; leading to vain and passionate self-precipitation 
 upon Titanic enterprises barred by fate and ending in 
 destruction : (2) by excessive caution, that, for want of 
 acquaintance with nature's larger laws, ventures no step 
 beyond the range of partial or proximate experience, and 
 is paralysed by the hidden power of the universe : (3) by 
 the cynical mood incident to a crumbling faith and a 
 decaying Church, passing through the stages of anxious 
 doubt, of compromised sincerity, of conventional conformity,
 
 10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of mutual distrust among associates, till all secure anchor- 
 age is lost, and the life drifts at the mercy of the currents 
 and the winds 1 . These several states of mind are finely 
 described and illustrated ; and if by ' feebleness ' be meant 
 any kind of failure, all may be accepted as examples of it ; 
 though it is evident that in the first case, of the presumptuous 
 impoiens, the failure is due to baffled energy, while in that 
 of the over-circumspect, it is due to defective energy, to 
 which alone the word ' feeble ' properly applies. But what, 
 except in the third case, have they to do with Atheism ? 
 Is every rash man who dares what is beyond his strength, 
 and is struck down by superior force, an atheist ? and also 
 every timid man, who underrates his possibilities, and keeps 
 within the safe enclosure of petty things ? Is this the 
 classification which we must make of the Polish nation, 
 adduced by the author as his instance of the first ; and of 
 the Mahommedans, who are his representatives of the 
 second ? Is it that the author, identifying God with 
 Nature, looks upon every distrust or misplaced trust of the 
 laws of nature as tantamount to blindness towards God ? 
 Then, till the whole of nature on which action and character 
 are based is read through and through, all would be 
 atheists together ; for, short of this, the condition is not 
 reached of that accurate prediction, which excludes temerity 
 and timidity alike. Atheism, no doubt, is ' feeble ' ; and 
 the heroisms which illuminate the course of history and 
 regenerate the life of nations are, for the most part, the 
 products and embodiment of Faith ; and this is doubtless 
 the antithesis which was present to our author's mind. 
 But it is one thing to say that atheism is feeble ; it is 
 another, that feebleness is atheism ; and the attempt to 
 disparage and spoil the word as the name of a theological 
 denial, yet save it as the designation of a certain type of 
 
 1 Natural Religion, ch. ii. pp. 27-35.
 
 INTRODUCTION. II 
 
 moral character and disposition, forfeits what we want for 
 the sake of what we can well spare. 
 
 On the whole, then, I cannot reconcile myself to the 
 proposed rhetorical extension of the word Religion, with 
 all the altered meanings which it involves for the connected 
 group of terms. The motives which recommend the sug- 
 gested change deserve, no doubt, acknowledgment and 
 sympathy. On the one hand, it is a pathetic thing to see 
 how hard it is for the human soul to let its religion go ; to 
 watch how those who, from loss of the infinite Father, find 
 themselves in an orphaned universe, would fain attempt 
 compensation by worshipping either each other, or even, 
 while its sacred look yet lingers, the mere scene where he 
 was, and persuade themselves that it is still the same piety, 
 though they stand alone and no one reads their heart or 
 hears their orisons. On the other hand, it is a generous 
 impulse which leads large-minded men, themselves perhaps 
 emerging from terrible crises of thought, to be tender 
 towards like sufferers, and make the least rather than the 
 most of the still doubtful issue. The hatred of denuncia- 
 tion and anathema, the desire to diffuse a calm clear air 
 and a sweet light through the halls of controversy, so that 
 the scientist from his observatory and the artist from his 
 studio may enter them without sense of repulsive change, 
 the fear of letting an utter alienation grow up between the 
 intellectual and the spiritual elements of modern civilisa- 
 tion, are laudable and reasonable pleas for a quiet docility 
 and modest respect in settling the relations between know- 
 ledge and religion. The broader the common ground 
 which you can define, the better ; provided you do not 
 lay down upon your map a territory which no traveller can 
 discover and no foot has ever trod. That however is an 
 irremovable condition, which no catholicity of temper can 
 charm from its place. The disputes between science and 
 faith can no more be closed by inventing 'religions of
 
 I a 1NTROD UCTION. 
 
 culture,' than the boundary quarrels of nations by setting 
 up neutral provinces in the air. 
 
 Heartily as I would welcome the enthusiasms for know- 
 ledge and for art, as well as for Right, into the circle of 
 religious affinities, and recognise in their noblest repre- 
 sentatives an inspiration akin to that of genuine piety ; 
 emphatically therefore as I deny that there is any un- 
 congeniality between the modern culture and the ancient 
 sanctities, I yet must hold that, in the order of dependence, 
 these minor forms of devoutness hang upon the major ; 
 and that if we are to give them a home in the widened 
 category of Religion, it must be as children of the house 
 and not as wielding its supreme authority. Their functions 
 are sacred, because concerned with a universe already con- 
 secrate by a Divine presence, gleaming through all its 
 order and loveliness : suppose its inner meaning gone, let 
 its truth be only useful and its beauty only pleasant, and 
 would any lofty genius be taken captive by them, and 
 bow before them? Rightly enough are the man of science 
 and the true artist called ministering priests of nature : 
 but this they could not be, unless nature were a temple 
 filled with God. If there be no sanctuary and no Shekinah 
 there, there is no inner meaning for them to interpret ; 
 and the account of it is complete in the measure of its 
 proportions and the inventory of its contents. If you 
 place me face to face, not with an infinite living spirit, 
 but only with what is called ' the Great Necessity* what 
 ' enthusiasm ' do you expect the vision to excite ? Can 
 there be a more paralysing spectacle? and shall I fling 
 myself with passionate devotion into the arms of that 
 ghastly physical giant ? It is impossible : homage to an 
 automaton-universe is no better than mummy-worship 
 would be to one who has known what it is to love and 
 trust, and embrace the living friend. In short, a human 
 soul so placed would itself be higher than aught it knows
 
 INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 within the immensity, and could worship nothing there 
 without idolatry. Even if it turns its gaze within instead 
 of without, and, conscious of its littleness, forms the pre- 
 conception of more knowledge, of purer beauty, of larger 
 and deeper goodness, still, though it looks up to these, it 
 is but as possibilities for itself, and not as the eternal 
 realities of the universe, the law of its laws, the light of 
 its loveliness, the pledge of its ends ; and, amid all the 
 sickly talk about ' ideals ' which has become the common- 
 place of our age, it is well to remember that, so long 
 as they are dreams of future possibility, and not faiths 
 in present realities, so long as they are a mere self-painting 
 of the yearning spirit, and not its personal surrender to 
 immediate communion with an Infinite Perfection, they 
 have no more solidity or steadiness than floating air- 
 bubbles, gay in the sunshine, and broken by the passing 
 wind. You do not so much as touch the threshold of 
 religion, so long as you are detained by the phantoms of 
 your thought : the very gate of entrance to it, the moment 
 of its new birth, is the discovery that your gleaming ideal 
 is the everlasting Real, no transient brush of a fancied 
 angel wing, but the abiding presence and persuasion of 
 the Soul of souls : short of this there is no object given 
 you, and you have not even reached the specified point 
 of ' admiration' Within the limits of pure sincerity, no 
 one can worship either a nature beneath him or an idea 
 within him : however big may be the one, though it 
 comprise all forces and all stars, if that be all, it will be 
 venerable to no spirit that can comprehend it ; and how- 
 ever fine may be the other, if it be but a dreamer's image, 
 a phenomenon of perishable consciousness, it can never be 
 more than the personality that has it, so as to make him 
 its suppliant. 
 
 The definition of religion as 'habitual and permanent 
 admiration ' can hardly be intended for any rigorous appli-
 
 14 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 cation. Like the frequent identification in devotional 
 literature of all goodness with Love, it forgets to take 
 account of the object on which the feeling is directed, and 
 on the worth of which the whole character and place of 
 the feeling depend. To love amiss is no evidence of 
 goodness ; and it is possible so to admire as to contradict 
 the very essence of religion. Is there any more ' habitual 
 and permanent admiration' than that of the handsome 
 fop the Beau Brummel or Count d'Orsay of his day 
 for his own person, as he stands before the mirror ; and 
 he is only a more visible example of many varieties of 
 self-complacency and self-homage equally sincere ; and 
 surely no temper of mind is more utterly closed against 
 the tender reverence and abnegating service which religion 
 inspires. It would therefore be necessary, if this definition 
 were not relinquished, to stipulate that the object of 
 admiration should be something other than ourselves. 
 That condition is no doubt fulfilled by the Positivists' 
 calendar, which gathers into one view the nobles and 
 martyrs of history, and leaves no day of the year without 
 its tribute of celebration ; and I shall not challenge the 
 right of this commemorative discipline to call itself 
 a ' religion of humanity.' It does rest essentially upon 
 reverent affection, not, on the whole, unwisely and un- 
 worthily directed ; and if it were possible for human souls 
 to illuminate and uphold each other, without any central 
 orb to give them their reflected light and determine their 
 dependent paths, this ritual might be something more than 
 a melancholy mimicry of a higher conception. But place 
 it beside the Catholic constellation of the saints ; and 
 though its component stars are often of greater magnitude, 
 you see at once that, as a whole, it is a minor worship 
 made grotesque by being thrust into the place of the 
 Supreme. Its attitude is retrospective, gazing into the 
 Night of ages gone : the other has its face to the east, and
 
 INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 anticipates the dawn : it is a requiem for the dead ; the 
 other is a communion with the ever-living, an anthem in 
 tune with a choir invisible : it anxiously seeks and puts 
 together the doubtful traits and broken features of figures 
 irrecoverably lost ; the other only waits a little while for 
 the venerated teacher or the dear saint to be the com- 
 panion that shall die no more. The secret dependence of 
 all satellite forms of piety upon the grander, and at last 
 upon the solar attraction, cannot be slighted without the 
 fatal collapse of every problem we attempt Guard your 
 canonisations as you may, take only the fairest specimens 
 of character where it seems to blossom into all the virtues, 
 cull and combine them with blameless skill, yet they are 
 memorials of what was and is not, and make but a funeral 
 wreath borrowed from one grave to be cast upon another. 
 
 The author of 'Natural Religion' earnestly desires to 
 heal the breach between what is called the 'culture' of 
 our time and the inherited faith with which it seems so 
 little congenial It is a noble aim, worked out with im- 
 pressive persuasion and illustrated by episodes of the finest 
 criticism. With his main purpose, and with the greater 
 part of his subsidiary estimates of history and literature, 
 I go with enthusiastic assent. But against the essential 
 principle of his method, viz. that the anti-theological notions 
 being accepted as facts and left as they are, lodgings shall 
 be found for them within the vocabulary of religion, so 
 that each leading term shall mean what it has hitherto 
 repudiated and be at a loss for its own antithesis, I cannot 
 but seriously protest A God that is merely nature, 
 a Theism without God, a Religion forfeited only by the 
 'nil admirari,' can never reconcile the secular and the 
 devout, the Pagan and the Christian mind. You vainly 
 propose an dpr\viK.ov by corruption of a word The moment 
 the device is put to the test, the antipathic elements which 
 you have brought together spring asunder with more
 
 1 6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 aversion than ever. Can you expect, for instance, that 
 one to whom the whole essence of religion consists in 
 conscious personal relations with a Divine Spirit, and who 
 cannot live apart from that ever-present Friend, should 
 consent to reduce this experience to a secondary position, 
 and feel still a religious fellowship with his neighbour who 
 deems it all a dream ? The most you can demand is that 
 each should respect the conscientious belief of the other, 
 and refrain from expressed or implied reproach. But the 
 alienation of sympathy is inevitable ; and, resting upon 
 real differences, is beyond the reach of verbal fusion. 
 
 For these reasons, I retain the old meanings of the chief 
 theologic terms, and decline to loosen their precision ; and 
 by Religion I understand the belief and worship of Supreme 
 Mind and Will, directing the universe and holding moral 
 relations with human life. This I state as its essence ; 
 but whatever this essence may either necessarily carry as 
 a consequence, or, with the collateral aid of other evidence, 
 may justify us in accepting as true, will also find its place 
 under the category of religion. 
 
 II. WHY ETHICS BEFORE RELIGION. 
 
 The enquiries on which we are now entering have been 
 preceded l by a treatment of ethical theory, the results of 
 which will here be assumed as known. This order of 
 exposition undoubtedly implies that I do not regard moral 
 rules as depending upon prior religious belief ; and that I 
 do regard the consciousness of duty as an originating con- 
 dition of religion. In adopting this order, however, I do 
 not mean to set up one exclusive source for the faiths and 
 worships of mankind ; or to contradict any enquirer who 
 may trace their genesis to the ' idea of the infinite, 1 or the 
 1 sense of absolute dependence,' or the startling impressions 
 
 1 In Types of Ethical Theory, two vols. 1885.
 
 INT ROD UCTION. 1 7 
 
 of external nature, or the memory of ancestors, or the 
 images of dreams. In the absence of any experience 
 which can test such hypotheses, they must remain specula- 
 tions neither verified nor disproved ; and the chief objec- 
 tion to them is, that the advocate of each is apt to claim 
 the whole phenomenon as his own, and to suppose that his 
 favourite source must be the only one. This is an un- 
 warrantable assumption. Nothing forbids us to recognise 
 in our nature more causes than one of the beliefs and 
 affections embodied in worship ; and the strongly con- 
 trasted types of creed, mythology and ritual, which have 
 coexisted in the world, are more simply accounted for by 
 distinct initiation than by divergent development. As I do 
 not wish to ' speak evil of dignities/ I will not disparage 
 the resources of the so-called ' science of religions ' for ulti- 
 mately determining this question. But meanwhile we have 
 some psychological knowledge of the springs and varieties 
 of religious conception in ourselves ; and there seems no 
 reason why we should neglect to consult these indications 
 of experience as to the lines of tendency that pass from 
 our own nature to feel after the Divine. If we live in 
 union or affinity with God at all, it must be in several 
 relations, not in one alone ; for our being is complex, and 
 must touch his at every point We suffer, we think, we 
 will ; what we feel is the pressure of his laws ; what we 
 know is the order of his reality ; what we choose is from 
 his possibilities : and how can there fail to be a path to 
 him from the sensitive, the intellectual, and the moral 
 passages of our history? 
 
 If however the first of these were there alone, we should 
 indeed be his creatures, but know it not : the dependent 
 relation would be complete, yet in the dark to us, as to 
 any animal that shares it with us. Not till the second 
 function comes upon the scene, and we are set up as self- 
 distinguishing subjects, does the first function step into 
 
 VOL. I. C
 
 1 8 I NT ROD UCTION. 
 
 the light, and show us what we feel ; and with this self- 
 conscious reading of our own experience comes the dis- 
 covery of its order and the conception of its cause. If the 
 experience which we contemplate is only that which we 
 passively receive, either from without or from the instinc- 
 tive forces within, we shall be aware of ourselves simply as 
 parts of nature, just as the sheep upon the hills would do, 
 if they could see themselves in the mirror of reflection. 
 Of such a nature the Reason would find an adequate cause 
 in a simply thinking Necessity, turning out idea into being 
 at each step of consecutive inference ; and behind or with- 
 in the phenomena nothing would be recognised as opera- 
 tive but a conscious immensity of Science, the archetype 
 of the system registered in visible characters throughout 
 space, and now construed back into thought by man. 
 Such a conception would certainly fall under the category 
 of Religion ; but would barely save its essence, presented in 
 the leanest condition, without any resource for investing it 
 with fresh plenitude or grace. The defect can be removed 
 only by quitting these side-chapels of our inner temple and 
 resorting to the high altar of our Moral experience. There, 
 a new type of relation bursts upon us. It is only as Objects 
 in the known world that we are parts of nature : only as 
 disposed of by it that it can claim us : but, as Subjects that 
 know it, as Agents that withstand and conquer it, deter- 
 mining its course this way rather than that, we are not of 
 it, but above it, not in the chain of its effects, but tran- 
 scending their position as a Cause ; for it is absurd to say 
 that one of the phenomena known can be the knower of 
 them all, that one of the necessitated links can have free 
 choice of what shall follow from itself. In the moral con- 
 sciousness therefore there enters a kind of dependence on 
 the universal Cause unfelt before ; a dependence not for 
 what we have to suffer, or are driven to do, but for what 
 lines of self-determination it is open to us to take ; our
 
 INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 datum is not a factor already settled for us, but an alterna- 
 tive left to be settled by ourselves : the conditions are 
 given : the solution is to be found. We are thus partners 
 in the transaction ; not in servitude, as tools or creatures 
 wielded by another hand, but taken into counsel, with the 
 adoption of sons. Such investiture with selective power 
 introduces at once relations of trust, of living affection, of 
 possible sympathy, of possible alienation : the Divine pro- 
 poser of the choice makes no secret of his own preference ; 
 but in order that, on becoming ours as well, it may consti- 
 tute a true spiritual tie uniting us with him, he refrains 
 from imposing it as inevitable, and would have us make it 
 our own by unconstrained assent. It is out of the vast 
 enrichment which these conceptions add to the inner con- 
 tents of life in its contact with Divine things that Religion 
 gains its deepest problems and its intensest power : that 
 both God and man emerge into thought as something 
 more than nature : that the Science which knows the 
 actual ceases to be supreme, and becomes ancillary to the 
 insight which anticipates the possible : that Righteousness 
 ascends to the throne in heaven, and Duty is owned as 
 sacred upon earth. Hence it is that Ethics must be treated 
 before Religion : not that they are an absolute condition 
 of its beginning : not that they always involve it as their 
 end ; but that they implicitly contain the resources whence 
 Religion, in the higher form which alone we can practi- 
 cally care to test, derives its availing characteristics, its 
 difficulties, and its glories. 
 
 The points of interconnection between Ethics and Re- 
 ligion are perhaps most clearly seen when we try to realize 
 what each would be when set up for itself apart from the 
 other. Theism may undoubtedly announce itself as a 
 purely ontological doctrine, justified by the impossibility 
 of a universe of phenomena, without some substantive 
 being whence they proceed ; and though philosophers 
 
 C 2
 
 20 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 have sometimes been content to identify that substantive 
 being with matter, the cosmical order has usually led to 
 the recognition of an intellectual power as the disposer 
 and sustainer of the universal frame. Whether regarded 
 as standing to the world in the relation of substance to 
 attribute, or in that of Designer to his product, such a being 
 needs nothing to fulfil these conditions but thought and 
 power. He either lays down laws of coexistence and suc- 
 cession, or evolves them from his own essence, and sets in 
 order the catena of means for their unswerving execution. 
 If, among the creatures ruled by these laws, we were on 
 the field, with all our present capacities except the con- 
 sciousness of moral distinction in our impulses ; if then we 
 discovered that this neutrality of ours was not shared by 
 our Maker, and that, in order to encourage in us one set of 
 affections rather than another, he had attached pleasures 
 to the former and pains to the latter ; this knowledge 
 would undoubtedly make it our wisdom to conform to his 
 purpose, just as it is wiser -to take a profit rather than incur 
 a loss : but should we be conscious of any guilt in doing 
 otherwise ? should we have gone against anything but our 
 own interests and a superior power? Clearly not. We 
 should have no answer to one who pointed out our impru- 
 dence ; but, if he charged us with sin, we could only reply 
 'We know not what you mean.' Where the grotmd of a 
 command is present only to the legislator's mind and has 
 no place in the natures on which the law is imposed, the 
 requirement remains arbitrary, and the obedience external ; 
 that obedience expresses no character, beyond mere pru- 
 dence ; nor can a government of living beings conducted 
 on this method alone ever much transcend in its results 
 the movements of a flock of sheep driven by the shepherd's 
 dogs. Religion then, as the bare belief in Divine omnipo- 
 tence administering universal law, cannot institute a Duty 
 or provide us with a possibility of Morals : the ' sanctions '
 
 INT ROD UCTION. 2 1 
 
 of happiness and misery, though magnified to infinity and 
 prolonged to eternity, are in themselves unavailing to dis- 
 tinguish the angels of heaven from those of hell, except as 
 the wise from the foolish virgins. Without an internal 
 enactment in the soul, to which the external mandate 
 brings its appeal, the consciousness of Right is impossible, 
 'and the human world is susceptible of government only as 
 a menagerie. 
 
 Take the converse case, and observe the difference. If 
 we start from our own psychological experience alone, 
 without assumption or speculation respecting the universe 
 around, we meet there, at a very early stage, with ethical 
 elements, involving the idea and furnishing the rule of 
 duty. Childhood itself, small as are its concerns, is full of 
 its moral enthusiasms and indignations, quick with its 
 shame and compunction, bright with its self-approval ; and 
 with all its heedlessness betrays every day the inner work- 
 ing and the eager growth of Conscience. This order of 
 feeling, personal and sympathetic, does not wait for the 
 lessons of the religious instructor and the conception of the 
 universe as under Divine administration : on the contrary, 
 it is the condition on which such teaching depends for its 
 efficacy ; and is present, where no theological sequel is 
 ever appended to it. The profound sense of the authority 
 and even sacredness of the moral law is often conspicuous 
 among men whose thoughts apparently never turn to 
 superhuman things, but who are penetrated by a secret 
 worship of honour, truth, and right. Were this noble state 
 of mind brought out of its impulsive state and made to 
 unfold its implicit contents, it would indeed (as I have 
 endeavoured elsewhere to show) reveal a source higher 
 than human nature for the august authority of righteous- 
 ness. But it is undeniable that that authority may be felt, 
 where it is not seen, felt as if it were the mandate of a 
 Perfect Will, while yet there is no overt recognition of such
 
 22 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Will : i. e. conscience may act as human, before it is dis- 
 covered to be divine. To the agent himself its whole his- 
 tory may seem to lie in his own personality and his visible 
 social relations ; and it shall nevertheless serve as his 
 oracle, though it be hid from him who it is that utters it. 
 The moral consciousness, while thus pausing short of its 
 complete development, fulfils the conditions of responsible 
 life, and makes character real and the virtues possible. 
 Ethics therefore have practical existence and. operation 
 prior to any explicit religious belief: the law of right is 
 inwoven with the very tissue of our nature, and throbs in 
 the movements of our experience ; and cannot be escaped 
 by anyone till he can fly from himself. Did we even 
 imagine that we came out of nothing, and went back into 
 nothing, and had ties only with one another, still, so long 
 as we are what we are, our life must take form from its 
 own germ, and grow and ramify into moral common- 
 wealths. 
 
 Do not these statements, however, threaten religion with a 
 very startling humiliation ? If it is incapable of creating 
 morals, and if morals are secure of themselves and can 
 dispense with it, what function remains for it? What 
 affinity associates the two agencies? And in what di- 
 rection does the passage lie, along which influence may 
 flow from the one to the other ? 
 
 i. The simply ethical conscience, with its intuition of 
 what ought to be beyond anything that is, has contact with a 
 mystery to which it conforms without consciously quitting 
 the ground of commonplace. To be blind to any solemn 
 significance in this experience is to carry an arrested 
 humanity. If this ought is a fact, it is a very curious 
 one : it is not, like other facts, in Time ; it is no pheno- 
 menon, past or present : it has never been seen or other- 
 wise perceived : it is predicable of no actual existence : it 
 is no objective property : nor is there any nameable
 
 INTRODUCTION. 23 
 
 category of empirical reality under which it can be 
 brought It can be affirmed of nothing that comes as 
 a link in the chain of necessary sequence ; but only of 
 a possibility, where more than one is present. It refers 
 therefore only to the future and uncreated, that is still 
 determinable py some free will. It is not the agent's fore- 
 sight of what will be ; nor is it anything of his own making, 
 which he can unmake or alter. Nor is it information, 
 passing from the knowing to the ignorant ; it is command- 
 ment, speaking in the imperative, and instantly owned as a 
 perfect word, coming whence sovereign tones have a right 
 to flow. Hence there is no sincere power to challenge that 
 peremptory voice : the whole personality secretly kneels 
 before it. Here then is revealed not simply the thought 
 of one mind, but the relation between two ; both, the seat 
 of the same conscious moral order ; the one, its infinite 
 Archetype, the other, the finite image, made susceptible of 
 appeal and of response. Till the peculiarity of the moral 
 consciousness is thus followed out to its natural issue in 
 religion, it environs us with a haunting realm of possibilities, 
 with ' ideals ' of righteousness, which indefinitely grow, and 
 oppress us with a quasi-infinitude, wholly unsecured as any- 
 thing more than a subjective vision that may be baulked 
 of all reality. There is a stage in the history of the 
 conscience, when it reaches its fulness of feeling without 
 yet being new-born into faith ; and it can no longer be 
 content with the plainness of the near duty and the little 
 zone of light at hand, through pressure of an infinite but 
 dark horizon of the unattained closing in upon it from 
 beyond. Stunted natures may stop short of this stage, and 
 be complacent with their good habits : else, the mystery, 
 once felt, must not rest idly upon the heart ; for, while it 
 merely broods with its dead weight, it becomes either a 
 helpless sense of sin or a hopeless reverie of aspiration : 
 how can the lonely human will lift ' this mountain ' and
 
 24 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 'cast it into the sea'? But, as soon as the other side of 
 the relation is apprehended, the loneliness ceases : ' Lo ! 
 God is here, and I knew it not ' ; the vision of Perfection is 
 no dream ; and the tremulous purpose has an infinite ally. 
 The self-strain is exchanged for self-surrender ; and the 
 hovering cloud of possibilities which covered the soul with 
 gloom bursts into heavenly light. We may compare the 
 change, under some variation in the analogy, with that 
 which Kant 1 describes as subsisting between the aspect 
 which life would have for us if our nature came to an end 
 with the data of Sense and Understanding, and that which 
 it actually presents to us, as modified by the additional 
 faculty of Reason. Limited to the narrower endowment, 
 we should be wholly engaged in the apprehension and 
 ordering of phenomena and their laws, and should be 
 content with these, and from the absence of any ideas 
 beyond, should treat them as our world. That world, 
 however, by decree of nature itself, is only an island, 
 though it is for us the sole seat of experience, where we 
 measure the definite things that exist or happen, so as to 
 build up Sciences ; yet Reason no sooner visits us, than we 
 find it lying in the midst of a vast ocean, whose waves for 
 ever break upon the shore, and on whose expanse loom 
 mysterious objects that may be habitable lands, or mere 
 cloud-banks, or melting ice. It is the boundless girdle 
 of the possible that thus embraces all our actual : the 
 murmuring and unresting deep of what may be and ought 
 to be ; and from the moment of its opening upon our view 
 we long to navigate it and bring home reports of what lies 
 within or beyond it ; nor do repeated failures avail to 
 quench the inextinguishable hope. Though Kant deemed 
 the exploration impossible to the Speculative Reason, 
 what he had dismissed as its illusions he received back 
 
 1 Krit. der reinen Vernunft. Rosenkranz und Schubert, ii. 196.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 25 
 
 as realities on the authority of the Practical Reason ; so 
 that I do him no violence if, neglecting his obsolete division 
 of faculties, I treat his transcendent world as not inac- 
 cessible to rational belief; and then we may apply his 
 illustration strictly to the development of the conscience. 
 It is no doubt possible, so long as it is shut up within the 
 routine of life, for it to remain quite unaware of any 
 relations beyond this circle, and work within it as a 
 complete and rounded whole ; but, when the moral eye 
 loses the films of habit and attains to spiritual vision, the 
 life of present duty reveals itself as an insular element of 
 a more comprehensive sphere, and assures us of boundless 
 affinities and a communion unseen. Ethics therefore, on 
 their outer margin, bring us face to face with the momentous 
 question, whether their supreme intimations are verifiable, 
 and their relations eternal. 
 
 2. If this question is decided in the negative, not only 
 is the passage into religion cut off as illusory, but the 
 retreat back within the shelter of simple authoritative 
 Morals is rendered impossible. The life of conscience 
 may be one either of childlike trust, or of divine insight ; 
 but to quit the first, and fail of the second, is to become 
 an exile and a wanderer. Ask for no credentials, and you 
 will have clear guidance : scrutinise its imperial claims, 
 and persuade yourself that they are ultra vires, and you 
 will listen to them only where they are within the limits of 
 your wish. A sovereign title must either be perfect, or 
 good for nothing ; and against a detected pretender there 
 can be no high treason. If, on close inspection, you find 
 in your moral consciousness nothing to excuse the por- 
 tentous tones in which it speaks ; if you attribute their 
 impressiveness to the survival of a misplaced trust or an 
 early superstition, you will resent it as a cheat, and set to 
 work to rationalize and reduce your code. There is but 
 one result possible. If, among the acts of the will, there is
 
 26 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 for you no better and worse per se, if right wins no alle- 
 giance from you on its own account, and you will insist on 
 discovering some other quality that makes it right, you 
 have bespoken your place in the school of Epicurus ; for 
 sentient good and moral good make up together all that 
 is eligible in human life ; and when once you treat the 
 second as dependent, it becomes of necessity a satellite 
 of the first. Hence it is that Ethics must either perfect 
 themselves in religion, or disintegrate themselves into 
 Hedonism ; and that there is an inevitable gravitation 
 in all anti-theological thinkers to the ' greatest happiness ' 
 doctrine. The attempts to construct intermediate theories 
 have only shown, by their instability, the irresistible logical 
 tendency to the single line of cleavage, which puts religious 
 thought on the one side, and the eudaemonist on the other. 
 Should then Kant's great ocean either prove to be an in- 
 hospitable waste, or, defying our courage and skill to cross, 
 refuse to tell us what sunnier lands and ampler skies may 
 spread beyond, it will only remain for us to return inland, 
 out of hearing of its waves, and raise what fruits we can 
 from our island's scanty soil, asking no more from our 
 span of space and time than to minimise its ill. 
 
 3. If, on the other hand, the question is decided in the 
 affirmative, and the infinite seas are ours no less than the 
 rocky nest which they embrace ; if the voices heard in the 
 soul come to it on winds that cross the deep, and do 
 indeed tell of an everlasting sympathy with the faithful 
 and disinterested will ; if our action alone is tied to this 
 spot, but our love is at home either here or there, the 
 whole spirit and character of Duty becomes transformed. 
 It was not indeed a hard necessity before, yielded-to simply 
 because we mtist ; for instead of being reluctant it was self- 
 accepted, adopted with assent, because we ought ; but still 
 there was a weight to lift ; we had to remove out of the 
 way another wish ; and in the felt imperative which de-
 
 INTRODUCTION. 27 
 
 manded this there was a mystery which made its power 
 seem to issue from the dark. It was a sacred cloud, without 
 form or living feature, which approached us and uttered a 
 bidding as it passed ; and we obeyed, with reverence for 
 we knew not what. Now, this impersonal pressure breaks 
 its secret, and avows itself as the persuasive warning of 
 One who would have us 'holy as He is holy'; and not 
 only is this new vision equivalent to the apparition of the 
 universe unveiled, but the response which conforms to it 
 springs forth with the free enthusiasm of personal affection, 
 unburdened by any weight. If the moral consciousness be, 
 in very truth, a communion between the Divine and the 
 human mind, it remains inchoate and one-sided only so 
 long as God's part in it is unseen ; the moment the mists 
 are gone, it completes itself in the conscious answer of 
 the worshipper ; and the relation, which was always in 
 existence, is now reciprocal in thought. Prior to this 
 crowning recognition, the life of the faithful soul is the 
 life of Law, shrinking from the forbidden ill, and compell- 
 ing itself to the ordered good, not indeed from servile fears, 
 not perhaps without a certain zeal for some favourite con- 
 viction or abstract cause, but aided only by the limited 
 dynamics of rigid conscientiousness and truth to itself. 
 But with the opening of the heavens, a great redemption 
 comes, and by presenting an infinite object of personal 
 affection, converts the life of Duty into the life of Love, 
 and reinforces the individual will by the ' Spirit that beareth 
 witness with our spirit, that we are children of God.' The 
 point of contact between Ethics and Religion is thus 
 analogous to that between the bondage of the Law and 
 the freedom of the Gospel. 
 
 4. When through this point of contact the transition 
 has been effected to the spiritual life, the moral world has 
 gained an immense expansion. The rule of right, the 
 symmetries of character, the requirements of perfection, are
 
 28 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 no provincialisms of this planet : they are known among 
 the stars : they reign beyond Orion and the Southern 
 Cross : they are wherever the universal Spirit is ; and no 
 subject mind, though it fly on one track for ever, can 
 escape beyond their bounds. Just as the arrival of light 
 from deeps that extinguish parallax bears witness to the 
 same ether there that vibrates here, and its spectrum 
 reports that one chemistry spans the interval, so does the 
 law of righteousness spring from its earthly base and 
 embrace the empire of the heavens, the moment it becomes 
 a communion between the heart of man and the life of 
 God. Not only does it thus pass, as already pointed out, 
 from our ' ideal ' to the veritable real, but the reality it 
 wins is stupendous in its scale, planted in the seats and 
 following in the paths of all self-conscious spirits, coex- 
 tensive with the Divine free agency. By such identifi- 
 cation with the all-originating mind, it no less declares 
 itself eternal than omnipresent : inherent in his essence, 
 and therefore objectively put forth and instituted by his 
 Will, for the assimilation of dependent and growing 
 spirits to his own. The emergence of the dutiful relations 
 into these dimensions is surely no slight change : it makes 
 a difference whether the conscience is listened to as the 
 wayside notice of a village oracle, or as a living voice from 
 the sacrarium of the universe. And only when the true 
 hierarchy of the affections has set into this sublimer form, 
 will the character cease to be fluid, and show the stead- 
 fastness of the martyr, with a stature more than human 
 and a sweetness like that of Christ. Is there any en- 
 thusiasm of goodness that can be excessive or unnatural 
 in those who realise what it is to be, in very truth, 
 ' children of God ' ? If, as a native of Tarsus, the Apostle 
 could not help saying with a glow of pride that he was ' a 
 citizen of no mean city/ how is it possible, without a flush 
 of higher joy, for anyone to know himself a denizen of the
 
 INTRODUCTION. 39 
 
 city and commonwealth of God ? a community whose 
 service is simple righteousness, and whose patriotism inex- 
 tinguishable love of perfection. 
 
 5- One further result springs up at the point where 
 Ethics become transcendent and constitute the relation 
 between man and God. The world is thenceforward 
 conceived as under moral administration, and natural 
 law is expected to bear trace of a moral idea. In a being 
 recognised as the central impersonation of righteousness it 
 is impossible to suppose it subordinate to anything else : 
 from their very nature all moral ends must yield to the 
 ascendency of the moral conditions. Hence the religion of 
 conscience goes to the great order of nature with the pre- 
 conception that all its dispositions will be compatible with 
 justice and beneficence, treating no sentient creature with 
 cruelty, and all responsible agents according to their 
 deserts. Under this preconception, attention would par- 
 ticularly fix on the allotment of pleasure and pain ; for 
 chiefly through them is it possible to give proportionate 
 expression to the approval or disapproval of a judicial 
 mind. What then is the general impression left by this 
 new outlook upon the world ? Without entering as yet 
 into the interior of its problems, it is well to notice at least 
 whereabouts they lie. 
 
 A certain portion of the good and evil of life answers 
 well, in its distribution, to the moral anticipation, and falls 
 where it is deserved. Besides the anguish of remorse, 
 which is directly incident to guilt, the miseries of unhappy 
 temper and ill-will, of alienation from others, of failure and 
 despondency, of perplexity and ennui, are all referable to 
 ethical disorder in the mind : nor is there any human 
 instinct or affection which can either yield its own place or 
 arrogate another's, without inducing the pangs and weak- 
 ness of distortion. Of the physical disturbances of our 
 well-being, an incalculable proportion is incurred by self-
 
 30 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 indulgence and the waste of energy which it entails and 
 perhaps transmits ; and even of unsuspected disasters the 
 causal ignorance is often wilful, though the intentions be 
 clear. Through the whole range of these self-incurred penal- 
 ties, the inner moral sense and the outer divine sense are in 
 accord, and the thought secreted in the constitution of 
 things seems but the echo or the original of our own. And 
 great is the gain when some large lot of pain, that would 
 else torture our sympathies by its aspect of indifference or 
 cruelty, comes to be thus touched with new and ideal 
 meanings which lift it at once into a higher plane, as an 
 instrument of the sublimest end. If only this end, the 
 realizing of absolute justice and the beatification of perfect 
 character, can be similarly shown to swallow up all the 
 remaining sufferings of the known world, the moral idea, in 
 becoming transcendent, will have proved adequate to all 
 demands, and the pessimist, having received his answer, 
 may be requested to retire. 
 
 It is by no means possible, however, to transfer the 
 entire residue of painful experiences from the class of 
 purely sensitive to that of ethical phenomena. Not all 
 diseases, not all incapacities, are self-induced, or even visited 
 upon ancestral sins. Convulsions of the earth's crust, the 
 sweep of the tornado over sea and land, the baffling sur- 
 prises of drought and frost and flood, and many another 
 startling event, which may be regularities in nature, are 
 yet unearned catastrophes for man ; and all the attempts 
 to bring them, under the name of 'judgments,' into the 
 moral category, are too futile to need reply. The boundary 
 line between the responsible and irresponsible classes of 
 experience may no doubt be plausibly shifted a little this 
 way or that ; but that a large territory will anyhow remain 
 where the Law of Right does not appoint the executive, is 
 beyond dispute. What account may reasonably be given 
 of its facts will be in due time considered : at present I
 
 INTRODUCTION, 31 
 
 would only point out that here we find the religious 
 function of the moral consciousness at the end of its re- 
 sources ; it has no competency beyond. This limit against 
 which it strikes in no way impairs its validity in its previous 
 application ; it leaves its authority untouched within its 
 own proper bounds ; it simply marks its inadequacy to 
 deal with an appendix of ulterior problems. As the 
 sufferings from involuntary causes cannot be retributory, 
 some other account of them must be sought : either they 
 have no ends in view, and refuse to be brought into teleology 
 at all ; or else they are directed upon some unmoral end, 
 and are seen in their true place only as incidents in a 
 physical or intellectual order, upon which a moral order 
 is superinduced, or with which it is concurrent. 
 
 At the same time the religion of conscience, which en- 
 counters the check of this limit, is not without means of 
 softening, if not neutralizing, its effects. If the moral 
 relations revealed in our consciousness are the ectypal 
 miniatures of eternal realities in God, it is impossible not 
 to raise the question of their duration in us ; for there is 
 something incongruous in supposing that a communion on 
 our part with an eternal being, in respect of eternal verities 
 central to his essence, should have just begun to know 
 itself for what it is, and then be extinguished. Hence the 
 immortality which the conscience assigns to moral re- 
 lations it could not avoid expecting for itself; so as to 
 throw open the gates of death and indefinitely prolong the 
 story of human existence. That vaster world once coming 
 into view, there is no telling what boundless reserve of 
 rectifying possibilities it contains for completing the in- 
 cipient but unfinished justice of the present life, and for 
 compensating the sacrifices demanded by unmoral though 
 indispensable laws. It is easy to visit with derision this 
 way of postponing to an unknown future the solution of 
 known difficulties in the present, and to insist that the
 
 33 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 lame justice of what we see is a poor reason for expecting 
 a perfect justice in the unseen. But certain it is that, in 
 the mixed experiences of this life, those which plainly 
 affirm a moral rule impress us more deeply than those 
 which are silent of it and will not tell their tale : so that of 
 the one the report is believed, of the other the enigma 
 remains ; and the part of which we are assured by its living 
 witness in ourselves becomes the sample and foretaste of 
 whatever sequel the further evolution of our nature may 
 bring. The real light-sphere of conscience is not quenched 
 by a limiting zone of darkness which it cannot penetrate ; 
 and when its glow kindles faith in a state whence limits 
 disappear, it must needs be the light that moves forward 
 till there is no darkness at all. In every age ethically 
 noble, the grief is keenest at every failure of right, and yet 
 the despair of right will be the least possible ; and the 
 secret stores of the eternal world will be held in resefve to 
 redress the unequal incidence of natural ills, and harmonize 
 the issues of life with the holiness of God. 
 
 At this final point of contact then between Ethics and 
 Religion there arises a certain check to their concurrence ; 
 the former cannot, by becoming transcendent, so pass into 
 the other as to permeate it throughout. Yet, precisely 
 on this account, it opens up the conception and belief in a 
 life beyond the present, which else would hardly have ac- 
 quired the same distinctness and tenacity. Here we touch, 
 I believe, the link of final connexion between Theism and 
 the belief in a hereafter. Apart from the question of the 
 moral government of God, and the painful lacunae in it 
 which the conscience at present feels, the doctrine of a 
 future life would become a mere episode of anthropology, 
 and would have to be tested by the methods of natural 
 history and physiology. Judged in this way (as it now 
 often is), it would hardly present data worthy of serious 
 attention ; nor would it, even if rendered credible, belong
 
 INTRODUCTION. 33 
 
 more specifically to religion than the fact of birth into this 
 life. The evidence and the interest of this faith alike 
 depend not only upon a pre-existing Theism, but upon 
 the moral relation between man and God, and the need 
 of somehow adjusting this to the order of the natural 
 world. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 BOOK I. 
 
 THE LIMITS OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CONSIDERED. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES. 
 
 IF we have named the true links of connection between 
 Ethics and Religion, we may see at once within what 
 limits Morality may be transformed by ascending into 
 Piety. It is not altered in its form, or the adjustment of 
 its contents ; but simply carries over its old organism into 
 its new life : for the springs of action stand on the same 
 steps as before in the hierarchy of authority. Nor is there 
 any revolution in its detailed application ; for its canon of 
 consequences stands as it did, and if new fields are opened 
 to it, they retain the same proportions. The difference lies 
 (i) In the vast enlargement of dimensions throughout the 
 whole scale, rendering what was empirical, transcendent ; 
 turning the subjective miniature into an objective infinitude, 
 as the picture on the retina's sensitive spot becomes in 
 perception the vault of heaven, and each prick of light 
 overhangs us as a star ; and so, intensifying the sublimity, 
 while preserving the gradations, of our feeling. Our 
 immediate lot may be small as the vicissitudes of a baby- 
 house ; but its laws are not trivial, if they reduce in 
 photograph the legislation of the universal empire ; (2) 
 In the conversion of some springs of action, viz. the 
 Sentiments (wonder, admiration, reverence) from impersonal 
 impulses into personal affections ; and their consequent 
 assumption of a far more definite and deeper power, 
 
 D a
 
 36 UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES. [Book I. 
 
 manifesting. itself in distinct acts of religious expression, 
 such as prayer, and all the usages of church life ; (3) In 
 the appearance, therefore, upon the face of the world, of a 
 large class of new moral facts for estimate, viz. all ecclesias- 
 tical phenomena, and every expenditure of human zeal and 
 interest for objects directly religious. These form a clear 
 addition to the activities and products of the Will, and 
 alter the whole contour of every historical and actual 
 society. If we did not make the advance beyond the 
 moral law, we should be disqualified for taking them into 
 account. If, making the advance into* religion, we found 
 it an illusion, we should condemn them as a grievous waste 
 of life in delirious dreams. If we pronounced the religious 
 surmises justified, we should trace in this field, amid 
 many pathetic aberrations, some of the sublimest expres- 
 sions of conscience, and nearest approaches to the perfection 
 of our nature. 
 
 But, however clear the points of approximation between 
 morals and religion, and however great our interest in 
 accomplishing the transition, it were vain to map out their 
 lines of relation, if we can only stand upon the brink and 
 look at the passage, without the foot to leap it, or the wing 
 to fly, or the machinery to bridge the abyss. And this, 
 it is well known, is a favourite modern allegation, sanctioned 
 by many leaders of scientific opinion in England and on 
 the Continent. From the very approaches to our enquiry 
 we are driven by a notice that there is no way through. 
 It is not denied that there may be habitable land, divine 
 and fair, beyond. Perhaps there is ; perhaps there is not : 
 but at all events we can never know, for its only possible 
 objects are out of all relation to our faculties, and intrinsically 
 incognisable by us. It is fitting indeed to stand with 
 a certain reverence in face of that hiding-place of possibility ; 
 but to say nothing, since nothing can be ascertained, a rule 
 which recalls the maxim of Sextus the Pythagorean,
 
 Book I.] UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES. 37 
 
 TOP Oebv TI//.O, ei8oi>s KCU 8ta r <riya l . 
 This doctrine of Nescience professes to be the result of an 
 exhaustive scrutiny of the cognitive faculties, and an exact 
 measurement of their resources against the objects to which 
 they may address themselves. These processes of psycho- 
 logical stock-taking we have apparently as much reason to 
 dread as the mismanaging director to shrink from the audit 
 of his accounts ; for, somehow, they are always disclosing 
 bad debts, and reducing our intellectual capital nearer to 
 bankruptcy. Each successive critique of the human mind 
 contrives to detect some new incapacity in place of a 
 supposed knowledge. Locke, as a Nominalist, denies to 
 us all access to the essences of things, and to all our 
 general ideas, with the doubtful exception of Substance, any 
 corresponding ground in the nature of things 2 . Hume 
 removes the exception, and with it invalidates the idea of 
 personality, and resolves Causation into customary sequence. 
 Berkeley cancels from our knowledge the whole material 
 world, and leaves us cognisant only of ideas. Kant reduces 
 Space and Time, Causality and Substance, the ideas of a 
 permanent Soul, of moral Freedom, of a God transcending 
 the world, to subjective forms of sense or thought, which 
 can be guarantee for no reality ; though, by an act rather 
 of faith than of inference, he reinstates as practical 
 postulates a portion of what he has lost as speculative 
 conclusions, and so repairs the most serious breaches made 
 by his own criticism. But again, there are admirers of his 
 genius who treat these reconstructions as an inconsequence, 
 and are not content to let them stand. Hamilton insists 
 that, having once treated the Reason as incompetent in its 
 speculative inspiration, he could not consistently give it his 
 
 1 Sextus Pythagoraeus, ap. Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum : 
 F. G. Mullachius, 1860; i. 522. 
 
 2 Human Understanding, Book II. ch. xxiii, i, 2, 29, 30; Book IV. 
 5. 1 1, and Letter I. to the Bishop of Worcester ; the cautious language 
 of which seems to me to warrant the doubt which I have expressed.
 
 38 UNSETTLED BOUNDARIES. 
 
 confidence in its practical assumptions 1 . And Schopen- 
 hauer complains that Kant, even in the second edition 
 of his treatise on the pure Reason, and much more in his 
 later writings, shrank from the thorough idealism which 
 pervades the first draught, and made artificial provision 
 for the return of beliefs from which he had withdrawn the 
 grounds 2 . This partial recoil in Kant is attributed by his 
 censor to the timidity of the aged philosopher, who was 
 unprepared for the uproar which his transcendental scepti- 
 cism had created in the church and in the schools, and who 
 made his peace with them by giving back in his moral 
 critique the entities of psychology and of divinity, with 
 which he had made such havoc in his analysis of know- 
 ledge. Certain it is that, except in the incomplete cases of 
 Locke and Berkeley, the result of all these researches into 
 the ultimate laws of thought is to banish into the unknown 
 the essential objects of religious belief, and to justify the 
 decree against them on the ground that they are empty 
 forms illegitimately turned into objective realities. This 
 despair of religious knowledge must be encountered at the 
 outset, for if it be well founded, every step of advance can 
 only take us farther astray ; and if it be unfounded it leaves 
 us, like a victim of the black art, imprisoned within a magic 
 circle which, though needing but a breath to blow it away, 
 we cannot pass ; in a world whose chief relations are cut off 
 in the midst and quenched in fatal darkness ; with mind 
 adjusted to the finite, as if that were all, and heart that has 
 no ideal except what is not real, with a clinging sense 
 of dependence, and nothing but necessity to depend upon. 
 We cannot afford either to enter a Paradise of fools or to 
 miss any Heaven of the wise, and must pause and guard 
 our steps where the ways divide. 
 
 1 Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, &c. p. 91, note. 
 
 2 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 3te Auflage, Band I. Anhang, 
 especially pp. 514 seqq.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FORM AND CONDITIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 How are we to pronounce upon the alleged limitations 
 to our possible intelligence ? In the very act of criticising 
 them, do I not already contradict them ? If there is no 
 knowing whether I know, how can I know the boundaries of 
 my knowledge ? If I can tell nothing but that I have this 
 feeling and that thought, and am permanently shut up 
 within this cell of inner consciousness, how can I, the 
 dreamer, draw the line between the dream that never 
 breaks and the waking that never comes? On the 
 assumptions of these philosophers, no investigation of the 
 range and validity of our intellectual apprehension of 
 things is possible, for, ab initio, we are enclosed by definition 
 in self-knowledge, and forbidden to apply the terms of 
 cognition to anything out of the time-series of our own 
 states. When this postulate has been laid down, and 
 allowed to pass unchallenged, the whole work of the scep- 
 tical philosophy is done ; the result is securely the same, 
 on whatever lines the ulterior psychology may advance ; 
 whether, with the English school, it works out everything 
 in the mental history from the data of sensation ; or, with 
 Kant, tries to discriminate between these and the a priori 
 conditions that lie in the mind itself and are brought by it 
 to its experience. The first precaution, in any attempt to 
 find what knowledge may be, is to keep clear of this 
 postulate, not indeed with a prejudgment against it, but
 
 40 VARIETIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. [Book I. 
 
 with a refusal to adopt it, till the means of deciding on its 
 merits present themselves in the course of our research. 
 
 i. Varieties of Consciousness distinguished. 
 
 Knowing is a condition, and an active condition, of the 
 mind, and what it is and what it is not must be learned by 
 psychological search, asking ourselves what we mean by it. 
 We shall best get hold of it by calling up its nearest 
 kindred, and one by one turning them out and shutting the 
 door upon them. It is different from Feeling and from 
 Will, also conditions of the mind ; from the latter, by the 
 absence of preference and effort directed upon a future 
 end ; from the former, by the presence of an object as well 
 as the existence of a certain mode of consciousness. Both 
 these differences are expressed if we say that it is a kind of 
 Thinking. 
 
 Thinking is impossible without thinking of something. 
 It is a single act with a pair of factors : a subject that 
 thinks ; an object that is thought ; and carries in it there- 
 fore whatever conditions are indispensable to this distinc- 
 tion. It is the characteristic of the thinking subject to 
 be always here, and always now ; and nothing can stand in 
 antithesis to it as its object which is not removed from 
 it either into a there, or into a then : in order to exercise 
 my thought, I must direct it on something either different 
 in place from myself, as the person, the book, the diagram 
 before me, or different in time, as last night's dream, or the 
 conjecture that occurred to me a moment ago. Without 
 Space and Time, therefore, no objectivity ; without objec- 
 tivity, no thinking; without thinking, no knowing. 
 
 Not all thinking, however, amounts to knowing. I may 
 ' give the reins,' as it is said, ' to Fancy,' and without wholly 
 forgetting myself, may let the trains of images play across 
 my mind, whether in spontaneous suggestion or marshalled 
 for me by the novelist or poet ; and in this state I should
 
 
 Chap. 1.] VARIETIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 41 
 
 fulfil the conditions of thinking just assigned, without any 
 pretension to proper knowledge. It is less easy than 
 might be supposed to discriminate by proper marks such 
 imaginations from cognitive states; especially as, in their 
 extreme case, that of our dreams, the distinction seems to 
 vanish, and we believe in the objective reality of the mind's 
 scenery, and experience all the effects of assured convic- 
 tion. Hamilton J cites from Abel the case of a young 
 man (a poor apprentice to a merchant), who, after a fit 
 of catalepsy, dreamed every night that he was a married 
 man, the father of a family, and a senator, in affluent 
 circumstances; and who, when his actual life was men- 
 tioned to him as he slept, declared it to be a dream. If 
 this complete change of fact and fancy can take place, 
 why, it may be asked, do we not habitually believe our 
 imaginative trains? and how can we tell them from the 
 presentation of the actual ? What is to prevent us from 
 accepting the scenes of Othello or Ivanhoe as history? 
 Perhaps the principle of the answer lies in this that 
 in direct perception, where objects are presented im- 
 mediately and now, the evidence of objective reality, 
 moment by moment, and apart from experiments made 
 by our activity, lies in the vividness and exclusive presence 
 of a given image ; and that this evidence will always carry 
 the day where there is nothing to contradict it. In the 
 ordinary use of the senses, it is there of its own accord; 
 and is confirmed by whatever experiments it sets us upon 
 instituting. In dreams it is no less cogently with us ; the 
 representations are vivid, and they are alone; and as we 
 are stretched in passiveness, we are at their mercy, without 
 power of questioning them : the conditions of presentation 
 are therefore successfully simulated, and our experience 
 is indistinguishable from the case of waking perception. 
 The imitation is less perfect in the witnessing of a drama 
 1 Lectures on Metaphysics, ii. p. 270.
 
 42 VARIETIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. [Book t. 
 
 or the reading of a poem, from the inevitable conflict 
 between what is presented to the waking senses and what 
 is represented to the excited mind ; but, as we know, it is 
 quite possible for the keenness and brilliancy of the latter 
 to overpower and virtually lay to sleep the tamer solicita- 
 tions of the former, so that we lose our actual life in the 
 ideal; and the illusion is more complete in proportion 
 as the fiction moves in a possible present, not too difficult to 
 substitute for the world in which we live. But this vivid- 
 ness, which can thus cheat us about the present, can never 
 impose upon us about the past ; for that is known to us, 
 if personal, by memory, if not personal, by testimony; 
 neither of which can be simulated by mere bright painting. 
 If we were carried away, therefore, by the graphic art 
 of an historical novelist, the effect would be, not that 
 we should believe the story true for the past, but that 
 we should believe ourselves in the midst of it at the 
 present. Lively representation puts on the mask, not of 
 testimonial evidence by which other times and distant 
 scenes are known, but of our own perceptions which tell 
 us what is here and now. It may paint, therefore, but not 
 narrate. As a mode of thinking, imagination can be mis- 
 taken for only immediate or perceptive knowledge; and 
 can carry the semblance only until the real perceptions 
 awake and withdraw the disguise. In another way mere 
 representation falls short of knowing; viz. that it may 
 consist of a single objective image the face of an absent 
 friend, the sound of a flowing river, the pressure of a 
 violent wind ; whereas all knowledge has two terms objec- 
 tive to us, one of which is subject of the other, and must 
 take the predicative form, as, ' the moon is full,' ' the sea is 
 salt.' It is true that we sometimes talk of having cog- 
 nition of a single thing before us, or feeling within us; 
 but unless there be more than simply suffering the feeling 
 or being exposed to the thing we do not get beyond
 
 Chap. I.] VARIETIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 43 
 
 sensation; and we cognise neither till we attend to it 
 as our object, and, supplying the Ego as a second term, 
 think ' / perceive the thing,' ' I have the feeling! The 
 mental act consists in referring the thing contemplated to 
 myself to my outward sense in the one case, to my inner 
 consciousness in the other; or, what is equivalent, in re- 
 ferring it to a position in exterior space in the one case, in 
 interior time in the other. In order to do this I must 
 contemplate not only that which is before me or within 
 me, but myself also as affected by it; and, besides the 
 subjective Ego which cognises, there must be an objective 
 Ego to which I refer the perceptive or sensitive pheno- 
 menon. We might express the same analysis in yet 
 another way. To have cognition of a single object means 
 to recognise it as a reality, or to affirm existence of it. 
 And what do we mean by saying that a thing exists ? 
 We mean that it is present in space, or time, or both ; i. e. 
 that it is at least a possible object of our perception or 
 self-consciousness. The rule, therefore, stands without 
 exception, that no mode of thinking amounts to know- 
 ledge but one, viz. the predicative ; which, for distinction's 
 sake, we call judging. 
 
 It is plain, however, that not all judging amounts to 
 knowledge; else there would be no error. Only when 
 the mind's predications reproduce in thought the relations 
 which exist in reality, do they constitute knowledge. To 
 secure this condition we must have access to reality, and 
 be able to compare its relations with their supposed re- 
 production in our affirming thought. Whether such 
 access is granted or denied us is therefore the question 
 on which depends our power of discriminating true from 
 false; and as it is answered more easily in the case of 
 some predicated relations than of others, we must divide 
 judgments into classes on this ground, beginning with those 
 that present the least difficulty.
 
 44 ANALYTIC AND [Book I. 
 
 2. Analytic and Synthetic Judgments. 
 
 The first class consists of what Kant 1 calls Analytic 
 judgments ; where the object of our thought (i. e. the sub- 
 ject of the proposition) is some concept of our own 
 (embodied in a noun common), of which is affirmed in 
 the predicate some one or the whole of its contents. If 
 I say, for instance, 'water is a liquid/ ' matter is extended,' 
 ' the circle has a centre,' the property which I affirm is 
 already contained in the very meaning of the subject ; and 
 I merely bring into explicit view what is implicitly thought 
 in that meaning. Such a proposition only takes to 
 pieces the comprehension of its own subject, and so earns 
 the designation ' analytical' And its truth is secured, if it 
 conforms to the so-called 'law of Identity,' viz. that it 
 names nothing in its predicate which is absent from the 
 meaning of the subject : within these limits it may name 
 all the characters comprised in the concept {Subject is x + 
 y + z, &c.), or any selection from them (Subject is x + z). 
 Throughout this class, it is plain, the object of thought 
 and speech is a concept which the speaker has at home 
 in his own mind : to know what it connotes, he has but to 
 consult his self-consciousness, and compel its lazy ex- 
 perience to unpack its contents and spread them out side 
 by side with the specified particulars of the predicate. 
 
 Of a single analytical proposition the truth or falsehood 
 is thus read immediately at a glance. By combining a 
 plurality in which the same concepts recur, a mediate 
 variety of criterion is contrived by the logicians. In the 
 case of two judgments with the same subject, one must 
 not affirm what the other denies; if in one the subject 
 is pronounced = x + y + z, no one of these characters must 
 be denied of it in the other; a rule which receives the 
 name of the ' Law of contradiction.' It tests the truth 
 
 1 Logik, 36. Rosenkranz und Schubert, iii. S. 294.
 
 Chap. I.] SYNTHETIC JUDGMENTS, 45 
 
 of neither proposition, but merely says that they cannot 
 both be true. 
 
 The ' Law of the excluded middle,' advancing a step 
 further, points out that of two such propositions one must 
 be true, and the other false. By the previous law they 
 cannot both be true. And if the affirmative be false, it 
 is because the attribute in the predicate is absent from 
 the subject, precisely what the negative declares. If the 
 negative is false, it is because the attribute in the predicate 
 is present in the subject, precisely what the affirmative 
 declares. We cannot therefore discard both judgments 
 in favour of some third different from either ; but are 
 certain of the truth, if we make the right choice between 
 them. Is it false that the subject is y ? Then is it true 
 that it is not y. Is it false that the subject is not y? 
 Then is it true that it is y. They cannot both be false. 
 
 By the introduction of a third term, whose contents can 
 be measured, in separate propositions, against those of 
 each of the other two, the range of inference may be 
 extended to the unfolding of further relations, to the 
 correct eliciting of which the rules of the syllogism are 
 all subservient. But however far the deduction may run 
 into ulterior varieties of form, the criteria of their correct- 
 ness are all drawn from analysis of the act of judgment 
 itself, and engage us still in a comparison of our own 
 concepts, and a shifting of their contents from the implicit 
 to the explicit side of an equation. The process therefore 
 appeals to a purely internal experience, and is an inter- 
 pretation, and not an enlargement, of what we objectively 
 think and know. It is not therefore without reason that 
 Kant denies to ' logical truth,' i.e. agreement of judgments 
 among themselves, and their conformity with the predi- 
 cative law, the character of Knowledge. For any insight 
 into Nature we must go beyond the development of our 
 own concepts.
 
 46 ANALYTIC AND [Book I. 
 
 This end is not attained unless we form judgments of 
 the second class, viz. Synthetic or Ampliative, called so 
 because the predicate puts on to the subject an attribute 
 not within its previous contents, and so enlarges its com- 
 prehension. When I say, ' Water is composed of oxygen 
 and hydrogen,' 'matter is heavy/ 'a circle's intersecting 
 chords make equal rectangles under their segments,' I 
 specify of each of these objects a property not necessarily 
 involved in the understanding of its name ; and the judg- 
 ment is synthetic. Here, the object judged being no 
 longer in my own mind, self-consciousness is of no avail 
 as a test of the affirmation ; for the verdict of experience, 
 I must go out of myself and take counsel of direct per- 
 ception and experiment with the water, the matter, the 
 circle and its required construction. However wide the 
 sweep and abstract the expression of synthetic propo- 
 sitions may be, they never escape their dependence on 
 perception for their verification. The proposition that ' all 
 projectiles move in some conic section ' is no doubt a 
 necessary deduction from the law of gravitation ; but this 
 law itself remains a mere hypothesis till it is carried into 
 the midst of physical facts, and found to give an exact 
 description of their form and relations. And no less do 
 synthetic judgments of mental phenomena appeal for their 
 confirmation to experience on its internal side. That ' our 
 conception of an object's distance affects our estimate of 
 its size,' that 'with a fundamental note we hear its har- 
 monics,' that 'we remember visible things better than 
 notions and feelings,' are simply a record of the inward 
 witness of our self-consciousness. This appeal is univer- 
 sally taken as ultimate ; so that we assume that in per- 
 ception and self-consciousness (Kant's 'outer and inner 
 Sense ') we know. 
 
 For all practical purposes this ultimate reference to 
 perceptive experience for a verdict on synthetic assertions,
 
 Chap. I.] SYNTHETIC JUDGMENTS. 47 
 
 answers perfectly. If. .a question arises between you and 
 me whether something familiar to us both has or has not 
 a certain property not mentioned in its definition, our only 
 resource is to go and look for it ; there is the object in the 
 external space ; here are we, with similar susceptibilities 
 to be affected by it ; bring the two into presence of each 
 other ; then, if we both of us gain the impression which 
 corresponds with the attribute affirmed, the doubt is 
 resolved, and a new feature is, for each of us, added to the 
 original conception. Its reality is admitted in virtue of our 
 being similarly affected, and feeling sure that, if brought 
 to the test, all other men would be so too. In strictness, 
 however, this amounts to no more than inevitable univer- 
 sality of belief, or concurrence of thinking ; and are we 
 to say that this is all that we mean by ' knowledge ' ? Do 
 I not suppose it to give me not only agreement with you, 
 but also insight into the nature of the external object? 
 Yet how can this be, if it be really where I am not, and 
 a chasm lies between it and my faculty? Unless either 
 my cognitive power can achieve the paradoxical feat of 
 actio in distans, or the object can dispatch on commission 
 something of itself, while still retaining itself entire where 
 it is, it would seem to be hopelessly inaccessible to my 
 apprehension. Nor does the difficulty disappear when we 
 observe, step by step, what actually happens in the process 
 of perception. The object is not supposed to speak to 
 me except by certain changes in my sensibility : in these 
 it is that my relation to it begins ; from one of these that 
 I gain the new feature now predicated of it ; and all these 
 are in my own consciousness ; and in being aware of them 
 I know, instead of anything external, only some phenomena 
 of myself. The experience therefore which determines the 
 truth of a synthetic proposition resolves itself, after all, 
 into variations of sense-affection, and though it professes 
 to send me abroad, never really lets me loose from home.
 
 48 MATHEMATICAL JUDGMENTS. [Book I. 
 
 Such process, in distinction from intentional self-reflection, 
 and to mark its reference to an object other than self, 
 Kant may call an experience of the ' outer Sense ' ; but 
 what it contributes under the name of a new attribute, is 
 still a variety of feeling, which is 'outer' only to the 
 present contents of our concept, and contrasted with them 
 only as a percept to an ideal image ; and the elements of 
 the story, old and new alike, are unsevered from the seat 
 of inward self-knowledge. It remains therefore question- 
 able whether, in my supposed excursions of discovery in 
 the world of foreign things, I am not all the while at rest, 
 playing with the phantasms of my own dream. 
 
 3. Kanfs account of Mathematical Judgments. 
 
 Before attempting to relieve our problem of this sus- 
 pense, I may point out a distinction observable in a special 
 class of synthetic propositions. The experience which 
 furnishes by far the greater number of them warrants no 
 universal and necessary judgment, but only a rule of actual 
 fact, always open to correction by ulterior experience. In 
 this respect analytical propositions, with their inferences, 
 have an advantage ; for, when a system of concepts has 
 once been accurately defined, the contents of each are 
 relatively comparable, and in what they respectively 
 include and exclude there can be nothing variable or 
 contingent ; so that unblemished logical deduction carries 
 necessity into its conclusions, and bars exceptions. From 
 the one procedure we contingently learn the unknown ; 
 from the other, we necessarily prove the known. Can we 
 nowhere then combine these separated advantages? We 
 do so, Kant assures us, in the mathematics ; which afford 
 the one undisputed example of absolute demonstration ; 
 and at the same time open to us an ever-widening field 
 of quantitative relations to the apprehension of which it 
 would be absurd to refuse the name ' knowledge.' Whence
 
 Chap. I.] MATHEMATICAL JUDGMENTS. 49 
 
 have they this peculiarity? To find its source, we must 
 scrutinise again the 'experience' we have already con- 
 sulted ; but must turn to a factor in it which we have 
 hitherto neglected, though inevitably assumed. In refer- 
 ring either to the contents of our own concepts, or to any 
 new affection of sense added on from the object, we have 
 regarded our consciousness as a receptacle and depository 
 of feelings delivered on to it, and their vestiges ; and this 
 store of materials given us is the indispensable passive 
 condition of all that we perceive and think. It is what 
 Kant calls the ' manifold of sense I the variegated concourse 
 and transit of sensations, differencing a being that feels as 
 it changes from one that changes without feeling. This, 
 however, is no more than may be said of every animal. 
 In man it completes itself into ' Experience,' because in 
 him it falls upon an active faculty that meets and moulds 
 it, and turns the shapeless mass into the organic order of 
 his intelligence. Such form to the formless he must 
 assuredly bring ; what is to be done with the matter given, 
 how his faculty is to re-act upon it, cannot settle itself by 
 any passivity, but demands the presence of a determining 
 function ; since that which puts feelings into this order or 
 that cannot itself be one of the ordered ' manifold.' There 
 cannot fail therefore to be a priori ways of disposing of 
 the sense-data ; and those ways, inherent as they are in 
 the very constitution of our nature, supply the second 
 factor, not only of all actual, but of all possible human 
 experience. To these all our percepts and representations 
 must conform ; and the whole of the ' manifold of sense ' 
 must be taken up by their arrangement. Its contents, as 
 they arrive, are not allowed to drop unnoticed upon our 
 receptivity ; if they touch the ' inner sense,' they are met 
 by the question ' When did you come hither?' if the 'outer 
 sense,' by the question 'Where do you belong to?' in 
 other wprds, are supplied respectively with an order of 
 VOL. I. E
 
 50 MATHEMATICAL JUDGMENTS. [Book I. 
 
 Time in which they must regiment themselves, and of 
 Space in which to group themselves. These then are 
 indigenous principles of arrangement brought by the 
 mind's own faculty to the passive data of sense, and 
 giving law to its mode of handling them ; lifting them 
 into ' experience,' in one case, of the successions of self- 
 consciousness, in the other, of the co-existences of Per- 
 ception ; in both, giving them Objectivity, i.e. a separate- 
 ness from the Now and Here whence the apprehending 
 Subject himself contemplates them. Time is the possi- 
 bility of change or succession 1 : space, of co-existence 2 : 
 and the matter claiming disposal in those two orders is the 
 collective mass of sensitive changes. 
 
 These forms, while conferring objectivity on the ' mani- 
 fold of sense,' acquire it themselves in the very act. In 
 appropriating my own feelings to their order in my con- 
 sciousness, I cannot but read in their series a sample of an 
 unlimited continuum of Time. In the image into which I 
 combine what is delivered to my ' outer sense,' I cannot 
 but perceive, even after throwing out of account all the 
 sensory elements which I can abstract (colour, smell, hard- 
 ness, &c.), a residuary magnitude and shape, embraced, 
 with myself, in a circumambient infinitude of Space. And 
 since, among the objects in this field, no less than in the 
 inward story of my own consciousness, changes never 
 cease, Time, the condition of change, is common to both, 
 immediate to the 'inner sense/ mediate to the outer. 
 These two constitutive forms, latent but prior conditions 
 of all experience, first declare themselves in their concrete 
 application ; so long as they were empty, we knew them 
 not ; but, once introduced to their contents, we never lose 
 the idea of the containing spheres, though all which they 
 hold be blotted out of thought ; just as the expanse be- 
 
 1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Supp. x. Rosenkranz, Band ii. 
 * Ib. Kritik der 4ten Paralog. der transc. Psych, p. 299.
 
 Chap. I.] MATHEMATICAL JUDGMENTS. 51 
 
 tween the sea and sky, revealed by a moment's lightning, 
 broods over us still when all is dark. Remaining thus, 
 these quantities are pure intuitions (reine Anschauungen) ; 
 each a single object, not less than any particular thing 
 which it might contain ; yet differing therefrom by owing 
 its distinctness to no boundary and. its essence to no 
 origin. They are pure, because cleared of the material of 
 sensation required to constitute a ' phenomenon ' : they are 
 'apriori,' because not taken from objects, but conditions 
 involved in their apprehension, our own contribution to 
 the phenomenon : they are intuitions, because immediate 
 in perception and not gathered by thought. 
 
 Presented thus to objective contemplation, Time and 
 Space exhibit certain self-evident predicates. Both are 
 infinite, and infinitely divisible : neither is built up of its 
 parts, but each is one whole, out of which particular times 
 and spaces are cut by limitation. Time has one dimension, 
 Space has three : two times cannot be together : the suc- 
 cessions in time, and the limitations set up in space, taken 
 in quantity, furnish the relations of number and of geometry, 
 which carry in them all the Necessity of the intuitions 
 themselves. The propositions in which these predicates are 
 affirmed are synthetic ; for the object spoken of is not a 
 concept which is analysed, but a singular which opens into 
 new relations ; and as it does so without resort to any 
 further experience than is at command of the intuitions in 
 their possible combinations of dimension, the propositions 
 are synthetic a priori. 
 
 Whoever rejects this interpretation has only the alter- 
 native of treating Time and Space as universal properties 
 drawn by abstraction from things and events, like hard- 
 ness, weight, and swiftness. But this resource is excluded 
 by fatal objections. Abstraction cannot work except upon 
 a complex datum already there ; and no thing or event 
 can be already there without Time and Space to hold it. 
 
 a
 
 52 MATHEMATICAL JUDGMENTS. [Book I. 
 
 We have to think of it as in time and space, and not of 
 time and space as in it. And after we have picked out and 
 separately named some property found in a multitude of 
 particular things, it can always be predicated in its whole 
 significance (i. e. with all its predicates) of each member of 
 the class to which these particulars belong ; as, for instance, 
 warm blood of every mammal : but Space and Time, with 
 their infinitudes, can be predicated of no finite object of 
 our experience. They are pre-supposed, not evolved, by 
 such experience. 
 
 Thus then we are introduced, without quitting the 
 synthetic bounds, to a new type of judgments, viz. the 
 mathematical, distinguished by the a priori character of 
 their object and their synthesis, and consequently the uni- 
 versality and the necessity of their method of advance. 
 
 In the light of this exposition consider and compare 
 what we do in forming each of the two types of synthetical 
 judgment. In the a posteriori case we apply the ' forms ' 
 Space and Time to the ' matter ' of sensation present with 
 us as a foreign gift (Gegebenes), and furnishing all that 
 fills the empty forms. In the a priori case, we apply the 
 same forms to themselves contemplated as potential or 
 quasi- objects, though there is no sensory matter there ; so 
 that the act consists of the subjective function somehow 
 escaping from its subjectivity and getting a look at itself, 
 and discovering its possibility through its exercise in 
 actuality : Space, the infinite possibility of perception ; 
 Time, the infinite possibility of self-consciousness. 
 
 It is only however in the a posteriori case that any 
 object exists : for it is precisely the meeting of the native 
 and the foreign conditions, the fittirig of the subjective 
 forms upon the given states of sensibility, that constitutes 
 ,the objective, by putting a unity upon the ' manifold,' and 
 effecting the ' apprehensive synthesis.' Without this dual 
 combination, intelligence is impossible; the 'matter' alone
 
 Chap. I.] MATHEMATICAL JUDGMENTS. 53 
 
 is blind ; the ' form ' alone is empty ; not till they unite do 
 the changes of the manifold become phenomena, i. e. con- 
 sciously appropriated to ourselves in time, and referred to 
 their position in space. 
 
 In the a priori intuitions of time and space in their im- 
 mensity these constituents of objectivity are not present ; 
 the sensory element or ' manifold ' being given only in the 
 finite objects which we see distributed in the infinite time 
 and space ; beyond which the outlying continuum, for 
 want of this condition, is no realised object, but only the 
 possibility of objects without end, the prerequisite of what is 
 not. It is the vacancy waiting for the knowable without 
 anything to be known ; and merely means that we are 
 ready to take in hand whatever ' manifold of sense '-may be 
 contributed over and above what we have. The predicates 
 which are inseparably attached to these pure intuitions are 
 but the law of our percipient thought, and express before- 
 hand the rules to which all things and phenomena that 
 may enter their field must conform ; and this is what is 
 meant by the universality and necessity of the mathematics. 
 It is a subjective universality and necessity, determining 
 how the human mind will always have to think, but be- 
 longing exclusively to the judgments of possibility, and 
 meanwhile of empty ideality. 
 
 It will now be intelligible how Kant's doctrine runs up 
 into the sharpest antithesis to the empirical theory of 
 cognition ; and, instead of admitting that it is wholly the 
 tuition of Nature that makes the Mind, insists, totidem 
 verbis, that the ' Mind makes Nature,' contemplating there 
 nothing but what it constructs and projects thither out of 
 its own constitution. It is indeed the pupil of 'experience' ; 
 but both the factors of that experience are fetched from its 
 domestic stores ; and though each encounters the other, tf 
 it encounters nothing else, and is absolutely incapacitated 
 for reporting anything beyond : the material factor, be-
 
 54 JUDGMENTS TRUE AND FALSE. [Book I. 
 
 cause offering nothing but passive feeling ; the formal, 
 because destitute of any object, except what it sets itself to 
 fabricate out of a select lot of passive feelings. While the 
 essence of the Self centres in the active factor, and the con- 
 tents of the Not-self are found in the passive, neither earns 
 its name but by synthesis with the other, or enters the re- 
 lation Subject Object; and in establishing that relation, 
 the Self claims the passive elements as its own, and the 
 Not-self the unknown causality of what is given us to 
 feel. External therefore to the total or constituted Self no 
 object can be ; other than self we cannot call it, except so 
 far as a product is other than one of its own factors ; it 
 cannot be where the Subject is not ; for it is a function of 
 the same nature ; and in what we may predicate about it 
 we are passing judgment on nothing but our own ideas. 
 In conformity with this view, J. S. Mill decides that we 
 have cognisance only of ' feelings and states of concious- 
 ness.' * 
 
 4. What makes Synthetic Judgments true ? 
 
 Supposing such to be the constitution of our synthetic 
 judgments, let us next consider wherein consists the 
 difference between their being 'true' and their being 'false.' 
 How they are known to be synthetic has been explained ; 
 and it has been said that, to test the correctness of the 
 synthesis, we must go up to the object, and see whether the 
 predicated property is there. But now it appears that our 
 ' object ' is a homespun article, woven from the material of 
 our own sensibility by the loom of our own faculty ; and 
 what can be meant by ' going up ' to that which is thus a 
 mere phenomenon of ourselves, to search for an alleged 
 property? It means that we must repeat the experience 
 from which our present concept was gathered, and take 
 
 1 System of Logic, Book I. chap. iii. 15.
 
 Chap. I.] TESTS OF- 1 REALITY' 55 
 
 notice of the residue that we neglected and left behind ; 
 i. e. from the concept we must recur to the fuller percept, 
 and hunt through its overlapping margin for the additional 
 attribute now claimed. What then have we found that 
 percept to be ? It is that portion of the ' manifold of 
 sense ' to which we have applied the forms of Time and 
 Space that carve out the object. The question therefore is, 
 have we fitted these on to the right piece of the ' manifold,' 
 or will they take in something more, and in particular, the 
 additional predicate affirmed ? To win an answer to this 
 question is to consult and interrogate a purely inward 
 process, viz. the play of an a priori facultative activity with 
 the matter of our sensitive passivity ; and the questionable 
 property will be pronounced ' real ' or ' unreal ' according 
 as the experiment shows a fit or a misfit. It is an experi- 
 ment conducted altogether by ourselves upon ourselves ; 
 and the 'reality' which it may disclose means no more 
 than a concordant relation between two orders of our own 
 ideas. 
 
 It may come to mean more, however, if the experiment, 
 instead of being individualised in myself, is extended to 
 the consciousness of others, and they also be asked whether, 
 among the differences between their corresponding concept 
 and percept, they find the supplementary quality. If they 
 do, the ' reality' for me is no less ' reality ' for them, and 
 gains whatever corroboration can be conferred by concur- 
 rent voices of assent. After passing this enlarged ordeal 
 of comparison, ' reality ' becomes equivalent to ' univer- 
 sality,' and embraces whatever is affirmed by the general 
 suffrage of mankind. But still, in the many as in the one, 
 the test is sought simply within the limits of the human 
 personality, and found in the agreement, whether individual 
 or universal, of concept and percept. 
 
 It must be admitted that this is not what we usually 
 mean by 'reality. 1 When we speak of the solar system,
 
 56 TESTS OF XEALITY. [Book I. 
 
 and of the heaven that contains it, as real, or of the battle 
 of Austerlitz as a real event, we make no statement about 
 men's belief, but intend to affirm that, whether men believe 
 it or not, a certain group of globes exists around them, 
 and a certain composite event has passed in history, both 
 the presence of the one and the genesis of the other being 
 in a field independent of the inward states of any conscious 
 nature. If the test of truth is to be universality in human 
 consciousness, how will it fare with the ' ideality of Space '? 
 Is there any conviction more clearly 'universal' than its 
 ' reality,' not as an idea within us, but as a containing in- 
 finity around us ? or any proposal harder of acceptance 
 than to turn back the whole external sphere into the mind, 
 as an illusory device for classifying sensations ? 
 
 In working out his doctrine of Perception, Kant was 
 content with showing how, out of the resources of its own 
 constitution, the mind could provide itself with the objects 
 of its cognition, so that it was a mistake to look further for 
 the seat of their existence. His expositors advance upon a 
 bolder line of argument, and insist, on a priori grounds, 
 that even if our objects were in an external space, know- 
 ledge of them would be impossible. For in that case there 
 would be a contradiction between 'the form of thought' 
 as in 'the individual consciousness,' and 'the matter of 
 thought,' as not in it but beyond it ; and in ' the very 
 assumption that the objects of knowledge are objects the 
 impossibility of knowledge is involved.' How is it possible 
 for ' the mind to throw a bridge between itself and objec- 
 tive reality,' 'to go beyond itself to apprehend that of 
 which, according to the very idea of it, we are not con- 
 scious,' and span ' the gulf between itself and that which is 
 not itself,' ' to be one of the terms, and at the same time 
 the unity which includes them both,' to ' leap oflf its own 
 shadow'? 1 'To know,' it is said, 'is for the intelligence to 
 1 Caird's Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, 1887, pp. 6-8.
 
 Chap. I.] LIMITS OF THE INTELLECT. 57 
 
 find itself in its object.' 1 To this supposed impossibility 
 of the mind 'getting beyond itself I shall recur, after 
 noticing the further disqualifications for knowledge which 
 Kant finds in the constitution of the speculative Reason. 
 I will only point out in passing its curious contrast with 
 Comte's rule that the real impossibility lies in the mind's 
 getting at itself, so that the Kantian condition of know- 
 ledge is the Comtian doom of ignorance 2 . 
 
 5. Extension of Critical Principles to Super-sensible 
 Objects. 
 
 The disabilities for knowing things really external to 
 ourselves have thus far been charged exclusively upon our 
 sensory receptivity and perceptive faculty; and their limits, 
 we may naturally suppose, apply only to the lessons of 
 physical experience. When we rise above this ground- 
 level and look forth on the wider horizon swept by the 
 Intellectual vision, may we not expect to transcend these 
 limits, and through the purer light and air gain access to 
 super-sensible objects ? Kant extinguishes any such hope 
 by the restriction under which he places the intellectual 
 function. It fetches in no fresh material ; it simply unifies 
 in certain determinate ways the indeterminate multitude of 
 sense-images and experiences ; primarily appropriating 
 them to the centre of self-consciousness, as the funda- 
 mental unit ; next, calling in the ' productive imagination,' 
 to mediate between the pictured singulars of remembered 
 perception and the universals of thought, by help of its 
 indefinite sketches (or schemata) of grouped similars ; and 
 at last tying them up into concepts or severing them into 
 abstracts. The different manipulating activities by which 
 
 1 Caird's Philosophy of Kant, p. 614. 
 
 2 ' Par une necessite" invincible, 1'esprit humain peut observer tous 
 les phe"nomenes, excepte" les siens propres.' Philosophic positive, 
 1830-1847, i. p. 35-
 
 58 LIMITS OF THE INTELLECT. [Book I. 
 
 the understanding works its materials into varieties of 
 Thinking or judgment, constitute its Categories, or subjec- 
 tive forms for disposing of its store under the heads of 
 Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality. But none of 
 these operations introduce us to any new field ; they do 
 but deal with the original data of sensation, from the 
 elaboration of which all their contents and products are 
 furnished. 
 
 But our illusions do not stop here. As in perception we 
 are busy only with our own modes of feeling, yet suppose 
 ourselves engaged upon some 'thing in itself/ a mere 
 noumenon which we put behind them ; and as in using 
 the understanding we do but wield our own concepts, 
 marshalling them in their orders of rank and possibilities 
 of combination, yet fancy ourselves face to face with the 
 matter and necessary laws of a nature independent of our 
 thought ; so, in the ulterior attempt of the Pure Reason to 
 break the empirical bounds, and apply the categories to 
 unify these noumenal objects and reach absolute ultimates 
 of cognition, it does but project upon vacancy the mirage 
 of its own Ideas, and believe that in the pursuit it is appre- 
 hending the essence of the Soul, the World, and God. 
 
 The mode in which this self-deception arises is de- 
 pendent on the very nature of the reasoning-process. The 
 premisses, state the conditions under which the conclusion 
 is true. If either of these conditions should be problem- 
 atical, it will need to be made good by affirming its con- 
 ditions ; which again may have to be secured by a further 
 prosyllogism ; and so the conditioned proposition may be 
 kept in suspense during a regress in infinitum. The Reason 
 does not realise its end till it grasps the whole of the con- 
 ditions, i.e. till it has reached the unconditioned. Here then 
 is the goal of Reason, the Idea that for ever possesses it 
 and leads it on, the Law and inward demand of its nature. 
 Treat this as a practical rule, never to rest in any con-
 
 Chap. I.] LIMITS OF THE INTELLECT. 59 
 
 ditioned phenomenon which in experience can be carried 
 back to its condition ; and it has its legitimate place as 
 a working guide. But presume upon it as a theoretical 
 guarantee that the Reason can fulfil its ideal and appre- 
 hend the unconditioned Cause of causes, Substance of sub- 
 stances, Unit of all infinitudes ; and you will lose yourself 
 in a thicket of paralogisms and antinomies. The idea of 
 'the Unconditioned' is the necessary correlative of its com- 
 panion term ' the Conditioned ' ; but to identify this indis- 
 pensableness of thought with necessity of existence is not 
 less absurd than to make two persons of a man and his 
 shadow, or two objects of ' something ' and ' nothing.' Such 
 an error would double the census of the world's contents, 
 by entering the negative member of every contradictory 
 antithesis on the register of positive things. 
 
 It is needless to follow Kant as he tracks this illusion 
 through the constructive metaphysics of his time, and 
 shows how it invalidates in turn the so-called Rational 
 Psychology (the doctrine of the Soul as a simple indi- 
 visible, imperishable entity), the scheme of Cosmology (the 
 theory of the universe as a total system of phenomena 
 under conditions of Time, Space, Causality), and that of 
 Theology (the doctrine of God, as the Ens realissimum 
 the absolute ground of all possible existence and thought, 
 in themselves and their relations). So little of the schemes 
 then favoured by the schools survives for us, that his criti- 
 cism has chiefly an historical interest ; and so far as it has 
 still a living application, it will be most fitly noticed as the 
 particular topics present themselves which are successively 
 affected by it. For our present exposition of the doctrine 
 of Nescience it is sufficient to point out its inseparable 
 connection with the author's doctrine of Perception. The 
 changes of feeling, or ' manifold of sense,' supply the whole 
 matter or contents of what we can know, though not them- 
 selves constituting knowledge, till taken up and objectified
 
 60 LIMITS OF THE INTELLECT. 
 
 by our perceptive 'forms' of Space and Time. Neither 
 these forms, nor ' concepts ' of the understanding ranged in 
 its ' categories,' nor again the ' ideas ' which meet the 
 Reason at the ultimate ratio of unification, bring with 
 them anything further to be known, except themselves. 
 They are absolutely dependent on the original sensory 
 elements of experience, which alone they are qualified to 
 handle, and on which all their activity is expended. If 
 therefore, after extracting a store of concepts and ideas by 
 precipitating the mere sensitive affection, we make objects 
 of those concepts and ideas, by applying to them the form 
 of Space and the categories of ' Reality,' ' Unity,' ' Neces- 
 sity,' we do but snatch our own phenomena from their place, 
 and set them up as idols of self-deception. The general 
 result of this critical Analytic is, that the human being is 
 a casket of faculties and susceptibilities, which coherently 
 treat and interpret their own phenomena, without access to 
 anything beyond.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 APPRECIATION OF KANT'S DOCTRINE. 
 
 IN testing the conclusions of this ' Critical Philosophy/ 
 it is necessary to distinguish between its psychological and 
 its logical pretensions. To decide upon the former, we 
 must ask whether, if accepted, it accounts for our belief in 
 an external world. To determine the latter, we must ask 
 whether it enables us to verify or to invalidate that belief. 
 
 i. As a Psychology of Belief. 
 
 Mr. J. S. Mill has appropriated to his empirical doctrine 
 the name of ' The psychological theory of the belief in an 
 external world ' ; as if everyone who gives a different 
 reading to the internal genesis of that belief forfeited his 
 place as a psychologist. There is no justification for such 
 a monopoly of the term. Kant's analysis of the fact of 
 Perception is no less exclusively derived than Mill's from 
 careful scrutiny of the contents of the self-conscious pro- 
 cess. The difference between them is simply that the one 
 discovers there only sensitive changes administered to the 
 mind's receptivity, while the other finds also determining 
 factors brought by the mind's own activity. The two 
 heads of arrangement, Time and Space, under which all 
 phenomena dispose themselves, the one regards as gradually 
 learned, like any observed property of things, by analysis 
 of experience, the other, as conditions presupposed in 
 experience, and belonging to the very make of the faculty 
 that wins it. Whether the former and purely empirical
 
 62 KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 doctrine can render an adequate account of our belief in 
 an external world will be considered hereafter in treating 
 of Mill's application of it to this purpose. Meanwhile, that 
 Kant's '^Esthetik,' in assigning an a priori character to 
 time and space, obtains a complete competency to this end, 
 and leaves no element of the belief at a loss for its meaning, 
 appears indisputable. It escapes the impossibility of meta- 
 morphosing passive feelings into active cognition, by 
 superinducing the perceptive ' form ' on the sensational 
 1 material ' ; and provides for the objectivity which certainly 
 is not involved in the mere changes of the sensitive nature. 
 The distinction between truth that must be and truth that 
 simply is, the demonstrative certainty of the mathematical 
 sciences which deal with number (time) and with dimension 
 and figure (space), the infinity towards which the possi- 
 bilities of quantity run out, all become intelligible in the 
 light of this doctrine, while else still fruitful in unsolved 
 problems. 
 
 But notwithstanding the irresistible cogency and ade- 
 quacy of Kant's position as to the a priori character of 
 Time and Space, his account of the relation between these 
 two forms in their genesis and first application is not free 
 from obscurity and inexactness. They are the distinctive 
 laws, respectively, of the 'Outer' and the 'Inner' sense, 
 phrases which, with Locke's own sanction l , had come into 
 use as equivalent to his ' Sensation ' and ' Reflection ' or 
 Self-consciousness. But there is this difference between 
 them ; that we might have had the inner sense alone, and 
 in becoming aware of its feelings, we should cognise them 
 one after another and apprehend them in Time, without any 
 surmise of Space ; while on the other hand, it would be 
 impossible to have the outer sense alone, with its reference 
 of the phenomenon to Space ; for this, ex vi termini, is an 
 
 1 Essay on the Human Understanding, Book II. ch. i. 3, 4.
 
 Chap. II.] CONSIDERED. 63 
 
 idea of which we are self-conscious ; as an affection of our 
 inner sense, it must stand there in the Time series ; and so 
 the Space idea which it carries cannot be realised without 
 dipping into the element of the antithetic sense. Hence 
 the rule that Time is predicable of both inner and outer 
 phenomena, Space of the outer alone l . 
 
 The primacy thus assigned to the 'inner sense,' while 
 containing within it the key to the true solution, is so 
 presented as to involve serious difficulties. The parallelism 
 of function between the two ' forms ' of Sense, and the 
 distinction between its two constituents, of ' matter ' and 
 ' form,' are both of them disturbed by this account. By 
 the ' material ' is always meant the passive feelings em- 
 pirically given ; by the ' form ' the spontaneity with which 
 we meet them and unify them under this head or that ; 
 Time for one set, Space for another ; and neither of these 
 can be empirical material, not being sensation but a dis- 
 poser of sensation : and still less can one form, or the Ego 
 in the exercise of one form, apprehend the other. Yet we 
 are assured that the Space form of the outer sense cannot 
 perform its function without becoming the matter of the 
 inner, and must itself enter a series of one dimension 
 before it can claim its three. A further want of clearness 
 is observable in Kant's use of the word ' Sense ' in its 
 demarcation from Understanding. The essence of the 
 former he places in passive ' receptivity,' of the latter 
 in active 'spontaneity' 2 ; and this is also the distinction 
 which he draws between the empirically received 'manifold' 
 of feelings and the a priori 'forms' of time and space which 
 
 1 Kr. d. rein. Vern. transcend. Elementarlehre, I. ii, Schliisse C. 
 Rosenkr. ii. p. 43. 
 
 2 ' Wollen wir die Receptivitat unseres Gemiiths, Vorstellungen zu 
 empfangen, so feme es auf irgend eine Weise afficirt wird, Sinnlichkeit 
 nennen, so ist dagegen das Vermogen, Vorstellungen selbst hervor- 
 zubringen, oder die Spontaneital des Erkentnisses, der Verstand! 
 Transcend. Elementarlehre, II. i, Rosenkr. p. 56.
 
 64 KANT'S DOCTRINE. [Book I. 
 
 we ourselves bring upon it to unify its contents. Yet this 
 spontaneity, though first constituting intelligence and 
 supplying it with objects, he does not assign to the Under- 
 standing, but retains in the retinue of Sense. It was quite 
 admissible for him to limit the word Understanding to the 
 kinds of cognition that commence with the manipulation 
 of concepts ; but not to set up for this an exclusive claim 
 to a spontaneity which no less belongs to the intuitions 
 and processes of Perception. 
 
 If the ' Inner Sense ' is to dispose its feelings in one 
 order, the ' Outer Sense ' to arrange its own in another, we 
 must be differently affected in the two cases ; else in the 
 absence of any distinguishing mark, the ground of classi- 
 fication will be wanting, and the feelings may be captured 
 by the wrong ' form ' and appear in the inventory of a 
 usurper. No such distinction exists ; for the simple reason 
 that the very same sensations which belong to the Outer 
 Sense are those which we know by the Inner : the 
 fragrance, for instance, the bloom, the shape, of a rose ; 
 and in the two cases we have to discriminate between, 
 not dissimilar kinds of feeling that may be separately 
 unified, but different intellectual dealings with the same 
 feeling, viz. an appropriation of it as in itself, and a re- 
 ference of it to a source other than itself. Self-conscious- 
 ness takes it home : Perception carries it to its cause. 
 
 In performing this act, rightly regarded as occasioning 
 the idea of Time, Self-consciousness cannot properly be 
 called ' Sense ' at all ; simply because it is an act put forth, 
 and not a feeling passively emerging. It is no item of 
 change in the receptivity, but an attention directed upon 
 such an item, allocating it upon its point of emergence, 
 which it identifies with the attending self. If another 
 change arise, it also is referred to the same point, without 
 however meeting the former occupant except as an image 
 of what has been : and so of a third and any following
 
 Chap. II.] CONSIDERED. 65 
 
 number. The receptive continuum on which these sparks 
 of consciousness seem to glow and fade involves, under the 
 intuition of the active intelligence, the idea of Time. 
 Were the very same changes of state lighted up and 
 quenched, one by one, without the presence of the attentive 
 eye, each of itself would be a feeling, but, strung into no 
 combination, would remain without chronology. 
 
 The self-activity which is attended by the intuition of 
 Space takes the form of movement ; not that movement 
 pure and simple as a continuous spontaneity would supply 
 it with adequate occasion ; for I must not only have the 
 activity, but know it ; and know it I shall not, until it is 
 arrested or resisted. But the moment the impelled limb 
 strikes on an impediment, I realise what I have been about; 
 the stopped impulse, surprised by the challenge, tries to 
 fulfil itself by additional tension, and the energy passes 
 from spontaneous to voluntary, facing the alternative of 
 my causality or causality other than mine. I might say, my 
 1 force ' or force other than mine : but there is this differ- 
 ence ; that ' force ' means that which I have been un- 
 consciously expending all along, and first discover when 
 the flow of it is checked, just as the normal heart-beat 
 is latent till the pulsation slacken or run wild, and is 
 therefore a single continuity which might never be dis- 
 puted : while 'causality' denotes that which decides between 
 two conceived possibilities, and determines the actual to be 
 this rather than that. Now that which in me decides 
 between two possibilities is Will, the act of choice which 
 settles an alternative ; and when I encounter resistance 
 and set upon trying, the problem thrust upon me is simply, 
 'Which is to be determiner?' and necessarily takes the 
 form of Will against Will, mine against other. If, as I 
 believe, this is the birth-point of the intuition of causality, 
 that intuition is involved in the elementary exercise of 
 perception : it is neither deducible from the ' forms ' of 
 
 VOL. I. F
 
 66 KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 time and space, nor answerable for them ; but as a function 
 of the self-consciousness which discriminates the Ego from 
 the non-Ego, is co-ordinated with them. 
 
 It is an evident implication in the foregoing analysis 
 that the Self is revealed to us in its active capacity ; and 
 similarly that the not-self bursts upon the stage as its 
 energetic antagonist. But the encounter of opposite 
 causalities involves the delivery of reciprocal effects ; and 
 the collision which checks my spontaneity announces itself 
 also by tactual and visual feelings passively attending the 
 shock, while my own impact is followed by more or less 
 commotion among the images of my camera conscia. The 
 former of these, completing the causal idea of the not-self, 
 are what I get, and so they introduce my receptivity into 
 the same ego with my activity: the latter are what I give, 
 and so they are thrown off into the non-ego ; each of the 
 antithetic terms becoming thus both agent and patient. 
 
 The precise relation of the Causal antithesis between the 
 ego and the non-ego to the ' forms ' of Time and Space, 
 and of those ' forms ' to one another, is by no means easy 
 to determine. It is common to regard these two quantities 
 as quite heterogeneous in their idea, notwithstanding their 
 common predicates of infinity and divisibility, and the 
 recognition in Time of a dimension which at least resembles 
 one of the three belonging to Space. Kant treats this as 
 no more than a resemblance. He says, ' Since this inward 
 intuition has no form, we try to compensate this want by 
 resort to analogies, and represent the time-succession by a 
 line infinitely produced, in which the manifold items form 
 a series which is of only one dimension ; and from the 
 properties of this line we infer the properties of time, 
 except the single one, that the parts of the first co-exist, 
 while those of the last are in every case successive 1 .' Is it 
 
 Transcend. Elementarlehre, II. Schliisse (b).
 
 Chap. II.] CONSIDERED. 67 
 
 then psychologically true that ' this inward intuition has no 
 form ' ? Of course it is, if by ' form ' we are to understand 
 only a periphery inclosing an area ; but is it so, if we 
 extend the word to an imaged quantity presentable only on 
 spatial conditions ? In other words, is the one dimension 
 of Time something other than the first of the three dimen- 
 sions of Space, and described by it only in the way of 
 metaphor? Have we any literal idea of time which dis- 
 penses with this ' analogy ' ? It is admitted that of Time 
 as empty we have no perception : it is reported to us by its 
 felt contents ; and, on the other hand, that of those contents 
 as successive we could have no apprehension, but for the 
 underlying continuum of Time provided for them a priori: 
 if there be such indissoluble interdependence between the 
 unbroken continuum and the manifold train of items, how 
 can it be said that only the successive links of the latter 
 belong to time, and that the undivided line of the former is 
 but a borrowed property of Space ? Two forms that thus 
 play into each other's hands in order to exist must stand in 
 some nearer relation than is compatible with the entire 
 distinctness assigned to the ' Inner ' and the ' Outer Sense.' 
 I venture to raise a question whether they have not a 
 common point for their origin. What is the initial point 
 or standard to measure from in the Time consciousness ? It 
 is the Now, as distinguished from every then. And what 
 is the initial point in the Space consciousness ? It is the 
 Here, as distinguished from every there. And what do we 
 mean by the Now, and how do we fix its seat? It is the 
 Subject's own existing state, the point through which his 
 act is passing. And what again do we mean by the Here? 
 It is where the subject himself is : it is at his own centre, 
 the waking point of his activity. The self is always here, 
 and is always now : it constitutes the common starting 
 term of both relations. But how could this be, if the 
 elements which contained the complementary terms were 
 
 F 3
 
 68 KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 altogether heterogeneous? In remembering a feeling, I 
 recall a then which once was now : in repeating the act on 
 several occasions, I submit all the memories to the same 
 condition, and connect them in my regards as beads upon 
 a thread reaching to the intuent self. The continuity 
 traced by the flowing of this now through its series of 
 points seems to me so literally a line, that the story, so far 
 as I can see, might be just as truly told in terms of longi- 
 tudinal distance, as a looking forth on the perspective of 
 theres each of which had in turn been here. The reason 
 why we do not adopt this language is partly that in the 
 Space-field lie innumerable other theres that never have 
 been here, and that are as much there and there and there 
 to each other as they are to us ; and we need therefore a 
 distinctive phraseology to mark out the limiting condition 
 of this particular externality ; and partly that the identity 
 of Self through all its changes forbids us to differentiate 
 them from each other by the same terms which serve to 
 contrast the total Self with the total not-self. 
 
 If then our self-discovery shapes itself at its birth into 
 the a priori form of alternative Causality with reciprocal 
 passivity, and if the self is coincident with the here, the 
 other than self must be the not-here, but there : in other 
 words, it comes to us as external ; and the Perceptive act 
 involves, along with the Causal intuition, the geometrical 
 idea of Space. This interpretation of the conditions of 
 experience somewhat modifies Kant's adjustment of their 
 order and proportion, and assigns an earlier function to the 
 idea of cause ; but does not transfer any of his a priori data 
 to the account of empirical acquisitions. 
 
 On one point more the language of the yEsthetik is apt 
 to mislead. The feelings delivered on to our Receptivity 
 are called, as we have seen, ' the manifold of Sense ' ; and 
 are regarded as a plurality ready stored, and waiting to get 
 into their right order, either of series, or of group, by the
 
 Chap. II.] CONSIDERED. 69 
 
 application of the respective forms of time and space : and 
 the arrival of this event it is which first moulds the many 
 into one. Is this a true description of the purely animal 
 states of passive sensibility ? He evidently assumes that 
 where several organs, visual, tactual, olfactory, etc. are 
 affected by the different properties of an object, a corre- 
 sponding number of sensations will be assembled in the 
 consciousness, and constitute a ' manifold.' And this seems 
 at first to follow from the undoubted fact that, if one of the 
 senses were thrown out of the phenomenon, the feeling 
 would be different. But so would it be with our own 
 general life-feeling if any one of its tributary organs, a 
 valve, a gland, an artery, a membrane, were to drop its 
 function or become abnormal ; yet so long as it goes on 
 as usual, its special sensibility is undistinguished ; and our 
 momentary consciousness, formed though it is by the con- 
 fluence of innumerable rills of sensibility, is simply one. 
 The compositeness of the raw material of our experience 
 is a secret from us not only until it change, but until we 
 wake up and notice the change, i.e. until we actively per- 
 ceive as well as passively feel. We apprehend an object as 
 single before we read off its properties as many, instead of 
 picking up its properties one by one, and then adding them 
 together to constitute an object out of their sum. This 
 law of the Unity of original consciousness has important 
 bearings on psychology ; and requires us to invert Kant's 
 account ; to read the process of perception, not as a descent 
 of synthesis upon multiplicity, but as a resolution of single- 
 ness into analysis. 
 
 With these modifications Kant's doctrine of Perception 
 seems to me accurately to reflect the contents of our 
 experience. But even in its original form its resources are 
 sufficient to give an intelligible account of our belief in the 
 existence of an external material world : and criticise as we 
 may his steering through some of the more intricate
 
 70 KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 channels of psychology, that problem suffers no shipwreck 
 at his hands. 
 
 2. As an Instrument of verification. 
 
 There remains the more momentous question as to the 
 Logical value of his doctrine : in explaining our belief, does 
 he enable us to verify or to invalidate it? What is the 
 tenure by which we hold that belief? Does he tell us that 
 it depends in us on the existence of a world outside us ? 
 No : its specified conditions are the ' manifold of Sense,' 
 and the a priori ' forms ' of Time and Space, both factors 
 being functions of our own nature. Constituted as we are, 
 we should necessarily believe in a real world independent 
 of us, whether there were such a thing or not. We are 
 formed as if it existed, and cannot escape its idea ; but it 
 comes to us as postulated, not as demonstrated ; and we 
 may rightly read the make and the contents of our own 
 mind, without being obliged either to accept or to reject its 
 postulates : they may be taken as intuitive knowledge or 
 as subjective illusions : either supposition is compatible 
 with assent to the psychology of the critical philosophy. 
 If Kant therefore, in reducing Time and Space with what- 
 ever they carry, to ' idealities,' means no more than that we 
 cannot logically remove either of these alternative possibili- 
 ties, he occupies an unassailable position. Our judgment 
 that through feelings in the mind we have knowledge of 
 what is not in the mind may undoubtedly be true ; yet 
 need not be true, since its existence as a belief is in any case 
 provided for by the very structure of our faculties. Kant 
 however does not hold the balance thus even between the 
 opposite hypotheses ; nor does he institute any thorough- 
 going choice between them. Though he constitutes all our 
 objects for us out of our own feelings, and makes them 
 therefore self-evolved products, he does not avow a com- 
 plete Idealism, with no world but the world of thought :
 
 Chap. II.] AS 1 VERIFIER. 71 
 
 yet neither does he concede anything like equal rights to 
 the Realism which he retains. His proof that our mental 
 constitution is a constant factor in our interpretation of 
 experience he takes as a disproof of any possible know- 
 ledge except of our own ideas, and thus sets aside as 
 inadmissible the natural postulate of intuitive truth. He 
 concludes, as Hegel remarks, ' It cannot be true, because 
 we think it 1 .' And yet of the outward objects which he 
 withholds from our knowledge, he does not deny the 
 existence : he leaves a ' Ding-an-sich ' as the real correlate 
 (wahres Correlatum) 2 of our perception, with the proviso 
 that it shall keep its secret and tell us nothing of what it 
 is : he defines a ' phenomenon ' (Erscheinung) an ' idea ' 
 (Vorstellung) which has 'an unknown transcendental 
 object ' 3 : he speaks of Matter, not as an ' Unding,' but as 
 a ' Ding-an-sich ' or ' transcendental object ' inaccessible to 
 knowledge 4 . And accordingly, without questioning its 
 reality, he simply warns us against supposing the last 
 ground reached by calling it ' spirit ' instead of ' matter ' : 
 the ' transcendental object,' he says, ' on which are grounded 
 both outward phenomena and the inward intuition is in 
 itself neither matter nor a thinking being, but a ground 
 unknown to us of the phenomena which supply the empiri- 
 cal concept of both the one and the other 5 .' If these 
 expressions occurred only in the Kritik der reinen Ver- 
 nunft, they might be treated by a cynical reader as mere 
 nominal concessions of objects which, like the Epicurean 
 gods, having been disabled and set aside, might be per- 
 mitted to exist. But they are found in both earlier and 
 later expositions of his doctrine, under conditions which 
 
 1 ' Nach Kant ist dasjenige was wir denken falsch, darum weil uiir 
 es denken.' Encyklopadie, i. 60. Zusatz i. Ros. S. 123. 
 3 Transc. .sth. i, sub fin. Ros. p. 40. 
 3 Transc. Analyt. Anal, der Erf. 2 ; Ros. 163. 
 * 3 er Paralogism, d. r. Vernunft. Ros. 293. 
 5 4 er Paral. d. r. Vernunft. Ros. 303.
 
 72 KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 leave no doubt of their sincerity. His repeated disclaimer 
 of the Berkleyan idealism, already appearing in his inau- 
 gural disputation for his Professorship (1770), rests on the 
 principle that ' our sense apprehensions as caused attest the 
 presence of an object 1 .' And in his Prolegomena to Meta- 
 physics (1783) he says expressly, 'This so-called Idealism 
 of mine does not touch the existence of things (and this is 
 the doubt which properly constitutes Idealism as commonly 
 understood) ; for it has never entered my head to doubt it : 
 but merely the sensible presentation of things, culminating 
 in Space and Time ; and in regard to these, therefore to all 
 phenomena in general, I have only shown, that they are 
 not things (but mere kinds of presentation) and not predi- 
 cates belonging to things in themselves 2 .' 
 
 This retention of undoubting belief in ' things in them- 
 selves' after showing that a 'thing' is but a synthesis of 
 feelings by a unifying ' form ' of apprehending, and in a 
 ' transcendental object ' foreign to the mind, after resolving 
 objectivity itself into a subjective manipulation of sensations, 
 is a singular incongruity. What warrant can he have for 
 his belief in their existence ? Are they not, by definition, 
 beyond the field of possible experience which absolutely 
 shuts us in ? Does he need them as indispensable causes 
 of what we passively feel ? Has he not forbidden us to 
 apply the category of Causality, or any other, a single step 
 outside the phenomena of sense? Has it not been the 
 whole problem of the critical philosophy to empty out the 
 transcendental world, and reclaim its supposed contents for 
 the human mind as their inventor? If the 'forms' and 
 ' categories ' of that mind are good authority for ' never 
 doubting ' existences beyond it, why will they not serve as 
 guarantee for the externality of Space and the continuity 
 of Time irrespective of our senses? The acceptance or 
 
 1 De mundi sens. & intell. forma & princ. 1 1 ; Ros. i. 315. 
 
 2 13 ; Anmerkung. 3 ; Ros. iii. 51.
 
 Chap. II.] AS VERIFIER. 73 
 
 retention of such transcendental belief can be justified only 
 as an act of confidence in an intuitive necessity of thought 
 a confidence which at the same time is denied to perfectly 
 parallel if not identical beliefs on the ground that they are 
 nothing but an intuitive necessity of ours. 
 
 The two subjective ' forms of sense ' do not, it would 
 seem, equally disqualify us for objective cognition ; for from 
 the external field we are said (as already explained) to be 
 cut off by an a priori impossibility of knowing which does 
 not apply to the internal field. If the knower is here, and 
 the thing to be known is there, he can never, we are 
 assured, carry his consciousness over the interval or throw 
 a bridge across to what he would be at ; and as long as 
 his faculty wins no contact, it is as much baffled by a 
 millemetre as by a mile. With the inner sense this 
 hindrance does not exist : the ' consciousness ' has not ' to 
 go beyond itself,' but is present where its object is ; and 
 hence, in asking the question ' How the conscious subject 
 can know anything else but himself and his own state 
 of mind/ ' can know what is not brought within the range 
 of his consciousness, 1 ' Kant allows that self-knowledge at 
 least is possible. He 'can understand how analytic pro- 
 positions are possible : how the mind, when it has once 
 possessed itself of certain conceptions can analyse them or 
 break them up into their parts : but in so doing it is merely 
 dealing with itself : how can it go on to add to its own 
 conceptions of objects ?' 2 The contrast here drawn depends 
 then on the plausible plea, ' the subject can of course 
 contemplate and analyse his own thought, for it is with 
 him ; but objects are, by supposition, separate from him, 
 without access to his consciousness.' On nearer inspection 
 however the ground for this distinction vanishes, because 
 holding good for only one (the geometrical) of the two 
 
 1 Caird's Kant, p. 19 2 Ibid. p. 7.
 
 74 KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 quantities within which distance exists. The concept or 
 memory which I analyse is, as the object of my analysis, 
 no less beyond my point as thinking subject, than the 
 grass which I see : the one is separate from me in time, the 
 other in space ; if I can know what is absent from me now, 
 why can I not know what is absent from me kereJ 
 Objectivity is common to both, and so far from being the 
 contradictory of knowledge, is the essence of its meaning. 
 The theory of knowing gains no advantage by fetching all 
 objects into the mind, that the intelligent and the intelligible 
 may sit on the same chair ; just as much remains unex- 
 plained as before. The fallacy lies in the arbitrary 
 assumption that between subject and object, the knower 
 and the known, there must be homogeneity ; so that 
 thought may know thought, but cannot know things : an 
 assumption which finds an extreme expression in the 
 dictum of Professor Caird, ' knowledge of things must 
 mean, that the mind finds itself in them, or that in some 
 way the difference between them and the mind is dissolved' 1 ' 
 If I wanted to name the condition which most certainly 
 excluded knowledge, I should be at a loss for better terms 
 than this : the moment you dissolve the difference between 
 the knower and the known, they coalesce like the foci of 
 an ellipse with its eccentricity reduced to zero, and the 
 relation between them which constitutes intelligence 
 vanishes. 
 
 If we waive this objection and suppose a real 'contra- 
 diction' to exist 'between the form of thought and the 
 matter of thought,' the question returns upon us, how are 
 we helped out of it by a search into the limits of thought, 
 terminating in this check-mate as its chief trophy ? When 
 addressing ourselves to this peculiar ' matter of thought,' 
 by what magic can we silence the contradiction of 'the 
 
 1 Caird's Kant, p. 553.
 
 Chap. II.] AS VERIFIER. 75 
 
 form'? Have we competency for a critical analysis which 
 shall separate the ' valid ' from the ' invalid ' factors of 
 experience? The Reason which conducts the criticism 
 being affected by the same incapacity as the Reason 
 which is the object of criticism, if the latter proves desti- 
 tute of the marks of validity, so does the former ; and 
 the philosopher will be only amusing himself with the 
 attempt to ' leap off his own shadow.' It is no doubt 
 possible, and important, to analyse the process of know- 
 ledge ; but only on the condition that it be not prejudged 
 to be nescience, and that, when analysed, it be -accepted 
 on its own terms. We cannot spring out of our own 
 nature, in order to ' criticise ' it from a higher platform of 
 intelligence. All that can be done is to correct its acci- 
 dental aberrations, by bringing its processes into harmony 
 with one another, whether in the same mind or in many 
 minds. 
 
 Were we obliged to choose between the two a priori 
 assumptions, that we can know only what is at our own 
 centre, and that we can know nothing that is there, it is 
 the latter which would merit our preference. And Comte's 
 error in regard to it lay, not in its abstract enunciation, 
 but in wielding it as a weapon fatal to psychology : not 
 observing that self-conscious analysis is always directed 
 upon states of mind familiar to us from prior experience, 
 and contemplated by the Subject across an interval of 
 time. 
 
 When Kant applies his analysis of our sensible experi- 
 ence to discredit all supposed access to 'transcendental 
 objects,' he appears to me to prove too much. Such an 
 object, as not phenomenal, he describes as Noumenal, i.e. 
 constructed purely by thought ; definable negatively as 
 ' not an object of perception,' positively as ' an object of 
 non-sensuous perception,' and in that capacity judged, by 
 his ^Esthetik doctrine, to be an illusory ens rationis, pre-
 
 76 KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 senting itself to our minds as an object^. But if this 
 reasoning is good for anything, it goes to remove such 
 a Noumenon not only from existence but from thought. 
 For how have we learned that objectivity is constituted 
 for us ? It is by applying a ' sense form ' to passive sense 
 feeling, and so obtaining an Anschauung in space or time ; 
 nor can there be an 'object,' without both these factors 
 from the sensory province of our nature. On quitting then 
 this province for the understanding, and leaving space and 
 time behind, we drop the possibility of an ' object ' at all, 
 and, in the absence of both its ' manifold ' matter and its 
 subjective 'form,' are incapacitated for constructing any 
 such thought. It is not enough to say that we misapply 
 the forms of space and time where they do not fit ; the 
 very power of applying them at all depends on the 
 presence of the sensuous material which, by hypothesis, 
 has vacated in favour of the pure understanding. We 
 ought therefore to have no ideas, false or true, of such 
 existences as the soul or God. Nor indeed is it easy to 
 understand the distinction between the ' reality ' and the 
 ' semblance ' of an ' object,' when the sole condition of 
 objectivity is presentation to consciousness under the forms 
 of space and time, and the whole perceptible world is 
 transposed from its external allocation into the Ego. If, 
 indeed, it is the mind itself which in exercising its own 
 laws, ' makes the natural world ' which it fancies itself to 
 perceive, the distinction between the knower and the 
 known, the percipient and the percept, is abolished ; and 
 whatever is then called knowledge is 'only a coherent 
 system of semblances 2 .' 
 
 Of the two ways of treating our reference of a perception 
 to an object in independent space and time, viz. as an 
 
 1 See Prof. John Watson's Kant and his English Critics, Glasgow, 
 1882, pp. 294, 295. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 356.
 
 Chap. II.] AS VERIFIER. 77 
 
 intuitive apprehension of what is, and as an illusory attri- 
 bute of what is not, Kant then adopts the latter ; and 
 considers its correctness established by proving the ' sub- 
 jectivity' of the two forms of Quantity. They would 
 however be equally ' subjective,' if, being also ' objective, 1 
 they were contained for us in an intuitive apprehension of 
 what is : so that the discovery that they are native forms 
 of our percipient constitution decides nothing as to their 
 illusory or trustworthy nature. Whichever side of the 
 alternative you take you have to postulate it, and can no 
 more prove it than you can prove that life is not a dream. 
 If Kant does not convince me, it is not because I can 
 adduce any class of phenomena which may not fit in with 
 his idealism ; but partly because, instead of making it 
 thorough-going, he has left some real existences standing 
 outside of it ; partly because he has failed, while vindi- 
 cating the psychological adequacy of his theory, to dis- 
 prove the equal resources of its alternative ; and, above 
 all, because I hold, with Trendelenburg \ that the sub- 
 jectivity of space and time, the fundamental character- 
 istic of the critical philosophy, does not prejudice their 
 claim to objectivity, and requires no surrender of the 
 reliance which we inevitably place on the veracity of our 
 own faculties. The contemptuous terms in which Kant 
 himself anticipates, and Professor Caird criticises this 
 'absurd' opinion, that 'space and time may be both 
 empirically and transcendentally real,' might well deter 
 me from professing it ; but they are supported by reasons 
 convincing only to the adherent of Kantian principles 
 pure and unmodified. ' I should like to know,' says Kant, 
 'what I should need to assert in order to avoid the 
 idealising of space. I should need to say, not only that 
 
 1 Logische Untersuchungen, 2 te Auflage I. vi. S. 156 seqq. ; and 
 Historische Beitrage zur Phil. III. vii. S. 215.
 
 78 KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 the idea of space completely corresponds with the relation 
 which our sensibility has to objects, which is what I have 
 said, but that it is in all points like the objects themselves. 
 But this is an assertion to which I can attach no meaning 
 whatever, any more than I can attach meaning to the 
 assertion, that the sensation of redness is like that quality 
 of cinnabar which excites the sensation in me 1 .' To 
 make this parallel just, the 'idea of space' ought to be, 
 like the ' sensation of redness,' a passive feeling of the 
 'manifold of sense'; whereas even with Kant, it is the 
 active factor of spontaneity which shapes that feeling in 
 the self-consciousness ; and, otherwise interpreted, it is 
 not ' sensation ' at all, but thought, the intelligent or cogni- 
 tive act involved in all perception. The visual experience 
 does not tell us that redness for us is like the exciting 
 quality in the cinnabar : the ' idea of space ' does tell us 
 that the sun and moon which we perceive are outside of 
 us, and of each other in real relations represented by ideal 
 ones in us. Professor Caird asks, ' Is it possible that the 
 object which we determine for ourselves in consciousness, 
 exactly corresponds to an object which exists independent 
 of our determination out of consciousness? and answers 
 that 'we can give meaning to the assertion that empiric 
 reality may also be transcendental reality, only by reviving 
 the old hypothesis of pre-established harmony.' The 
 question appears to me somewhat loosely put and arbi- 
 trarily answered. To speak of the object as that ' which 
 we determine for ourselves in consciousness,' i. e. as owing 
 nothing except to our own constitution, is to assume more 
 than Kant assumes ; for he admits (as Professor Caird 
 himself allows 2 ) 'things in themselves' to be 'unknown 
 causes of these ideas.' And to represent Trendelenburg's 
 doctrine as requiring ' exact correspondence ' between the 
 
 1 Prolegomena, 13 ; Note 2, ap. Caird, p. 261. 
 9 Caird, p. 259.
 
 Chap. II.] AS VERIFIER. 79 
 
 object as thought and the object as existing, i. e. perfect 
 resemblance, point by point, in defiance of the distinction 
 of the sensuous from the intellectual element of the per- 
 ception, and of the conscious subject from the unconscious 
 object, is an obvious exaggeration. The 'objectivity' of 
 space means no more than that it does not come and go 
 with the presence and absence of sentient animals, as pain 
 and pleasure do ; but that it is the irremovable and ever 
 ready condition of the very ' things in themselves ' whose 
 existence irrespective of all consciousness Kant himself 
 allows. The ' subjectivity ' of space means our a priori 
 apprehension of this ' objectivity ' on occasion of the first 
 experience that wants it. That the apprehension should 
 agree with the fact would drive us to an hypothesis of 
 pre-established harmony, if the order of knowing and the 
 order of being were assumed to be two eternal series 
 without possible contact or interaction ; but not if relations 
 of causality either subsist between them as they pass, or 
 are prefixed to both in the unity of their source. That 
 our cognitive faculties should be constituted in accordance 
 with things as they are is no more surprising than that 
 the instinct of animals should adapt their actions to things 
 as they are to be ; and much less surprising than would be a 
 constitution of them conformable to things as they are not. 
 Nothing then, I conceive, stands in the way of our trust 
 in the bona fides of our intuitive witnesses to a world 
 beyond the contents of our own consciousness. We are 
 spared the heavy task of taking Time and Space, with all 
 their infinitude, as lodgers within us, and may leave them 
 free to spread out all possibilities of experience, while 
 toughing us at only a few points of contact. Having access 
 to fellow beings and an external scene, we are within reach 
 of other truth than the mere self-consistency of our own 
 ideas ; and our judgments may be tested by the agreement 
 of their affirmed relation with the real one. This is but the
 
 8o KANT'S DOCTRINE [Book I. 
 
 return to what it has become customary, in the esoteric 
 schools, to call 'the common consciousness': in ignorance 
 of any other, and unable to find myself in the sublimer 
 experiences of the closet philosopher, I cannot withdraw 
 my natural trust from a guide that has never deceived me. 
 By all means let illusions be banished, provided the 
 eviction be not effected, like that of an exorcised devil, by 
 another stronger than itself. But the idealist's superior 
 airs towards the natural postulates and the direct working 
 of the honestly -trained understanding, are seldom un- 
 attended by intellectual error and moral wrong. Philosophy 
 supplies no substitutes for the implements of thought with 
 which every human mind is furnished : it can only make 
 the use of them more dexterous, and to speak of a ' philo- 
 sophical consciousness' as if it transcended the habitual 
 earth and ' caught a man up into the third heaven ' to ' hear 
 unspeakable words ' is the usual prelude to paradox rather 
 than to higher truth. The first condition of a sound mind 
 is to plant a firm trust on all beliefs and feelings involved 
 in the very exercise of the natural faculties, and the 
 collapse of this condition opens the way to illimitable 
 aberrations. In direct contradiction to this, the late Mr. 
 James Hinton lays down the rule that ' All mysteries are 
 removed if we once grant our feeling not true 1 .' And the 
 effect of such a rule is evident in his statement that ' the 
 law of cause and effect under which we see nature, is a form 
 of thought. It is nothing real, belonging to the essen- 
 tial action which constitutes the universe, but a relation, 
 like that of time and space and motion, arising from our 
 constitution : it arises as time does from the limit we 
 impose on that which is unlimited. Hence its absolute 
 authority : hence its absolute nonenity 2 ! Kant tells us that 
 
 1 Philosophy and Religion : selected from the manuscripts of the 
 late James Hinton. Edited by Caroline Haddon ; 2nd ed. 1884, p. 22. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 17.
 
 Chap. II.] AS VERIFIER. 8 1 
 
 we can know only what we feel ; Hinton, that what we 
 feel is false. Both invest the category of causality with 
 'absolute authority' for our thought, and divest it of all 
 meaning for reality. Doubtless, 'all mysteries are thus 
 removed' ; for the very antithesis between the knowable 
 and the unknowable vanishes in the universal blank. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ABSOLUTE AND EMPIRICAL IDEALISM. 
 
 i. From Kant to Schopenhauer. 
 
 THOUGH the critical philosophy, by discrediting the 
 prior metaphysics, laid the foundation of the modern 
 doctrine of Nescience, a devoted disciple of Kant might, 
 for two reasons, deem it unfair to place him in the front as 
 answerable for it. He stopped short of unqualified ' tran- 
 scendental Idealism,' reserving a remnant of Realism in the 
 existence of the ' Ding-an-sich.' And, in the ' Practical 
 Reason,' he recovered as postulates a great part of what, 
 in the Speculative, he had surrendered as inferences. This 
 latter plea, whether accepted or not as theoretically adequate, 
 I thoroughly believe to be personally just ; for the cynical 
 imputations of time-serving hypocrisy heaped upon him by 
 Schopenhauer are warranted by no evidence 1 . But the 
 former plea cannot relieve him of philosophical responsi- 
 bility, because it only pronounces him inconsequent ; and 
 in the history of systems an inexorable logic rids them of 
 their halfness and hesitancies, and drives them straight to 
 their inevitable goal. In the first edition of the Kritik der 
 reinen Vernunft, he had presented his Idealism in so 
 unflinching a form as to neutralise the effect of any minor 
 reservations. ' We cannot be wrong in affirming that only 
 
 1 Zeller says, ' Hat er doch auch das Dasein Gottes, wie allgemein 
 zugegeben wird, damals so wenig als friiher und spater, bezweifelt.' 
 Geschichte der deutschen Philosophic seit Leibnitz, 1873, S. 437.
 
 SCHULZE. 83 
 
 that which is in ourselves can be immediately perceived, 
 and that nothing but my own existence can be the object 
 of a mere perception.' ' What is external not being in me, 
 I cannot come across it in my apperception, therefore can 
 meet with it in no perception V Again, ' It is clearly 
 shown,' he says, ' that if the thinking subject be removed, 
 the whole material universe must lapse, since it is nothing 
 but a subjective phenomenon of Sense in us, and one of its 
 varieties of Idea 2 .' Even were it possible, after thus 
 identifying the subjective phenomena with the All, to save 
 a remnant of Realism under the name of ' things in them- 
 selves,' they would not relieve the sentence of nescience, for 
 they are as inaccessible to knowledge as if they had no 
 existence. It is no wonder therefore that so gratuitous a 
 survival dropped off at the next stage of the critical 
 philosophy, and left the egoistic Idealism of Fichte in 
 possession of the field. Not that these 'things in them- 
 selves ' were permitted to die away in silent peace ; for a 
 trenchant attack upon them in 1792 by an author assuming 
 the name Ainesidemus (and soon known to be Professor 
 Gottlob Ernest Schulze of Helmstadt), in a work reviewed 
 by the young Fichte at the outset of his career, had already 
 given a more consistent direction to philosophical thought 3 . 
 The modern New-Academician, in correspondence with 
 his friend Hermias, has no difficulty in showing that if 
 Causality, in common with all the other categories, can be 
 applied only to phenomena, it is impossible to call Ding- 
 an-sich the unknown Cause of our perceptions without 
 
 1 4 ter Paralogism der Idealitat ; Rosenkranz, ii. pp. 294, 295. 
 
 2 Folge des Paralogism ; Rosenkranz, ii. p. 306. 
 
 3 Schulze's book was directed against Reinhold's version of the 
 critical philosophy, as the second title announces : ' Ueber die Funda- 
 mente der von dem Herrn Prof. Reinhold gelieferten Elementar- 
 Philosophie ; nebst einer Vertheidigung des Skepticismus gegen die 
 Anmassungen der Vernunftkritik.' Fichte's review appeared in the 
 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung of Jena in 1794. 
 
 G 2
 
 84 FICHTE. [Book I. 
 
 eo ipso denying its an-sich ; and that, as ' Reality ' also is 
 one of the categories, it is but an empirical product, and 
 every transcendental object must be unreal. No Kantian 
 therefore has the least excuse for dreaming of any world 
 beyond that of his own ideas. 
 
 Nevertheless, this is a kind of theory which, though 
 admitting of a coherence and completeness which secures 
 it from absolute confutation, never gains a durable hold on 
 human convictions ; and even in the philosophical schools, 
 where subtleties are apt to recommend rather than to 
 repel, it has as precarious a life as a treaty of peace and 
 amity that is to last 'for ever,' The objective beliefs of 
 mankind have in them a provoking self-conceit, and are 
 averse to enter the service and wear the livery of any sub- 
 jective ' forms ' that lord it over them. The idealistic inter- 
 pretation of the heavens and the earth, of the human crowd 
 in the city streets, of sleeping and waking, of ploughing and 
 building, of literature and science and law, of the ages of 
 history, of the usages of religion, is not so easily worked 
 out as to find a settled home in any but the most excep- 
 tional consciousness. To take all objects into the subject is 
 to leave the Self in an intolerable solitude, while overburden- 
 ing it with unmanageable contents ; and it is no wonder 
 that, under pressure for relief, the imprisoned captives 
 fling off the nightmare and rush out of doors again, in spite 
 of philosophic bars and bolts. So early did the reaction 
 set in, that the spell of Fichte's idealism was broken by his 
 own most brilliant disciple. Schelling, whose first writings 
 betray no consciousness of deviation, was soon led, by his 
 interest in the natural sciences, to feel that in the problem 
 of Knowledge there were two sides, of which Fichte had 
 explained to him only one. To know is to establish 
 accordance between object and subject, and the conditions 
 of this accord must be determined by studying the relation 
 from each end, asking first how Nature can come into
 
 Chap. III.] SCHELLING. 85 
 
 consciousness ; and then, how Intelligence can get into 
 communion with Nature. The second of these questions, 
 belonging to transcendental philosophy, had been answered 
 in Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre ; the first, belonging to the 
 philosophy of Nature, still waited for an adequate reply. 
 This missing half Schelling claims to have supplied in his 
 System der Transcendentalen Idealismus (1800), where for 
 the first time he rescues objective speculation from its subor- 
 dination to the subjective, and places the two in parallelism 1 . 
 So long as the transcendental philosophy declines the equal 
 partnership, no relief will be given to the irrepressible de- 
 mand which a Naturphilosophie alone can lay to rest 2 . This 
 defection from the sovereignty of the ideal, dignified by the 
 name of the Identitats- Philosophic, and distinguished as 
 objective Idealism from Fichte's subjective Idealism, was 
 intolerable to him, and denounced by him as a lapse into 
 empirical Realism. It was no such thing ; for Schelling did 
 not propose to transfer the sceptre from the hand of the 
 conscious self to that of unconscious nature, or look for any 
 final settlement from the mere altercation of the rivals. 
 He was for lifting the problem of knowledge to a higher 
 point from which these and all other antitheses were born, 
 the Absolute Principium of all relations, a Real above 
 our reality, an Ideal above our ideas, the common source 
 and totality of both. Such transcendent existence however 
 would be of no avail for the theory of knowledge, if 
 speculatively assumed only (as with Spinoza), and prefixed 
 to the contents of experience. But Schelling maintained 
 that the Absolute was accessible to thought ; not indeed 
 to the differentiating thought of the reflective understanding, 
 which deals with things in their distinctions, and therefore 
 only with the many and the finite : but to the Reason, 
 which has immediate intellectual intuition of the one 
 
 1 Einleitung, i ; Werke, iii. 339-342 ; and Vorrede, 330-332. 
 
 2 Ibid. 343, note.
 
 86 SCHELLING. [Book I. 
 
 Infinite and Eternal which unifies them all. This intuition, 
 merging finite things and phenomena into the infinite 
 self-identity, not only apprehends the Absolute, but even 
 loses the apprehending subject himself in the Absolute ; so 
 that his Self is no longer his, no longer individual, but 
 universal. Missing this higher stage of thought, Fichte had 
 looked only into the Ego of personal experience, of which 
 he regarded Knowledge as the self-affirmation ! : whereas it 
 is in truth the self-affirmation of God, the universal Ego. 
 The one view, bringing everything to the standard of the 
 empirical consciousness, results in a subjective Idealism ; 
 the other, apprehending the inner life of the whole, subject 
 and object in one, embraces Nature on the same terms 
 with Self, and constitutes a transcendental Idealism. 
 
 1 Dr. Courtney, in his interesting introductory volume of ' Construc- 
 tive Ethics,' 1886 (p. 2 1 4), speaks of Fichte as 'a thinker who has perhaps 
 been too hastily accused of Subjective Idealism, and whose fame has been 
 somewhat unfairly obscured by the reputation of the Hegelian system' ; 
 and insists, truly enough, that in the Anwrisung zum seligen Leben 
 * the outlines of an absolute Idealism are traced.' But at the date 
 (1806) of this ' complete and final reconstruction,' Schelling's aliena- 
 tion from the 'Subjective Idealism' of his early friend had long been 
 declared, and indeed had produced both his Naturphilosophie in 1799 
 and his Jdentitdtsphilosophie in 1802, and had now at last led to a 
 formal personal breach. Fichte himself had not remained untouched 
 by the increasing reaction against the overwrought pretensions of his 
 Ego ; and wished to show that he too, as well as Schelling, could find 
 a way to rest in the Absolute. But to one long used to the voice of 
 the Wissenschaftslehre, there was a falsetto in the change of tone. 
 He had too deeply committed himself to the subjective order of 
 thought-construction to admit the need of any other ; and so the 
 'Absolute' which he professed to reach was, after all, a dependent 
 result, inferred or evolved from the individual consciousness of which 
 it is one of the implicit contents ; and, however enveloped in the 
 'fervour of religious emotion,' was seen, on emerging from this 
 ' ambrosial cloud ' to be a mere phenomenon of the Ego, on which 
 it looks down with the air of the prior and all-embracing Reality. 
 This subjectivity of method establishes an essential distinction be- 
 tween Fichte's 'Absolute,' and that which is objectively apprehended 
 by Schelling's 'intellectual intuition,' or eternally manifested in 
 Hegel's 'dialectical process.'
 
 Chap. III.] HEGEL. 87 
 
 Schelling's divergence from Fichte was evidently due to 
 the study of Spinoza, who carried his speculation back 
 behind the bifurcation of Being into the relation of subject 
 and object ; only, in order to link his new thought with 
 his prior Kantian limitation to the materials of experience, 
 he added to those materials a direct intellectual Intuition, 
 capable of contemplating as in vision (schauen) the supreme 
 Unity, of which Spinoza could say only that it was, and 
 Kant only that it was a blank unknown. He seems to have 
 forgotten that to the intuent being whatever he contemplates 
 assumes the character of his object ; and to have supposed 
 that because in it, as apprehended, the antithesis of sub- 
 jective and objective states is merged, the apprehender 
 also is delivered from the conditions of his subjectivity, 
 and is himself made absolute in the Absolute. What- 
 ever illusions the theory may involve, the interest in which 
 it is worked out obviously is, to rescue some reality 
 other than empirical, and manumit Objectivity from its 
 thraldom to the subject's consciousness. It is an insur- 
 rection of Nature against the autocracy of Humanity ; 
 and a protest of humanity against the agnosticism of 
 Kant. 
 
 Absolute Knowledge is claimed by Hegel also as the 
 attainable goal of intellectual development; but with a 
 difference from Schelling both in the thing known and in 
 the act of knowing. The former is not a Nature foreign 
 to the subject and in negative relation to it, but a phase of 
 the universal Reason of which the individual is a self- 
 discriminating function ; and the latter is not a flash of 
 intuitive vision, directed upon a fixed object, but a process 
 moving through traceable stages from simple consciousness 
 through self-consciousness, reason, the moral law, religion, 
 to absolute Thought, in which all antitheses return to 
 unity. In each of these stages, the movement takes the 
 form of a triple pulsation, of affirmation, denial, and re-
 
 88 HEGEL. [Book I. 
 
 conciling emergence into something higher. The universe, 
 being but the life of one thinking principle, repeats this 
 law of movement in all its fields in outward Nature, in 
 human history, and in the individual experience. This 
 is Idealism ; because it never quits the realm of its ideas ; 
 all that I know is the process of universal Mind; and my 
 knowing is the process of my own function in it. And 
 it is absolute^ because it unifies the objective and sub- 
 jective sides of this relation, and makes one immanent 
 law co-extensive with the All. 
 
 On looking back at the development of Idealism from 
 Kant to Hegel, it becomes obvious that only in its subjec- 
 tive form does it impugn the reality of knowledge; and 
 that its advance into the absolute form derived its chief 
 impulse from the desire to escape that paradoxical con- 
 sequence. . The happy union thus proclaimed between 
 subject and object was soon, however, rudely broken in 
 the interest of Kant by Schopenhauer, the tormentor of 
 all living professors, who treats the deviations of Schelling 
 and Hegel from the Kantian criticism as bewildered 
 aberrations, and breaks out against them thus : ' In our 
 German philosophy, Intellectual Intuition and Absolute 
 Thinking have now taken the place of clear conceptions 
 and honest investigations. To impose upon the reader, 
 to bewilder and mystify him, and by all sorts of con- 
 trivances throw dust in his eyes that is our method now ; 
 that, and not truth, is the expositor's leading aim. In 
 consequence of all this, philosophy, if we are still to call 
 it so, could not but sink into ever lower depths, till at last 
 the lowest stage of degradation was reached by Hegel, 
 who, to stifle again the freedom of thought won by Kant, 
 turned Philosophy, the daughter of Reason and future 
 mother of Truth, into an instrument of obscurantism and 
 Protestant Jesuitism, but in order to hide the disgrace and 
 at the same time stupefy men's brains to the utmost, drew
 
 Chap. III.] SCHOPENHAUER. 89 
 
 over her a veil of the emptiest verbiage and most senseless 
 hodge-podge ever heard out of Bedlam V 
 
 In thus spurning the attempts of the Absolutists to gain 
 access to the Ding-an-sich, Schopenhauer did not abandon 
 the enterprise for himself, and simply fall back upon the 
 critical Idealism. He laughed at the pretensions of both 
 the ' intellectual intuition ' and the ( dialectical process ' to 
 pass behind phenomena into the apprehension of Reality. 
 And he denied the right of Kant, after restricting possible 
 knowledge to the empirical, to leave in existence at all any 
 ulterior real, as the unknown cause of our sensitive ex- 
 perience; on the ground that the law of causality had 
 no meaning or application beyond the field of phenomena; 
 so that, accepting as he did from the critical philosophy 
 its a priori apparatus of ' sense-forms ' and ' categories of 
 the understanding,' as fixing the boundary of intelligence, 
 he had shut himself up within the interior resources of the 
 subject, and regarded and characterised the world as 
 human ' Vorstellung.' So far, therefore, i.e. in his theory 
 of cognition, he reverted to simple Idealism. But there 
 is another side to his philosophy. His theory of Being has 
 not the same source with his theory of Knowing; the 
 latter comes from the ' consciousness of other things/ the 
 former from the 'consciousness of Self.' The Erkennt- 
 nissvermogen is synonymous with Bewusstseyn anderer 
 Dinge* \ and in that field of 'other things' even pheno- 
 mena and effects of ours, no less than those of our neigh- 
 bours, may present themselves, so far as they are looked at 
 and reckoned as facts occurring. But in his self-conscious- 
 ness the human subject is let into a secret which would be 
 for ever hidden from a mere contemplating spirit, or from 
 himself, were he not an Agent. His body, besides being 
 observable as an object among objects, is identified with 
 
 1 Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, 1841, p. 84. 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. 10, 27.
 
 90 SCHOPENHAUER. [Book I. 
 
 his own individuality, and moved and wielded by himself; 
 it is the Will itself passing into phenomenal expression ; 
 what it does may be perceived and submitted to rules of 
 experience and intelligence ; what it is reports itself only 
 to immediate and incommunicable consciousness ; it is 
 the subject's very essence and reality 1 . By a courageous 
 spring, the analogy is extended from the individual to 
 the world ; as his body turns out to be both Idea and 
 Will, it may be taken as a sample of the whole, and the 
 universe be established as phenomenally ideal, but in its 
 reality (Ding-an-sich) as Will; the ' idea' of it being only 
 in the human observer, while the ' Will,' without idea, and 
 therefore blind and forceful, is its own eternal nature 2 . 
 Thus Schopenhauer arrives, after all, at an Absolute ground 
 of the phenomenal world, the common base of Subject 
 and Object ; whether, in naming it, he succeeds in showing 
 it to us we shall better judge when treating hereafter the 
 doctrine of Causality. At present I will only say that his 
 account of it imposes upon us rather hard terms he in- 
 sists on our calling it ' Will' and nothing else; yet it 
 has no tincture of thought and does not know what it 
 would be at, which seems just to unsay its volitional 
 nature. If we take refuge in what remains when all ' idea' 
 is expelled from our activity, and suppose that ' Force ' is 
 what he means, he accuses us of a vorcpov -n-poVepoy, and 
 declares that Will is the common element of all forces, 
 not Force of all Wills. From these riddles arising on 
 the absolute side of his philosophy I turn to its opposite 
 phase, to explain the modified form into which he threw 
 the Kantian Idealism. 
 
 Accepting the fundamental doctrine of the subjectivity 
 of Time and Space as forms of Perception, and of the 
 Categories as laws of the Understanding, and ranking 
 
 1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, i. 18, pp. 118 seqq. 
 * Ibid. i. 19, pp. 123 seqq.
 
 Chap. III.] SCHOPENHAUER. 91 
 
 it among the greatest of discoveries, Schopenhauer un- 
 conditionally assents to the proposition that, in the absence 
 of the thinking subject there would be no natural objects, 
 and that it is his presence that constitutes the world. But 
 the details of the Kantian analysis he submits to several 
 corrections and simplifications; softening the hard line 
 of distinction between 'Sense' and ' Understanding' (An- 
 schaimng and Denkeri), so as to invest Perception with 
 an intellectual character ; and reducing the twelve Cate- 
 gories to the single head of Causality, which, when thrown 
 into the form of the principium rationis sufficients, may be 
 shown to include all the laws of intelligence. As the most 
 comprehensive enunciation of this principle he selects that 
 of Wolf: ' Nihil est sine ratione cur potius sit, quam non 
 sit' Quitting, therefore, the rampart of the categories, 
 leaving silent the triple armament on each of its four 
 bastions of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Modality 
 he goes forth with his light equipment of Time, Space, 
 and Causality, pledged to overrun the whole objective 
 world and fetch in all that it contains, to be appropriated 
 by the insatiable Subject. The process of conquest, the 
 idealist annexation of province after province of every 
 real, is not perhaps so much simplified as he supposes. 
 The principle of ratio sufficients may be stated in one 
 sentence, but not understood and assented to as one 
 judgment ; as becomes evident the moment you test its 
 pretended identity with the law of Causality. You then 
 perceive at once that the word ratio is ambiguous, and 
 enters as a constitutive member of relations which are 
 essentially different, and on that account referred by Kant 
 to distinct heads. Schopenhauer so far recognises this 1 as 
 
 1 In one passage he says, totidem verbis, that the principle of the 
 sufficient reason is 'ein gemeinschaftlicher Ausdruck fur vier ganz 
 verschiedene Verhaltnisse.' Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes 
 vom zureichenden Grunde (ed. 1864), 52.
 
 9a SCHOPENHAUER. [Book I. 
 
 to prepare his principle for application by presenting it 
 under four separate forms, distinguished as the ratio essendi, 
 the ratio fiendi, the ratio agendi, and the ratio cognoscendi. 
 The generic unity of these, which seems to be implied 
 in the word 'ratio' common to them all, is illusory. The 
 ratio agendi is ethical, and is out of place among the 
 logical categories. The ratio cognoscendi, as regulating 
 mediate judgment, belongs to the discursive or inferen- 
 tial Vernunft in its mode of wielding Kant's quantitative 
 relation of universal and particular. The ratio essendi is 
 mathematical, and depends on the a priori forms of Space 
 and Time alone. And not till we come to the ratio fiendi 
 do we alight upon the relation amenable to the law of 
 Causality. Of the four heads, the last two have the aspect 
 of nearest affinity : yet the slightest reflection shows what 
 different kind of answers they render to the ^question 
 'Why?' Compare the ground which we assign for what 
 always is, and that to which we refer what transiently 
 happens. Why is the tangent of a circle at right angles 
 to the radius at the point of contact ? or an arc's angle at 
 the centre double that at the circumference ? or a cone 
 one-third of the cylinder of same base and altitude? 
 These properties are deduced from others previously 
 established for the same figures ; but the order of deduc- 
 tion is susceptible of change or inversion, and, as in 
 the case of the conic sections, is frequently turned round ; 
 so that the dependence of truth on truth is reciprocal, and 
 all have their source of deduction in the particular pro- 
 perty which happens to be selected for the definition 
 of the figure. This is the Ao'yos which gives account of 
 the series ; but it realises nothing, and makes nothing true 
 which was not there and true before ; and it is a matter of 
 arbitrary choice or convenience that it does not take a 
 consequent instead of an antecedent place. In the field of 
 phenomena, on the other hand, we require an alria which
 
 Chap. III.] SCHOPENHAUER. 93 
 
 admits of no such transposition, and obtain a concatenation 
 which is rectilinear in a uniform direction; e.g. the move- 
 ment of the earth in its orbit from the winter solstice 
 brings our hemisphere under less slanting solar rays ; which 
 gives more heat, which stirs the sluggish vegetable sap, 
 which developes the germs of leaves and blossoms, which 
 fructify their seeds, which yield the fruits. Here we have 
 to do with a different ultimate law the law of Causality, 
 and no longer with the laws of figure and number. We 
 cannot speak of the cause of the three angles of a triangle 
 being equal to two right-angles ; we cannot speak of the 
 reason or rational ground of the rising sap or of the 
 changing moon ; the one, as a constant truth, goes back 
 for its explanation to the given nature of geometrical 
 and arithmetical magnitude; the other, as an event that 
 happens, goes back for its explanation to the originating 
 source which our understanding requires for every phe- 
 nomenon. In the two cases our questions are laid to rest 
 upon different data of thought ; and to disguise that 
 difference under the loose mantle of a term not made for 
 both is sure to betray us into mistaken identity. 
 
 I have said that Kant's sharp distinction between 'Sense' 
 and ' Understanding ' was not retained by Schopenhauer ; 
 and this divergence in the disciple is very observable in 
 the account he gives of our belief in an external world. 
 With Kant, the ' outer sense ' alone is responsible for the 
 belief, which becomes possible as soon as the idea of Space 
 is given ; while the ' inner sense ' with its representation of 
 Time, suffices for the self-knowledge of successive or his- 
 torical experience. With Schopenhauer, such separation 
 of function is logically impossible ; and in order to consti- 
 tute the idea of objective reality, the understanding has to 
 step in and secure the combined action of the two forms of 
 sense. The mode of their co-operation, and the propor- 
 tion of their contributions to the result, are thus defined by
 
 94 SCHOPENHAUER. [Book I. 
 
 Schopenhauer in his earliest treatise 1 : 'If Time were the 
 sole form of presentation (Vorstellung), there would be no 
 co-existence, therefore no permanent, and no duration ; for 
 time is perceptible, not as empty, but only as occupied ; 
 and its lapse is perceptible only by change of occupant. 
 Duration of an object is therefore known only through 
 contrast of change in others co-existent with it, This re- 
 presentation, however, of co-existence, is not possible in 
 mere Time ; but, for the other half of its condition, requires 
 the representation of Space ; because, in time everything is 
 successive ; in Space, everything is side by side ; the two 
 must unite, to give rise to co-existence and duration. 
 
 If, on the other hand, Space were the sole form of pre- 
 sentation, there would be no change ; for change or altera- 
 tion is a succession of states, and succession is possible 
 only in Time. Hence Time might be defined as the possi- 
 bility of opposite states of the same thing. 
 
 We see therefore that the two forms of empirical presen- 
 tation, though having in common infinite divisibility and 
 infinite extension, are in this respect fundamentally dif- 
 ferent ; that what is essential to the one is without meaning 
 in the other, co-existence in time, succession in space. 
 Yet the empirical presentations which constitute the regular 
 tissue of reality present themselves in both forms at once ; 
 and it is just the inner blending of the two which is the 
 condition of Reality, and makes it a product of them as 
 factors. This blending is effected by the Understanding, 
 which has the function of combining these heterogeneous 
 forms of Sense, so that from their reciprocal interpenetra- 
 tion (though only for its subjective use) there arises empiri- 
 cal Reality as a whole.' 
 
 The particular act of the Understanding which effects 
 this co-partnership of Time and Space is further explained 
 
 1 Ueber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde, 
 52-
 
 Chap. III.] SCHOPENHAUER. 95 
 
 to be the law of Causality. This is a rule over and above 
 the a priori properties of pure Time and Space. Their 
 separate infinitudes would admit of countless and endless 
 phenomena and conditions, needing no order to prevent 
 their mutual interference ; but the Understanding so re- 
 lates the two together, as to say that every phenomenon 
 at one point of space must be preceded by another at the 
 same point ; and that therefore phenomena cannot present 
 themselves at the same point of time except at different 
 points of space. This rule could not come into operation 
 in empty time and space ; not till they are rendered per- 
 ceptible by something in them, are the phenomena there to 
 which the rule applies ; and that ' something there ' is what 
 we call Matter, which having on us the effect of Perception 
 is operative or Causal ; and two co-existent phenomena, in 
 their need of two causes, must be referred to portions of 
 matter planted apart in space. Thus the law of Causality 
 is but the a priori forms of Time-succession and Space- 
 extension, with their possibilities turned into actual ex- 
 perience by being filled with changes felt ; the aggregate 
 of which constitutes what we mean by Nature or Reality 1 . 
 
 It is plain that these modifications of Kant's doctrine 
 qualify its idealism only by completing it. Everything is 
 spun out of subjective conditions, inner-sense form, outer- 
 sense form, the blending of these by the Understanding ; the 
 consequent appearance of an objective world, which however 
 'exists only for the subject as his Idea'; and the subjection 
 of the world to the principles of the ratio sujficiens, which 
 itself is his a priori law for dealing with it 2 . The only 
 possible result is, that he is the miniature of the world he 
 contemplates, and it is the reproduced monstrum ingens of 
 himself; the one a /xtxpoKoo-^ioy, the other a naKpavdpfairos. 
 The difficulties therefore with which subjective idealism is 
 
 1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, i. 4. 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 13.
 
 96 HELMHOLTZ AND J. S. MILL. [Book I. 
 
 burdened are not lightened. And though, in the other 
 half of his theory, identifying the universe with Will, he 
 professed to have alighted on its real essence, it is difficult 
 to see why this element, planted out there from the sub- 
 ject's own personal consciousness, should be exempt from 
 the prohibition which shuts out all other individual a- 
 priorities from being predicable of what is other-than-self. 
 If it is to be a rule at all that the contents of empirical 
 consciousness are invalid for all that is beyond conscious- 
 ness, it surely must be a rule without exception. 
 
 2. Helmholtz and J. S. Mill 
 
 Our belief in an external world of things and persons, 
 that grand crux philosophorum among the Idealists, is 
 sometimes explained out of Schopenhauer's three elements, 
 Time, Space, and Causality, only taken in a different order. 
 He takes the first two as native pre-suppositions of Sense, 
 inner and outer, and then, by fetching in the law of 
 Causality to operate in their fields, obtains the related con- 
 tents of the subjective and objective worlds. The empirical 
 psychologist, dispensing with all a priori 'forms,' under- 
 takes, with the law of Causality alone, to go in among the 
 sensations and make them supply the ideas of time and 
 space, and furnish both the external scene itself and the 
 whole order of material Nature. Our belief in their exist- 
 ence he regards as an inference from the axiom that every 
 change must have its cause. The phenomena that are 
 started by our own volition we are conscious of ourselves 
 causing ; the phenomena that emerge in our passive re- 
 ceptivity, being excluded from this category, we have to 
 refer to a cause other than our Will ; and in this capacity 
 it is that we set up a universe of objects. Nowhere is this 
 view more skilfully presented than in Professor Helm- 
 holtz's Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, I867. 1 
 
 1 26, S. 452-455-
 
 Chap. III.] HELMHOLTZ AND J. S. MILL. 97 
 
 The discovery of an external world, he thinks, is due to 
 our locomotive power of experimenting with the sensations 
 given to us by objects. If the same phantasmagoria of 
 change were played off on our passivity by foreign agency, 
 we should not know what to make of it, any more than men 
 could interpret at first the planetary movements exhibited 
 in the heavens. We find however that, a table being be- 
 fore us, we are able, by shifting our place, to get all sorts 
 of perspective views of it, or to lose sight of it altogether, 
 though only to recover it at will ; and so arises the con- 
 viction that our movements are the ground of certain 
 altered or vanished appearances ; and that, whether we 
 actually see it or not, we can see it if we will. Thus 
 through our movements we gain the permanent image of 
 the extended table as a possible object of perception. In such 
 cases, there is a part of the changes in our impression de- 
 pendent on our will, and a part independent of it ; and the 
 latter is the ground of our belief in a permanent object. It 
 is in distinguishing between the two that the principle of 
 Causality comes in. We could never make the step from 
 the world of our own feelings to the idea of an external 
 world, except by reasoning from the variation in our con- 
 sciousness to outward objects as caiises of this variation : 
 our will disowning it, the claim lapses to them as not-our- 
 will. If we are now unaware of this step, it is only be- 
 cause, when once we have got this idea of outward objects, 
 we cease to think how we came by it ; particularly because 
 the conclusion seems so self-evident, that it does not affect 
 us as a result which we have gained. Thus the discovery 
 of an external world is a reasoning from effect to cause ; 
 we provide that world as Cause for what we do not cause ; 
 and without the law of Causation we could have no ex- 
 perience of natural objects. 
 
 So far as this exposition gives account of our division 
 of causes into two, our own activity, and not our own 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 98 MILL! S PSYCHOLOGICAL [Book I. 
 
 activity, it is perfectly satisfactory : it reports correctly the 
 birth of the dynamical antithesis of which I have spoken 
 (P- 75) as not waiting for the forms of time and space. But 
 so far as it is an attempt to deduce the geometrical anti- 
 thesis from the dynamical, to get the idea of externality 
 from that of causation, the theory will not work. For 
 surely the distinction between voluntary causation and 
 involuntary is not identical with that between inner and 
 outer, and carries in it no space-representation whatever, 
 unless you have already divided your world into a here for 
 the Will and a there for all else. Not till this is done, does 
 'other than my will' become tantamount to ' external to 
 myself as an epithet of causation. Send me forth on my 
 experiments unprovided with this geometrical antithesis, 
 and with knowledge only of my sensations, present, past, 
 and future, and with the intellectual need to supply them 
 with a cause, and I am for ever shut up in the line of 
 Time, where all my experiences, reminiscences, anticipa- 
 tions, of my own states lie, and within which several in- 
 voluntary causes of my mental phenomena are found. 
 
 Mr. Mill indeed undertakes, out of these time-data alone, 
 to get up a belief in an external material world 1 . For that 
 belief, he thinks, amounts to no more than a reliance on 
 the rules of contingent sensations ; an assurance that the 
 sensations I have belong to a set which I simultaneously 
 might have, or to a series through which it is possible for 
 me to be led. To think of anything as externally existing 
 is to put it out of our time\ to suppose it to be when we 
 are not thinking of it, before we thought of it, after we are 
 dead, nay, though it never was perceived by man. Now, 
 as sensations come to us in certain stated clusters, the 
 colour, for instance, and the form of a lemon, along with 
 its scent and flavour, etc., they cling together in groups, 
 
 1 Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, 1865, chap. xi.
 
 Chap. III.] EXTERNALITY. 99 
 
 and each that is actual suggests the rest as possible, giving 
 us the idea of a present object. As other sensations come 
 to us in stated succession, certain muscular movements, for 
 instance, and the sight of certain lines of streets, resulting 
 in the view of Hampstead Heath, they also hang together 
 in regiment, and each one in immediate consciousness 
 carries the belief that the rest are to be had by following 
 out the series ; and this is our faith in an absent object. 
 These are ideas which we could not help having if we were 
 simply the theatre of orderly sensations, and retained their 
 order in idea by the acknowledged laws of association. 
 We therefore become familiar with permanent possibilities 
 of sensation which remain, whether we actually experience 
 them or not ; the more so as they are found to belong to 
 other people as well as to ourselves, and are the subject of 
 their talk and expectation, though under actual sensations 
 different from ours. They thus win a permanence inde- 
 pendent not only of our personal variations of state, but of 
 all human changes of feeling ; i. e. they coalesce with the 
 conception of ' external Nature' 
 
 This explanation of our belief in a material world seems 
 to me open to several conclusive objections. 
 
 (i) It assumes throughout that we can conceive of a 
 thing existing though we are not thinking of it, i. e. of two 
 facts, the thing which is not thought of, and the thought 
 which is not of the thing, subsisting at one and the same 
 moment. This is simultaneottsness ; and of simultaneous- 
 ness no notion can be formed without resorting to space as 
 well as time. 'Der Raum,' says Kant, 'ist die blosse 
 Vorstellung einer Moglichkeit des Beisammenseins ' : and 
 ' Der Raum selbst ist nichts anders, als blosse Vorstel- 
 lung 1 .' No two times can be together ; nor in time alone 
 can there be any order but the successive ; and to have a 
 
 1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Kritik des 4* Paralogisms der tran- 
 scendentalen Psychologic, Rosenkranz, ii. p. 299. 
 
 H 2
 
 100 MILL'S PSYCHOLOGICAL < [Book I. 
 
 plurality at 6ne time, you must have coexistence, i.e. you 
 must difference by place what you identify in date. Thus 
 the one idea which is to be deduced is secured under a 
 disguise among the data. 
 
 (2) The same assumption is again made, when sensations 
 are said to exist and to be conceived in groups. This is 
 simultaneousness in another form ; and, far from being the 
 cause, is the effect of our idea and our analysis of the object. 
 Take away all cognizance of our different senses as dis- 
 tributed in our body, and all idea of the object as having 
 dimensions and parts for the seat of its qualities, and what 
 room will there be for the conception of grouped sensations ? 
 ' Linked sensations ' are concurrent affections of different 
 senses, and are localised in the organism. Linked 'possi- 
 bilities of sensation ' are concurrent causes of my feelings 
 coexisting out of me, and are localised in the object ; for 
 instance, the colour, flavour, scent, hardness, of the lemon, 
 conceived as shut up within the dimensions of its ellipsoid 
 form. 
 
 (3) Of the two simultaneous things compared, one, viz. 
 my sensation, is transient, the other, viz. the possibility, is 
 permanent. Now of the permanent (as Schopenhauer has 
 shown) we can have no cognition without the coexistence 
 of change with no change ; so that we are once more 
 thrown upon this experience, to which time, without space, 
 is incompetent. 
 
 (4) Mr. Mill says 1 , ' I see a piece of white paper on the 
 table. I go into another room, and though I have ceased to 
 see it, I am persuaded that the paper is still there. I no 
 longer have the sensations which it gave me ; but I believe 
 that when I place myself in the same circumstances in 
 which I had those sensations, i. e. when I go again into the 
 room, I shall again have them ; and further, that there has 
 
 Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, chap. xi. p. 192.
 
 Chap. III.] EXTERNALITY. 101 
 
 been no intervening moment at which this would not 
 have been the case.' Is then this process of thought 
 merely a belief in the consecution or possible futurity of 
 my sensations ? Has it therefore nothing to do but with 
 time-relations ? Why then can it not be described in terms 
 of successional order alone, beyond which no piece of 
 purely egoistic history can ever go ? Yet here we have 
 at every step a resort to the language and representations 
 of Space ; the white paper is seen on the table (perceived 
 position) ; I go into another room (motion or change of 
 position) ; I am persuaded it is still there (conceived 
 position) ; I place myself in the same circumstances (locally 
 move into a given set of external relations] ; and on fulfil- 
 ment of all these space-conditions, I expect to see the 
 paper again. No doubt I do ; but is it from expecting the 
 sensation that I believe the object to be there ? Is it not 
 inversely from believing the object to be there that I expect 
 the sensation? When I think of the paper as now in 
 another room, while I am seeing something else, is there 
 any trace of my imagining future possible sensations ? Is 
 it not rather a purely synchronous relation which engages 
 me, of two distinct places, the paper there, myself heret 
 Again, we find, says Mr. Mill, that 'possibilities of sensation' 
 undergo modifications (i. e. things change) ' independently 
 of our presence or absence ;' the fire goes out, the corn 
 ripens, whether we are there or not, subtracting or adding 
 possible sensations ; and to this independence we give the 
 name of Externality. Perhaps we do ; because the * presence 
 or absence' of which the phenomenon is independent already 
 carries the externality in it ; for I am ' present ' when I am 
 within ear-shot or eye-shot of the phenomenon ; ' absent,' 
 when I am away from it ; and if the phenomenon occurs 
 in either case, my local relation to it is indifferent, and its 
 history is outside of mine. Nay, finally, the very phrase 
 ' possibility ',' behind which Mr. Mill thinks to make good 
 
 LIBRARY
 
 102 MILL'S PSYCHOLOGICAL [Book I. 
 
 his escape into the internal world, has no meaning in this 
 connection, unless as an abstract substitute for the phrase 
 ' external cause,' of sensation. We do not believe in possi- 
 bilities /*y se ; they are not phenomena which we see, hear, 
 or touch ; they are not entities given us a priori \ they are 
 our estimate of what may come from causes assumed to 
 exist ; and when we believe a sensation to be possible, it is 
 because we recognise the cause as there which has given it 
 us before, and needs only to be 'present' to give it us 
 again. In other words, it is the external object which 
 gives the possibility ; not the possibility which gives us 
 the external object. Beneath the whole language of this 
 doctrine, the very conceptions are thus surreptitiously intro- 
 duced for which it is intended to furnish an idealistic origin. 
 (5) 'The final seal to our conception of the groups of 
 possibilities as the fundamental reality in Nature' is put 
 by our discovery that other people reckon on them as we 
 do, in spite of the difference of their immediate sensitive 
 experience. But we can hardly wait for this to settle our 
 belief in a world beyond ourselves ; for how can we know 
 anything of other people's calculations, or of their existence, 
 while we are yet on our way to the conception of any 
 external non-Ego at all? They are a part of the very 
 sphere of given objects for which Mr. Mill undertakes to 
 find a genesis within the subject ; and to prove the thesis 
 by their aid is either to renounce it, or to call them as 
 witnesses to their own non-existence. If it is from the 
 study of others' experience that we assure ourselves of the 
 outward scene, they must teach us the lesson before they 
 are there ; for to notice them is to have noticed it which 
 holds them. Whatever account may be given of our belief 
 in the presence with us of minds like our own, the order in 
 which it arises cannot be that which is here implied ; it is 
 not tributary to an unformed apprehension of the non-Ego ; 
 but an expression of it in its maturity.
 
 Chap. III.] EXTERNALITY. 103 
 
 Mr. Mill however devotes a separate discussion to the 
 origin of this belief 1 ; and we naturally turn to this ampler 
 expression for relief from the difficulty in which he leaves 
 us here. Having taken the non-Ego into the Ego as its 
 'guaranteed possibilities of sensation,' and woven it into 
 the line of the internal personal consciousness, he proceeds 
 to break up the permanent unity of the Ego, and resolve it 
 also into the series of its successive states attended by the 
 idea of contingent possibilities of feeling different from the 
 present ones. The notion I have of myself is that of my 
 immediate conscious state plus that of an indefinite variety 
 of other mental states, familiar by experience, which I may 
 have ; the aggregate of these conscious phenomena kv 
 bwdfjifL constitute my personality. By this method of 
 resolution the Ego becomes a mere 'possibility of mental 
 states' As the non-Ego has also been reduced to 'possi- 
 bilities of sensation} they seem to approach very near to 
 one another, and the question arises, how are we to make 
 good the antithesis between them. The difference lies in 
 the different range of the two possibilities ; in the case of 
 the non-Ego, it is limited to sensations ; they alone give to 
 the chance of their occurrence the name of 'external 
 world ' ; in the case of the Ego, it extends to all sorts of 
 feelings and conscious states, emotions, volitions, reason- 
 ings, etc., as well as affections of sense. Both are part 
 of one and the same series, the continuous thread of my 
 conscious life. But the former picks out upon this line a 
 small and definite section, or set of sections, this or that 
 knot or reach of sensations, which under certain conditions 
 may be distinctly preconceived ; while the other includes 
 without selection the whole indeterminate tissue of possi- 
 bilities. Again, the small and definite section, besides 
 being restricted to sensations, has these sensations in 
 
 Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, chap. xii. p. 204.
 
 104 MILL'S PSYCHOLOGICAL [Book I. 
 
 groups ; while in the mixed and indefinite continuum which 
 we call Self, the states of mind present no cases of the 
 coexistence of separate elements. There is also, we are 
 told, the further difference, that the former are ' possibilities 
 of sensation ' to other people as well as to myself ; while 
 the latter are for myself alone. Superinduce these three 
 specialties upon the thread of internal consciousness ; 
 possibility of sensations among the ' mental states ' ; possi- 
 bility of ' groups ' among the sensations ; possibility of 
 sensations to others with myself; and you have all that 
 you mean by an external world. 
 
 I venture to affirm that the first of these distinctions gives 
 us nothing external, and that the other two presuppose it. 
 
 i. The difference between the possibility of any mental 
 state you please and the possibility of sensation in par- 
 ticular, is a mere difference of scope between genus and 
 species ; and to take the former as equivalent to the Ego, 
 the latter to the non-Ego, is to say that the non-Ego is a 
 part of the Ego, or that the Ego contains its own contra- 
 dictory. No difference of range, no definite selection from 
 the indefinite stream of my inward feelings, has the least 
 tendency to take me out of the line of these feelings, and 
 to present me with what is not a variety among them, but 
 in antithesis to them all. This is so obvious, that one 
 looks about for the obvious source of so strange a piece of 
 psychology. It is perhaps to be found in an unnoticed 
 ambiguity of the word 'possibility! The belief in myself 
 certainly involves belief in the ' possibility of mental states,' 
 i. e. in the possibility of my having them. The cognition of 
 a solid body involves a belief in the ' possibility of sensa- 
 tions,' i.e. in the possibility of its supplying them. But 
 these are not the same belief, taking in the two cases a 
 different range ; they are two beliefs, in two separate causes 
 of the phenomena expected, viz. in myself, as susceptible of 
 all sorts of feelings, and in an external object, as capable of
 
 Chap. III.] EXTERNALITY. 105 
 
 giving some. Apart from all contrast in point of scope, 
 and in the single instance of possible perception itself, 
 expectation of future sensations is different on the inner 
 and the outer side. The egoistic belief virtually says, ' / 
 am here to see, to feel, etc., if only the thing is there.' The 
 non-egoistic says, ' The thing is there^ to be seen, felt, etc., 
 if only I am ' ; i. e. the possibility is internal in the one case, 
 external in the other. Take away this prior idea of a 
 cause, and the possibility, left without support, falls to the 
 ground ; and to keep it standing, you must rest it on the 
 duality of the cause. Misled by the sameness of the word, 
 Mr. Mill has taken these heterogeneous possibilities for 
 homogeneous ; and has tried to add on to the word by 
 further differentiation the distinction which already exists 
 within it and gives its only intelligible meaning. He thus 
 shuts himself up within internal phenomena, without escape 
 into anything external. 
 
 2. The next distinction, that among the sensations there 
 are groups, but among the mental states in general, none, 
 is, in the first place, not true in fact, on the principles of 
 Mr. Mill's own psychology. The groups to which Mr. 
 Mill refers are the clusters of sensations involved in the 
 perception of objects, which speak to several senses, the 
 eye, the hand, the nose, etc. at once ; and report to one of 
 these, the eye, a number of qualities together, the form, the 
 size, the colour. These are the ' separate elements that 
 coexist ' in 'what we call outward objects.' Is it then only 
 in the actual sensations that this coexistence has place ? 
 Is it not retained in the mental representation which they 
 leave behind ? and, on a reduced scale, in the concept of the 
 Kind ? and are not these a part of the mental series which 
 is said to constitute myself? If it be objected, ' Yes, but 
 they belong to that part which expresses the possibility of 
 sensation, though not amounting to its actuality,' then I 
 ask, whether beyond this limit, among the remaining
 
 106 MILL'S PSYCHOLOGICAL [Book I. 
 
 ' thoughts, emotions, volitions, etc./ no instance is to be 
 found of a ' highly complex idea,' from which moreover the 
 conscious traces of its composite character have not been 
 effaced ? When Mr. Mill himself maintains that ' the moral 
 feelings ' are ' complex,' and raises the question ' of what 
 elementary feelings they are composed ' ; when he tells us 
 that the attribute 'generosity' carries two meanings con- 
 sciously united in one thought, viz. ' a state of the mind 
 itself,' and ' a state with which other minds are affected by 
 thinking of it ' ; does he not supply instances of ' separate 
 elements which coexist ' ? Is my idea of three not the 
 idea of a group ? and is there no complication, which defi- 
 nition may unravel and lay out to view, in the thought 
 expressed by the words Fault, Law, Science, Meditation ? 
 Mental aggregates are just as common in the purely per- 
 sonal part of the field of consciousness, as elsewhere ; and 
 there is no point of a mature mind's history into which 
 there are not numerous confluents ; and however perfect 
 their fusion may tend to become, the result is reached only 
 through stages of conscious coexistence. 
 
 But, in the next place, even if the psychological fact were 
 truly reported, the notice of sensations in groups is itself 
 conditional, as I have shown, on our already having the 
 idea of externality. We may have several sensations 
 together (every complicated animal always has), but we 
 cannot know them to be together, without planting out them 
 or their causes apart from each other. The act involves 
 the idea of simultaneousness ; and a plurality of things 
 cannot be assigned by us to one time, except by allowing 
 them a place a-piece. The quasitum therefore is put into 
 the datum to be taken out again. Indeed the word ' groups' 
 denotes an external aggregate, and cannot properly be 
 applied to the mental phenomena in themselves, though it 
 is admissible and convenient in the analysis of their sources 
 or objects as given in the outer space.
 
 Chap. III.] EXTERNALITY. 107 
 
 3. The third distinction, that the sensations in question 
 are possible to others as well as to myself, so obviously 
 assumes the externality which it is introduced to explain, 
 that it is needless to pause upon it. Till we have got the 
 door open out of our own egoistic chamber, and found that 
 there is a field beyond, it is premature to serve a summons 
 on inconceivable people there, to come and bear witness to 
 its existence. The question being, how, in my unbroken 
 solitude, I get to believe in what is other than myself, there 
 is more humour than philosophy in the answer, ' Other 
 persons come and tell you.' Is then their separate exist- 
 ence unattended by the difficulty of reaching the rest of the 
 external world to which they belong ? Is it exceptionally 
 cognizable, so that through it we may step to the less 
 known material scene ? On the contrary, philosophers have 
 usually selected the belief we have in the presence of other 
 minds as the hardest knot which the idealist has to untie. 
 The problem however has no perplexities for Mr. Mill, 
 who states the grounds of this belief to be the following l : 
 
 I see and hear walking and speaking figures ; which 
 exhibit, in two ways, features known from my own case to 
 be marks of feeling, viz. bodies as antecedent conditions, 
 and gestures, acts, etc. as consequent expression. In 
 myself I experience in order the three steps, antecedent, 
 feeling, consequent ; in the case of others, I see only the 
 first and third ; but infer the intervening presence of the 
 second, from analogy to my history. This reasoning 
 remains undisturbed, though more cumbrously presented, 
 if we translate it into the idealistic language, and for my 
 body and other bodies substitute the phrase permanent 
 group of possibilities of sensations. Among those groups 
 is one (my own body) which plays the part of antecedent of 
 any sensation realised from the others [i. e. without a change 
 
 Examination of Hamilton, chap. xii. pp. 208, 209.
 
 108 MILL'S PSYCHOLOGICAL [Book I. 
 
 in my body, no feeling from any other]. Looking about 
 me, I see other groups resembling in sensible properties 
 this particular one, but not calling up a similar ' world of 
 sensations in my consciousness.' Since not in mine, I infer 
 that they do so in another, related to it as mine to my body. 
 This exposition appears to me to give a satisfactory 
 account of the wrong problem. If the proposition were 
 ' Given other people, to prove that they have feelings like 
 my own/ it would be legitimate to pass by analogy from 
 our own case to theirs. But the relation of the data and 
 qucesita is quite different, viz. this, ' Given my own feelings, 
 to prove that there are other people' Mr. Mill starts with 
 assuming ' walking and speaking figures,' not as entoptic 
 affections, sensational modifications in myself, but as 
 distinct from myself, and susceptible of comparison with 
 myself, and presenting, as the result of that comparison, 
 a correspondency of marks in the two instances, from 
 which is inferred a latent correspondency in a third. 
 Need I say that this assumption, of the objectivity of 
 the ' figures,' contains the very pith of the thing of which 
 we are in quest ? The question is not, ' How do I know 
 that, among the objects in the non-Ego, some have pro- 
 bably an experience like mine ? ' but, ' How do I know 
 that, among the phenomena of the Ego, some are beings 
 in a non-Ego?' and the difficulty is by no means to 
 characterise and class correctly the things other than self 
 when you get them ; but to pass out at all into otherness. 
 On the idealistic principle, everything known is still within 
 the mind ; other than which, or otherwise distinguished 
 than as its various phenomena, i. e. as sensation, thought, 
 emotion, etc. there can be nothing cognizable. Over this 
 impassable chasm, cutting off the idealist from the negative 
 of self, Mr. Mill ventures on his personal leap ; but he 
 does not help us to follow him ; or tell us how he manages 
 to leave himself behind him. As soon as he tries to avoid
 
 Chap. III.] EXTERNALITY. 109 
 
 all objective language, and translates his reasoning into 
 the terms of his own theory, his inability to move except 
 within the Ego, or to obtain any other point of reference, 
 becomes apparent, though disguised by a fallacy of am- 
 biguity. The argument turns on the three successive 
 characters in myself, my body, my feeling, my gesture of 
 expression ; of which the first and last are marks, ante- 
 cedent and consequent, of the middle ; and are presented 
 to view sometimes (i. e. in not my own case) without the 
 middle. The marks, being not yet objectively known to 
 me, are nothing but 'groups' of my own sensations. 
 These things being remembered, we may present the 
 idealistic phenomena, both when I feel and when another 
 feels, by the help of symbols, thus : Let A that ' group 
 of possibilities of sensation ' called the human body ; B = 
 any particular sensation of which A is the antecedent ; 
 /3 = the idea or memory of the same ; C = that ' group 
 of sensations ' called the gesture or act of expression in A, 
 consequent on B. Then the difference between the two 
 compared cases will stand thus : When I feel, A is fol- 
 lowed by B, and B by C. When otherwise, A is followed 
 by C; and association established by the prior case leads 
 me to think of B as inserted between them, i.e. to experi- 
 ence /3 : in other words the idea of my sensation is sug- 
 gested by the experience of the two connected groups. 
 But the idea of my sensation is not the belief in other 
 peoples ; and this is the result which we require. 
 
 Mr. Mill is fond of telling his critics that they have not 
 ' thought themselves sufficiently into ' his theory ; else 
 they would see that there is nothing the matter with it ; 
 and that their objections are directed only against his 
 unavoidable resort to the common objective language in 
 his description of the subjective phenomena. In the face 
 of this dismissal of all remonstrants back to their desks to 
 learn their lesson better, it seems presumptuous to doubt
 
 110 MILL'S PSYCHOLOGICAL [Book I. 
 
 whether our author himself always distinctly sees the con- 
 ditions of his own problem and the force of his own terms. 
 But in the foregoing exposition does he not impose upon 
 himself by assigning a double function, under a single 
 phrase, to other people's body? He calls it, as he calls 
 our own body, ' a group of permanent possibilities of sen- 
 sation.' Group however, we must ask, of whose sensa- 
 tions? Is it of my own, who only see the body, or, it 
 may be, touch it, but have not its feelings ? If so, if to 
 me it is only visual and tactual sensations of my own, and 
 if neither in this term A, nor in the last C, which, as 
 gesture of A, is in the same plight, is there any concep- 
 tion of another than myself, there certainly will be none 
 introduced by 'the suggested /3, which is the idea of a 
 sensation of my own \ any more than there would be if, 
 in my own body, the gesture C should take place by 
 exceptional mechanical spasm apart from the usual feeling 
 B, and should excite in me the idea /3. Mr. Mill would 
 hardly maintain that if in my own person the phenomenon 
 were thus reduced to its visual form, I should be led to 
 conclude that another had the missing feeling, i. e. that 
 I was somebody else. If, on the other hand, by 'group 
 of possible sensations ' be meant, not my own (the visual 
 impression of human form), but another's sensations (the 
 possible feelings of a human organism), then the external 
 being, who was to be brought out as an inference in y3, 
 is already surreptitiously introduced in the data A and C. 
 
 I have said that the difficulty, on the idealist theory, is 
 to get to other than the Ego at all : everything known 
 being still within the mind, nothing but home dissimilari- 
 ties, giving varieties of kind among the inward experiences, 
 can present themselves ; and for the conception of what 
 negatives the Ego there can be no room. How then does 
 Mr. Mill suppose himself to reach this otherness? He 
 finds it among the home dissimilarities connected with our
 
 Chap. III.] EXTERNALITY. Ill 
 
 experience of the human body. In one case we see this 
 object, we touch it, (say, by grasping our arm), and, in 
 doing the latter, we have tactual and muscular sensations 
 twice over (in the hand that grasps, and in the arm that 
 is grasped). In another case, we also see, and touch, as 
 before ; but we have the tactual and muscular sensations 
 only once (in the hand that grasps). The two internal 
 series therefore differ by a term ; the former being visual, 
 tactual, tactual ; the latter, visual, tactual ; and this differ- 
 ence it is which we are said to mark by the antithesis of 
 self and other-than-self : the lacuna of a sensation, re- 
 ducing the trio to a pair, though it is wholly an internal 
 variation, is what we mean to mark by the language of 
 externality. Must we not say that if this be all the 
 otherness there is, the language of externality describes 
 it very inaccurately, and with the addition of an hypo- 
 thesis wholly superfluous, that a mere two-thirds of an 
 internal phenomenon could no longer be internal. This 
 hypothesis, we are assured, is justified by inductive 
 analogy ; since the instances are alike in two parts, we 
 may infer their resemblance in the third ; that third, thus 
 supplied in thought, is a feeling of my own ; and, since 
 it is absent from me, I can only refer it to some one else. 
 But is it not evident, that before I can conduct this reason- 
 ing, before I can contemplate a feeling as present with me 
 or absent from me, before I can conceive of its existence 
 elsewhere than in my consciousness, I must already have 
 discriminated myself from what is not myself; and that 
 thus the issue of the problem is imported into its solution ? 
 Besides, this argument of analogy rests on the assumption 
 that like effects imply like causes ; and involves therefore 
 the law of causality, which is itself conceivable only co- 
 ordinately with the idea of externality. In short, you can 
 never explain the belief in a non-Ego as the inferred site 
 of feelings which, though existing, you find missing from
 
 112 "NOT PROVEN" 
 
 your own mind ; because to refer feelings to yourself at 
 all, whether you find them or whether you miss them 
 there, is to have settled the boundaries between a sphere 
 that is yours and one that is not. All that you can learn 
 from the analogical argument is that, in the known non- 
 Ego, the particular cause (or effect, as it may be) of what 
 you see is a mind like your own. 
 
 For these reasons, I cannot admit that the belief in 
 outward space and its contents can be psychologically 
 evolved from the inward Time-successions of our mental 
 states ; but must maintain that it is intuitively given as 
 a primitive condition of any cognitive act at all. We thus 
 reinstate the disturbed balance between the inner con- 
 sciousness and the external perception, and give them 
 equally whatever rights may belong to original forms of 
 thought. Mr. Mill's empirical idealism has no advantage 
 over Kant's a priori idealities. On the contrary, it leaves 
 us with a double discontent : invalidating, no less than the 
 Critical Philosophy, all knowledge that will not own itself 
 mere self-knowledge ; and, in addition, failing to account 
 for the illusory belief in a world of objective realities 
 antithetic to ourselves. It is a curious coincidence that 
 neither philosopher practically believed in the sceptical 
 conclusions of his own system : Kant, as we have seen, 
 leaving the Ding-an-sich still in possession of existence, 
 and re-constituting in his Ethics the relations which he 
 had cancelled in the criticism of the Pure Reason ; and 
 Mill, like his predecessors of the English school, resorting 
 wholly to the outward world to mould and build up the 
 human subject, whose consciousness was at last declared 
 to contain all that there is to be known. The mind 
 cannot make both its cognita and its cognitio. It is beyond 
 the cunning of philosophy to dispense with standing- 
 ground for its own feet ; or, if this be too low an image, 
 with atmosphere for its own wings.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 RELATIVITY OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 WE are not however clear of all difficulties when we 
 have adjusted the claims of the empirical and the a priori 
 psychology ; or even when we have wholly disengaged 
 ourselves from the self-enclosure of subjective idealism, 
 and owned the presence of objects not made by our 
 consciousness. Though the outer world be no dream of 
 our thought, but a real scene conditioning our experience 
 and affected by it, still what guarantee have we that it is 
 what our belief represents it to be? It can tell us only 
 what our ways of thinking are shaped to admit. Our 
 minds being constituted as they are, we think in our 
 present fashion ; were they constituted otherwise, we should 
 think in a different fashion ; though beyond us no corres- 
 ponding change were made. We should in each case be 
 liable to feel the same intuitive certainty ; yet in one of 
 them, perhaps in both, the trust would be illusory. The 
 possibility thus suggested that even our ultimate principles 
 of cognition may be out of joint with reality and justify no 
 predications about 'things as they are,' must now be 
 considered. Those who dwell upon it present it under the 
 title of the Relativity of human knowledge. It appears in 
 several modified forms, and in the ancient philosophy as 
 the doctrine of 
 
 i. Homo Mensura. 
 
 It is evident from the force of the term that in all ' know- 
 ledge ' there must be two factors, a person to know, and a 
 VOL. I. I
 
 114 HOMO MENSURA. [Book I. 
 
 thing to be known ; and that the knowledge resulting is 
 the mode in which the constitution of the latter affects the 
 faculty of the former. It is therefore a relation between 
 the two, and must vary with every change in that relation : 
 the knowledge which a blind man has of an apple or of the 
 fire being not the same that is possessed by a person with 
 eye-sight. The effect of this evidently is that, if we sup- 
 pose either term to be constant while the other varies, the 
 product must proportionally change ; and if the objective 
 datum be fixed, the rule arises ' recipitur ad modum recipi- 
 entis.' In this form the doctrine passes into the shape in 
 which, as regards perception, it was presented by Pro- 
 tagoras : that the apparent must to us ever be the real : 
 that what was bitter to the sick palate was sweet to the 
 healthy: what was large to the child was little to Hercules. 
 It is obvious that this implication of the object with the 
 subject is not limited to cases of external perception, in 
 which, from the variation of the percipient organ in differ- 
 ent persons and in the same person from time to time, we 
 are best able to notice it. If no such variation took place, 
 it would equally hold, though it would not betray itself by 
 inconsistent judgments. And if there be parts of our 
 nature which escape the liability to change, if our intel- 
 lectual cognitions are constant, this only conceals from our 
 consciousness, and does not remove, the relative character 
 of the knowledge which they give. A man may be wholly 
 engaged with the thing to which he attends, and forgetting 
 himself and the processes of his mind, may suppose that he 
 apprehends it unconditionally in its isolated reality; but he 
 cannot escape himself as the apprehending nature, or stand 
 clear of the limits of his own faculties as the only media of 
 his knowledge ; and their laws mix themselves up with 
 whatever is objectively given, and, like a refracting sub- 
 stance, modify the form and colour of the light which 
 finally enters the consciousness. It is therefore perfectly
 
 .Chap. IV.] HOMO MENSURA. 115 
 
 true that the relativity of objective knowledge to the 
 capacity of the subject cannot be limited to al<T6r]Td, but 
 applies no less to vorjrd : and when Mr. Grote protests 
 against confounding the doctrine with the perfectly distinct 
 psychological theory that there is no cognition except of 
 the perceptive sort, his criticism is logically unimpeachable 1 . 
 But historically I cannot imagine him to be justified in 
 discussing the Protagorean thesis Homo Mensura as if 
 it were identical with the modern doctrine in its whole 
 extent, of the necessary correlation of subject and object, 
 and in condemning Plato for conducting his polemic 
 against it on the narrow ground of sensible cognition. By 
 imparting into his critique of the Theaetetus the antithesis 
 now so familiar to us between the Ego and the non-Ego, 
 and taking the large modern conception of their relativity 
 as his key to the probable teaching of the great Sophist, 
 Mr. Grote appears to me to have seriously misconceived 
 the Greek doctrine, not only in the case of Protagoras, but 
 even in that of Aristotle. The comprehensive relativity 
 now insisted on was absent from the ancient philosophy 
 altogether : neither did Protagoras affirm it, nor Plato 
 deny it. The 'Homo' whom the one accepted and the 
 other discarded as the ' Mensura ' was not the whole mind 
 occupying the human being as we take him in his insulated 
 completeness. It did not include the impersonal and 
 superhuman vovs, with its etS?;, at once subjective and 
 objective, which not only gave cognizance of real being but 
 actually were real being cropping up in thought. These ei5r/, 
 regarded as cognitions of ours, correspond with what 
 modern philosophy calls intellectual intuitions ; and the 
 entia Rationis to which they introduce us are certainly, in 
 our mode of viewing them, relative to the intuitive faculty 
 which contemplates them, therefore relative to us who have 
 the faculty. But these two related terms, the intuent act 
 
 1 Crete's Plato, chap. xxvi. vol. ii. pp. 325-335. 
 I 2
 
 Il6 HOMO MENSURA. [Book I. 
 
 and the thing intued, were, in the view of the Greek 
 Realist, only one, the same reality pervading in common 
 the realm of existence and that of thought : they are not 
 described in the language of comparison as separate or 
 separable things, but are treated as identical, the point of 
 union or fusion of the tmarrjTov and emorrjjLiTj. In claiming 
 for us access to this field, the Realist meant to invest us 
 with the power of transcending ottr own personality, and 
 becoming partners in the universal Mind : the et8?j were 
 not ours, to be enumerated among the anthropological 
 phenomena ; we were only partakers of them, and, in so far 
 as we had share in them, were rather gods than men. If 
 we measured the world by them, we measured it by no 
 human rule ; but, on the contrary, we fetched our criterion 
 from the universal, the divine, the objective and eternal 
 Reason, and by this detected the illusions to which the 
 limits of our own nature expose us. This was Plato's 
 meaning when he denied the doctrine of Homo Mensura. 
 And, on the other hand, Protagoras in denying us access 
 to any such transcendent sphere of the Real, cut down our 
 nature to a susceptibility of the phenomenal ; a suscepti- 
 bility which partakes of the transiency and variableness of 
 the phenomenal, and which therefore changed its reports 
 from person to person, and from time to time in the same 
 person, and accordingly could never give rise to more 
 than 8oa. Thus reduced by the elimination of his sup- 
 posed superior capacities, Homo as the measure of all 
 things, becomes with Protagoras a being simply of Per- 
 ception and of judgment from perception; and the doctrine 
 of the Mensura is equivalent to the theory that ' knowledge 
 is sensible perception.' So far as the language of this 
 controversy goes, Plato and Protagoras were agreed in 
 making &v6p<t>Tros and ala-drja-is coextensive ; the Sophist 
 dismissing from humanity all that is beyond, as fictitious ; 
 and the Realist, as transcendent.
 
 Chap. IV.] HOMO MENSURA. 1 17 
 
 The great historian not only credits Protagoras with the 
 modern doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, but attri- 
 butes to Aristotle the Protagorean opinion, in spite of an 
 express refutation of it in his Metaphysics 1 ; where he 
 says, ' If not all things are relative, but some also are 
 entities of themselves, it is impossible that the apparent 
 can be coextensive with the true ; for the apparent is the 
 apparent to some one ; so that he who affirms the apparent 
 to be the true, makes all existence relative.' It is hardly 
 possible to conceive a more distinct repudiation of the 
 Homo Mensura. Yet Aristotle is claimed as its advocate 
 on the strength of the following passage from his De 
 Anima 2 ; 'let us say again that the soul is in a manner all 
 existences (TO. OVTO). For existences are either things per- 
 ceived or things thought ; and intellection is in a manner 
 the intelligibles, and perception the things perceived. I 
 say, in a manner ; and in what manner, we must enquire.' 
 This enquiry establishes the following distinction : that in 
 the case of the senses, the perceived object itself is not in 
 the mind (e.g. a stone), but its form (TO e!8os) is, and with 
 this, not with the matter, the percipient is for the moment 
 identified ; whilst, in the case of the intellect, the things 
 thought, having no matter but only eZ8o?, are uncondition- 
 ally identical with the thinking intelligence. Now, when a 
 philosopher identifies subject and object in this way, he 
 may do it in either of two opposite interests : to secure the 
 subject in his possession of the object in its reality : or to 
 expose the object to all the contingencies of the subject in 
 his limits of cognition. Mr. Grote assumes 3 that Aristotle 
 speaks here in the latter sense ; and appends the comment, 
 ' This is in other words the Protagorean doctrine, that the 
 mind is the measure of all existences ; and that this is 
 even more true about vorjrd than about ala-Orjrii. That 
 
 1 T. 6. ion a, 15 seqq. "III. viii. I. 
 
 8 Crete's Plato, Theast. vol. ii. p. 342, note.
 
 ii8 HOMO MENSURA. [Book I. 
 
 doctrine is completely independent of the theory that 
 eTTio-TTjpirj is at(rdri<ns.' But that Aristotle speaks here in the 
 former and opposite sense is rendered certain by his own 
 profession of faith in the Metaphysics : his ' measure ' or 
 regulative term is not the internal and personal, but the 
 ra oyra : these, in the case of objects of scientific thought 
 he declares to be identical with the cognitive 
 so ^at the ipsissima cognita are there and no mistake ; 
 while in the case of sensible perception they are not 
 identical in their entirety with the percipient V^x 7 ?) Dut are 
 in part related to it as matter to form. This difference, of 
 unconditional and of partial and secondary identity, is in 
 favour of the vorjrd as compared with the ai<r^rjr(i, instead 
 of placing them, as Mr. Grote does, in the lower rank of 
 security. With Protagoras, on the other hand, the ^ux*?, 
 and that without eirior^rj at all, is the regulative term or 
 measure of ra ovra. If these doctrines are the same, there 
 is no difference between Realism and Idealism. The 
 historian's prepossession has apparently led him to an 
 unconscious but total inversion of Aristotle's meaning. 
 
 Whether the attempt of the ancient Realist philosophers 
 to rescue from Relativity some portion of our knowledge 
 was successful is quite another question. As all cognition 
 is the apprehension of an object by a mind, it seems self- 
 evident that the apprehension cannot pretend to inde- 
 pendence of the limits of that mind : that it will go only 
 so far as the mind is susceptible of being affected by the 
 object : that beyond this, the object will be blank to the 
 subject : that the proportion between the luminous and 
 the blank phases will be indeterminable : and that, even if 
 the apprehension should be exhaustive, and leave no pos- 
 sibility of further affection of some other sort of faculty by 
 the object, this fact will be unascertainable. These propo- 
 sitions are not only true, but truisms ; and when they are 
 advanced as imposing humbling restrictions upon the
 
 Chap. IV.] HOMO MENSURA. 119 
 
 range of our understanding, we may best estimate them 
 by asking, What is the sort of knowledge which they shut 
 out from hope ? Do they disappoint us of any conceivable 
 possibility of light, and warn us from the attempt to reach 
 it ? The answer perhaps will be, ' They banish you from 
 cognition of the absolute.' But what does this mean, 
 except that with what is to remain out of relation I cannot 
 enter into relation ? And that if I enter into relation to it, 
 it also will stand in relation to me ? Since, in wishing to 
 know it, this is just what I wanted, it does not disturb me 
 in the least to be informed of my fate ; any more than 
 to be told that I cannot visit a friend without putting an 
 end to his solitude. To speak of 'knowing' 'things in 
 themselves ' or ' things as they are,' is to talk of not simply 
 an impossibility, but a contradiction ; for these phrases are 
 invented to denote what is in the sphere of being and not 
 in the sphere of tJwught \ and to suppose them ' known ' 
 is ipso facto to take away this character. The relativity of 
 cognition imposes upon us no forfeiture of privilege, no 
 humiliation of pride : there is not any conceivable form of 
 apprehension from which it excludes us. The intellectual 
 relations into which different natures may enter with a 
 given object may be more or fewer ; and the remembrance 
 of the paucity open to us and the numbers that may be 
 out of our reach though within the range of richer capa- 
 cities, is fitted to adapt our temper to our place : but to 
 dispense with all intellectual relations in the act of intel- 
 lection can be no object of ambition to any waking man : 
 the very statement is like one of the senseless knots of 
 some nightmare dream. 
 
 Not only is no mortifying restriction put upon us by 
 this law ; it further fails to make good the doctrine that 
 'Man is the measure of things.' This doctrine means, that 
 things are to us only what we can discern of them ; and 
 they may very possibly have qualities which speak to no
 
 120 HOMO MENSURA. [Book I. 
 
 organs of ours, and to which we turn a blind side. Our 
 range is therefore the range of our world. But it is equally 
 true, that our mind is addressed by things only so far as 
 they have resources for speaking to it ; and that it may 
 very possibly have capacities which there is nothing in 
 nature to reach, and which lie dormant for want of the 
 possible but absent objects they are fitted to cognise. In 
 this converse case, ' things are the measure of Man ' ; that 
 part of him only waking into conscious knowledge to 
 which they can bring their appeal. Each of these sup- 
 positions, of something unknown in nature and something 
 unknowing in us, from want in either case of the comple- 
 mentary term, is alike compatible with the law of relativity : 
 the first alone gives the rule av6pa>Tros = /xerpov T&V OVTMV ; 
 the second, TO. ovra = /xerpoy TOV avOptonov. 
 
 It should moreover be observed that, whatever efficacy 
 the law of relativity may be supposed to have as a caution 
 against an illusory pretence of knowledge must, in its 
 application, tell impartially on the whole field claimed by 
 the human intellect. It subjects our sensible apprehen- 
 sions to precisely the same insecurity as our postulates of 
 thought ; so that our readings of phenomena have not the 
 least advantage over our underlying ontological beliefs. 
 It is commonly assumed that only metaphysical and theo- 
 logical entities are affected by this law ; and that while it 
 dispatches them into the limbo of vanity, it instals the 
 Scientific conceptions in possession of the field which they 
 vacate : accordingly, its praises are celebrated in a tone of 
 triumph by the writers who resolve the all of things into 
 successions and clusters of change. This assumption is 
 however absolutely baseless. If I am at the mercy of my 
 own intellectual constitution when I trust my idea of Space, 
 of Substance or of Cause, and of my moral constitution 
 when I accept the reality of Obligation, I am no less at the 
 mercy of my percipient constitution when I register as
 
 Chap. IV.] HOMO MENSURA. 121 
 
 facts the forms, the weights, the features, tJie movements of 
 the physical world. It will perhaps be said that the cases 
 are not parallel, because in the former instance we make 
 pretensions to the knowledge of something Absolute, while 
 in the latter we avowedly deal only with sensations of our 
 own, where we are at home and can make no mistake. 
 Neither part of this statement however will bear examina- 
 tion. In working my problems of speculation by help of 
 the ideas of Space, Cause, Substance, etc., I certainly 
 commit myself in either instance to a Noumenon, i.e. to 
 something given me or postulated by me through a law or 
 necessity of Thought alone, to an Ens rationis, for which 
 I can offer no other guarantee than that it is the condition 
 of my thinking at all. But I do not affect any other cog- 
 nizance of such Noumenon than this inner constitution of 
 my faculties affords ; I know it only so far as it is pre- 
 supposed, and in that presupposition revealed, by my 
 intellect : it is precisely in virtue of this its relation to 
 my Reason that I take it with unquestioning trust ; and 
 could anyone eject it from this relation and turn it out 
 into the desert of ' the Absolute,' it would cease to be any- 
 thing to me. It is surprising that so many writers, among 
 them Mr. J. S. Mill, should fall into the error of treating 
 a 'Noumenon' as interchangeable with the 'Absolute.' 
 The distinction between them is perfectly plain : the latter 
 term marks the object as existing out of all relation ; the 
 former marks the faculty of ours in relation to which, if 
 existing, it stands. A noumenon is an object of the under- 
 standing only, opposed to phenomenon, as an object of 
 sensible perception : the existence of the noumenal thing, 
 a fortiori its absolute existence, the name in no way 
 affirms ; and it is competent to one who construes his ideas 
 of causality, substance, etc., as noumena, and who believes 
 that they stand for realities, yet to treat them as subject 
 to the law of relativity, and to say that Substance we know
 
 122 HOMO MENSURA. [Book f, 
 
 only as the ground of attributes, and Cause only as the 
 source of phenomena. But this relativity, which a noume- 
 non may retain, 'the Absolute* discards; and the mere 
 disproof of its ability to stand thus alone has no effect on 
 the more modest pretensions of its companion. If the 
 'Absolute' were cognizable, it could only be through 
 revelation of the Reason, and it would be a noumenon ; 
 but we must not convert the proposition, and identify 
 every noumenon with an absolute. In truth, noumena are 
 the intellectual conditions of apprehending their related 
 phenomena, as phenomena are conditions of thinking their 
 related noumena ; and the claims of the two to be reckoned 
 as known are perfectly reciprocal : they arise from the 
 mutual play of faculties whose concerted action gives all 
 our knowledge ; and to discredit either at the expense of 
 the other, to say that we know nothing of causality but 
 something about effects, nothing of substance but a good 
 deal about attributes, etc., is to contradict the very rela- 
 tivity which is the plea for the assertion, and set up the 
 absolute once more, only standing on its head. 
 
 It is quite true then that a given object can report itself 
 to a knowing subject only so far as its modes of being are 
 in relation to his modes of cognition ; and that even if all 
 its possible modes found in him some responding appre- 
 hension, his knowledge would still be the result of two 
 factors, and would be of the object, not in its absolute 
 existence, but as affecting him. As this however is what 
 constitutes knowledge, and not what contradicts it, it gives 
 no ground for distrust, either of our faculties as a system, 
 or of any one as against another of the powers which all 
 come under the same rule. It does not follow thkt we 
 know no entities, because we can know them only in their 
 relation to us. 
 
 We have hitherto construed the 'relativity of know- 
 ledge ' as denoting the interaction of the object and the
 
 Chap. IV.] HOMO MENSURA. 12$ 
 
 mind. But, in order to know, the object must not only be 
 en rapport with us ; it must further be seen in relation to 
 something else. To know a thing's place, we must appre- 
 hend it as in space, and as measuring so and so in its 
 distance from some standard points. To know an event's 
 time, we must hold it in thought between a before and an 
 after. To know a flower by its scent, we must remember 
 a prior experience of it, and discriminate it from other 
 appeals to the same sense. I cannot know myself, but as 
 antithetic to the outer world, or the outer world but as 
 other than myself. All knowledge consists in distinguish- 
 ing, defining, marking off this from that ; so that intelli- 
 gence always takes at least two things together into its 
 ken, and even an object that looks most like an island in 
 thought, must at all events have an ocean round it. Here 
 we have a relation lying wholly in the objective field ; and 
 it is no less involved than the former one in every act of 
 cognition. It is to this fact of external comparison that 
 Dr. Bain applies the name of the ' Law of relativity? It 
 is perhaps but an extension of the rule already noticed ; 
 for the differentiation of object from object is but the 
 result of our self-differentiation from each, the effect upon 
 ourselves of the one and of the other being the measure of 
 their contrast : the single comparison with ourselves telling 
 us that a thing is : the double comparison telling us what 
 it is. It becomes my object, i. e. is cognised by me as 
 existing, in presenting itself as different from me : it 
 becomes this object, i. e. is cognised by me as such and 
 such, in presenting itself as different from something other 
 than myself. Both cases therefore exemplify the principle 
 that knowledge goes by differencing, and intrinsically 
 carries relation in it ; and furnish not so much two distinct 
 meanings of the phrase ' relativity of knowledge,' as two 
 steps, one more elementary than the other, in the working 
 of the same law. In this second form, as in the first, the
 
 T24 'ALL WE KNOW is PHENOMENA: 
 
 rule denies to us all cognizance of the ' Absolute ' ; but 
 not of noumena, so far forth as they may be related 
 to us. 
 
 2. ' All we know is phenomena? 
 
 But there is another way of presenting the same sceptical 
 doctrine, specially intended to deprive us of such con- 
 ditional access to entities as I have reserved. It is said 
 that ' All we know is phenomena ' ; and since the entities 
 still left open to possible apprehension are all noumena, 
 this proposition, if true, at once abolishes their claim. In 
 order to test the maxim, we must ask what is a ' phe- 
 nomenon ' ; and in what consists its contrariety to a 
 noumenon ? Kant would say, in his distinctive language, 
 that the former is an object of Sense, the latter of Under- 
 standing. He would add, that nothing can be an object 
 given us to know except that which is presentable to ' the 
 mind's eye,' that at which we can look in perception or 
 imagination ; and since we have no such Anschauung except 
 of what is given to Sense, our noumena are not objects of 
 thought, but ways of thinking, and must be kept off our 
 list of things known. This account however is liable to 
 serious objections, (i) Even if we adopt the test of ob- 
 jective presentability (Anschauung), you can no more 
 satisfy this condition with the data of Sense apart from 
 those of Thought, than with the data of Thought apart 
 from those of sense. A thing which is perceived or 
 imagined by me, and on which I direct an apprehensive 
 attention, is not a mere mess of my own sensations as felt, 
 but is judged to be other than myself, to be in Space, and, 
 if it has newly turned up, to have issued from an adequate 
 power. These are all of them, according to general ad- 
 mission, and the last according to Kant's own psychology, 
 additions of the understanding to the contributions of 
 sense ; and the Anschauung is the joint product of both
 
 Chap. IV.] 'ALL WE KNOW IS PHENOMENA.' 125 
 
 faculties and arises only by their concurrence ; and whether 
 you withdraw the intellectual element or the sensible, you 
 equally destroy your represented object of cognition. That 
 a noumenon cannot be viewed by itself is therefore no 
 adequate ground for discharging it from our knowledge, 
 (a) We cannot adopt Kant's very wide use of the word 
 Sense ; to include not only (under the name of outer sense) 
 Perception with the intuition of Space, but also (under the 
 name of inner sense} self-consciousness, with the intuition 
 of Time. The fact that we can picture to ourselves space 
 and time, and that they are the condition of all other 
 pictures, determined him to this arrangement which aimed 
 to keep the picturing and the thinking faculties separate 
 from each other. But since we also judge about space and 
 time, e. g. they are infinite, and judging is the function 
 not of sense but of understanding, they cannot be with- 
 drawn from the intuitive cognizance of the intellect, or with 
 any propriety be transferred from the list of noumena to 
 that of mere forms of sense. We want a name to include 
 all cognitive functions or judgments of truth ; and to hand 
 over a number of them to ' Sense,' which is an attribute of 
 creatures that feel and do not understand, is highly incon- 
 venient. When once we are furnished with a comprehensive 
 designation (be it Understanding or Reason) for the whole 
 field of judgment, it may be well to divide off, as Kant 
 does, the provinces of immediate judgment by Ansckauung, 
 and of mediate judgment by Begriff; but this minor dis- 
 tinction is purchased at too great a price, by flinging its 
 prior members altogether out of the intellectual back into 
 the sensible realm. 
 
 If we limit the word Sense to the feelings given us by 
 outward things, then, even though we should include the 
 perceptions connected with them, we can no longer define 
 ' phenomenon ' as the object of sensible cognition, as nou- 
 menon is of intellectual ; for we speak habitually of purely
 
 126 ' ALL WE KNOW IS PHENOMENA? [Book I. 
 
 mental and moral phenomena, of reasoning, emotion, will, 
 etc., known to us by inward self-consciousness alone. 
 These in fact are the most exact type of the genus, because, 
 being only internal, they protect us from the irrelevant 
 image of a Space in which we are to look for what we 
 want, and drive us upon the true definition, that a phe- 
 nomenon is an observed change, i. e. a step in Time from one 
 state to another, a ylyvto-Qai, a Werden. It is not enough 
 that there be a change : the altering colours, forms, etc., of a 
 growing plant are not phenomena till they ' appear ' before 
 the eye that marks them : the sensations that make up 
 the life of the mollusk or the chrysalis, though lifted into 
 the sphere of feeling, are still short of the rank of phe- 
 nomena, unless we suppose the creature able to notice 
 them and refer them to itself, or the naturalist to do so on 
 its behalf : besides the change, there must be a cognizance 
 of it. Phenomena, therefore, not only may be known, but 
 must be known, in order to earn their character at all. 
 Further, but for phenomena, nothing could be known. For 
 differentiation, as we have seen, is the essential condition 
 of every cognitive act ; and difference can be brought home 
 to us only by change ; either external, throwing us into 
 first this state of feeling, then that ; or internal, delivering 
 our attention now upon this point, then upon that : to take 
 away these vicissitudes would be to throw the world before 
 us and the mind within us into eternal sleep, in which 
 neither communicated with the other. But from this pro- 
 position, that ' without phenomena we cannot know,' does 
 it follow that, with phenomena, we can know nothing but 
 themselves ? Not so : in making us aware of the changes 
 around and within us, they may, and they do, reveal to us 
 something besides : viz. in every instance a permanent 
 ground, the correlative of changes, without which they 
 cannot be conceived, which is contained in their very 
 meaning, and which has all the certainty belonging not
 
 Chap. IV.] 'ALL WE KNOW IS PHENOMENA" 127 
 
 simply to their actual occurrence, but to their possibility. 
 The Westminster bell strikes five: it is impossible to count 
 the sounds and notice their succession, or to remember 
 them afterwards, without distributing them in a line upon 
 an underlying duration which holds them, and of which 
 they occupy a larger segment than the quicker strokes of 
 my study clock announcing the same hour. We know the 
 changes by their turning upon this permanent : we know 
 the permanent by the changes that break its uniformity : 
 one and the same intellectual act puts us in presence of 
 both ; and neither can have any cognitive title to the ex- 
 clusion of the other. I see a balloon ascend and glide 
 hither and thither as the air currents drift it : it is im- 
 possible to mark its course without referring it to the three 
 dimensions of an all-embracing Space, whose existence 
 and infinitude are interpreted to us by the phenomena 
 of which it is the condition and the field. This Space is 
 not one of the phenomena ; for if they were abolished 
 it would still be there, as it was before they came ; yet 
 by what right can you affirm that it is less known than 
 they ? I remember meeting a friend who told me of Pro- 
 fessor Trendelenburg's last illness, and receiving next day 
 by post the news of his death, and later in the week 
 writing a letter consequent on the tidings : it is impossible 
 for me to be aware of these incidents without referring 
 them to my own personality as a constant, and being sure 
 that I who now remember them am the same who ex- 
 perienced each, and who, as recipient of the earlier, have 
 been led to act and think in the later as permanent subject 
 of them all. Do I then know the phenomena, and yet not 
 know myself of whom they are phenomena? I am startled 
 by a flash of lightning and its thunder clap : this surprise 
 of eye and ear compels me to feel myself in presence of a 
 power of which these are the signals : and otherwise than 
 as effects it is impossible for me to conceive of them at all ;
 
 i28 'ALL WE KNOW is PHENOMENA: 
 
 the same act by which I apprehend them forbidding me to 
 rest in them and carrying me behind them. Do I then 
 know that they are there, and not know that they are 
 caused"} both cognitions have their credentials locked in 
 the same casket and embodied in the same text ; and what 
 you cancel for the one you cannot save for the other. In 
 all such instances it is a direct consequence of the duality 
 of intellectual apprehension, that in knowing one thing you 
 must know two : that in so far as one is a change, the other 
 is a permanent ; and that every disparagement of the latter 
 as mentally invisible has no effect but to put the former 
 into the dark. Noumena and phenomena are thus in- 
 separable companions on the field of intelligence, and must 
 live or die together, like the two cotyledons of one seed. 
 
 Is there then no ground for the statement, which almost 
 every philosopher repeats, that all we know of matter is its 
 qualities, and of mind its acts and states ? There is thus 
 much ground for it : we usually employ the word ' know- 
 ledge ' of something which we consciously get to know, and 
 of which we continue to learn more and more, embodying 
 it as we proceed in fresh propositions organically united 
 with what goes before. Such process, resulting in a growing 
 system, arises only on the phenomenal side of our cognitive 
 duality: the corresponding Noumenon accompanying it all 
 along as an invariable condition. With the properties and 
 changes of matter we are always extending our acquain- 
 tance, whole treatises being written on physical aspects of 
 nature never suspected by the ancients : but the idea of 
 matter as the substantive datum for these phenomena 
 remains where it was. Similarly, the mind is to us, as it 
 was to Aristotle, that in us which thinks, feels, wills, etc., 
 while the laws of its action have been followed out into 
 new fields which give to our modern psychology a wider 
 scope. The assumption of the Mind as the ground of these 
 multiplying phenomena has remained stationary, but indis-
 
 Chap. IV.] <ALL WE KNOW IS PHENOMENA: 129 
 
 pensable to their conception. This has given rise to the 
 assertion that these substantive centres are the unknown 
 subjects of known modifications : since we can say nothing 
 about them except in language borrowed from attributes, 
 and cannot make the thought of them fruitful in new 
 truth. That this language however is not strictly correct 
 is very obvious. That you can say only one thing about an 
 object is very different from being able to say nothing: the 
 unity and simplicity and unchangeableness of a cognition 
 do not identify it with ignorance. And since to the corre- 
 lative of phenomena this permanence must from its very 
 function belong, and otherwise it would itself become phe- 
 nomenal and demand its own permanent behind, any 
 disparagement of its intellectual claims on this ground 
 forgets the very conditions of human knowledge. A rela- 
 tion not altogether dissimilar exists between the definitions 
 and the axioms of geometry. The former (including the 
 real assumptions which they carry) are the genetic source 
 of all the discoveries of ulterior properties which the sub- 
 sequent reasonings elicit : the latter are wholly unpro- 
 ductive and might be pondered for ever without yielding a 
 single glimpse of new truth ; but they give the ever-present 
 rule in conformity with which the forward movements must 
 proceed : a rule that repeats itself again and again without 
 change whenever the case for its application comes. Yet 
 we treat the axioms as lying within our knowledge, and as 
 types of its highest certainty. 
 
 It is worth remarking that on the use of language here 
 noticed the scheme of Idealism really rests. It assumes 
 that in every mental act the cognitum is that term on which 
 attention is directed and of which we think : while the other 
 is our way of thinking it, which is not looked at at all, and 
 cannot therefore, it is said, be an object of knowledge. The 
 former is the phenomenon, the latter the noumenon. The 
 former is attended to only as an affection of ourselves, and 
 
 VOL. L K
 
 130 ' ALL WE KNOW IS PHENOMENA.' [Book I. 
 
 beyond these limits is not cognized : the latter is not 
 attended to in any way, and therefore is not cognized. 
 How then are we able to speak of it, and give it a name ? 
 Simply by afterwards reflecting upon the act of knowledge, 
 and questioning it as to its contents : we then find out its 
 two parts, and in tracing the process, what was before our 
 unconscious way of thinking now becomes the object of 
 our conscious thought. Is it not then at last our cognituml 
 and have we not made sure of our noumenon? Yes, it is 
 answered ; but only as a phenomenon of our mental history, 
 and not as valid for realities beyond : so that we know no 
 more than that we have this particular idea ; but what it 
 is good for we cannot tell. The only answer possible to 
 this is a conditional admission of its truth and an uncondi- 
 tional rejection of its scepticism. If 'knowledge' is to be 
 so defined as to include only the phenomenal or objective 
 term, then of course noumena are unknown except as 
 phenomena cognizable in our personality. They cannot 
 at the same moment play the part of apprehensive act 
 and apprehended thing, of condition and conditioned. 
 But none the less shall I rest and move with assured 
 certainty upon them ; and if you will not let me say 
 '/ know them', I W M De content to say '/ trust them' 
 That they are my given way of thinking is the best 
 possible reason why I should listen to no proposals to 
 think otherwise. It only therefore amounts to this; that 
 the subjective postulates are accepted under one name, the 
 objective data under another; but the difference between 
 ' trust ' in the one case and ' knowledge ' in the other, marks 
 no distinction of certainty; simply the outer and the inner 
 side of one indivisible act of the intellect.
 
 Chap. IV.] THE UNKNOWABLE. 131 
 
 3. The Unknowable. 
 
 One other mode of speech must be adverted to before we 
 take leave of the maxim we are criticising. Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer takes up a peculiar position in relation to it. He 
 admits that it is impossible to present phenomena in 
 thought or language without the assumption of entities 
 to which they are related; especially without referring 
 them to a Cause or Power whence they issue. Nay, our 
 very conception of them as Relative, and relativity itself, 
 involve, ex vi termini, the Absolute as a necessary cog- 
 nition. He does not therefore question the reality of these 
 noumena; our thought does not delude us in its report of 
 their existence. But there its capacity stops. We know 
 that the absolute power is; but not what it is. Is this 
 a tenable distinction ? Is it possible to have assurance 
 of a real existence, which yet remains to the end an utter 
 blank ? Do we know the fact by a vacuum in thought, or 
 by a thought itself? If the former, how can a subjective 
 nothing tell us of an objective something ? If the latter, 
 how can there be a thought with nothing thinkable ? By 
 calling this existence a 'Power,' surely Mr. Herbert Spencer 
 removes it by one mark from the unknown ; but, besides 
 this, ' we are obliged,' he says, ' to regard that power as 
 omniscient,' as eternal, as one, as cause manifested in all 
 phenomena ; a list of predicates, scanty indeed when mea- 
 sured by the requisites of religion, but too copious for the 
 plea of Nescience. Wherever I can distinguish, there I 
 know; and do I not distinguish this 'absolute' from all 
 that is related to it, and thus get it, as counter term, into 
 relative apprehension? Is it not, limcmg noumena, dif- 
 ferent from Space, from Time, from Substance ? If I can 
 say all these things about it, it is no longer competent 
 to me to designate it as the absolutely Unknowable. To 
 know that an object is, yet know nothing that it has, is 
 
 K 2
 
 132 THE UNKNOWABLE. [Book I. 
 
 impossible, because contradictory. This negative Ontology 
 therefore, which identifies ' the supreme reality ' with total 
 vacuity, and makes the infinite in Being the zero in thought, 
 cannot permanently poise itself in its precarious position : it 
 must either repent of its concessions to realism (which it is 
 too philosophical to do), and lapse into the Scientific com- 
 monplace 'all we know is phenomena'; or else advance, 
 with what caution and reserve it pleases, into ulterior con- 
 ceptions of the invisible cause, sufficient to soften the total 
 eclipse into the penumbra of a sacred mystery. It is but 
 natural that the pretensions of men to more knowledge 
 than they can substantiate should lead to this reaction into 
 imaginary ignorance: to eyes long dazzled by a blaze just 
 quenched, the open twilight seems like a midnight black 
 with clouds ; but soon, under the solemn grey of evening, 
 though the colours are gone, the forms emerge, and when 
 the west also is pale and cold, the stars come out with 
 brighter fires, and give the heavens their shape. Mr. 
 Spencer's testimony against the purely phenomenal doc- 
 trine is of high value. The importance which he attaches 
 to this characteristic of his, as relieving with a sense of 
 reverence the hard self-confidence of special science or 
 dogmatic materialism, is scarcely less so : for it betrays 
 his appreciation of that outlook beyond the region of 
 phenomena for the conditions of religion which cannot 
 eventually be content to gaze into an abyss without reply. 
 But men will not permanently be persuaded by him, that, 
 while they may be sure there is more than phenomena, 
 they cannot tell what else there is 1 . 
 
 I have now examined the modern doctrine of nescience 
 with regard to metaphysical truth, in the three forms which 
 
 1 I content myself with a brief treatment of this subject here, 
 having already dealt with it more explicitly in an essay on Science, 
 Nescience, and Faith, vol. i. of Essays, Philosophical and Theological, 
 pp. 171 seqq.
 
 Chap. IV.] 'DOGMATISM' AND 'CRITICISM? 133 
 
 it assumes : viz. the idealism which limits our knowledge to 
 the interior line of our own consciousness : the principle of 
 the relativity of knowledge, which forbids us to suppose that 
 what is true to us is true beyond us : and the maxim that 
 ' all we know is phenomena' In no one of these instances 
 have we found the attempts satisfactory to explain away, or 
 render untrustworthy, the intuitive beliefs which are the 
 concomitants and conditions of our phenomenal experience : 
 i. e. the fact of their being noumena does not condemn them, 
 but, on the contrary, leaves them entitled to the same 
 reliance as the phenomena apprehended with them in one 
 act of thought Whether this or that particular conception 
 comes under this general defence, or is the possibly spurious 
 growth of an illusory experience, is a different question, 
 which can only be dealt with as the case arises. I do not 
 propose to give a complete table of the intuitions of the 
 understanding; but to take up, one by one, those which 
 have to do with the grounds of religion ; and under each 
 head to say what may be needful to vindicate their validity 
 as elements of religious knowledge. 
 
 This final appeal to the intuitive witness borne by con- 
 sciousness to the presence of a world beyond the contents 
 of that consciousness it has become customary to brand 
 with the name ' Dogmatism,' and to treat as superseded by 
 the discoveries of the modern 'Criticism'; which affects to 
 have found a back-door of entrance behind each intuition, 
 and detected it, with lighted magic-lantern, flinging off the 
 phantasmagoria of sham externalities, for the deception of 
 the simple and the amusement of the wise. In this re- 
 spect, a change has taken place in the canons of philo- 
 sophical judgment which, to say the least, needs to be very 
 carefully watched lest, like every oscillation, it only replaces 
 one untenable position by another. With a few comments 
 on these changes, I take leave of the subject of this Book. 
 
 Till past the middle of the last century the ultimate
 
 134 POSTULATES [Book I. 
 
 security of our knowledge was assumed to rest upon a few 
 given cognitions, not preceding experience ; but elicited by 
 our first experience, and shaping it into a judgment. It 
 was generally agreed that, if any judgments could be shown 
 to be original and intuitive, their authority must be consi- 
 dered beyond question, and what they told us be held valid 
 for the reality of things. Accordingly, if a philosopher 
 desired to weaken their authority, he proceeded, like 
 Locke and Hume, to strip them of their a priori pre- 
 tensions and reduce them to empirical rank; explaining 
 them away into custom, association, prejudice, logical tra- 
 dition, etc.; in other words, into accidents of education 
 and position, and dislodging them from their rights as 
 data of our intellectual constitution. This is still the 
 method most in favour with the English empirical school. 
 Again and again its expositors return to certain obstinate 
 knots or ganglia of thought, duration, extension, causality, 
 duty, etc., and try to resolve them by some new turn of 
 strength or skill : so that all the most elaborate efforts of 
 psychological analysis, from the time of Hobbes to that 
 of Bain, have been expended upon these nuclei, to break 
 them up. We have thus a virtual admission that, if a 
 judgment is to be impeached, it must be shown to be 
 fabricated by experience, and that, so long as it can hold 
 its ground as intuitive, it is entitled to be believed. Here 
 we have a healthy faith remaining in the veracious struc- 
 ture of the human mind ; and a willingness (which however 
 is far from being consistently maintained) to trust its verdict 
 as conclusive, provided it can be really had ; a proviso 
 needing stern enforcement, to prevent the too easy resort 
 to ' intuition ' which really is dogmatism. Since the time of 
 Kant however, it is only in England and in France that the 
 problem could be worked out upon these terms. For he 
 broke the spell of a priori factors of thought by a new 
 disenchantment; he maintained their existence, enumerated
 
 Chap. IV.] INEVITABLE. 135 
 
 and classified them ; but denied their metaphysical validity 
 as reporters of real being ; treating their subjective character 
 as their condemnation for purposes of objective ontological 
 knowledge. They are forms in which we are made to 
 think, and into which we must cast what is given to us : 
 they supply the law of our perceptive and intellectual life, 
 and maintain it as a consistent and coherent system in 
 itself; but that anything real corresponds with these forms, 
 which lie in us and not in the world, we have not the 
 smallest reason to believe. But then, neither have we the 
 smallest reason to disbelieve : and that, as has been shown 
 in a previous chapter, is indispensable for the justification 
 of metaphysical scepticism. To demand a reason for assent 
 to a primary belief is to insist that it shall be not primary, 
 but secondary: and the absence of this self-contradictory 
 condition can disturb no rational mind with idealistic 
 doubt. It is certainly impossible to show that our thinking 
 functions are organised in right relations with the scene in 
 which they feel and act : and if any one chooses to suppose 
 that they are sources of mere illusion, he must be allowed 
 to enjoy his humour. But the older presumption will still 
 prevail, that what is inevitably thought is in accord with 
 what really is ; and that Intelligence is not the mere creator 
 of a dream. Doubtless, it is a belief acted on without 
 proof: and if to enter upon the thinking process with a 
 postulate wrapped up in it be ' Dogmatism,' the imputa- 
 tion cannot be refuted. It holds good however of the 
 Kantist no less than of the Realist : for whether you say 
 that the subjective affirmation is, or is not, adequate 
 security for the objective reality, you have to take your 
 principle for granted. If to verify the affirmative, I should 
 have ' to jump off my own shadow,' to invalidate it, or 
 critically choose between it and its negative, would demand 
 the very same Mephistophilean agility. A ' Philosophy 
 without Assumptions ' must be a product outside the realm
 
 136 LEGITIMATE FAITH. 
 
 of thought, and inappreciable by human reason. Our only 
 resource therefore is to avail ourselves of the empirical 
 psychology to the limits of its honest analysis of acquired 
 combinations; and,' beyond these limits, to trust, as valid 
 intuitions, the residual belief inherent in our mental consti- 
 tution. This clue, at least, must serve me through the 
 following enquiries.
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 THEISM. 
 
 ALL religion resolves itself into a conscious relation, on 
 our part, to a higher than we ; and, on the part of the 
 rational universe at large, to a higher than all, i.e. to 
 a mind supreme above the whole family of minds. The 
 conditions of such supremacy are twofold, (i) Dynamical, 
 consisting in the command of all methods needful for the 
 accomplishment of contemplated ends. (2) Moral, con- 
 sisting in the intrinsic ascendency of the highest ends, 
 infallibly conceived and externally pursued, as the springs 
 of the divine Will. In treating of the former we have 
 to do chiefly with the relation of God to Nature, the sole 
 theatre of any possible power that can be supposed to 
 limit or dispense with His. In treating of the latter, we 
 deal with his relation to Man, and in a secondary degree 
 to the other sentient beings of our globe, as the only 
 sphere open to our observation in which Character can 
 play a part, and a righteous government appear. These 
 two fields really exhaust all that we can seek or really 
 desire to know of things divine ; for although to these 
 two aspects, of God as Cause, and God as Holy, we might 
 add a third, of God as Judge, in order to determine the 
 question of a life reserved for us beyond death, yet this 
 is evidently an integral portion of the moral problem 
 embraced in the second head ; apart from which the 
 phenomenon of death and its possible range of effects 
 become mere topics of natural history, and pass altogether
 
 138 THEISM. 
 
 out of the special cognizance of religion. In discussing 
 our moral relation to God, some indications can scarcely 
 fail to present themselves, whether that relation is 
 terminable or not, and, if it is, when and how it is to 
 cease. I therefore propose to be content with the simple 
 twofold division.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 GOD AS CAUSE. 
 
 i. Meaning of the Causal Relation. 
 
 A. As judged by the observer of nature. 
 
 THOUGH the idea of Causality has not only possessed, 
 but closely engaged the human mind in every reflective 
 age since the dawn of philosophical literature, it is 
 impossible to read through many pages of any scientific 
 book without noticing the variable forms which it assumes. 
 Two fixed points only are to be remarked in it : it involves 
 a relation between two terms, distinguished as Cause and 
 Effect ; and of these two terms, the second must be a 
 phenomenon, or change. The moment we pass beyond 
 these limits, and seek to define the first term, we are 
 surprised by its versatility of aspect ; it appears at one 
 time as a thing or object in space ; at another, as a prior 
 phenomenon ; and again, as a definite force identical with 
 neither. In assigning the cause of the daily tides, you 
 may name the Moon, or the rotation of the earth, or the 
 gravitation of the related masses. The growth of a plant 
 may be referred to the seed, the soil, the air ; or to the 
 circulation of the sap ; or to the chemical action of heat 
 and light. The river Rhone may be traced to the great 
 glacier that sends it forth ; or to the winter fall and 
 summer melting of its snows ; or to the heats from 
 southern latitudes, especially from the African continent, 
 which qualify the climate of Switzerland and are ever 
 widening the green of the Alpine valleys.
 
 140 MEANING OF < CAUSE.' [Book II. 
 
 How are we to reduce these variations, and secure to 
 the first term of this relation the fixity of meaning which 
 belongs to the second ? Common usage cannot decide 
 among them. Physical observation will not help us, for 
 each adduced instance of the relation may be read in any 
 of the several ways. There remains but one resource ; not 
 all the three meanings have got hold of the word together; 
 there is among them an order of succession in which one 
 has precedence, while the others are derivative ; or each 
 may pick out some partial feature of an idte mire to 
 which they all belong. It is only by reference to the 
 psychological birth and history of the notion of causality, 
 that we can detect its essence, and account for its modifi- 
 cations. What we have to do with here is no object of the 
 senses which can be submitted to microscope, telescope, or 
 crucible, but a thought, determinable only as a function of 
 the understanding. Our problem therefore is purely re- 
 flective ; to find what we primarily mean by Cause, and 
 how we gain and mould the dependent ideas. As there is 
 some advantage in beginning from the negative side, and 
 shutting out what we do not mean, we may first examine 
 and limit the claims of the three interpretations already 
 enumerated. 
 
 (a) Thing as Cause. 
 
 If by ' thing ' we denote that which has definite position 
 in space (Z>#seyn), the word belongs to whatever holds 
 geometrical relations ; and as these subsist wherever 
 there are points, lines, surfaces, with their angles and 
 enclosures, they would be present in a world where no 
 motion was. In a scene thus dead, however partitioned 
 by marking objects, no one can pretend to find a source 
 of change : all that is true of its contents must remain as 
 it is, no less than the group of properties predicable of 
 a parabola. It is not by being a thing that the moon
 
 Chap. I.] 'THING' AS CAUSE. 141 
 
 is credited with the tides, but by being the supposed seat 
 of an energy crossing the lunar orbit with dispatches to 
 our seas. We inaccurately speak as if the effect were due 
 to the object's mere externality, as there, instead of to an 
 activity which is one of its phenomena. This misleading 
 habit has left its traces upon the doctrines of even the 
 most careful philosophers. Kant himself never wholly 
 escaped it ; and in his prae-critical period allowed it to 
 shape some fundamental formulas of his thought. In the 
 Latin trial-Essay which admitted him as Privat-docent 
 into the philosophical faculty at Koenigsberg (1755, 
 aet. 31), he lays down the following proposition, as de- 
 monstrable a priori : ' No change can take place in a 
 substance except in so far as it is connected with others, 
 and the reciprocal dependence of all determines their 
 mutual change of condition ; ' and on the strength of this 
 proposition he rests a refutation of idealism ; inasmuch 
 as the changes in the mind of which we are self-conscious 
 could not, under the rule, arise without its connection with 
 something other than itself, and are therefore indices of an 
 external world related to it 1 . Far from allowing that in 
 the series of mental states each term has its sufficient 
 cause in its antecedent, so that the whole is a nexus or 
 concatenated phenomena, he thus insists on referring the 
 inward changes to the presence of outward things ; and 
 that, a presence not learned by sense, but inferred by a 
 necessity of thought, in virtue of which the understanding, 
 on noticing its own phenomena, assumes the existence of 
 objects other than itself. At this time therefore it was the 
 need of a cause that, in Kant's view, called up the belief 
 we have in external objects : they were introduced to us 
 by a category of the Understanding, not, as he afterwards 
 taught, by the factors of Sense. It has been shown how 
 
 1 Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova Diluci- 
 datio, Prop, xii ; Werke (Rosenkranz), B. i. pp. 36-39.
 
 142 'THING' AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 Schopenhauer shapes the same deduction, and derives 
 externality from the causal law, in confutation of Kant's 
 later doctrine * ; and how Helmholtz, in like manner, 
 trusts to the same natural bridge to bear us across from 
 the successions of consciousness to synchronous realities 2 . 
 If the external world were no more than our hypothesis for 
 explaining our sensations, we might no doubt be said 
 to believe in it, as we may believe in luminiferous undu- 
 lations as the condition of vision ; but our assent to it on 
 these terms would little resemble the certainty we feel 
 as to the direct objects of perception. It is no wonder 
 therefore that the order of thought maintained by these 
 writers, from Cause as a pre-supposition to outward things 
 as an inference, is called in question and even reversed by 
 .recent critics. Thus Professor Strumpell insists that, in 
 reference to external things and events, it is logically 
 impossible for us ever to identify our idea with real things, 
 or the nexus of our ideas with the real sequence of facts. 
 The use of the idea of causality presupposes that not 
 merely the existences there are, but the phenomena there 
 are, are already there ; and hence neither can be reached 
 by inference, because always posited in the premisses. 
 This pre-supposition is indispensable ; and the idea of 
 external existence and external change is interwoven 
 with whatever view may be taken of causality 3 . Whether 
 it is necessary to accept either of these opposite orders of 
 relation for the ideas of cause and of externality, will 
 be considered further on. 
 
 Though Kant's later doctrine of causality differed 
 from the first by making both terms of the relation 
 phenomenal, a curious vestige still remained of his Latin 
 
 1 Supra, pp. 93-95- 2 Supra, pp. 97, 98. 
 
 3 Der Causalitatsbegriff und sein metaphysischer Gebrauch in der 
 Naturwissenschaft, von Ludwig Striimpel. Leipzig, 1871, pp. 14, 15.
 
 Chap. I.] 'THING' AS CAUSE. 143 
 
 proposition in his refusal to part with the Noumenal Ding- 
 an-sick, as the source of our sensible experiences. That he 
 was unconscious of inconsistency in reserving this little 
 corner of realism is due probably to the feeble tenure by 
 which he held it, and the little use he made of it. But it 
 is certain that he never renounced it, and that its lingering 
 presence with him helped him to disclaim the Idealism 
 which his disciples and his critics alike saw to be involved 
 in the fundamental principles of the critical philosophy. 
 However blank of predicates the Ding-an-sich might be, 
 so much at least might be certainly affirmed of it, that it is 
 no phenomenon ; and if it is demanded by the intellect in 
 order to serve in the capacity of a Cause, the first term in 
 the category is occupied, not by an antecedent phenomenon, 
 but by an entity or thing. Thus, the older idea that some- 
 thing must be in order that anything should come to be, that 
 a statical permanent is the indispensable base of a flash of 
 transiency, refused to quit its hold upon him, though he 
 had long declared the opposite doctrine incontrovertible. 
 
 The tendency to invest external things, as such, with 
 causality was handed down from the metaphysics of an 
 earlier age, and was rendered intense by the influence of 
 Spinoza. His theory of Substance, Attributes, and Modes, 
 exhibited the second term as evolved from the first, and 
 the third from the second, and identified Substance with 
 the Cause of all ; not less of what eternally is and must be, 
 such as the properties of space, figure, and number, than of 
 what comes and goes in the form of successive objects and 
 events. As the essences of all particular natural kinds 
 have their ratio sufficiens in the essence of universal Nature, 
 so might the properties of each kind be deduced from its 
 essence by one who could read it. This relation of logical 
 necessity being treated as identical with causality, it would 
 follow that the definition of a right cone is cause of all that 
 is true of its sectional curves, and that whatever we predi-
 
 144 'THING' AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 cate of man is the effect of the self-assertion of his essence. 
 In this way therefore each sort of 'thing' is made the 
 cause of its own qualities ; and, in order to enter upon this 
 relation, has only to be so and so, without doing anything. 
 ' The word Substance' says Professor Laurie, ' is used to 
 denote that non-sensible " somewhat " which, underlying 
 the substrate crude matter or bundle of qualities, supports 
 them and lives in them ; which is hi fact the being of the 
 sensible object ; and, as the being of it, is also the cause of it, 
 relatively to its qualities or phenomenal existence.' This 
 use of the word ' Substance ' identifies it at bottom with 
 'Cause.' 1 
 
 It is obvious that this use of the Ding-an-sich as the 
 source of its own expressions contradicts not only Kant's 
 doctrine of phenomenal causation, but his original demand 
 for a second thing, to account for an affection of the first. 
 The difference is that here Cause and Effect lie within one 
 substance, while before they required two ; but both cases 
 have the common feature that Cause is identified with 
 ' Thing,' and is distinguished from Effect, as Being is from 
 Change. 
 
 In no one of these various forms can we consent to accept 
 of 'entity as synonymous with cause. To be is not to do ; and 
 however true the maxim Operari sequitur esse, where both 
 oferari and esse are, it is not true that esse necessarily 
 entails operari, as we have already seen in the case of 
 mathematical relations 2 . The sphere does not produce its 
 own properties ; or a substance make its own attributes ; 
 for neither is there, till the object exists. In instances like 
 these, which, we contemplate ' sub specie eternitatis,' it is 
 easy to see that the ratio essendi is not causal, i. e. is not a 
 ratio fiendi. We are more liable to illusion where our 
 
 1 Metaphysica nova et vetusta, a return to Dualism, Part V. ch. i. 
 pp. 99, 100. 
 
 2 Supra, I. iii. I. pp. 92, 93.
 
 Chap. I.] PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. 145 
 
 judgment is concerned with material objects of perception ; 
 because, being quite unconscious of all the processes through 
 which they communicate with us, we fancy that they have 
 only to be where they are, in order to be perceived there : 
 the moon in the sky and the pair of eyes on the field 
 beneath are sure to find each other out ; and she straight- 
 way gets the credit, gratis, by merely existing in her place, 
 of the observer's visual experience. It is not however by 
 being) but by shining, that she affects him ; and, in order to 
 shine, looking one way at the sun, and another at him ; and, 
 from the former, receiving an undulatory message which she 
 forthwith transmits to the latter, the thrill of which upon 
 his retina completes at last the complex story. Here we 
 have not a ' Substance,' calling up any event by a ' So let 
 it be ' ; but successive links of change, of which the first is 
 no less a phenomenon than the last. Except as the seat of 
 change, or partner in a change, no ' thing ' can ever play 
 the part of Cause. 
 
 (b) Phenomenon as Cause. 
 
 Is it then a sufficient correction to disregard the things, 
 as such, and seek the cause in another phenomenon, so that 
 the relation shall be between two homogeneous members of 
 the same series, differing simply as constant prior from 
 constant posterior ? This, it is well known, is the doctrine 
 of Hume, Brown, the Mills, and the empirical psychologists 
 generally in England, of Kant in Germany, of Comte in 
 France. They all reduce causality to a rule of time-suc- 
 cession traceable in the order of phenomena ; a rule which 
 our writers, with the exception of Brown, regard as gathered 
 merely from inductive observation, and as having no further 
 cogency than attaches to any wide generalisation ; but 
 which Kant treated as a form of thought inherent in the 
 understanding, and applied by it to the materials of sen- 
 sible experience. His theory may be presented thus : In 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 146 PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 themselves, the perceptions of Sense, and the rules or cate- 
 gories of the Understanding, lie entirely apart, without 
 interpenetration ; Sensation being silent, for instance, of 
 Causality; and Causality presenting no picture to the 
 imagination. But there is an intermediate which enables 
 them to meet ; viz. Time ; for, on the one hand, it is the 
 form of our inner sense (i.e. self-consciousness), in virtue of 
 which we represent our own inner states to ourselves as 
 sticcessive ; and, on the other, is involved in the intellectual 
 conception, A is cause of B, B is effect of A, where our 
 thought necessarily takes A first and steps thence to B. 
 Possessed of this key of sequence, the understanding can 
 plant itself in the field of perception and make application 
 of its rule. Not every succession, however, which there 
 turns up will answer to its law ; and to find where it will fit, 
 a distinction must be drawn. There are some series of 
 perceptions and imaginations which I can take in any 
 order, direct, inverse, or mixed ; as when I survey a house 
 from roof to base, I could as well pass my eye from . base 
 to roof; and, in remembering Guide's picture of Aurora 
 and the Hours, I can circulate among the figures at will, 
 and dwell upon the horses and the clouds at whatever in- 
 terval I choose. But there are other series, in the thread 
 of my inward life, in which this freedom of movement is 
 denied. I see, for instance, a boat pass down the stream ; 
 my perception of its position when appearing from above 
 precedes my perception of the position to which it de- 
 scends ; and it is impossible, in the apprehension of this 
 phenomenon, to invert the order. So, the vision of the 
 lightning and the hearing of the thunder, the stroke of a 
 sword and the flow of blood, present themselves in a de- 
 finite order of perception, which defies inversion. In such 
 cases therefore, the subjective order of my perception, not 
 being variable ad libitum, I must regard as imposed upon 
 me by the objective nature of the phenomenon, and ren-
 
 Chap. I.] PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. 147 
 
 dered determinate by a fixed rule. This is the feature 
 which separates our inner experiences into two sections ; 
 and that in which the order of succession admits of no 
 inversion is under Causality : the fact of fixed order is 
 what we mean by Causality ; and wherever there is a pair 
 of presentations or representations offering themselves in 
 this determinate sequence, the first is of the Cause, the 
 second of the Effect. 1 
 
 Does this resolution of the causal relation into a mere 
 stereotyped arrangement of our feelings and images in 
 their consecution satisfy the meaning we attach to the 
 language of this relation ? I think not, even though we 
 look no further than the current use of its terms in natural 
 science, where they bear only a curtailed and derivative 
 sense. The element of Time is certainly not wholly with- 
 out rights in the problem of Causation ; but, to say the 
 least, it occupies there not the essential but a very subordi- 
 nate place. If we admit priority as predicable of a cause, 
 still it is not this priority that makes it a cause. Into the 
 logical connection between the terms of this relation, as 
 construed by the understanding, Time does not enter ; 
 that it forces its way into our mode of picturing it to 
 the imagination is due to the necessity we are under of 
 taking our ideas in succession, even though they should 
 represent phenomena that are synchronous in objective 
 things. In its scientific use, the causal law declares, not 
 that one phenomenon regularly follows upon another, but 
 that a change in one thing is conditional on the behaviour 
 of such others as stand related to it, so that if they retain 
 the same attitude it will persist in its state. But this con- 
 ditionality does not imply any difference of date between 
 the coupled phenomena. The altered distance of the earth 
 
 1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I. ii. i ; Analogic der Erfahrung. 2 ; 
 Rosenkranz, B. ii, pp. 162 seqq. Alsb Schopenhauer, Vierfache Wurzel, 
 iv, 23, p. 85. 
 
 L 2
 
 148 PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 from the sun in approaching the perihelion does not pre- 
 cede its acceleration ; the two changes, of shortened radius 
 vector and of increased velocity, are absolutely simul- 
 taneous. The growing phases of the moon accompany, 
 and do not follow, her habitual flight from conjunction to 
 opposition with the sun. If the colour of an object de- 
 pends on the shape of its superficial molecules, a change of 
 colour could not fail to be synchronous with a change of 
 shape. Hence the maxim of the medieval philosophy, 
 ' Cessante causa, cessat effectus,' a maxim which, on the 
 ' antecedent and consequent ' principle, will have to be re- 
 placed by Cessante causa, incipit effectus. We should thus 
 be involved in the following absurdity : In a certain time a 
 change takes place in the dgttftl-object, without any change 
 in the condition of the patient', in the next section of time, 
 when the change in the agent no longer exists, there arises 
 a change in the patient. Such succession implies that, 
 when there is something to cause, there is no effect ; when 
 there is nothing to cause, the effect turns up. Kant him- 
 self could not pass this incongruity without some slight, 
 though inadequate notice ; for he says, ' The greater part 
 of the acting causes in nature are simultaneous with their 
 effects ; the sequence of which arises only from the fact 
 that the cause cannot accomplish the whole effect in a 
 moment But in the moment of the initiation it always 
 coexists simultaneously with the causality of its cause.' 1 
 Must we not add, ' not in the moment of its initiation only, 
 but in the moment of its cessation, it keeps time punctually 
 with its fleeting and vanishing cause?' Does the increment 
 of velocity due to a given decrement of the earth's solar 
 distance wait till the figure is lower by even the smallest 
 decimal before it is realised ? or is it not paid off and 
 expressed in mathematical tables with absolute exacti- 
 
 1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ibid., p. 172.
 
 Chap. I.] PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. 149 
 
 tude? If indeed the ' effect' on which you fix attention is 
 separated from the 'cause' to which you assign it by a 
 series of intermediate links of change, time may be needed 
 for the delivery of the final result ; and this is the case 
 wherever interposed media, solid or fluid, have to be stirred 
 to molecular movement, and to transmit vibrations to a 
 far-off goal. Thus, swift as are the undulations of light, a 
 new phase of the moon would earlier reach an eye nearer 
 to it by a thousand miles than it reaches ours ; and from 
 the flash of a distant gun we have to wait longer for the 
 report, the further we go from the battery. But in such 
 instances it is incorrect and arbitrary to fix ad libitum 
 upon any remote term in a series as the effect of which the 
 initial term is to be taken as the cause ; to treat the two 
 extremes as a simple example of the applied category, and 
 to merge all the intermediates, as if they were not there. 
 Instead of two phenomena in the sense required, i. e. 
 changes reduced to their lowest terms, there are millions 
 in each of these cases, every one efficient and every one 
 effect, sometimes with additive and sometimes with sub- 
 tractive value, relatively to each other, and to the complex 
 result. If I am asked to account for the time spent by a 
 long chain of causes and their effects, when every two 
 being a simultaneous pair, require no time in which the 
 one is to follow the other ; if I am pressed by the dilemma, 
 that, consecution being denied to this relation, either all 
 phenomena must be simultaneous, or else the sum of any 
 number of simultaneities must constitute time ; my answer 
 is, that though no interval is admitted between the cause 
 and the effect, these phenomena themselves take a little 
 time to enter and depart, and supply one of the infinitesi- 
 mal quantities, the aggregate of which measures the whole 
 life of Nature. Inconceivably fleet as the shifting of a 
 molecule is from the crest to the hollow of a luminiferous 
 wave, of such elements are made up the myriad years
 
 .150 PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 traversed by a ray now reaching my eye from the fixed 
 star on which my telescope is turned. Simultaneity does 
 not exclude duration. 
 
 On the assumption that ' prior and posterior ' are the 
 essence of the causal relation, there must be a clear 
 boundary between the successive terms, if they are to be 
 saved from confusion. But it is no more possible to dis- 
 cover a unit of phenomenon than it is to fix on a minimum 
 of space, or time, or motion. Shall we say that vibration 
 No. i of an elastic fluid is a complete phenomenon, and 
 cause of No. 2, as next ? or shall we let them all run on as 
 a single fact, till, by impinging on a heterogeneous surface, 
 they vary the form of motory change, and seem better to 
 merit a new name ? We do usually wait for this kind of 
 unlikeness, before counting a second phenomenon ; but it is 
 an arbitrary distinction, from mere subjective impression, 
 unsupported by any objective aetiological change ; the 
 prior molecular movements are just as much cause of the 
 posterior within the same homogeneous medium as between 
 that elastic fluid and the neighbouring substance, for in- 
 stance the nervous structure, at its edge. The phenomenal 
 tracks are not put together of welded links, but are con- 
 tinuous lines, which you indeed may divide by the points 
 of your logic and take piecemeal by the stops of your 
 attention, but which flow on without noticing your marks, 
 as Time slides forward whether there be clocks or not. 
 
 For purposes of inductive research, it is immaterial, as 
 Mr. Mill observes, whether cause and effect are successive 
 or synchronous ; since in either case we must seek the 
 essential conditions of the effect in the same way, viz. by 
 isolating those with which it never dispenses, and which it 
 never deserts. It is enough that it appears constantly in 
 their company, and matters not whether it enters on even 
 line with them, or a hair's breadth before. True as this is, 
 it hardly justifies Mr. Mill's treatment of the question as
 
 Chap. I.] PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. 151 
 
 indifferent ; the investigator of outward nature and the 
 student of the ultimate categories of thought being intent 
 upon different ends. The former gains all that he wants, 
 if he can but read the order of perceptible phenomena, and 
 lay down the modes in which they group themselves in sets, 
 or follow in sequence. This done, he can reckon on their 
 ways of massing their battalions and marching over the 
 field of Time ; and in the standard ' antecedent ' of each 
 column he has the premonitory sign of what is next to 
 come. And this power of interpretation and prediction, 
 which fulfils the aim of Science, would be equally attained 
 whether the component elements of this order were loose 
 from each other, as mere regimented items of fact, or were 
 determined to their place and held to their relations by 
 bonds of interdependence of which their juxtaposition and 
 sequence are only the marks. In other words, the induc- 
 tive sciences have concern only with Laws of nature, and 
 have nothing to ask and nothing to say about Causes at all ; 
 and they rightly frame their methods without regard to the 
 ulterior questions raised by scrutiny of the very principles 
 of thought. True, the chemist or the physiologist habitually 
 speaks of causation ; for he no less has and uses the idea 
 than any other rational man : but it goes with him into his 
 science, instead of coming out of it : what he learns there 
 adds nothing to it ; but, on the contrary, often takes so 
 much from it as to reduce it to a synonym of Law ; to 
 which then, by endowing it with agency, he wrongfully pays 
 over what he has pilfered from the impoverished word 
 Causality, being the noumenal interpretation of empirical 
 existence, cannot be learned from the rules of experience, 
 but claims to carry its meaning into them ; and whoever 
 applies it merely to what they contain, eviscerates it, and 
 leaves it in the chambers of the dead. 
 
 The inadequacy of the time-relation to explain and fill 
 the causal is further evidenced by the numerous instances
 
 152 PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 in which unbroken constancy of succession inspires us with 
 no belief of causal relation between the members of the 
 series. If I live by a dropping well, whose plash is 
 regular as the beat of a pendulum, I do not attribute 
 stroke B to the prior plunge of drop A. In the movement 
 of a running animal, I do not regard the action of each leg 
 as resulting from that of its predecessor in the series. Tide 
 succeeds to tide, and day to night, and moment to moment, 
 without our ever identifying their consecution with 
 causation. Mr. J. S. Mill endeavours to relieve the 
 difficulty presented in such cases by stipulating that the 
 antecedent shall be not only invariable, but unconditional, 
 i. e. that it shall be, or shall include, the sole requisite to 
 the effect. This, he says, is not the case in the sequences 
 adduced. If the head-springs were dried up, the drip of 
 the well would cease : if the dog at full speed were 
 struck with apoplexy, there would be a movement of a 
 leg without successor : if the moon were abolished, there 
 would be a last tide; and if the earth's rotation were 
 stopped, the alternation of day and night would cease. To 
 say nothing of the fact that this plea has no application 
 to the consecutive moments of time, it is only a circuitous 
 way of escaping from the whole doctrine of phenomenal 
 order, and of acknowledging that there are 'conditions' 
 of causation which you must secure, beyond the most 
 constant of observed priorities ; upon the evidence of time- 
 relations alone, however perfect, you cannot make sure of 
 having caught your cause ; you may yet be baulked by 
 failure of life, or of gravitation, which without being antece- 
 dent phenomena are yet indispensable conditions. 1 Besides, 
 
 1 I am glad to strengthen this criticism by the following admirable 
 sentences of Professor Laurie's : If by the word conditioning Mr. Mill 
 4 means merely to signalise the true antecedent as opposed to many 
 possible antecedents, or the crude antecedents of the vulgar, he mani- 
 festly gains nothing as regards causality. If, on the other hand, he 
 means by the word conditioning that there is something more than
 
 Chap. I.] PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. 153 
 
 mankind have never, in their utmost ignorance, before the 
 time of Copernicus and of the lunar theory of the tides, 
 been disposed to regard ebb as the cause of flood, or night 
 of day : the time-argument was perfect, the intercepting 
 possibilities were unknown ; yet they never mistook the 
 links of custom for the bonds of causation. It is evident 
 therefore that something else is necessary than order among 
 phenomena, before the mind sets up the belief of cause and 
 effect. 
 
 But suppose that we resolve the principle of causality 
 into a rule of succession which cannot be inverted : it can- 
 not possibly rest there ; for that rule itself, in virtue of which 
 A goes before B, and never B before A, is a phenomenon, 
 which can only be conceived as an effect, seeing that it 
 stands in contrast with the other set of successive per- 
 ceptions in which the order can be varied at will. But 
 that which determines the order to be this and not that, 
 cannot itself be a member of the series of which it dis- 
 poses, and does not therefore fall under the time-definition 
 of Cause ; and over and above the invariable arrangement 
 of phenomena in our thought, there must be a causality 
 deriving that arrangement from something beyond. 
 
 If neither ' thing ' nor ' prior phenomenon ' can separately 
 satisfy the meaning of Cause, is it possible perhaps to find 
 it in the combination of the two? They may easily be 
 brought together in the following case. Suppose there 
 were in space a single body in uniform rectilinear motion. 
 It would change its position on its path, first from A 
 to B, then from B to C. Here are two consecutive facts in 
 one given thing. Can we say that the thing's change 
 
 true time-sequence, he is endeavouring illegitimately to foist in caus- 
 ality in the sense of effectuating power and necessary effect ; and thus 
 he either gives up the sensationalist position altogether, or confesses 
 his failure to explain causality.' Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta, V. ii. 2, 
 pp. 123, 124.
 
 154 PHENOMENON AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 of place from A to B was the cause of its change of 
 place from B to C ? Assuredly not. Yet here we have, on 
 the one hand, the substance which is said to be ' identical 
 with Cause ' ; and, on the other, the time-relation which is 
 the rival claimant on the same term. If it be said that 
 this is a case not of two phenomena, one after the other, 
 but of a single phenomenon bisected, we shall have to 
 ask for a definition of the unit of phenomenon ; for it cannot 
 be denied that every assumption of a new position by a 
 body constitutes a change, or that the positions between B 
 and C are other than the positions between A and B. The 
 objection therefore can only mean that a more considerable 
 change than one of place alone is required to warrant the 
 application of our category; and that unless, in addition, 
 the direction or the velocity of the motion be altered, we do 
 not get the sort of second phenomenon which the causal 
 principle contemplates. Here, it must be observed, we 
 have a completely new stipulation, viz. that the antecedent 
 and consequent shall be not homogeneous, but shall differ in 
 other respects than in the date which rendered the order 
 right. Not till the body quickens, slackens, or arrests its 
 motion, or starts into a new direction, does the understanding 
 ask an explanation ; and then it answers its own question, 
 it is said, by postulating the influence of some other body 
 existing before but now under changed relations to the 
 first. That the postulate may accomplish its purpose of 
 satisfying the understanding, its terms must be still further 
 narrowed ; for not every change of relation between the 
 two bodies will lay our question to rest. If it be in distance 
 only, there is nothing in that idea which involves a priori 
 the modified direction or velocity for which we have 
 to account : let the second body be inert and dead, and its 
 existence at more or less interval seems to be indifferent to 
 the first ; and if a posteriori experience shows it to be not 
 indifferent, it is because, instead of being inert, it is opera-
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 155 
 
 tive, charged with that which, under the name of Force or 
 Power, the understanding supplies as the pre-supposition of 
 every phenomenon. Have we then, in this idea, here at 
 last the true essence of Causality ? and shall we say that, 
 while we miss it in existence in space (Dasein), or succession 
 in time (antecedent and consequent), we find it in action or 
 energy ? This third meaning I proceed to test. 
 
 (c) Force as Cause. 
 
 The presence of a dynamical idea in our affirmations of 
 Causality is so obtrusive that the chief difficulty, for ex- 
 positors of Hume's doctrine, is to find examples which even 
 seem to throw the stress upon antecedence and to render 
 efficiency a superfluous appendage. The blow of the 
 steam-hammer which welds two masses of iron, the com- 
 bustion of the furnace which runs the metal out of the ore, 
 the rush of the torrent which buries a homestead in gravel, 
 the gale which drives the ship upon the rocks, the summer 
 warmth which decks the earth with foliage and flowers, 
 are hardly reducible, even in the imagination of an em- 
 pirical philosopher, to mere pioneers of the phenomena 
 they announce. Their relation to what follows is that, 
 not of prophecy, but of production : it is their ' effect] and 
 they are its ' efficients ' : they not only give notice of it, 
 but do it : not only do it, but necessitate it. In order 
 to find examples otherwise conceivable, we must select the 
 two terms from widely separated regions, the one perhaps 
 a phenomenon of the heavenly bodies, the other close 
 at hand, while between them there is room for unknown 
 intermediaries or partners which may complicate the 
 facts. But even here, though our experience is confessedly 
 of nothing more than succession, so that it gives us a fair 
 plea for a time-doctrine of causation, we prefer to import 
 the idea of efficiency from the other class of cases, and to 
 interpret the whole causal world by the dynamic rule, and
 
 156 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 believe that the changes happening in Saturn or in Sirius 
 really work out the phenomena that answer to them here. 
 
 To this preponderance of the idea of Force over that of 
 antecedence the habitual assumption is due of a nexus 
 natures that ties together effect and cause, and turns two 
 phenomena into the opposite surfaces of one. Without 
 this, the second would be a new item of fact, with the 
 first for its constant herald, proclaiming ' Here it is ' ; in- 
 stead of an irresistible fate, announced by a ' So it must be.' 
 That we cannot divest ourselves of this belief in a link 
 between the two giving to the one pcnver to present the 
 other, is now seldom denied ; but is explained as a mental 
 illusion due merely to the invariably conjoined experience 
 of the consecutive events ; a subjective association is mis- 
 taken for an objective bond. Which order then gives the 
 more reasonable account of our mode of thinking that 
 for us causation owes its ' necessity ' to customary succes- 
 sion ? or, that in itself it owes its customary succession 
 to its necessity? In other words, Is our belief in causation 
 identical with our belief in Law ? or with belief in Power ? 
 or, to vary the expression once more, does it mean belief 
 in the uniformity of nature ? or in the derivative origin of 
 phenomena? The reasons for preferring the latter ex- 
 planation appear decisive. Order, Law, customary Se- 
 quence, can be found to exist, and be laid out on its lines 
 only by experience. To say that nature is uniform is to 
 say that each series of events repeats itself without varia- 
 tion, that what has filed past us once files past us again, 
 if only the first term makes the start ; and this is a matter 
 of fact which observation only can report or can contra- 
 dict. Whether the consecution of phenomena which we 
 see agrees with that which we remember, i.e. whether the 
 present repeats the past, cannot be known but by setting 
 our memory and our perception side by side : and we are 
 certainly capable of noticing their concurrence or their
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 157 
 
 discrepancy and of accepting accordingly the belief of 
 order or the belief of disorder. If therefore we rest in the 
 assurance of uniformity, it must be on the evidence of fact, 
 prior to which our mind stands neutral, ready for regu- 
 larity, ready also for variation. As every particular law of 
 sequence, so the existence of any such law at all, must be 
 empirically learned ; and for our belief in the order of 
 nature as it is it would be inexcusable to set up any special >; 
 intuition. Nor does there seem to be any mystery in our 
 habitual assumption that the past, so far as its laws have 
 been deciphered, will, under like conditions, reproduce 
 itself in the future. It is but an example of our only 
 possible method of forming expectations : the familiar 
 conjunction of things in our experience supplying the 
 sources of suggestion for what has yet to be. Hume 
 has unanswerably shown that no logical inference can 
 carry us over from the past order to the future : all the 
 predictions of Science take *for granted, what cannot be 
 proved, that the system of the world will remain what 
 it has hitherto been; and the practical assurance with 
 which we rest in this continuity, though the mere result of 
 custom, we mistake for a necessity in rerum naturd. A 
 necessity thus arrived at through exposure to an unbroken 
 order, would evidently operate only between the particular 
 terms of that order, and would be co-extensive in its range 
 with our empirical apprehension of the course of nature; 
 and, like every other incomplete induction, would be open 
 to correction from any supplementary experience which 
 should sever the supposed links and throw the phenomena 
 into new combinations. What we learn from experience, 
 from experience we may unlearn ; and if B, which we had 
 regarded as the effect of A, surprises us by dispensing 
 with this antecedent, we shall have no difficulty in looking 
 out for another to which it may be credited. But, how- 
 ever long we might be baffled in our search, would it ever
 
 158 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 occur to us that the event was not only without this cause, 
 but without any ? that the originating power which was 
 not here, was nowhere ? On the contrary, the very eager- 
 ness of curiosity which ensues on our surprise is but the 
 pressure of the axiom of causation, reasserting the deriva- 
 tive origin of all phenomena : we know the missing power 
 to be somewhere ; but where is it then ? Nay, more : were 
 * phenomena released, not only from this order or that 
 order, but from all perceptible order, and turned from a 
 regiment into a rabble, did they defy prediction, and 
 startle us every instant like a flash of lightning or a 
 shooting star, they would none the less be to us the 
 expression of some power, and fall under Plato's maxim, 
 avaynaiov fivai iravra ra yiyvo/zeva 8ici nva alrlav yiyve&OaC 
 TT&S yap av x^pi-s TOVT&V yiyt'oiro 1 ; Belief which would thus 
 cleave to us alike in a chaos as in a kosmos, can be no 
 induction from the observed uniformity of nature, but 
 must be an a priori law of thought brought by us to the 
 interpretation of the world. 
 
 If this be so, we must carefully distinguish between 
 the a posteriori reliance on the ' uniformity of nature,' and 
 the a priori belief that ' all phenomena are derivative.' 
 If in both cases we put the question ' Whence is it?' we 
 mean, in the first, ' whence is this particular phenomenon, 
 and what is the sign of its coming?' but in the other, 
 1 whence is phenomenon itself, qud phenomenon, at all ?' in 
 that capacity it is, as genesis irrespective of its varieties, 
 that the understanding claims an account of it. Changes 
 have only to be change, and the question is asked about 
 them; and no answer is given till you go beyond the 
 category of change, and instead of stepping from one 
 member of it to another with endless beat, refer its whole 
 contents, as such, to that which is other than phenomenon. 
 
 Plato, Philebus, 26 E.
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 159 
 
 ' Other than phenomenon ' however is presentable in 
 thought only under the form either of Being or of Power, 
 of which the latter alone can do what is wanted and 
 supply the Operari quod sequitur Esse, In thus insisting 
 that, in the causal intuition, it is the phenomenal itself 
 which, as such, has to be referred to the non-phenomenal, 
 I do not mean to deny the presence of the further ques- 
 tion, 'Why does this phenomenon turn up rather than 
 that? On the contrary, we shall presently see that it 
 is part of the express business of all causal investigations 
 to clear up and determine such a preconceived alternative. 
 But that preconception itself assumes the existence of 
 a double, though disjunctive, possibility of change, i.e. the 
 prior reality of a. power to change, that will take advantage 
 of the first open door. The problem thus presents two 
 questions : Whence any phenomenon at all out of the bosom 
 of eternal rest ? and, Whence this particular phenomenon 
 rather than any other that might have come instead ? It 
 is to the former of these that the idea of power gives 
 the appropriate reply ; while to the clearing of the latter it 
 furnishes an indispensable prerequisite. 
 
 The distinction thus drawn relieves of their apparent 
 contradiction the judgment of J. S. Mill that the ' law of 
 universal causation ' is an empirical induction open to 
 correction, and that of Schopenhauer and Helmholtz that 
 it is an intuitive and necessary postulate ; for by ' law of 
 causation ' Mill means ' uniformity of nature,' the others 
 mean ' the issue of phenomena by a power.' The former, 
 in maintaining that we have no logical right to extend its 
 application beyond the limits of our experience into out- 
 lying regions of the universe, means that we cannot be 
 sure whether a given phenomenon there would be found to 
 have the same constant antecedent that it has here 1 : the 
 
 1 System of Logic, B. Ill, ch. xxi, vol. ii, p. 104 (3rd ed).
 
 160 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 latter mean, that the phenomenon, in thus parting from 
 its familiar antecedent, does not set up for itself and re- 
 nounce its dependence upon a producing power, but must 
 still be conceived as an effect: no difference in the empirical 
 uniformities affecting in the least the conditionally of 
 change upon a dynamical source. The absolute confidence 
 with which we must carry this assurance into every new 
 field could never be reposed, Schopenhauer remarks, in 
 any law which we had inductively learned : how could 
 we then declare it impossible that we should meet with 
 exceptions ? Even the law of gravitation we can suppose 
 to cease beyond the limits of space and time explored by 
 us; but the presupposition of some substitute force re- 
 mains unaffected by such possibilities of change *. Schopen- 
 hauer and Mill therefore agree in treating belief in 'the 
 uniformity of nature' as inductively gained, and as having 
 no necessary cogency beyond the limits of experience ; but 
 while Mill there takes leave of the very idea of causation, 
 and finds himself in an imaginary medley of phenomena 
 without it, Schopenhauer carries across the border the 
 intuitive postulate of the power without which phenomena 
 cannot be, and which lends to all specific causes the 
 causality they exercise. 
 
 With direct reference to Mill's exposition, Helmholtz 
 insists on the same evidence of a-priority in the causal 
 belief ; observing ' that the consequences deduced from the 
 logical law do not concern our actual experience, but only 
 its intellectual apprehension ; and that on this account it 
 can never be refuted by any possible experience. For if 
 we anyhow go wrong in our application of the causal law, 
 we infer from this, not that it is false, but only that we 
 do not yet completely know the tissue of concurrent causes 
 concerned in the phenomenon before us.' And however 
 
 Vierfache Wurzel, 23, pp. 89, 90.
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. l6l 
 
 often baffled, we never raise the question, whether perhaps 
 the changes we desire to explain are without cause. Nay, 
 the law of causation, even when taken in Mill's own sense, 
 of invariable connexion of consecutive phenomena, it is, in 
 Helmholtz's opinion, beyond the resources of induction to 
 render tolerably secure ; as will appear from his comment 
 on the following argument of Mill's : 
 
 ' Whatever has been found true in innumerable instances 
 and never found to be false after due examination in any, 
 we are safe in acting on as universal provisionally, until an 
 undoubted exception appears ; provided the nature of the 
 case be such that a real exception could scarcely have 
 escaped our notice. When every phenomenon that we 
 ever knew sufficiently well to be able to answer the 
 question, had a cause on which it was invariably conse- 
 quent, it was more rational to suppose that our inability 
 to assign the causes of other phenomena arose from our 
 ignorance, than that there were phenomena which were 
 uncaused, and which happened to be exactly those which 
 we had hitherto had no sufficient opportunity of studying 1 .' 
 Helmholtz observes, in reply, that the empirical proof of 
 the law, thus universalized, cuts a very poor figure in the 
 present state of scientific knowledge. ' For the number of 
 cases in which we can suppose ourselves able fully to trace 
 the causal connection of natural processes is trivial in com- 
 parison with the number of those in which we are still 
 quite unable to do so. The former belong almost exclu- 
 sively to inorganic nature, while as to the majority of the 
 phenomena of organic nature we are in the dark. Indeed 
 in the animals and man we are led, by the reports of our 
 own consciousness, to assume quite positively a principle 
 of Free Will for which we claim with decisive confidence 
 an independence of the strict causal law, and, in spite of 
 all theoretical speculation on the possible errors of this 
 
 1 System of Logic, ibid., p. 104. 
 VOL. I. M
 
 1 62 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 conviction, it is likely, I believe, to cling for ever to the 
 natural consciousness. Precisely therefore in the best and 
 most exactly known case of activity we regard ourselves 
 as encountering an exception to that law. If then the 
 causal law were a law of experience, the inductive proof 
 of it would seem to be in a very bad way. At the most it 
 would be about as valid as the meteorological rules and 
 those of the rotation of the wind.' Unless therefore the 
 law be accepted as a logical intuition, Helmholtz regards 
 our inability to part with it on any^ imagined conditions, 
 as irrational and inexplicable 1 . 
 
 Another indication that we must leave room for the 
 idea of power within the meaning of the word Cause is 
 afforded by the impossibility of translating it and its 
 subsidiary phrases into equivalent terms denoting simply 
 co-existence and succession. The whole literature of 
 Science is pervaded by language and conceptions strictly 
 Dynamical', and if an Index Expurgatorius were drawn 
 up, prohibiting all modes of speech that went beyond 
 ' Laws of uniformity,' it would make a clean sweep of every 
 treatise, physical or metaphysical, from the time of Thales 
 to the present day, not excepting the very writers in the 
 interest of whose doctrine the proscription was enforced. 
 Comte, for instance, speaks of ' the mutual action of differ- 
 ent solar systems,' of 'the action of the sun upon the 
 planets:' he says that 'the mathematical study of astro- 
 nomical movements indispensably requires the conception 
 of a single force ' he speaks of 'the thermological actions 
 of the system mutually destroying each other:' and of 
 ' a character special to the electrical forces which presents 
 more difficulty than the molecular gravitations*.' And 
 Mr. Mill tells us that ' the contiguous influence of chemical 
 action is not a powerful forced that 'electricity is now 
 
 1 Physiologische Optik, p. 454. 
 
 ' Phil. Pos., vol. ii. pp. 250, 254, 560, 708.
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 163 
 
 recognised as one of the most universal of natural agencies : ' 
 he speaks of 'a force growing greater' and 'growing less:' 
 of 'the action of the central force-' of 'the propagation of 
 influences of all kinds:' and distinguishes ' motions, forces, 
 and other influences:' and 'the motion with which the 
 earth tends to advance in a direct line through space' he 
 calls ' a Cause ' 1 . Whence this perpetual resort to an idea 
 which lies out beyond that simple 'order of phenomena' 
 of which alone, it is said, we are competent to speak ? Is 
 it the mere equivalent of that order, and is the word 
 ' Force ' simply a more compendious symbol for language 
 of succession which would be inconveniently circuitous? 
 To this plea, which is presented by Comte and Mill, it is 
 sufficient to answer, that Force admits of epithets which 
 Time-order absolutely rejects : as possessing or disposing 
 of it, a cause is called adequate or inadequate, an effect 
 vast or slight : it carries gradations of intensity, greater, 
 equal, less, while sequence either is or is not, and cannot 
 be shaded off from maximum to minimum, so as to give 
 us a more Prior or a less Posterior. True, an invisible 
 antecedent, if a quantifiable phenomenon (e. g. a fainter or 
 a brighter light), may, besides being prior in position, also 
 be of higher degree, and so, without being ' more Prior,' be 
 prior to more. But if the larger measure of the consequent 
 is due to the corresponding tension of the antecedent, and 
 is expressible in a constant ratio between them, then, in 
 thus varying with each other, they stand in a relation not 
 covered by their time-order, yet distinctly belonging to 
 them as under the causal law. And the quantity which 
 supplies the terms of this ratio is Force. On this suscep- 
 tibility of dynamical gradation is founded Newton's third 
 Law, that between two bodies, 'action and reaction are 
 equal and in opposite directions ;' and also the Rule that 
 the amount of an effect is proportioned (or, as Leibniz 
 
 1 System of Logic, i. pp. 489, 501 ; ii. 33, 34 ; i. 335, 352. 
 M 2
 
 1 64 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 would say, is equal J ) to that of the cause ; two features 
 selected by Schopenhauer as invariable characteristics of 
 a cause 2 . Dr. Bain 3 is apparently conscious of the incon- 
 sistency in which the use of dynamical language involves 
 the disciples of his school ; for he says, ' To express causa- 
 tion we need only name one thing, the antecedent or 
 cause, and another thing, the effect : a flying cannon shot 
 is a cause, the tumbling down of a wall is the effect. But 
 people sometimes allow themselves the use of the addi- 
 tional word " power " to complete as they suppose the state- 
 ment : the cannon ball in motion has the power to batter 
 walls ; a pure expletive or pleonasm, whose tendency is 
 to create a mystical or fictitious agency, in addition to 
 the real agent, the moving ball.' If the author of this 
 criticism would try the effect of it upon the officers of 
 the Royal Engineers, he would find, I believe, that the ' ex- 
 pletive' which he derides was not without a meaning to 
 persons acquainted with cannon-balls, and that the ' mys- 
 tical' element was actually reducible to figures and the 
 object of innumerable problems far from being insoluble 
 and still further from being 'fictitious.' To the 'ante- 
 cedence' on which he insists as the one thing needful he 
 would see that very little attention was paid ; inasmuch 
 as it is a feature which would equally belong to the shot 
 whether it was of six pounds' weight or of six hundred, 
 and whether it had a velocity of two hundred or of six 
 hundred feet per second ; and, on the other hand, the con- 
 stituents of the 'force,' the mass, the charge, the initial 
 speed, he would find measured with the utmost nicety. 
 ' Merely to say " a cannon-ball and a battered wall " ' (as 
 an acute critic justly observes) ' is not to express causation. 
 It is not enough to name the two things together; not 
 
 1 Lettre a 1'abbe" Conti. II y a toujours Equation entre la cause 
 pleine et 1'effet entier. 
 
 8 Die Freiheit des menschlichen Willens, p. 30, Frankfurt, 1841. 
 ' Ment. and Mor. Sc., 1868, p. 406.
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 165 
 
 even if we add that they occurred in succession, or in in- 
 variable succession, whatever that may mean ; or in suc- 
 cession which we cannot conceive to be reversed. If one 
 body moves into a space already occupied by another 
 body, the second body must first move away. The suc- 
 cession here is invariable, if anything is, and its reversal 
 cannot be conceived ; yet there is not the slightest notion 
 of causation. The first body does not move into the space 
 because the second body moves out of it ; though this 
 moving out is the necessary antecedent to moving in. It 
 is not naming two things together that is sufficient in any 
 case. One of them must be named as an Agent ; as 
 indeed Dr. Bain himself seems to perceive. In other parts 
 of his work we find this causal agency resolved into force, 
 and force into tendency. Such a result is indeed inevitable 1 .' 
 This remark brings us to the last and most modern 
 device for explaining away dynamical language, and re- 
 solving it into the expression of Time-order. It is used, 
 we are told, to denote ' Tendency to motion! We have 
 seen how Mr. Mill speaks of ' the motion with which the 
 earth tends to advance in a straight line through space ' as 
 being ' a cause.' Dr. Bain describes the planetary ' forces ' 
 as 'a tendency in a straight line through space, and a 
 tendency to the sun as a centre,' and attributes to projectiles 
 ' a common tendency of the nature of attraction to the 
 earth's surface, or rather to the earth's centre 2 .' What 
 kind of phenomenon is this 'tendency'? and where does 
 it stand in the ' order of co-existence ' and the ' order of 
 succession' which alone are open to our knowledge? If 
 it is antecedent, what is its consequent? Shall we say, 
 'the motion which actually results'? then that motion 
 issues from something other than a prior event, from 
 a latent, imperceptible somewhat which, however evasively 
 
 1 On the meaning of the word ' Force,' by A. J. Mott, p. 43. 
 
 2 Ment. and Mor. Sc., p. 142.
 
 1 66 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 described by what it is going to do, is neither more nor less 
 than the ' power ' which you decline to acknowledge. Or 
 shall we say, ' the consequent is perhaps no actual motion, 
 but only that which would enstie under certain nameable 
 conditions?' then, in this hypothetical event, you have 
 still the belief of a phenomenon emerging, not from an- 
 other phenomenon, but from some ' mystical ' tension ' of 
 the nature of attraction,' whose name you must not men- 
 tion for fear of ' pleonasm,' yet whose presence you must 
 secure under a disguise. ' Motion ' I know as a phenomenon ; 
 but ' tendency to motion ' is no phenomenon, and, if cog- 
 nizable at all as objectively there, carries my knowledge 
 over the phenomenal edge into the region of power. No- 
 thing is gained by construing it into would-be-phenomena ; 
 for they, as out of existence altogether and present only to 
 the mind as conditional conceptions, cannot be causes, or 
 serve you in the capacity of ' invariable antecedents ' of 
 actual phenomena. What can be more illusory than to ex- 
 plain the existent by the non-existent, events that have been 
 by events that only conceivably might have been ? Hypo- 
 thetical phenomena are but a poor provision for moving a 
 planet or even working a mill. The true character of this 
 language of tendency discloses itself the moment we follow 
 it up to its Aristotelian origin, or the Latin equivalent : 
 the change which comes up on the field of time was said 
 to exist realiter, while that which only might have come up 
 was said to exist potentialiter ; or, in the Greek antithesis, 
 the former was present Ivtpyda, the latter bvvdp.fi. ; i.e. the 
 permanent objective power was there, of which the con- 
 ceived change is an effect ; but, for want of some com- 
 pleting conditions for its exercise, might remain latent till an 
 altered equilibrium opened a path for its operation. Thus, 
 under the mask of tendency is hidden the reality of Force. 
 So repugnant however to some rigorous physicists is all 
 resort to the idea of Force, that attempts are still made to
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 167 
 
 remove it from the metaphysical base of mechanical science. 
 In an ingenious Essay, written with this view by an anony- 
 mous Zurich Professor 1 , conceptions are laid down, and a 
 calculus established, which are intended to keep clear of the 
 obnoxious term ; the objections to which are so stated as 
 to throw light, by their greater explicitness, on the criticism 
 just quoted from Dr. Bain. ' By Forces' the author says, 
 ' turn and twist your explanation as you may, you under- 
 stand something mysterious. The tendency pressing 
 towards motion in a body of course admits of various 
 degrees, and so far of being treated as a mathematical 
 quantity. According to the doctrine of Physics, the ten- 
 dency of a body to movement is induced by the action of 
 other bodies ; and it is on the position of these other bodies 
 that in the particular case the amount of force is said to 
 depend. Obscure as this conception of tendency to move- 
 ment or of force is, it seems in certain circumstances, as if it 
 were an object of quite immediate perception, viz. as pres- 
 sure on the sense of touch.' This case the author illustrates 
 by supposing a hand laid upon the table between a piece 
 of iron which it supports and a powerful magnet vertically 
 underneath the table ; and he explains away the impression 
 that the varying attraction of the magnet at different dis- 
 tances is actually perceived, by resolving the feeling into 
 the effect of greater or less compression of the skin and the 
 nerve-extremities : were the iron prevented from thus sink- 
 ing into a lower position, the approach of the strongest 
 magnet would be unfelt 2 . Apart from this feature of ob- 
 scurity, ' the idea of Force, turn and twist it as we may, 
 involves,' it is said, ' the thought that a body knows, as it 
 were, where the other body is which attracts or repels it, 
 
 1 Ursache und Wirkung. Ein Versuch. Casselund Gottingen, 1867. 
 
 2 Ibid., pp. 15, 1 6. Of course the magnet does not attract human 
 flesh. But if the hand, keeping its present sensitiveness, could be of 
 iron would the attraction be unfelt ?
 
 1 68 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 since it directs a nisus thither or thence, if we proceed on 
 the current idea of forces.' This ' strange idea ' the author 
 thinks to escape by falling back on Kant's first doctrine, 
 that every effect is a change of condition in one body, and 
 its cause a change in its relative position to other bodies. 
 But he is obliged to acknowledge that here too ' an incon- 
 ceivability remains,' viz. that a body has, as it were, a feeling 
 of how much its relation changes to another with which it 
 stands in reciprocity. ' This assumption however is,' he 
 thinks, ' less of a stumbling-block than that of forces V To 
 me, I confess, a body which not only is conscious of relation 
 to others, but carries a delicate thermometer of feeling to 
 measure every change in it, is no less wonderful than a 
 body which knows its way to another that attracts it 2 . 
 
 It is curious to find an author of our own day rediscover- 
 ing in the idea of Force predicates of which, since Newton's 
 time, it had been divested. Kepler, in expounding his 
 law, that a planet's radius vector describes equal areas in 
 equal times, assumed that the body in its orbit must know it, 
 
 1 Ursache und Wirkung, p. 27. 
 
 1 The inadequacy of the conceptions of natural 'Law' and of a 
 * World-order] as an ultimate account of the existing All, is well 
 shown by Lotze. Such language is resorted to, in order to keep clear 
 of any religious assumptions in dealing with a pure matter of science. 
 ' But if we distinctly analyse what has to be thought, if these ideal 
 phrases are to signify what they intend, can they help being thrown 
 back upon what they would shun ? How little possible is it, by resort 
 to the notion of a natural Law of mere phenomena, to escape the 
 assumption of reciprocal action of things, or to explain their apparent 
 effects ! Were it even clear what is to be understood by the mandate 
 of a law, it would still be inconceivable how things or phenomena 
 manage to obey it : only an essential unity of all existences could 
 bring it to pass, that states of any one should be operative conditions 
 of changes in another.' So with the ' World-order? ' Could it ever 
 combine a plurality into the unity of any determinate relation or 
 maintain it in this unity, if, in each member of the plurality, there 
 were not both an immediate susceptibility to every state occurring in 
 all the rest, and an ability, through the requisite change of position, 
 to bring the mutual relations of them all into the intended form ? ' 
 Mikrokosmus, 3 er Band, pp. 562, 563 ; Zweite Aufl., 1872.
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 169 
 
 in order to keep true to its elliptic path and to the required 
 velocity 1 . By giving his physical interpretation of this and 
 the other two planetary laws, Newton dispensed with any 
 inherent intelligence in the bodies themselves, and commis- 
 sioned the material forces of the system to perform the 
 guiding function instead ; for the gravitating tendency of 
 every particle to every other was regarded as a primary 
 attribute of matter no less than extension or solidity : the 
 editor (Cotes) of the second edition of the Principia ex- 
 pressly affirming 2 that attraction is as much an essential 
 property of matter as impenetrability and extension ; so 
 that the orbitual curve, for instance, of Mars, and the varying 
 velocity in it from the action of the central body, are just as 
 demonstrably necessary as the equation of the ellipse itself. 
 Among the continental physicists howeverthere were always 
 some who, in accepting Newton's discovery, yet looked on 
 gravitation as a ' contingent law,' and refused to place it on 
 the same footing as mathematical truths. D'Alembert, 
 for instance, observes that ' this force may very well be a 
 primordial force, a general principle of motion in nature, 
 without on that account being an essential property of 
 matter. In conceiving a body at all, we have to conceive 
 it extended, impenetrable, divisible, and moveable ; but we 
 are not obliged to conceive of if as acting upon another. 
 Gravitation, if it be what the thorough-going supporters of 
 attraction conceive it to be, must have its cause in the 
 will of a sovereign being, who had ordained that bodies 
 
 1 Astronomia Nova amoAoy^To?, seu Physica Caelestis, tradita com- 
 mentariis de motibus Stellas Martis, ex observationibus G. V. Tychonis 
 Brahe, Prague, 1609, a Johanne Keplero. The Introduction, in describ- 
 ing the contents of this Treatise, says : ' Datum tamen fuit aliquid 
 partibus III et IV etiam Menti, ut motor Planetae proprius cum animali 
 facultate movendi sui globi conjungat Rationem, si quis objectionibus 
 nonnullis extraneis ad speciem validis territus, Naturae corporum diffi- 
 dere velit : modo talis aliquis hoc recipiat, mentem illam uti apparenti 
 diametro Solis pro mensura librationis, sensumque habere angulorum 
 quos exquirunt Astronomi.' (Last sentence but one.) 
 
 2 Preface to second edition of Newton's Principia.
 
 1 70 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 should act on one another at a distance as in con- 
 tact 1 .' Whoever takes this view finds himself, when 
 at the end of the Principia, in possession of no ultimate 
 truth, but only of an immense generalization of facts 
 that might have been otherwise ; and is impelled to continue, 
 his scientific search for a cause of the law with which he has 
 been working. Hence, not a few foreign writers resented 
 the absolute claims set up in England for the Newtonian 
 physics, and treated 'the attraction of gravitation' as a 
 provisional hypothesis, happy in its conception and appli- 
 cation, but in its mystical character not unlike the ' occult 
 qualities' which figure in medieval speculation. Its actio 
 in distans, its variation by rule with change of distance, 
 were more wonderful to the imagination than intelligible to 
 the understanding ; and it is hardly surprising that traces 
 of a lingering disaffection remained till the authority of 
 Laplace, and the growing efficiency of the doctrine in the 
 hands of the French physiciens, left it in peaceable posses- 
 sion of its field. It is obvious however, from the example 
 of the Zurich Professor, that the old misgivings are not 
 dead, and are already stirring from their sleep. Whether 
 they will ever be finally removed is perhaps doubtful ; for 
 the form of thought on which they bear stands upon the 
 very borders of the inconceivable. But this at least is cer- 
 tain, that the difficulty on which they insist they thus far 
 fail to relieve. Our critic, while pluming himself on dis- 
 pensing with the idea of Force, does but turn it out of one 
 door to admit it by another, giving it only the opportunity 
 of throwing a cloak over its tunic to hide its identity. Under 
 change of phrase he stands in presence of the same thought. 
 He will not hear of a body's Force ; but prefers to say that 
 the mass B acts on A so as to change its velocity, ' die 
 
 1 Essai sur les ldments de Philosophic, ou sur les Principes des 
 Connaissances humaines. CEuvres philosophiques, historiques et 
 littdraires. Paris, 1805, 18 vols., vol. ii. p. 423.
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 171 
 
 Masse B fur die Masse A wirklich wirksam ist 1 ' ; and 
 describes the relation between them as Wechselwirkung. 
 Surely the Operari thus designated involves Kraft ; and 
 when defined by specifying the direction of Wirkung with 
 the plus or minus sign, carries the idea of attraction or 
 repulsion ; for a body which wirkt in another an accelerated 
 motion towards itself attracts it, or forces its approach. The 
 notion of Power cannot be served with a writ of ejectment 
 from its lodgement in the word Cause. 
 
 The impossibility of dispensing with dynamical concep- 
 tions in describing the system of nature is plainly attested 
 by the whole intellectual structure of the sciences as they 
 now stand, and especially by the modern doctrine of the per- 
 sistence and metamorphosis of forces, which links them all 
 into a system. That this doctrine vastly facilitates the 
 apprehension of relations among heterogeneous phenomena, 
 and weaves an organic tissue to bind together separated 
 provinces of the Cosmos, no one will deny ; and this affords 
 strong presumption that it brings us nearer than before to 
 a true representation of the world as it is. But whatever 
 magic there is in this doctrine is wrought entirely by the 
 notion of power, as distinct from the representation of phe- 
 nomena and their order, and as capable of freely migrating 
 from one family of them to another, of passing through them 
 from end to end of the world, and looking out at us from the 
 face of all, whether in the dull gaze of mechanical weight and 
 cohesion, or in the electric flash, or in the light of living 
 eyes. If this notion is an obtrusive illusion, a mistake of 
 our subjective associations of ideas for a nexus in rerum 
 naturd, the greatest advance in science in our time is due 
 to an empty fiction, and nature responds better to our falla- 
 cies than to our logical exactitude. Unless we are prepared 
 to enforce this absurdity, we must believe that in following 
 out the dynamical idea we are moving on the lines of nature. 
 
 1 Ursache und Wirkung, p. 30.
 
 173 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 There are philosophers who so far feel the cogency 
 of these considerations as to admit the legitimacy of the 
 dynamical conception and allow it ample place in the 
 description of physical changes, yet are anxious to keep it 
 entirely apart from the doctrine of causality. Schopenhauer 
 especially takes up this position. He insists on the indis- 
 pensable necessity of acknowledging permanent natural 
 forces, all of them in the last resort phases of one and 
 the same power, and manifesting themselves in the various 
 groups of phenomena which make up the history of the 
 cosmos. But the word Cause he denies to them, and limits 
 to the phenomenal change which opens the way for them to 
 speak in a given effect. Of two conditions which are essen- 
 tial to every event, viz. a constant power behind the field of 
 time and on the watch, as it were, to enter where it can, and 
 a transient change, which lets it in and gives it opportunity 
 to do something, it is the latter alone, though it does not 
 really do the thing, but merely, by a step aside, permit 
 it to be done, which he honours with the name of Cause. 
 In this sense, he says 1 , 'there are two things which remain 
 unaffected by the endless chain of causes and effects whereof 
 all changes are links, viz. on the one hand Matter, and on 
 the other the original Forces of nature ; the former, because 
 it is the seat of all changes or that whereon they take place ; 
 the latter, because they are that in virtue of which changes 
 or effects are possible at all, that which originally gives to 
 causes their causality, i. e. the ability to produce effects, and 
 from which therefore they only borrow this ability. Cause 
 and effect are the changes which are bound to necessary suc- 
 cession in time ; the natural forces, on the other hand, in 
 virtue of which all causes operate, are exempted from all 
 change, hence in this sense out of the field of time, but 
 on that very account continually and everywhere present, 
 ubiquitous and inexhaustible, always ready to manifest 
 
 1 Vierfache Wurzel, p. 45.
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 173 
 
 themselves as soon as on a hint from causality the oppor- 
 tunity arises. The cause is always, like its effect, a single 
 thing, a single change : the natural force on the other hand 
 is universal, unchangeable, always and everywhere present 
 For instance, let the effect be, that a piece of amber at- 
 tracts a light flake ; its cause is the antecedent friction and 
 the immediate approach of the amber ; and the natural 
 force which is active in this process and governs it is 
 Electricity.' The ' two things ' here mentioned as unaffected 
 by the endless chain of causes and effects are identified in 
 Schopenhauer's later and larger work ; ' Matter ' or ' Ding- 
 an-sich ' having no meaning for us except as the Permanent 
 of Force 1 . But he still persists in reserving causality for 
 the phenomenon which releases a force from its latent con- 
 dition. He censures Kant for speaking of natural forces 
 as efficient causes and saying that ' Gravity is a cause.' He 
 pronounces it impossible to attain to clear thought so long as 
 our interpretation fails to keep power and cause completely 
 distinct. ' Matter and force,' he says, ' are the conditions of 
 causality, which is the condition of everything else 2 .' 
 
 Among metaphysicians who do not, with Hume, explain 
 away the idea of Power, this exclusion of it from the word 
 Cause Schopenhauer acknowledges to be new. The 
 relation however between force and phenomenon on which 
 it is founded is precisely that which Leibniz imported into 
 the celebrated dispute respecting the proper measure of vis 
 viva ; when he contended that ' motion per se is merely rela- 
 tive and cannot determine its subject, but force is something 
 real and absolute ;' and that while the quantity of the former 
 in the universe was variable, that of the latter was constant 3 . 
 
 In estimating this proposed limitation of the word Cause, 
 we must repeat the admission already made, that it suffices 
 
 1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Buch II, 22, 26. 
 
 2 Ibid., Band 1 1, .p. 51. 
 
 3 Lettre a Arnauld ; and Re"ponse & Fabbe* Conti.
 
 174 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 for simply scientific purposes, and gives a perfectly clear 
 meaning to the language in which we speak of the observed 
 relations of phenomena. It attaches to the word the very 
 sense assigned to it by Brown and the Mills, or, I should 
 rather say, applies it to exactly the same things. But 
 then it leaves us in want of some further term to express 
 the relation from which, by this restriction, the word is 
 withdrawn ; and here it is that Schopenhauer is at a 
 disadvantage when compared with the English writers 
 whose usage is like his own. With them, phenomenal 
 causes, in the sense of constant antecedents, are every- 
 thing, and tell the whole tale that has to be told ; but 
 with him there is a condition behind, and beyond the 
 vocabulary which suffices for them he has still something 
 else to express. He does not pretend to have got rid 
 of power, and cannot, like our philosophers, be content to 
 silence it and leave it dumb. If it is to have a language, 
 the question will only be, whether it is to have a new word 
 to itself, or to have share in the causal terms which are 
 applied to premonitory phenomena. For determining this 
 point we have but one reasonable rule : Let the word be 
 new, if the idea be new ; but if the thought be the same, 
 only differently placed, let us mark this by keeping its old 
 symbol with suitable qualification. On this principle, 
 Schopenhauer himself shall judge for us the real rights of 
 the case. How does he describe the relations between a 
 phenomenon and its effect ? The one, he says, is the con- 
 dition of the other : and how, again, the relation between 
 natural Force (say of electricity) and the phenomenon? 
 The one, he says, is the condition of the other: so that 
 we might apparently say, Force is to the phenomenon 
 what the phenomenon is to the effect. If then the latter 
 ratio is correctly designated by the language of causality, 
 how can the equivalent ratio fail to. deserve it? Nay, 
 the sameness of the thought is inadvertently confessed by
 
 Chap. I.] FORCE AS CAUSE. 175 
 
 our author in the terms which he employs for pronouncing 
 sentence against it ; for ' the natural force,' he tells us, it is 
 which ' lends to the cause its causality :' can it lend what it 
 has not got ? It is ' that in virtue of which effects take 
 place : ' has it then no efficiency ? Or can there be efficiency, 
 that is, command over effects, without any causal character? 
 the difference between the dynamical condition and the 
 phenomenal antecedent obviously lies, not in the absence 
 from the one and the presence in the other of the causal 
 element ; for Schopenhauer himself puts it into both, only, 
 in the latter where he owns it, borrows it from the former 
 where he ignores it ; but in its permanence and universality 
 in the one case, its transiency and localization in the other. 
 This is no doubt a real and important difference ; but it is 
 a difference within the sphere of the causal idea, and 
 requires to be marked by some epithet attached to the 
 central word, and not by removal in aliud genus. What- 
 ever word we employ for this purpose ought to pick 
 out precisely the fact on which Schopenhauer insists, viz. 
 that to Power the mind resorts for the Fountain-head 
 and original fund of causality, of which the antecedent 
 phenomenon is only the organ here and now to which it 
 lends itself. Suppose then the two terms to be sharply 
 discriminated by the presence of such a distinguishing 
 mark, which of them must we select as the specific variety, 
 and which reserve as the presupposed genus of cause ? 
 which is the more essential in the predicate of the maxim, 
 ' Every phenomenon must be caused ' ? Is it the 8wa/xis ? 
 or is it the Trporepov ? Plainly, the 8wa/ziy ; and the prior 
 phenomenon to which we refer any effect accounts to us for 
 nothing, except as a nidus or medium of the power which 
 the understanding demands for every change. It is a 
 favourite doctrine of Schopenhauer that all perception is 
 intellectual^. 'Without the understanding we could never 
 
 1 Ueber das Sehen und die Farben (Frauenstadt, 1870), I, p. 7.
 
 176 FORCE AS CAUSE. [Book II. 
 
 attain to presentation, to perception, to apprehension of 
 objects : we should get no further than mere sensation, 
 which might certainly, as disagreeable or agreeable, have a 
 value in relation to the whole, but would in other respects 
 be a change from one meaningless condition to another 
 and have no resemblance to a cognition. Presentation, 
 i.e. cognition of an object, is not constituted but by the 
 act of the understanding, in referring every impression 
 received by the body to its Cause, in planting this off in the 
 Space, pictured a priori, whence the effect proceeds, and in 
 thus recognising the cause as operative, as real, that is as 
 an idea of the same kind and class, as the body. This 
 transition from effect to cause is an immediate, living, 
 necessary act ; a cognition of the pure understanding ; not 
 a reasoned inference, or combination of notions and judg- 
 ments according to logical laws.' This is a statement, in 
 another form, of the distinction, often emphasized, between 
 sensation and perception ; but by what law does our 
 understanding spring forth upon the perceived object? 
 Does it resort thither in order to catch another phenomenon 
 than the felt affection of the body ? Does it cry out for an 
 'antecedent* to the sensation experienced? Has it the 
 least inkling of an endless chain of changes whereof the 
 present sensation is the last link, and of which it wants 
 the predecessor ? No ; by the very terms of the exposition 
 it looks for ( a cause' or operative power to give the 
 sensation : that is what it believes to be there, and what it 
 plants out wherever it can find lodging. And be it in an 
 object, or be it in a phenomenon, these are but the recep- 
 tacles or depositories of causality : it is not qua object, that 
 is, as being in outward space, or qua phenomenon, that is, as 
 being in neighbouring time, that either of them avails. It 
 is qua efficient that either of them can satisfy the demands 
 of the understanding. It is therefore evident that the 
 intellectual intuition carries us not to a phenomenal order,
 
 Chap. I.] AN AGENT'S CAUSALITY. 177 
 
 but to a permanent power ; and that the causal idea, 
 residing in the latter, the former carries with it on assuming 
 the limits of space and time. 
 
 Power therefore, we conclude, is postulated by the under- 
 standing as the operative condition of any and all change ; 
 but to determine into existence this change rather than 
 that, and rather than none, needs a phenomenon. As our 
 main interest lies in this kind of alternative possibility, 
 it is to determinative occurrences in - time that we pre- 
 vailingly apply the word Cause, giving it to them not in 
 consideration of their serial order, but as Nature's vehicles 
 of power on its passage through time. If ever Things are 
 called causes, it is as affecting us by their properties ; that 
 is, as durable storehouses or custodians of power in space, 
 not as simply being there, but as acting there. So that the 
 dynamic idea clings to causality throughout, yet does not 
 complete it. The supplementary condition must be sought 
 in its phenomenal application. What exactly this supple- 
 mentary condition imports which stamps it with pre- 
 eminence will appear in the further course of our analysis. 
 
 B. AS CONDITIONED BY ACTIVITY IN THE EGO. 
 
 All the interpretations of causality which I have thus far 
 reviewed agree in one respect ; they state the relation as they 
 suppose it to be given to us, in the form either of Sense or 
 of Understanding. They all find it in the experience of 
 the 'empirical Ego,' and study its features in objective 
 phenomena whether of the outer or of the inner world. They 
 ask, ' What do Cause and Effect exhibit to us as spectators 
 of the changes which we see or feel ? In contemplating 
 them, do we detect anything which B has to do with A 
 except to follow it ? Is there any rope or rivet between 
 them by which one takes the other in tow?' When such 
 questions are applied to the contents of our perceptive 
 experience, they can receive no answer but that of Hume : 
 
 VOL. I. N
 
 1 78 AN AGENT'S CAUSALITY. [Book II. 
 
 between the approach of a magnet and the movement of a 
 needle, between the presence of the earth and the fall of 
 a meteoric stone, there is nothing perceptible ; the items of 
 the compound fact are separately plain, but the must which 
 supervenes and blends them is nowhere to be found. It is 
 a fiction of our own, supplied, according to Hume, by cus- 
 tom and the clinging together of proximate impressions : 
 according to Kant, by a law or category of the understand- 
 ing which classifies for us the contents of sensible expe- 
 rience, and keeps apart under separate labels the constant 
 and the variable series. In neither case is there anything 
 objective in the relation ; which exists only as a subjective 
 construction, posterior or prior, put upon the materials 
 thrown into consciousness. 
 
 In this common feature lies, I believe, the inadequacy of 
 all the three accounts hitherto noticed. From a position 
 of mere receptivity or of contemplative intelligence, in 
 which we simply register what we observe, we could never 
 attain to our idea of causality ; for the essence of that idea 
 is present neither in synchronous visual images nor in the 
 procession of ideal trains marching past our inward gaze. 
 Were the world a panorama and man an intellectual eye 
 stationary before it, he would have no insight into this 
 relation. Not till he throws himself into the field as Agent, 
 can he find the problem and try to solve it. Its very rudi- 
 ments spring from the activity of the Ego, and are absent 
 from its receptivity ; and its higher forms arise out of pro- 
 cesses of that activity, demanding analysis and interpretation 
 from reflecting intelligence. Where the idea of Cause is 
 regarded as thus conditional on the subject's own activity, 
 a new variety of doctrine presents itself, to which we may 
 now turn. It has not indeed passed as yet beyond the 
 limits of tentative expression; admitting especially two 
 distinguishable aspects. Both of them lay their emphasis 
 on the putting forth of spontaneous energy as the conditio
 
 Chap. I.] MEDIATE PERCEPTION. 179 
 
 sine qud non of a possible idea of Cause. Both fix on the 
 act of percipiency as the initial point at which that pos- 
 sibility enters on realization. But as this realization may 
 supposably be either a process compounded of analysable 
 parts or logical stages building up the idea into several 
 stories, or a moment of activity giving to the light a many- 
 membered thought one in consciousness but multiform in 
 its significance, one aspect of the theory presents the causal 
 idea as mediated, and deriving its characteristics dialectically 
 by a nameable logical procedure ; while the other regards 
 it as immediate, and though finding in it similar contents, 
 does not wait for a dialectic to take them up, but evolves 
 them at once, as integral to the living organism of the 
 idea itself. As the happiest sample of the former, I select 
 Professor Laurie's ingenious and original little book en- 
 titled ' Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta n ; the more so because 
 I perceive, from his second title 'A Return to Dualism,' 
 that I have the honour to stand beside him in the forlorn 
 hope against which all the batteries of modern philosophy 
 are concentrating their fire. 
 
 (a) In Mediated Perception. 
 
 The evolution of the causal idea by Professor Laurie 
 from the activity of the individual subject cannot be un- 
 derstood without some account of the preliminaries of that 
 activity, with a view to conceive clearly the contents of the 
 field on which it is introduced. For it is not every form of 
 that activity, but only the latest, special to a rational nature, 
 that provides a path to the required result : the stage of 
 Percipiency must be reached, in order to complete the con- 
 ditions of our category. Prior to this we cannot say that, 
 in sentient beings, all is recipiency, and that no energy 
 is directed from within outwards; but only that what 
 
 1 Williams and Norgate, 1884. Originally published anonymously 
 under the local disguise, by ' Scotus Novanticus ' (of Wigton) ; but in 
 a second edition with the author's name. 
 
 N 2,
 
 l8o MEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 centrifugal movement there is takes place under provo- 
 cation from impressions delivered, and by way of reaction 
 from them : hence it is essentially ' reflex ' or ' passive- 
 active'; and implies that the subject is subordinated to the 
 object, and tyrannised over by it. In the lower organisms 
 the mere life-feeling administered by the elements around 
 stimulates a nutritive and self-preserving responsive move- 
 ment, without any breach of identity between subject and 
 object, or other variation than the rising and sinking of the 
 sensitive wave. In the higher quadrupeds, as the dog, a 
 state is reached which maybe called At tuition \ marked by 
 discrimination of particular objects from each other in space 
 and recognition of them as the same after intervals of time, 
 but without corresponding discrimination of them from the 
 attuent subject; and, in the case of each object, by in- 
 stinctive co-ordination of the particular sensations it gives, 
 and unifying synthesis of them into a single thing, without 
 consciousness of its sensible qualities as separate. In this 
 stage there is a 'dim feeling of duality/ but the subject has 
 no self-apprehension, and is still dependent on the object 
 and dominated by it. There is indeed as yet no 'Self 
 to be apprehended, for its final factor is missing, and enters 
 first with the life of man. 
 
 The ' presentate ' image of an object which only wakes 
 reaction as it falls on the canine receptivity, he meets with 
 a 'spontaneous inner movement,' a pure activity which 
 has its stimulus in and from itself, ' rebelling against the 
 outer,' ' disencumbering itself of the load of what is not 
 itself,' and eagerly co-ordinating the external data, be they 
 things or be they phenomena. This energy is called actus 
 purus, because, unlike the ' reflex,' it carries in it no ' im- 
 pressions ' that set it a-going, but is self-emergent, without 
 given contents, and addresses itself to the antithetic outer 
 phenomena in order to reduce them under its own law, 
 or, as Professor Laurie says, ' subsume them under itself.'
 
 Chap. I.] MEDIATE PERCEPTION. 181 
 
 This feature it is, this self-beginning of activity, which 
 we ought, it is added, to understand by 'freedom'; and 
 this also it is which earns for it the name Will; so that 
 to speak of ' Free-will ' is a mere tautology. Will can be 
 nothing else than ' free and autonomous ' J . 
 
 This spontaneity of the subject declares itself first in the 
 act of Percipience; which, to the former attuition of objects 
 as distinct from each other, adds the antithesis of them and 
 their sphere to the apprehending subject, and elevates that 
 subject into a proper Self. It is an affirmation of a not- 
 self containing all that is objective, and at the same time 
 the correlative consciousness of the perceiving Ego as 
 identical in the activity which it directs upon this, that, 
 and every other object. Simple as the act appears of 
 mentally saying ' I perceive a tree/ or ' a tree is there,' 
 it implicitly contains, as a movement of thought, a num- 
 ber of stages which admit of explicit enumeration, and that 
 only in one order which constitutes their law. 
 
 (1) Spontaneous initiation of movement. 
 
 (2) In going forth upon an object, A, A is what I would 
 be at : it involves therefore ' End or purpose'; though ' con- 
 cealed in the heart of the act' 
 
 (3) A must be either this, or that, or other, of the contents 
 of the not-self: that is, any middle possibility is excluded. 
 
 (4) A is not that or other : that is, the contradictory is 
 excluded. 
 
 (5) Therefore; that is, on Sufficient Reason, 
 
 (6) A is this, that is, A : affirmation of Being or Identity. 
 
 1 First Part, ch. ii. The author's use of the word subsume (pp. 14, 
 20, and passim) to denote the subject's active seizure of a ' presentate ' 
 and setting it up 'as opposed to himself^ is new to me. In logic the 
 word denotes the act of referring a species to its genus by predicating 
 the latter of the former. In this sense, ' to subsume objects under one's 
 Self would be to make one's Self a predicate of them, or include them 
 among the contents of Self, which directly contradicts the author's 
 intended meaning, of throwing them out into the not-self.
 
 1 82 MEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 (7) A is there, I am ttere\ that is, it is so related to the 
 unity of my consciousness. 
 
 (8) The Percept gained, fix it by calling it A ; that is, 
 secure its independence and distinctness by giving it a name. 
 
 These eight steps, implicit in percipience, constitute 
 Reason ; the percipient subject has become rational ; and he 
 alone knows. 
 
 Such is 'the form of percipience,' when fully drawn out; 
 and no percept can we gain without going through its suc- 
 cessive steps 1 . Percepts are sometimes of things, some- 
 times of phenomena : both statical and dynamical facts 
 therefore are under the law of this process and carry 
 in them the contents and relations of its parts. What we 
 apprehend in them and affirm about them is mediated by 
 its logic, on the cogency of which the validity of the affirm- 
 ation depends. Hence the percept, acquired in each of its 
 essential predicates, by the Reason through its own logical 
 act, is a 'Dialectic percept,' won by force of inference, and 
 not yielded by empirical analysis and abstraction. If there- 
 fore we want to know how we come to say this or that 
 about whatever we perceive, we shall find the key to the 
 problem somewhere in the foregoing ' form of percipience.' 
 Our affirmation, for instance, of Being or Reality respect- 
 ing any object or movement is nothing but No. 6, the 
 conclusion of the dialectic procedure, A is this, viz. A, an 
 assertion not of one or another kind of existence, but of its 
 existence and self -identity. The Will's act of perception 
 
 1 Prof. Laurie however says, ' these eight facts of simple percipience 
 are not separate acts historically and chronologically ; they together 
 constitute one act ; the various moments which constitute that one act 
 being by us logically discriminated, and that is all. Each involves 
 the others; all are implicit in each.' P. 138. As the whole use which 
 the author makes of these ' moments ' hangs entirely upon their order 
 in series, and this order is translated into time-priority and pos- 
 teriority in nature, I can put no interpretation upon this statement 
 compatible with the argument of the book. If the logical order 
 has nothing to do with time-order, the argument collapses.
 
 Chap. I.] MEDIATE PERCEPTION. 183 
 
 therefore is a predication of being and judgment of iden- 
 tity, declaring 'the object to be equal to itself 1 .' 
 
 And so too it is with our affirmations of causality. Why 
 do we say that all objects and phenomena are caused! 
 Because our percepts of them as existing are mediated or 
 conditioned. And why do we call cause and effect ante- 
 cedent and sequent! Because in the mediate process the 
 condition is the prius of the consequent. And why do 
 we predicate a causal nexus of necessity! Because in the 
 ' form of percipience,' the logical links which bring out the 
 percept lead to an inference necessarily valid. And why 
 do we conceive of cause as dynamic and for the sake of 
 effect ? Because the Will in initiating percipience is purely 
 ' kinetic,' and has ' purpose ' concealed in it, and so is at 
 once ' efficient and final cause.' 
 
 Thus both the fact of Being, or ' w-ness ' of each thing, 
 and the real nature of Cause, are guaranteed to us by the 
 free act of percipience and the mediating process which 
 yields its affirmation. ' It is out of the thought-affirmation 
 of being by the Ego in its free movement of percipience 
 that the knowledge or perception of being springs V Pre- 
 cisely as the universal predicate being is the issue of the 
 act of percipience, so is mediation, cause, or ground the 
 prius of that issue. Here, then, is 'cause, as sufficient 
 reason, woven into the very form of the primal process of 
 Reason, which is percipience, accompanying it in every 
 act, and making its act possible 3 .' 
 
 In concentrating attention upon the act of percipiency 
 and clearing it from the sphere of sense-receptivity, Professor 
 Laurie renders an important service to psychology, and 
 seizes, I am persuaded, on the true nodus of both the doctrine 
 of causation and of his larger problem. Confining myself 
 as far as possible to the former, I refrain from discussing at 
 
 1 First Part, ch. iii. 2 P. 102. * P. in.
 
 1 84 MEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 any length the contents of his intermediate stage of Attui- 
 tion ; the more so, as it is a state short of any ascertainable 
 human psychology, and is realised, if at all, only in the lower 
 animals and the dumb beginnings of infancy, and therefore 
 beyond the testing resources of our experience. It is 
 in short an imaginary condition, conceivable only by sub- 
 tracting and eliminating from our total inward life all that 
 it gains through the spontaneity of ' Will ' or ' Reason.' In 
 the attempt at this subtraction I discover only my incom- 
 petence to render it at all exact. Between sense impres- 
 sions arriving at us and energy going from us the distinction 
 is clear; but when I am told that my receptivity, on being 
 struck, reacts and starts a reflex movement, and am re- 
 quired to discriminate this from the spontaneous movement 
 in presence of some sensible object, I am at a loss for 
 a secure dividing mark between these two activities. It 
 is in fact a contradiction in terms to attribute action to 
 receptivity, and the contradiction is not removed by the pre- 
 fix re : the activity which wakes up on the sensory appeal 
 appears to me homogeneous with that which dispenses 
 with the appeal and presents itself as original to the 
 Ego ; and even were they distinguishable, I could never 
 feel sure that in the act of perception I had the latter 
 alone, when my senses stood all the time exposed to the 
 external thing which I am throwing off from myself. How 
 I should feel therefore, if I were abandoned to the reflex 
 portion of my activity, and reduced to the 'attuent' con- 
 dition, I find it impossible to judge. 
 
 But within certain limits we may perhaps determine how 
 we should not feel. A simply attuent creature, it is said, 
 discriminates objects in space from one another, but not 
 from himself; he is prevented by their differences from 
 mistaking them for each other : he can appreciate their 
 distances : their extension is a datum passively ' imposed 
 on his receptivity of sense ;' and their 'externality' follows
 
 Chap. I.] MEDIATE PERCEPTION. 185 
 
 as the reaction of the irritated sense ; but their otherness 
 to himself is still a secret from him. If I rightly under- 
 stand this feature of attuition, it supposes one term of 
 a pair of relatives to precede the existence of the other, 
 the outward to be in consciousness in the absence of any 
 inward, and things to be dealt with as objects without 
 determining the point ' objective to whatT If such a re- 
 lational biped were possible at all, it would be but a 
 wooden-legged affair, with one half alive and the other 
 unconscious and dead. Nay, the alleged order in which 
 it is to complete itself into the antithesis of self and not- 
 self is inconceivable. How can a subject difference two 
 objects from each other before either of them is differenced 
 from himself? Surely the difference between A and B is to 
 him measured by their different mode of affecting himself. 
 No secure light then can be thrown on our human 
 psychology by marking off from it the section supposed 
 to be present also in our dogs and horses, and making 
 comparative study of the remainder as so much distinct 
 supplementary faculty; inasmuch as our physiological 
 knowledge of the animals is not homogeneous with our 
 reflective knowledge of ourselves, and there is no common 
 measure of the two. Our nature must be interpreted by 
 itself, and looked at as a completed whole ; our resources 
 for knowing which are found in analysis of its complex 
 phenomena and the comparison of its stages of growth. 
 And in learning the lessons thus open to us, it is a pre- 
 carious thing to go behind" the data of inchoate memory 
 and speech, and spin conjectural autobiographies of baby- 
 hood which cannot be verified. We must start from Per- 
 ception : it has no safe prefix, beyond the mere passive 
 recipience of sensations ; and the stress which Professor 
 Laurie lays upon it, and the pertinacity with which he 
 brings every question to it for ultimate appeal, are ad- 
 mirable features of his treatise. And what he gets from
 
 1 86 MEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 the act of percipience is no more, I believe, than is really 
 there. But whether the way in which it is reached is truly 
 presented admits of reasonable doubt. The author says : 
 
 ' In entering this new sphere of consciousness, which 
 new sphere is identified with perception, I find that I 
 enter it enveloped in the forms of (i) end ; (2) excluded 
 middle ; (3) contradiction ; (4) sufficient reason ; (5) being 
 or identity (with its consequent affirmation). These forms 
 (or laws of movement) are simply the explicit expression of 
 the movement implicit in this new advance of conscious- 
 ness, this wholly inexplicable spontaneity, this acttispurus, 
 this Will which lies at the root of the whole V 
 
 I would accept much on Professor Laurie's authority ; 
 and do not for a moment question the report he here 
 gives of his experience. But if, on catching a percept 
 and reckoning the worth of its contents, he really dis- 
 covers this secret pocket-full of logical small change, I 
 must confess to a comparatively empty purse, with all 
 its value in a single coin, viz. the object, all at once and 
 all in one. I am astonished to hear of the five steps of 
 reasoning which I have taken to the proposition 'That 
 is the Sun ' : I am as unaware of them as a sleep-walker : 
 they have never been in consciousness ; and, if out of con- 
 sciousness, how can anyone assert them, or am I to verify 
 them ? It will perhaps be said that they hide themselves 
 from me by ' lying in the heart of the Will ' and keeping 
 ' concealed in it ;' and that due notice is given of this 
 by the epithet ' implicit ' attached to them. But if' ' im- 
 plicit ' is to mean ' withheld from consciousness,' how, on 
 their becoming ' explicit,' is their occult pre-existence to 
 be known and rendered affirmable ? Besides, it is surely a 
 contradiction to speak of Reasoning, the passage of the 
 mind from thought to thought, from premiss to conclu- 
 sion, as ' implicit ' : it may be a quicker or a slower 
 
 1 P. 15.
 
 Chap. I.] MEDIATE PERCEPTION. 187 
 
 flight from end to end, and with interest in the terminus 
 which eclipses the instrumental process : but the moment 
 the conclusion is challenged and the path to it has to 
 be defended, possession may be taken of it step by step 
 on the mere reverting of attention to the spot. The 
 antithesis 'implicit and explicit' applies only to syn- 
 chronous contents of thought, which may be lost sight 
 of in the unity of the containing object, or may not 
 even have been yet, as attributes, disengaged into view 
 apart from it or from one another, though contributing 
 their unrecognised share to the single impression which 
 it gives. Thus, the mental presentation of Space is the 
 prior and simple ground on which its three dimensions 
 emerge and are recognised as its eternal predicates, though 
 we knew them not. And if, as I hold to be the case, our 
 ' idea of an object ' is not built up by aggregation of its 
 qualities, but exists first as an undivided unit, on which 
 the several qualities come to the front one after another 
 through the experience of similars with a difference, we 
 may say with good warrant that these qualities were 
 implicit before they were explicit: for the unbroken unit 
 of thought was not what it would have been, had any 
 of them been absent. On this ground then, viz. that the 
 relation expressed by the phrase ' implicit explicit ' is 
 predicable of the contents only of a group and not of 
 a series, the supposed process of ' mediation ' in the ' form 
 of percipience ' appears to me inadmissible. 
 
 Suppose however this barrier in limine annulled, and 
 the path clear through the several stages of the ' form of 
 percipience' : I fear it will bring us to the wrong result. 
 Whence do we get the predicate of necessitating efficiency 
 assigned to the word ' Cause' ? From the closed links, 
 we are told, of the chain of ' mediation,' and the irresistible 
 cogency with which they conduct us to the conclusion. 
 But this cogency determines nothing except the order
 
 1 88 MEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 of our inference, and exemplifies only the law under which 
 we are thinking subjects. It has no objective power such 
 as we attribute to causality ; it does not create, but only 
 disclose, the truths to which it leads. It gives the statical 
 ratio essendi, and not the dynamical ratio fiendi ; and it is 
 the latter alone that we want in the term Cause. What is 
 found therefore in the process of mediation is not what is 
 wanted for the result mediated ; and it is in vain for 
 the author to ' emphasise the fact that in that mediating 
 process there is contained causal necessity' 1 ; and to assure 
 us that hence ' it follows that all phenomenal contents of 
 knowledge can be to consciousness only as caused*! In an 
 Hegelian writer we should hear without surprise that the 
 ' cause or ground of the external is contained in the there- 
 fore of sufficient reason which lies in the bosom of the 
 mediating process of all possible percipience,' and that 'the 
 universality and necessity of the causal predicate' is 'implicit 
 in the act of percipience, and so Reason-born 3 :' but such 
 identification of the Xo'yo? with the atria, such offer of the 
 logical necessity as warrant for the physical^ was hardly to 
 be expected from the advocate of ' a return to Dualism.' 
 
 A similar account is given of the predicate 'Antecedent' 
 habitually assigned to the term Cause. ' Why is Cause 
 always necessari'y conceived as the time-prius of the 
 effect?' The answer is, 'because all thought is in time, 
 that is, is a moment in the continuity of being, and the 
 fundamental form of reason yields Sufficient Reason or 
 Cause as the prius of the completion of its act, which act 
 is the Percept V Of two movements, for instance A and 
 B, in immediate consecution, why is A affirmed to be the 
 cause of Bt The answer is, because it is ' the time- 
 antecedent.' ' And why the //^-antecedent ? because in 
 the form of percipience the causal moment is the prius 
 of the issue of the whole movement 5 ,' that is, the Suffi- 
 
 1 P. 81. 2 P. 94. 3 P. 112. * P. 113. 5 P. 121.
 
 Chap. 1.] MEDIATE PERCEPTION. 189 
 
 cient Reason introduces the conclusion. The answer 
 adduces a ' reason ' which seems far from ' sufficient' ; 
 because in our thought the premiss precedes the inference, 
 its physical counterpart Cause must be construed as ante- 
 cedent in time ! the priority of Xo'yos in reasoning is 
 mistaken for antecedence in the alria ! Surely the ground 
 thus assigned to justify the predicate is precisely that on 
 which the sceptic would proceed to prove it an illusion. 
 
 Among the steps of the percipient process the Sufficient 
 Reason precedes the conclusion ; and this order, repeated 
 in their physical counterparts make Being the sequent and 
 dependent on Cause. Existence therefore, or 'is-ness' (as 
 Professor Laurie says) emerges both inwardly as an in- 
 ference, and outwardly as an effect : causality is in thought 
 before the idea of anything that is; and all that is, whether 
 thing or event, presents itself as derivative \ If this be so, 
 then the ' Cause,' of which we think first, must as yet be 
 non-existent ; and yet is charged with the task of calling 
 up existence ; and we are in a condition to think of it 
 before either it or we exist ! Well may Professor Strum- 
 pell protest, as we have seen 2 , against this paradoxical 
 order, and, in inverting it, insist on ' existence ' as a postu- 
 late indispensable to all our dealings with causality. The 
 lesson learned in perception is always What an object is : 
 it tells something which we may predicate about it ; but 
 the possibility of this lesson already implies That it is ; the 
 predicate it teaches presupposes a subject to which it is to 
 go. l fs-ness' therefore is not got out of perception, but 
 taken into it. A slight qualification which this statement 
 needs will presently be added. 
 
 This question respecting Being or Reality, whether it 
 is validly proved, or simply assumed by a subjective 
 necessity on our part, is of cardinal importance, as the 
 point of divergence between the Kantian Idealism and 
 
 1 Ibid. Cf. pp. 102, 103. 2 Supra, p. 142.
 
 190 MEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book 1 1. 
 
 Professor Laurie's Dualism. If the idea of outward 
 existence be only a postulated starting point for us, 
 there is no test of what it may be worth : were it an 
 illusion, it would be with us all the same. Nay, if we got 
 it by carrying over our logical 'form of mediation' into 
 external nature as a model for her order of things and of 
 phenomena, who could say whether this was anything 
 more than dressing up for ourselves an objective world in 
 our own likeness ? And the reader of Metaphysica Nova 
 et Vetusta may pass through chapter after chapter without 
 seeing room for any other interpretation, and wondering 
 where the Dualism is. He finds the central doctrine, of 
 percipient Will or Reason, couched in the very language of 
 idealism : ' this new power ' being characterised as ' the 
 power of imposing self on (or subsuming into self) the pre- 
 sentations of sensation and attuition 1 . But this phrase gives 
 a false impression of the author's meaning. He believes in 
 the legitimacy of the ' form of mediation ' as the source of 
 categories for interpreting the external world, and is per- 
 suaded that what our thought reads off from our own 
 dialectic is also in the things themselves to which we apply 
 it, being the movement also of the universal Spirit, and so 
 a true commerce between Nature and Man ; ' the thought 
 that, first passing into us, then emanates from us, not to be 
 imposed upon, but to be found in, the phenomenal, which 
 along with that thought constitutes the reality V As the 
 volume approaches the close, the expression of this answer- 
 ing relation becomes still more distinct and emphatic. 
 
 'The dialectic movement of Reason yields Cause, just as 
 it yields the Absolute-Infinite and Being, as immanent 
 ground of all that exists and of our synthesis of the con- 
 ditioned. The Reason in the universe thus and not other- 
 wise passes into us as children of nature, and, as it is the 
 Form of the universal Will, so it becomes the formal 
 
 1 P. 20. 2 P. 153.
 
 Chap. I.] MEDIATE PERCEPTION. 191 
 
 movement of that Will as finite, in its attempt to take 
 nature to itself. Reason can be seen only by the eye of 
 Reason. And yet we would in our weak perverseness 
 reduce Reason itself to the sensible and phenomenal 1 .' 
 
 Here we are brought to the true terminus, as at the 
 outset we were planted at the true starting point, of all 
 philosophy, in the fact of Perception. It is on the road 
 between the two that the author's comrades will be apt to 
 fall away, in doubt whether he is on the right track and 
 will ever lead them home. Had he been content to accept 
 the non-ego as, like the ego, immediately known in the act 
 of perception, and to defend its reality, if impugned, as a 
 postulate of all intelligence, his thesis would have been less 
 ingeniously worked, but, I believe, more securely made 
 good. ' Dogmatic ' it would doubtless have been called ; 
 but sophistic it could not have been. But when, in the 
 anxiety to make security doubly sure, immediate certainty 
 is pulled to pieces in order to furnish a process of ' Media- 
 tion,' several weak and wire-drawn links are substituted 
 for one that is infrangible. To let Being itself remain 
 unreached till it comes out as an inference, to give the 
 semblance of a reasoned result to the condition of every 
 possible premiss, to construe the relations of the non-ego 
 by those which are familiar to us in the ego, causal neces- 
 sity by logical cogency, and causal antecedence by logical 
 priority, is to overply the resources of Dialectic, without 
 escaping the idealistic tendency to throw around us a uni- 
 verse which is a mere reflection of ourselves. 
 
 I deem it a misfortune to have been obliged, in treating 
 of causation, to select for notice the side of Professor 
 Laurie's comprehensive treatise which least commands my 
 assent. Elsewhere, in matters not relevant to my present 
 purpose, it abounds in admirable expositions and acute 
 criticisms ; and especially indicates a clear insight, founded 
 
 1 P. 173-
 
 192 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 upon accurate knowledge, into the insufficiency of the 
 empirical psychology as a base of metaphysic philosophy. 
 
 (b) In immediate Perception. 
 
 The gains conferred upon us in Percipiency appear to 
 me not only more immediately won, but even greater in 
 amount, than Professor Laurie represents, or Kant allows. 
 They both of them sanction the common dictum of em- 
 pirical psychology, that, with no other endowment than 
 sensitive receptivity, we should have in consciousness an 
 ' aggregate of sensations,' separate synchronous ' units of 
 sensibility, situated within one and the same organism V a 
 ' manifold of Sense' 2 ; out of which multiplicity the merely 
 ' attuent ' animal, by ' reflex co-ordination,' effects a ' syn- 
 thesis,' or 'synopsis' constituting for him a single thing. 
 In the same way the 'idea of an object' is built up, accord- 
 ing to James Mill, out of its various sensible effects closely 
 cemented together by association ; its qualities subscribing 
 to make it up into one. I venture to say that this is an 
 inversion of the order of nature, and exaggerates the re- 
 sources of the simple receptivity on which percipiency is 
 superinduced. So far is it from true that we necessarily 
 have as many feelings in consciousness at one time as 
 there are inlets to the sense then played upon, that it is a 
 fundamental law of pure sensation that each momentary 
 state of the organism yields but one feeling, however 
 numerous may be its parts and its exposures. There is no 
 function of the human body unattended by a special sensi- 
 tive condition : the glandular secretions, the circulation of 
 the blood, the respiration which decarbonises it, the action 
 of the skin, are all tributary to the general life-feeling of 
 each instant ; which accordingly is changed at once into 
 malaise as soon as any one of them is suspended or dis- 
 
 1 Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta, pp. 3, 7. 
 
 2 Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Rosenkranz, ii. p. 76.
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 193 
 
 turbed ; but so fused together are the effects of all, that 
 numerous as they are in fact, to consciousness they are but 
 one. In order to disengage the contributions from each 
 other, and let us know the amount and kind of each, it 
 would be necessary to break their constant concomitance, 
 and ring the changes of combination by stopping now this 
 and now that, while letting the others run on. The dif- 
 ferences would then stand out, and, as one after another 
 appeared in front, we should be disenchanted of our sup- 
 posed unconsciousness. The experiment, though not at the 
 command of our will, is to some extent enforced upon us 
 by pathological vicissitude. Supposing it to be tried, the 
 result would be the emergence of the many out of the one, 
 an analysis and not a synthesis. 
 
 To this original Unity of consciousness it makes no 
 difference that the tributaries to the single feeling "are 
 beyond the organism instead of within it, in an outside 
 object with several sensible properties, instead of in the 
 living body with its several sensitive functions. To the 
 infant, feeling his way through his earliest lessons, a white 
 billiard-ball speaks through more senses than one ; but in 
 his consciousness are there present one feeling for its 
 shape, another for its size, a third for its smoothness, a 
 fourth for its hardness, a fifth for its colour ? and does he 
 put together these several components into a single 'aggre- 
 gate?' On the contrary, he gains an undivided image of 
 the object, as he has an undivided feeling of himself with- 
 out knowing anything about his eyes or his hands or his 
 muscles or his skin ; and not till you offer him a red 
 fellow-ball to the white, does the colour begin to loosen 
 itself from the image and threaten to float off as separable ; 
 and then, a marble will do the same for the size ; till by 
 repetition of differences the variables are detached, and 
 the constants retain undisturbed possession of the original 
 unity. The unity therefore is not made by ' association ' 
 
 VOL. I. O
 
 194 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 of severed components ; but the plurality is formed by 
 dissociation of unsuspected varieties within the unity ; the 
 substantive thing being no product of synthesis, but the 
 residuum of differentiation. 
 
 But long before this, indeed ever since the first breach of 
 the original unity of consciousness, Percipiency has been 
 at work upon the field ; for it is precisely the breach of 
 unity, the irruption of contrast, that wakes it up in the 
 human mind (I cannot speak for birds and dogs), and 
 turns a flash of energetic attention upon the emerging 
 difference ; and from this moment, the active Ego claims 
 its part, so that without it nothing shall be done that is 
 done. An activity which distinguishes, which takes notice 
 that this is not that, is no variety of sensation ; it is not 
 receptivity, but its opposite ; it does not happen to us, but 
 issues from us. Without it, we should indeed feel, but we 
 should know nothing, not even what we feel ; for we could 
 direct no inward look upon our own states, so as to make 
 them our objects, and count them as they pass, and com- 
 pare them as they stand. Not only do we first begin to 
 know, when that look darts from within ; but we again 
 cease to know, whenever it afterwards absents itself. ' The 
 impression of light,' says Scheffler, ' if received without any 
 attention, produces no self-consciousness ; but the material 
 change which, even without attention, that stimulus of 
 light generates, may subsequently, when the rays have 
 long been quenched, awake the mental consciousness, and 
 so an object may emerge before the mind, which had 
 previously sent us unawares its rays into our eyes 1 .' The 
 inadequate appreciation, or even positive denial, of this 
 incompetence of mere sensation has not unfrequently 
 weakened the whole structure of the empirical psychology, 
 and left it, in spite of infinite ingenuity, precarious as a 
 
 Physiologische Optik, 9. 3, p. 169.
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 195 
 
 house of cards. James Mill, for instance, prefaces a book 
 full of admirable analyses with this unfortunate statement 
 of principle : ' The having two sensations and knowing 
 they are two, are not two things, but one and the same 
 thing ; is not only sensation, and nothing else than sensa- 
 tion, but the only thing that can in strictness be called 
 sensation. The having a new sensation and knowing that 
 it is new, are not two things, but one and the same thing.' 
 ' Suppose that, without any organ of sense but the eye, my 
 first sensation is red, my next green. The whole process 
 is sensation. Yet the green is not the red. What we 
 call making the distinction, therefore has taken place, and 
 it is involved in the sensation.' Not even John Stuart Mill 
 could re-edit these passages without intimating his dissent 
 from them, and admitting it to be ' by no means certain 
 that, when we have two feelings in immediate succession, 
 the feeling of their likeness is not a third feeling which 
 follows instead of being involved in the other two.' ' We 
 do not get rid of any difficulty by calling the feeling of 
 likeness the same thing with the two feelings that are 
 alike : we have equally to postulate likeness and unlike- 
 ness as primitive facts, as an inherent distinction among 
 our sensations V 
 
 The psychologist who is in search of an example that 
 may come nearest to the life of pure sensation usually has 
 fixed on the oyster as encumbered with a minimum of 
 anything else. On finding it credited by Mr. Hazard with 
 a tolerable supply of knowledge, I was about to cite him 
 as a courageous re-assertor of James Mill's paradox. But 
 I should have done him wrong ; for, instead of attributing 
 the oyster's knowledge to his sensations, he supposes the 
 creature to come into the world ready furnished with the 
 knowledge of what it wants, and endowed with intelligence 
 
 1 Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, J. S. Mill's 
 edition, vol. ii, pp. u, 14, 18. 
 
 O 2
 
 196 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book 1 1. 
 
 to perceive the object, and to direct upon it the effort of its 
 will 1 . His doctrine presents therefore a contrast to Mill's ; 
 the oyster's knowledge having the least possible to do with 
 its sensation. 
 
 Essential however as the spontaneity of the Ego is to 
 the first step in cognition, it would be no less incompetent 
 than the receptivity, if existing by itself alone and spend- 
 ing its movement in vacuo. The automatic actions of our 
 organic life, of heart and lungs and glands, are (under 
 normal conditions) as little known to us as their attendant 
 sensations ; nor is it true only of the purely and constantly 
 reflex animal actions, that they cannot notice themselves. 
 The same mechanical character may belong even to 
 operations regulated by the organs of special sense ; for 
 when Goltz had removed the cerebral lobes of a frog while 
 leaving the spinal cord, the creature on being irritated and 
 made to jump, would avoid any object placed in its way ; 
 though the condition of consciousness and therefore of 
 knowledge was gone, the stimulus on the eye sufficed to 
 secure the appropriate muscular action 2 . By turning to 
 account this undoubted type of activity and exaggerating 
 its analogy, some modern physiologists have extended to 
 Man Descartes' doctrine of animal automatism, and dis- 
 pensed with his need of consciousness at all. And however 
 unreasonable the theory may be, the mere fact of its 
 existence on the strength of a real analogy, shows that 
 the question is one of limits and not of possibility, and 
 that activity, pure and simple, does not suffice to secure 
 cognition. 
 
 But when these two incognitive conditions come together 
 in man, Perception springs from their mutual play. Neither 
 
 1 Two letters on Causation and Freedom in Willing, addressed to 
 John Stuart Mill, by Rowland G. Hazard, 1869, pp. 87, 88. 
 
 2 Cited by Dr. W. B. Carpenter, Contemporary Review, Feb. 1875, 
 p. 411.
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 197 
 
 receptivity nor spontaneity can be unlimited ; the former 
 is relative to definite data ; the latter encounters foreign 
 resistance ; and when the two meet upon the same field, 
 passing to their end in opposite directions, the clash of the 
 crossing lines wakes us up, and from the darkness of feeling 
 strikes the light of Apprehension. Rays impinge upon the 
 retina and leave a visual sensation : the startled spontaneity 
 replies with a more or less energetic look. The light goes 
 out ; the sensation lapses of itself, and the look is dropped 
 by the gazer. Of this experience the component factors 
 cannot but stand out from each other ; the difference must 
 be felt between what comes to us and what goes from us, 
 between what we cannot help and what depends on us. 
 Still more distinct is the case when the initiative is taken 
 by the spontaneity. The arm is flung out towards the 
 measure of its length ; it is arrested by a book upon the 
 table ; if the initiative impulse is lively, it will not be 
 baulked, but redoubling itself will push the obstacle away, 
 and so complete itself. The contrast between the first 
 pure spontaneity and the counteraction it receives, and 
 again between the two intensities of energy on the change 
 halfway, reveals itself at once in the moment of collision ; 
 but no element of it before ; for it is the impediment that 
 serves as tell-tale of the free energy it stops ; and when the 
 check is defied and thrown off, the movement assumes a 
 new character and is thenceforth delivered over to the Will. 
 As the etherial undulations from sun and star fly through 
 the infinite and leave it darkness except where they are 
 challenged and tripped up ; as the hurricane sweeps over- 
 head in silence, and reserves its roar for the resisting forest 
 and the ambitious cities of men ; so is it the encounter and 
 strife of centrifugal and centripetal movements, of the 
 sensory and the facultative life, that supplies the conditions 
 and the occasion of Percipiency ; giving opportunity to 
 the Understanding for bringing its own inherent forms into
 
 198 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 use, and consciously disposing under them the materials of 
 feeling previously unorganised. 
 
 The fundamental discovery opened upon us in this 
 experience is the dualism of Self and other than Self, both 
 of which start into the field and divide between them the 
 contents of the percipient lesson. Whatever the change be 
 which breaks the prior continuity, be it the incidence of a 
 contrasted sensation, or be it the arrest of a current spon- 
 taneity, it instantly leads to what is no longer an element 
 in us, but an act by us ; in the one case an attentive look 
 turned upon the new feeling, in the other, a determined 
 effort to persist in a movement which before had gone on 
 of itself. We cannot behave thus without knowing, that 
 both the feeling at which we look and the energy we put 
 forth are ours ; while that which gives the feeling, and that 
 which receives the energy, are something other than our- 
 selves. To each member of the dualism therefore we 
 assign both a passive and an active predicate ; and each is 
 so far the counterpart of the other. We are born into self- 
 consciousness in the moment of disputed spontaneity, and 
 instantly assert ourselves by taking into our own hands 
 the power which before was only passing through our 
 nature. And as it is a shock of interrupted feeling that 
 gives us notice to do this, the feeling must have the same 
 owner as the power ; and both are necessarily referred to 
 one point and taken home to the Ego ; henceforth known 
 as the subject of both the sensory store and the forms of 
 activity. These two heads exhaust all the possible con- 
 tents of the Ego ; and whatever is without place in the one 
 must be sought in the other. 
 
 All else than these contents is embraced in the non-Ego. 
 This is revealed to us only as the negative correlative of 
 the Ego thus composed and given to consciousness. Its 
 terms are therefore the same pair, passive and active, only 
 with their positions inverted ; passive under our activity
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 199 
 
 active for our passivity. This interplay of microcosm and 
 macrocosm does not wait, it will be observed, for em- 
 pirical discovery, but is involved a priori in the mere act, 
 indeed in the possibility, of percipiency. 
 
 This one comprehensive antithesis gives account of 
 several truths, not as sequent inferences from it, enriching 
 it by new discoveries, but as contained in its own meaning, 
 yet admitting of separate expression. They constitute, in 
 short, functions of it, distinctly conceivable, but irremovable 
 from it without its vanishing altogether. Of these, the 
 most obvious is the relation of Cause and Effect, the cradle 
 of which we here reach at last, after long and, I fear, 
 wearisome approach. It is evident that, if the foregoing 
 exposition is correct, the Ego and non-Ego are known to 
 us ab initio as reciprocally limiting powers put forth by 
 antagonist agents and operating change in some recipient 
 object. If I know myself at all, it is in trying ' with all my 
 might ' to do something needed but difficult, to heave away 
 a retarding resistance ; nor does anything sooner bring 
 home to one the poise and counterpoise between Self and 
 Nature, than the attempt to shut a door against a furious 
 wind. When thus withstood and resolved to persist rather 
 than desist, I am conscious of exercising a causal Will to 
 institute or sustain efficient movement. It is the most 
 intimate and familiar fact of life, the very nearest to my 
 own centre, the assertion of the essence of me ; nay, more, 
 the sole initiation possible for me, into any bvvafj.cs at all ; 
 for all merely visible changes are but a scene-shifting to 
 the front? while here I both am myself the charge of 
 power, and bring the poles together to direct its discharge. 
 The unique significance of this point of consciousness has 
 been appreciated by at least a few of the most competent 
 philosophers and critics of philosophy. Zeller, for instance, 
 says, 'When man begins to reflect on the grounds of things, 
 the question of the Why (Warum) is forced upon him first
 
 200 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 by particular phenomena of the more striking kind, and in 
 course of time by continually more of them, and in answer 
 to this question the first notions of causality are formed ; 
 he is at the outset guided in this matter by no other clue 
 than the analogy of his own Willing and Doing. For we 
 ourselves are the one only cause of whose mode of action we 
 have immediate knowledge, through inner intuition. In the 
 case of every other, though we may perceive its effects, we 
 can only infer from the facts, and cannot immediately learn 
 by perception of the facts, the mode and kind of way in 
 which those effects arise, and the connection of them with 
 their cause V 
 
 If we are thus absolutely dependent on this single ' inner 
 
 intuition ' for our knowledge of what causality is, it must 
 
 fill and constitute our whole idea of it and the 'way in 
 
 which effects arise ;' nor can anything ever be added to 
 
 it, as there are no other sources which can tell us anything 
 
 about it ; it is confessedly entrusted to us as a secret of 
 
 our own. It determines the meaning of the word Cause, 
 
 and determines it for ever. Zeller therefore understates 
 
 the case, in saying that only ' at the outset ' man ' is guided 
 
 by no other clue ;' virtually contradicting the next remark, 
 
 that ' other clue ' there is none. Nor does it seem correct, 
 
 under these conditions, to speak of 'inferring from the 
 
 fact ' notions of causality different from ' the first,' which 
 
 we ' immediately learn by perception of the facts.' It is 
 
 not by analogical inference, but by an a priori axiom of the 
 
 understanding, that we apply the causal relation to the 
 
 external world ; and if we take the name of it thither, we 
 
 must carry the meaning too ; for if we drop it by the way, 
 
 it is never to be recovered there. It would not get there 
 
 at all, if the phenomena of the scene presented themselves 
 
 1 Ueber teleologische und mechanische Naturerklarung in ihrer 
 Anwendung auf das Weltganze, Berlin, 1876, p. 19. (Transactions of 
 the Academy of Sciences.)
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 2OI 
 
 only in their relations to each other ; but before they do 
 this, they enter into relations with ourselves, the privi- 
 leged trustees of causality ; and are commissioned to 
 reveal to us the nature of our power by thwarting it ; 
 for nothing gets known except through its negation, and, 
 as shown above, we first become alive to our agency by 
 more or less losing it against impediments. This encoun- 
 ter sets us face to face with Causality other than our own ; 
 which presents itself to us (since nothing but power can 
 arrest power) as a homogeneous causality from the outer 
 sphere and in the opposite direction. Having thus pos- 
 session of the antithesis, Cause within and Cause without, 
 the latter term becomes available thenceforward for 
 external changes within themselves ; a field where the 
 idea could never have entered, but for the intermediary 
 negociation of the human agent. 
 
 If it be thus that the understanding first brings. this 
 important category into play, its essential features come 
 out into a clear light. Not till we put forth and direct 
 our own causality, whether simply percipient or motory, 
 have we revelation of the causality of the world ; so that 
 it is not in mere exposure to changes, but in concomitant 
 production of them, that this intellectual intuition is gained. 
 Further, in the genesis of our consciousness, both the Ego 
 and the non-Ego are embraced as foci within the same 
 category of causality, and in the same objective relations. 
 True, the subjective focus has in it, as a seat of conscious- 
 ness, an immediate feeling of operative Will which can 
 only be reflected on to the other. But reflected it is, and 
 must for ever be ; for it is identified with the inmost 
 essence of the sole causality accessible to thought. And 
 accordingly, it is read by us into the non-Ego as what 
 would be stirring in us if we could change places with it ; 
 and is in truth the ground of that fellow-feeling with 
 Nature, which philosophy, deluded by its own abstractions,
 
 202 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 rashly surrendered to the poet, but will have to beg back 
 again, whenever it returns into living relations with reality. 
 To the world we are introduced, not as to a" dead thing, 
 or material aggregate of things, but as to another Self, 
 just as causal as we, instinct with hidden Will, and so far 
 presenting the outer and the inner spheres in true equi- 
 poise. This first aspect no doubt is greatly changed by 
 ulterior analysis, till the whole external scene, once so 
 busy with its work and purposes, comes to be regarded 
 as an assemblage of effects. But it will be found that this 
 inevitable change involves no surrender of the primary 
 intuition, but a mere redistribution of the phenomena to 
 which it is applied, and a shifting of the position among 
 them held by the originating cause. In the dualism, then, 
 which Percipiency opens to us, we are placed under an 
 irrepealable necessity of thought, to this effect : Here, at 
 home in the Ego, we have first-hand acquaintance with 
 Causality ; in the reaction of objects upon us, we know 
 their resistance to be simply its inverse or opposite ; and 
 so, on the principle that -rrepi -T&V avriKfi^v^v TJ\V avrrfv elvai 
 (TTi(TTrip.r)v, we recognise in them the same attribute by 
 which we ourselves have moved forth upon them. 
 
 In treating of this causal antithesis, I have unavoidably 
 discriminated its two terms by the epithets inner and 
 outer ; words which introduce us to another antithesis 
 involved in the percipient act, viz. of Here and There, as 
 contrasted positions of co-existence. Having had occasion 
 already to show how this geometrical distinction carries 
 with it the whole idea of Space and is related to that of 
 Time 1 , I recur to it only to bring up for judgment a dis- 
 puted question which, when before mentioned, was left in 
 suspense, waiting for our present point of view. We found 
 one authority affirming that our belief in the existence 
 
 1 Supra, pp. 66-68, 141, 142.
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 203 
 
 of things without (i. e. the contents of Space) is an infer- 
 ence from the principle of Causality ; another, insisting 
 that, inversely, the idea of causality pre-supposes external 
 existence and phenomena. It will now be evident, I think, 
 that neither of these beliefs can be before or after the 
 other ; the percipient act, in setting up the Ego and the 
 non-Ego for our consciousness, opposes them both causally 
 and geometrically ; and that not mediately, through any 
 logical interdependence, but immediately and simulta- 
 neously, as functions of the containing thought itself. 
 
 There remains, involved in the percipient act, one other 
 antithesis, of which a few words must be said, viz. that of 
 Entity and Attribute. The phenomena which, under the 
 eye of self-consciousness, range themselves within their 
 respective spheres of Self and some other than self, do not 
 betake themselves thither as a loose multitude, sheltering 
 under these two roofs ; but are referred to the one or the 
 other as to their essential home which claims and holds 
 them by inalienable right, not to say inherent necessity. 
 In assigning the heat which reaches me, and the flame 
 which plays before me to the fire, and the feeling of 
 warmth and the vision of flashing light to myself, I per- 
 form more than an act of assortment, tying up experiences 
 in parcels, and saying to one, ' You go there,' and to 
 another, ' You come here.' I do nofr allocate ; I predicate ; 
 i. e. affirm the burning fuel to be a substance to which the 
 heat and light belong as attributes ; and myself to be the 
 person, whose senses are affected by these qualities. It 
 is the same when the attention is turned inward, instead 
 of outward. In its self-consciousness the Ego is discovered 
 as the Subject of the act of feeling ; I am introduced to 
 the apprehension of two related terms, the act or feeling, 
 and myself to whom they belong. The relation embraces 
 both ; and whatever cognition I have of the feeling, I have 
 also of its being a phenomenon of my own existence.
 
 204 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 Wherein then consists the difference between these two 
 terms which fits the one to be predicable of the other? 
 In this ; that while the act or feeling is a present change, 
 the Ego is a permanent whence the change issues or 
 whither it arrives, which was there before and will be 
 there after. It presents itself as a continuum, other than 
 the phenomenon in not being a phenomenon, but having 
 it : in other words, it is thought of under the form of 
 Time, which alone renders change appreciable by contrast 
 with the unchanging. In both cases, the outward and the 
 inward, the understanding demands and provides a native 
 habitat for phenomena ; and the difference is, that Sub- 
 stance harbours the possibilities of synchronous phenomena ; 
 Self, of successive ; in either case, an Entity, whether its 
 unity extends in three dimensions, or in only one. That 
 this idea of a superior Unity for differences, a non-pheno- 
 menal for the phenomenal, is inseparable from the action 
 of the understanding at all, is evident from its surreptitious 
 re-appearance in every artifice for dispensing with it. It 
 is said that we know nothing about any object but its 
 qualities, so they must be the whole of it ; shape, colour, 
 lustre, etc. But of these it is impossible to think as a 
 mere co-presence or public meeting of individual attri- 
 butes ; let their assembly be called ever so frequently, 
 their collateral re-appearance will not constitute the 
 organic tie by which we hold them in unity : as well might 
 we try to make up a tree out of its own scattered leaves 
 upon the field. Not till. we supply the other term of the 
 relation, and refer to a permanent object in which they 
 inhere and of which they are modes, do we find them 
 intelligible. You cannot get up the thing by subscribing 
 its attributes ; it is not they ; it only has them. 
 
 The doctrine of the indestructibility of matter and of 
 the migration and transformation of energy are but applied 
 forms of this a priori thought, though often treated as if
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 
 
 they were inductions of experience. They assume that 
 aspect only because what is taken for substance to-day 
 may cease to be so to-morrow ; the term being applied 
 at first to any separate object presenting itself as a unity, 
 apparently the permanent and independent supporter of 
 its attributes. But, for a concrete individual, this character 
 can never be more than provisional ; on a wider view it 
 may turn into a satellite on something else, and be trans- 
 ferred to the dependent side of the relation. Or, when 
 looked into with microscopic eyes, better still through 
 a more than microscopic calculus of infinitesimals, it may 
 resolve itself out of all statical persistence into innumer- 
 able molecular dartings and percussions, swarming with 
 dynamical problems needing an eternity to work them out. 
 But then the idea of Substance, though driven into retreat 
 from its immediate haunt, does but walk abroad and 
 betake itself to a higher level, and command a vaster field 
 beneath. The numerical reduction is compensated by 
 more comprehensive range. You may sweep the thought 
 out from this hiding-place and that, and hunt it through 
 the universe ; but it will only run to higher altitudes, and 
 take refuge at last on a summit which you cannot invade. 
 
 Between the relation of Substance to Attribute and that 
 of Cause to Effect there is sufficient resemblance to prevent 
 surprise at their frequent identification. Yet the distinc- 
 tion is precise and plain. In both instances the relation 
 is, for the second term of the pair, one of dependence : but 
 on Substance it is a dependence of co-existence ; on Cause, 
 a dependence of origination. A Substance manifests, but 
 does not make its attributes ; a Cause produces its effects. 
 And though both the dependent terms express what is 
 phenomenal relatively to their priors as non-phenomenal, 
 yet it is with a difference ; for the attribute of a substance 
 is not any change in it ; it does not begin and cease to be, 
 but is immanent in the being of the thing : while the effect
 
 2C6 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 of a cause is a transient event thrown out by an act and 
 forming part of a sequence. We should perhaps hardly 
 deem the abiding quality of a thing phenomenal, were it 
 not for its also playing the part of cause by delivering 
 sensations on our receptivity whenever we expose our- 
 selves to its influence ; but, as it does this, now to one 
 and now to another of us, and disappears from view as 
 soon as each one marches past, the manifestation seems 
 to have the transiency of the observers' train. Accordingly 
 we do not speak of properties of Space, or of a geometrical 
 figure, as its phenomena, looking at them, as we do, exclu- 
 sively in relation to the object which has them eternally. 
 In this case, indeed, another reason enters which prevents 
 the parallel being quite complete ; the interdependence of 
 properties in a geometrical figure not only is reciprocal 
 inter se, but extends no less to what is selected as its 
 essence and named in its definition ; so that by a different 
 selection and corresponding variation in the order of 
 deduction, the whole group may be secured in another 
 way. Under the term Substance, on the other hand, we 
 understand a Unit of Being, not on a level with its pro- 
 perties and capable of changing places with any of them, 
 but the superior possibility of all alike, and the common 
 ground of their co-existence. Such an idea, of the radia- 
 tion of the one into manifold though invariable expression, 
 verges on the relation between the phenomenal and the 
 non-phenomenal, and can do no wrong in resorting to its 
 terms. 
 
 It is needless to follow the contents of Percipience into 
 further developments, the categories which we have reached 
 sufficing for the area of thought which we shall have to 
 traverse. To sum up in brief the positions which define 
 our base; the collision of the mind's activity and recep- 
 tivity breaks a sensory monism into the cognitive dualism 
 of Self and Not-self, each with its own activity facing the
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 207 
 
 other's receptivity. The two activities, taken as a related 
 pair, and construed by the member immediately known, 
 constitute, in dynamical antithesis, Cause within and Cause 
 without; the two receptivities, inversely, Effect without 
 and Effect within. But, to be thus provided with a within 
 and without, the dualism must also carry a geometrical 
 antithesis of here for the Self with its contents, there for the 
 Not-self and its contents, involving Space, and, after more 
 than one perception, Time. Thus completed, Perception 
 finally recognises, in the perceiving subject and in the per- 
 ceived object, a predicate over and above the acts issued 
 and the states received, both of which are in time-order, 
 viz. a presence in Space, irrespective of succession, and the 
 standing-ground of it; that is, self-identical existence, or 
 subsistence, in antithesis to changing phenomena, whether 
 given out or taken in. It needs but little reflection to be 
 convinced that no one of these thought-relations has any 
 rights of precedence over the rest, any logical or psycho- 
 logical priority ; with the exception of the last, which asks 
 for time enough to allow the qualities of an object to dis- 
 engage themselves, by an appeal to the several senses, from 
 the original ' unity of consciousness.' All the rest are alike 
 and at once implicit in immediate perception of any and 
 every kind ; and not being separately contributed by em- 
 pirical lessons, or deductively worked out by reasoning 
 process, are brought into experience by, the understanding 
 ab initio, and must be treated as its intrinsic categories or 
 conditioning laws of thought. 
 
 This analysis of the cognitive contents of Percipience 
 prepares us to determine the inmost meaning of the word 
 Cause; and to understand how it comes to pass that the 
 term is claimed now for a thing, and now for a force, and 
 again for a phenomenon. Revert to the example given of 
 the birth-moment of the idea, viz. the point at which a 
 blind impulse in full career, meeting with an impediment,
 
 208 IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. [Book II. 
 
 comes out of the dark for me, and, waking up my Self, 
 throws it upon me to persist or to desist. At that moment 
 I become aware of the impelling force which has been 
 moving me, and is in me still, and may yet do more if 
 not let drop at the challenge of the impediment. But, 
 on my persisting, that force enters on quite a new rela- 
 tion : it changes masters. Before, it invaded my organism 
 from some stimulant outside, and took possession of me 
 without my leave, or even knowledge ; and I was its vehicle 
 and slave. Now, its turn has come to serve ; it depends on 
 me to take it up or stop it short ; it is delivered over to be 
 the tool in my hand, and to be laid down or wielded, as I 
 may choose. In other words, it is at the disposal of my 
 Will; and in virtue of this, / am the cause of what it will 
 do. To be at the disposal of Will means to be ready for 
 either branch of an alternative ; for, selection in presence of 
 such possibilities is the sole function of Will, a function 
 predicable of nothing else. Cause, therefore, if you enquire 
 of it where it takes in its significance at the fountain head, 
 means that which can settle an alternative, viz. a disposing 
 Will. 
 
 In fixing thus upon the act of choice as the rightful 
 claimant of the term Cause, we evidently give the title, 
 with Schopenhauer, to a phenomenon, to the exclusion, 
 apparently, of both thing and force. Here, however, a dis- 
 tinction must be observed among the cases in which we 
 press enquiries about Causation. Cause of what, is it that 
 we ask? If, as most frequently occurs, of this particular 
 event rather than of that, the answer will name some single 
 phenomenal fact that makes the difference. But if we 
 want an account of vast groups of facts massed together 
 under a common head, such as the gaseous, liquid, and 
 solid states of bodies, or the ebbing and flowing of the 
 tides, the answer will indicate, probably, some force whose 
 special name has been appropriated to these phenomena in
 
 Chap. I.] IMMEDIATE PERCEPTION. 209 
 
 the same class, and alone enables us in one affirmation 
 to say the same thing of them all. Indeed the distinc- 
 tion of forces, if pushed to the furthest scrutiny, would 
 turn out to be but a device for the classification of phe- 
 nomena according to the rules of their occurrence, and to 
 denote their laws only, and not their dynamic origin. The 
 modern conception of the interchangeableness of forces 
 really means that they are in the last resort homogeneous, 
 distinguished, not in themselves, but in the kind of phe- 
 nomenal relations which give opportunity for this or that 
 kind of work ; so that ' Force,' though indispensable for all 
 change, can never, for that very reason, account for its 
 being this change rather than that ; that is, can never 
 properly be assigned as Cause of any single event. That 
 must be sought in the selective phenomenon which deter- 
 mines an alternative. The same disqualification attaches 
 to { Thing ' or ' Substance,' that is, permanent Being in 
 space. Like Power (in the potential state), it also is a 
 non-phenomenal essential to the birth of any phenomenon ; 
 without existence, there can be no' happening. You may 
 indeed, by mentioning some particular thing, enable your 
 enquirer to look in the right place for what he wants ; but 
 only because the thing is the theatre of an activity opera- 
 tive either immediately on his senses, or on some other 
 object which reports its change; and this phenomenal act 
 (the thing's ' quality'), for instance, the exclusive reflection 
 of one end of the spectrum, is the true cause of the red 
 colour by which you are affected. It is obvious that the 
 causal claim of Thing is further from the truth by one 
 remove than that of Power: without Being or existence, 
 there is no possibility of Power ; without power, no possi- 
 bility of act; without act, no possibility of effect, that is, no 
 Cause. The last alone gives the answer which we want. 
 
 There is nothing new in saying that we learn what 
 causality is by our own exercise of it in willing. There 
 
 VOL. I. P
 
 210 MEANINGS OF 'WILL! [Book 1 1. 
 
 is nothing new in saying that willing consists in deter- 
 mining an alternative. But the combination of these two 
 propositions is unusual ; and to clear it from misapprehen- 
 sion and prepare the way for its applied use, it will be 
 advantageous to enumerate the several ranges of meaning 
 which have been given (often without any exact definition) 
 to the word Will by authors, who have made a special 
 study of the faculty which it denotes. 
 
 (1) So far as I am aware, the sense to which I have 
 restricted it, viz. the choice between two alternative directions 
 of activity, is the narrowest which has been given to it. It 
 is so usual, that it is superfluous to quote examples. 
 
 (2) A larger scope is gained for the word by dropping 
 the idea of an alternative, and requiring only action upon 
 conscious motive ; the word motive being understood as end 
 in view. This is the sense in which the word is taken by 
 most determinists among English authors. 
 
 (3) Professor Laurie enlarges the boundaries still further; 
 so as to include the whole energy of the Ego in percipi- 
 ence, whether cognitive or active; and to cover the con- 
 tents of percipience under the twin phrase Reason-Will, 
 either word of which may answer for the other 1 . 
 
 (4) In Mr. Thomas Solly's Treatise on the Will, it is 
 made the source of all, even reflex, action from stimulus 
 or impulse, and therefore treated as predicable of all ani- 
 mated nature 2 . 
 
 (5) Dissatisfied with any remnant of exclusion, Schopen- 
 hauer still widens the door, and admits into the concept all 
 energy whatsoever, and credits Will with all the phenomena 
 of the world, inorganic as well as organic. He therefore 
 withdraws from the components of the word's meaning the 
 items of Consciousness and Idea ; and it becomes for him 
 co-extensive with Force, and is, like Matter, the non- 
 
 1 Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta, Part First, chap. iii. 
 
 2 The Will, Divine and Human, p. 20.
 
 Chap. I.] MEANINGS OF 'WILL! 311 
 
 phenomenal prerequisite to every causal change 1 . He 
 thus, I conceive, identifies Will with the wrong element, 
 viz. with the permanent quantity Force, instead of with the 
 phenomenal act, Cause, which gives direction to a portion 
 of the store. But he rightly appropriates the word Cause 
 to the determinant act. Only, after limiting the meaning 
 of Causality to this selective function, of this rather than 
 that, he was not in a position to say that Force, though not 
 causal, 'lent to all causes their causality:' for it does not 
 lend them their selective or determining f unction > , having none 
 of its own : what it does lend them is the power of realising 
 the particular effect selected. The truer statement would 
 have been, that the selective act is the cause, just on ac- 
 count of its setting free the realising power on the line 
 it has to take. This was doubtless the thought in Scho- 
 penhauer's mind; its form only is disguised by its para- 
 doxical expression. 
 
 The bearing of the foregoing account of the related causal 
 and dynamical ideas upon our conception of the universal 
 order will now be intelligible ; and the briefest outline will 
 prepare the way for the gradual filling-in of its contents. 
 The notion ' Cause ' takes its form from the fundamental 
 antithesis and correspondence of the Ego and the non-Ego, 
 revealed in percipience as the constituents of one whole ; the 
 key to which is necessarily found in the home-factor. Here 
 we learn what it is to be a Cause. It presupposes, because 
 it controls, immanent Power; to which, by an act of will, it 
 gives a selected direction. The alternative open to it may 
 assume either of two forms. The offered power may be at 
 the moment potential only, or may be kinetic. If the 
 former, the alternative is, to leave the equilibrium undis- 
 turbed, or to break in upon it and institute a line of 
 motion. If the latter, the alternative is, to assume and 
 
 1 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Band I, Buch ii. 
 
 p a
 
 212 DUALISM OF [Book II. 
 
 continue the current kinesis, or to alter its direction. It is 
 in this determining act, of initiating or modifying, at will, 
 a given quantity of energy, that the causality of the Ego 
 consists. This act is of all things the most intimately 
 known to us ; and nothing else is known to us (as will be 
 better seen hereafter) that can decide an "alternative. 
 
 As the non-Ego is the correlative of Self, the alter Ego 
 which, under the conditions of antithesis, has to resort to 
 the same categories for its interpretation, it necessarily 
 starts with corresponding predicates. Its changes, as sub- 
 ject to the principle of causality, we have to conceive of as 
 willed, upon the ground of a presupposed power: which 
 power, like our own, is regarded as immanent in the objec- 
 tive nature, only available for possibilities indefinitely more 
 numerous than ours. We begin by attributing to it volitions 
 entirely analogous to our own ; capable of either initiating 
 movement or controlling it ; and in every determination, 
 expressing preference and rejection, and direction upon an 
 end. The objects that act upon us speak to us at the 
 outset as with the voices and the meaning of a living 
 world : every impression which it flings upon our attention 
 seems the delivery of a separate volition ; and, through the 
 simply intuitive infancy of men and nations, life in*its 
 changes is little else than a colloquy between human and 
 superhuman wills. The course of gradual deflection from 
 this initial line of thought will presently be traced. But 
 within our own personal experience of causation there is 
 a provision for correcting and enlarging the crude dualism 
 from which we start. The change on which my will is 
 intent, be it only to get hold of an object seen upon the 
 floor, is not in contact with me and to be immediately had ; 
 but is procurable only through a series of intermediate steps 
 of change within the body and of the body, none of which 
 enter our thought at all, several being quite unknown, yet 
 which execute themselves while our purpose is fixed upon
 
 Chap. I.] WILL-CAUSALITY. 
 
 the end in view. What keeps the executive force rightly 
 directed along these unmeditated instrumental lines ? Since 
 we have not given it a thought, and its passage from be- 
 ginning to end is in the non-Ego (i.e. our organism and its 
 environment), we have to think of it as determined by a 
 Will in nature accordant with our personal will. Our 
 intent is enabled thus to reach its end by the long arm, 
 through the external pre-ordination of mechanical links 
 for the transmission of realising power. The outer Will, 
 which here only relieves us of the executive process, may 
 carry its agency one step further, and reserve to itself the 
 contemplated end as- well as the means ; and then we have 
 the phenomenon of blind instinct, working with unconscious 
 skill towards an issue unforeseen by the creature, yet essen- 
 tial to itself or to its kind. What is left, when thus the 
 non-Ego has more or less superseded the exercise of voli- 
 tion in the dependent being, supplies us with the idea of 
 automatic action. The name is an unfortunate misfit to 
 the conception entrusted to it ; for the phrase would natu- 
 rally mean 'action whose cause is in the subject's self;' 
 whereas what we want to designate is ' action whose cause 
 is not in the subject's self;' the determining Will being 
 elsewhere. The mixed case of personal initiation with 
 automatic execution, exhibiting the consensus of both 
 agents in one nature, presents the apparently necessary 
 as really voluntary, and shows that mechanical inter- 
 mediaries do not disturb, but distinctly exemplify, the 
 Will-Causality. 
 
 The ultimate identity of meaning in the words Cause 
 and Will, and the dependence of the former on the imme- 
 diate consciousness of the latter, are indirectly attested by 
 the frequent recurrence of even the most practised scien- 
 tific intellects to the springs of human action as the true 
 key to the dynamics of outward nature. When we find 
 so severe a mathematician as Euler suggesting that the
 
 214 INDICTMENT AGAINST [Book II. 
 
 essence of gravitation must be ' inclination and desire* l : 
 an astronomer so exact and physicist of range so large 
 as Sir J. Herschel detecting in the sense of effort the proto- 
 type of the causal idea 2 : a physiologist so Democritean 
 as Haeckel obliged to charge his atoms with 'desire and 
 aversion,' ' sensation and will,' to fit them for their work 3 : 
 the psychologist has some encouragement, from the use 
 thus made of his familiar phenomena, to turn with hope 
 to the intellectual record of our first experience for some 
 formula that may grasp the dualism of man and nature, 
 and bring them into the light of a related life. 
 
 2. ' The World as a Heap of Powers' 
 
 The foregoing argument is constructed on the assump- 
 tions, that we know something other than our own states 
 of consciousness ; and that what we thus know plays the 
 part of Cause to our inward and outward experience. Of 
 the philosophers reviewed, every one who has admitted a 
 reality beyond the Ego, whether in the form of a material 
 world, or as the Kantian Ding-an-Sich, or as Berkeley's 
 acts of the Divine Mind, or as the ' Absolute ' of Schelling, 
 has resorted to it as first fountain-head of all that comes 
 upon the scene of things, and charged it with creative or 
 
 1 ' Supposons qu'avant la creation du monde, Dieu n'eut cre"e" que 
 deux corps e'loignes 1'un de 1'autre, qu'il n'existat absolument rien hors 
 d'eux, et qu'ils fussent en repos ; seroit-il possible que 1'un s'approchat 
 de 1'autre, ou qu'ils eussent un penchant a s'approcher? Comment 
 1'un sentiroit-il 1'autre dans 1'dloignment ? Comment pourroit-il 
 avoir un desir de s'en approcher?' Lettres a une Princesse d'Alle- 
 magne (of Anhalt-Dessau, niece of the King of Prussia) sur quelques 
 sujets de Physique et de Philosophic : Lettre 68, Tome I, p. 266. 
 Paris, 1787. Nouvelle Edition, par MM. le Marquis de Condorcet et 
 de la Croix. 
 
 8 Treatise on Astronomy, chap, vii, 370. 
 
 8 Die Perigenesis der Plastidule, pp. 38, 39. The passage is given 
 in Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii, B. ii, Br. i, 6, p. 399, 2nd ed.
 
 Chap. I.] 'THE WORLD OF POWERS? 315 
 
 evolving power. In the processes there traced even the 
 Hegelian idealist finds his key to the rhythm of the uni- 
 verse and the movement of the human mind ; they are 
 answerable, in his view, for the stores of every science, the 
 drama of all history, the rise and fall of all religions. It 
 seemed therefore permissible to say that the Infinite Being 
 presupposed in all phenomena must be sought in the field 
 of his Causality; that there, if anywhere, must certain of 
 his predicates be found ; and that we could not go wrong 
 in reading, on the tota fades natures^ some ideal lineaments 
 of him. 
 
 Of late, however, a new version of Theism has appeared, 
 which divests the Divine Mind of all causality, and finds 
 its perfection in the exact correspondence of its conscious- 
 ness with facts as they are : all-seeing, all-judging, right- 
 thinking, but doing nothing and preventing nothing, it is 
 the infinitude of Reason and the negation of Will. Had I 
 been earlier introduced to this doctrine, and aware of the 
 brilliant ingenuity enlisted in its defence, I should have 
 felt bound to make room for its adequate treatment within 
 the plan of these volumes. As it is too late to do this 
 justice to Professor Royce's theory, I can only refer my 
 readers to his fascinating book 1 ; and meanwhile give such 
 brief account of its main drift, as may render intelligible 
 the grounds of my dissent from it, and apologise for my 
 pursuing my way with only a slight reference to so original 
 and vigorous an essay. 
 
 There is a singular contrast between the opening and 
 the close of the author's enquiry. Leading us to rest at 
 last in the deification of pure cognitive intelligence, he places 
 us for our starting-point at precisely the opposite pole of 
 
 1 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, a Critique of the Bases of 
 Conduct and of Faith : by Josiah Royce, Ph.D., Instructor in Philo- 
 sophy in Harvard College, Boston : the University Press, Cambridge, 
 1885.
 
 2i6 INDICTMENT AGAINST [Book II. 
 
 experience : he requires us to work out our problem, not 
 by the study of things as they are or ideas as they occur, 
 but by shaping action as it ought to be, and giving as- 
 cendency to the right direction of life and character. He 
 institutes a search for a moral ideal ; and rightly insists 
 that it is not to be found in the correct reading of facts ; 
 to know them as they happen to be, does not help us to 
 conceive how they had best be : to effect this, we must 
 change the scene, and from the mere deciphering of the 
 actual turn to the comparison of the possible, following 
 the clue, not of the True, but of the Good. The moment 
 we attempt the choice, we are baffled for want of some 
 authoritative guide ; the ends of life which appeal to us 
 with persuasive power are numerous and far apart. If I 
 listen to that which speaks most home to me, I may be at 
 the mercy of a subjective caprice. If I fling myself into 
 the throng of life, to consult the dominant aims of other 
 men, I am confused by the din of clamorous demands, 
 tormented by the 'warfare of ideals,' and borne hither and 
 thither by their ' instability.' There will be no want of ad- 
 visers willing to rescue me and set me clear ; the dogmatist 
 inviting me into his patent ideal, to drive off with him 
 through the crowd of impostors that fly at his approach ; 
 and the sceptic bidding me disregard the rival pretensions 
 of all, and believe one as good as another, and each best as 
 the fancy takes me. Professor Royce requires me to reject 
 the one as a false redeemer, yet not despair, in spite of the 
 other, of still detei mining a 'highest aim' of human activity, 
 The very hopelessness into which I am plunged by the 
 conflict of incompatible ends of human life, betrays the 
 secret of an ideal beyond them all, and marks the first 
 stirring of a ' moral insight ' stealing towards that ulterior 
 light. If there were nothing to choose among them, why 
 should I care about their strife ? If all are legitimate alike, 
 no one is the worse for their dividing the wills of men
 
 Chap. I.] 'THE WORLD OF POWERS? 317 
 
 among them, and my despondency at the sway of ' chance 
 desires ' is unmeaning. That I cannot part with it shows 
 how I am haunted by a dream of harmony, as the over- 
 topping crown of all the ideals, the re'Aos reXetoraroi; of a 
 ' Universal Will.' The hindrance to the attainment of this 
 end is the pre-occupation of each will with its own par- 
 ticular aim, and the unsympathetic gaze at the different 
 drift of his neighbour's movement. The remedy is plain : 
 break the bounds of your individuality; plant yourself in 
 his enthusiasm ; nay, realise all the several aims that 
 engage the lives of others ; let them be admitted to your 
 thought on equal terms, as if the many wills had coalesced 
 in one ; and in this unification, the conflict will have died 
 away : the moral insight into all human ends will have 
 conquered a peace for each ; and your rule will henceforth 
 be, ' Having made myself, as far as I am able, one with all 
 the conflicting wills before me, I must act out the resulting 
 universal will as it then arises in me 1 .' This 'realisation of 
 others' life ' is to be more than an imaginative representa- 
 tion to yourself of others' type of character ; more even 
 than sympathy with it as a foreign sample of heroism : it 
 must be an entry on your part into their inner conscious- 
 ness, a fusion of your personality with theirs, so complete 
 as to annul the difference between the meum and tuum of 
 aim and experience, and gather all agency into one. By 
 this ' moral insight ' you are lifted above Ithe very antithesis 
 between Self and Not-self: it says to us all, Act as one 
 being ; ' the universal will of the moral insight must aim at 
 the destruction of all which separates us into a heap of 
 different selves, and at the attainment of some higher 
 positive aim : the one undivided soul we are bound to 
 make our ideal ; and the ideal of that soul cannot be the 
 separate happiness of you and of me, nor the negative fact 
 
 1 Royce's Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 172, 173.
 
 2lS INDICTMENT AGAINST [Book II. 
 
 of our freedom from hatred, but must be something above 
 us all, and yet very positive 1 .' 
 
 So l6ng as the author is engaged in contrasting this 
 consciousness that 'Other life is as my life' with the 'in- 
 dividualism ' of the hedonist, of the sentimental cultivator 
 of his own ' beautiful soul,' or of the defiant Titan towards 
 all that resists his fixed intent, he easily persuades us that 
 it has the advantage over them of 'insight' over partial 
 blindness. But by what right is it called l Moral insight'? 
 I see by it that my neighbour's aim is on the same footing 
 of existence as my own ; but not that both can have their 
 way at the same moment ; or, which of them ought to have 
 it in preference to the other. The assemblage of all human 
 ends within one consciousness may level their despotisms 
 into a democracy ; but it neither remedies their incompati- 
 bilities, nor secures them from anarchy. Try the case in 
 your own person : is not your own mind the seat of warring 
 ideals ? and does your ' realisation ' of them as facts in self- 
 consciousness suffice either to end the conflict, or to invest 
 one with the authority of Duty over the other ? If it does, 
 it must be, not by the equalised appeal of all, but by their 
 falling into relative place before you in a hierarchy of right. 
 
 The process of thought indeed which Professor Royce 
 commends to us, viz. of merging our separate selves, of 
 turning our relations to other minds into fusion with them, 
 and losing our finite being in the life of one Universal 
 Will, conducts us, I should say, right away from every 
 possibility of Morals, instead of giving us the key of en- 
 trance to them. By attempting to erase from the world its 
 highest fact, the existence of Personalities, as distinct 
 creative centres, with individualised reason and choice, it 
 removes the conditions of ethical obligation, and treats its 
 enthusiasm as an illusion of the human childhood. Its 
 
 1 Royce's Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 193.
 
 Chap. I.] 'THE WORLD OF POWERS! 219 
 
 professed end is unification of life, not harmonious dif- 
 ferentiation of excellence ; in forgetfulness of the certain 
 fact that, even if it were possible for individual agents to 
 melt themselves into a single being, neither they, nor the 
 'One Universal Will' compounded out of them, could have 
 the slightest power to withdraw our moral interest from 
 the impassioned drama of personal intelligence and cha- 
 racter. Such suppression of individuality in homage to an 
 ' impersonal ' social organism is a relapse into the ruder 
 tribal life, out of which personality is evolved as the higher 
 stage, with its noble characteristics of inalienable trust and 
 imperative Duty. This emphatically it is, this sense of 
 ' other life which is not as my life,' which supplies the 
 'positive' contents of all moral affections and righteous 
 action, and quickens us with fervours of admiration and 
 reverence ; while the common pressure of the circumam- 
 bient ' Universal Will ' is but the negative restraint or regu- 
 lative condition, prescribing the limits within which the 
 free soul is to find and work out what is given it to do. 
 In the 'realising' process therefore, which is said to pro- 
 mise unification of wills, I cannot acknowledge anything 
 tantamount to ' moral insight.' 
 
 Suppose however that the ' instability' and 'conflict' of 
 aims were removed by mutual ' realisation ' of wills, and 
 that the resulting 'ideal,' in thus attaining unity, eo ipso 
 became ' moral ' and was identical with the Right ; is this 
 enough for the ends of character, and the strength of life ? 
 For inward harmony perhaps it may suffice ; but Professor 
 Royce remembers that in this inward life we feel ourselves 
 face to face with the world's outward reality ; and that it 
 must make a vast difference to us, what the behaviour of 
 that reality may be towards the visions which we chase. 
 He admits that ' our religious consciousness wants support 
 in our poor efforts to do right ' ; that ' we want to know 
 that when we do right, we are not alone ; that there is
 
 220 INDICTMENT AGAINST [Book II. 
 
 something outside of us that harmonises with our moral 
 efforts by being itself in some way moral;' either 'as a 
 person or a tendency,' the former to give sustaining sym- 
 pathy with righteousness, the latter to ' make for it ' by a 
 blind drift of force. He therefore sets out in search of 
 some answer to this natural need ; ready to accept the 
 best that he can honestly find ; but resolved to dress up 
 no illusions and be imposed upon by no evasions. The 
 pure love of truth which animates his critical enquiry 
 claims emphatic recognition ; so far as intellectual justice 
 is at the command of will, the author administers it with 
 the utmost simplicity and good faith. If ever he does 
 wrong to a theory which he condemns, it is that he 
 brings to philosophy, as we all must, some involuntary 
 predisposition. Entering it from the midst of the He- 
 gelian Zeitgeist, and passing through it under the spell of 
 Faust and Mephistopheles, he unconsciously works with 
 canons of judgment by no means secure, and applies them 
 to a world seen through disturbing media and discolouring 
 lights. He makes indeed tender allowance for the simple 
 souls that can still look on the evolution of things as some- 
 thing divine ; but with so condescending or even super- 
 cilious an air, as to imply rather a repression of impatience 
 than a 'realising' appreciation. 
 
 The general result of his criticism directed upon all 
 theories of 'the world as a heap of powers,' i.e. of its 
 phenomena as effects, is entirely negative : they supply 
 the history of nature and of man with no religious signi- 
 ficance. Beginning with the scientific conception of natural 
 phenomena as subject to definable laws, themselves resolv- 
 able into wider generalisations, ascending in their higher 
 stages towards a single formula, whence all the changes in 
 time might be deduced and predicted, the author looks in 
 vain for any religious meaning in such a system of ' dead 
 mathematical facts.' It is said indeed to be found in the
 
 Chap. I.] 'THE WORLD OF POWERS' 221 
 
 law of progressive evolution which runs through them, and 
 makes the future of living beings better than the past ; -but 
 the interpreters of that law themselves explain it as a tran- 
 sient oscillation of rising and falling temperature, which, as 
 it has already spent itself upon the moon, will at last con- 
 dense the solar system into a mass of darkness and of 
 death. And if, in a universe made up of such dreary 
 periodicities, it is hard to read anything divine, still less 
 contentment can we feel in a progress assumed to be in- 
 finite, yet, after a past eternity of work, leaving the world 
 still under the load of ills which make it sad. What trust 
 can we place in an everlasting power 'that makes for 
 righteousness,' and yet has brought us no nearer to it than 
 we are now ? Hence, the author concludes, in our search 
 for the ' moral worth ' of the world, we must look, not to 
 its history through Time, as it moves on in act and change, 
 but to its timeless entity ; to what it really is, and not to 
 what it seems to do. 'That which changes not, wherein is 
 no variableness, neither shadow of turning, must give us 
 the real religious truth upon which all else will depend 1 .' 
 I own myself unable to conceive ' what moral worth ' there 
 can ' always be in the world,' irrespective of all that hap- 
 pens in it. A crystallised existence, whose contents always 
 are and never stir, I cannot invest with an ethical constitu- 
 tion. ' Moral worth' surely has no meaning beyond the 
 sphere of voluntary agency : it is a predicate only of what 
 is flung by Will upon the "theatre of time ; and to close 
 that theatre against it is to refuse it life. 
 
 It is obvious that a writer whose ' ideal ' can put up 
 with nothing 'historical' and can live only outside the 
 bounds of change, must be impartially disaffected towards 
 all speculative efforts to conceive the origin and interpret 
 the development of the natural order to which we belong. 
 
 1 Royce's Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 251.
 
 222 INDICTMENT AGAINST [Book II. 
 
 Turning from the mathematical conceptions of mechanical 
 Physics to the monistic hypotheses which have re-edited 
 their book of Genesis from the time of Leibniz to that 
 of Clifford and Haeckel, Professor Royce easily sweeps 
 them from the field, by simply re-loading the same bat- 
 teries of argument. With atoms 'potentially' psychical 
 and actually material, or vice versd, you can of course 
 fetch up anything you like, minimising or maximising the 
 conscious or thinking function ad libitum, and can find 
 room in space for all grades of being, from infinite Reason 
 to the slough of decaying organisms. But if infinitesimal 
 bits of incipient consciousness can add themselves up into 
 the highest Mind, they can take themselves to pieces into 
 the lowest Matter ; and we are but in a scene where gods 
 and men come and go like the spring and autumn leaves. 
 Or, if you place the process at the disposal of a prior 
 Universal Reason, what is the need that sinks it from its 
 perfection to the borders of unconsciousness, to begin 
 again to be what it already is? and in its quest of the 
 higher stage, why spend an eternity in lingering on the 
 lower? Whence this circuitous labour in the creative 
 Reason for approaching a perfection which is inherent and 
 unresisted in itself? If the world is the manifestation of 
 infinite Mind, it can be no process of growth or of endless 
 cycles of growth : ' the Eternal One is always at the goal,' 
 and can never be where there is any wrong or error to be 
 banished or transcended. 
 
 The philosopher who has thus committed himself to 
 an absolute and motionless ideal cannot be expected to 
 find any solution of the problem of -evil in the moralist's 
 idea of a probationary Freewill. He listens to no such 
 plea. It is enough for him that failure, misery and wrong 
 can never slip past the flaming sword of prohibition, unless 
 through defect of will or defect of power in the eternal 
 Good. Come whence they may, they are foreign to the
 
 Chap. I.] 'THE WORLD OF POWERS? 223 
 
 infinitely Perfect ' with whom no evil dwells.' On similar 
 grounds, the Theist's recognition of intellectual purpose 
 in the structure and drama of created natures is rejected 
 as a puerile imagination ; implying the presence of material 
 conditions and tools as external data to the all-compre- 
 hending One. This whole group of criticisms will come 
 under review hereafter. I do but describe them here, 
 as the crowning feature of Professor Royce's doctrine on 
 its negative side. By way of prelude to his religious 
 theory, he clears out of his path, as having nothing to 
 say to him on sacred things, the whole phenomenal world, 
 physical and human, that falls under Law and betakes 
 itself to the category of Causality ; and, stopping his ears 
 to its confused and dissonant voices, he steals into the 
 midnight silence, and lifts his eye to the dome of In- 
 finitude to see what he can decipher of the Eternal. 
 
 It is from the station, and through the lens, of the 
 Idealist, that his survey is made, and his interpretation 
 devised. He knows nothing but his own ideas ; and his 
 knowing is only another idea added on to them : both 
 are facts within his consciousness ; one of them the object 
 of the other, but neither of them beyond the enclosure 
 of the home phenomena. Our author however does not 
 rest permanently in this initial position of subjective 
 idealism : for he insists that, if that were all, error, 
 the most certain of human facts, would be impossible. 
 Consisting as it does in disagreement between a judgment 
 and the thing judged, how could it exist if both were 
 ideas co-present in ourselves ? What do we mean in 
 affirming their agreement but that to our consciousness 
 they are alike ? What then is the disagreement or unlike- 
 ness of which we are unconscious ? for, except as affections 
 of consciousness, there is no shred of fact or being in them. 
 If, as our ideas, a possible subject and predicate shall 
 disagree, it is we that feel it, and in asserting it can say
 
 224 INDICTMENT AGAINST [Book II. 
 
 nothing but the truth. Unless truth and error are 
 to be replaced by mere resemblance and difference of 
 ideas, such as may belong to the consistency and con- 
 trasts of a dream, some escape must be found from 
 1 total relativity,' into a reality beyond consciousness, 
 and available as measuring its worth. To such reality 
 Berkeley found his way by one path ; our author ex- 
 plores another. 
 
 The reasoning of the former is well known. The states 
 of feeling and idea which form the thread of my experience 
 rise up within me unbidden and are no work of mine. 
 They extort from me the question, 'Whence are they?' 
 The first answer, on which my instinct of causality hastily 
 seizes, says, ' they are delivered to you by the perceptible 
 objects that occupy and animate the space around you, 
 and to which is entrusted the function of educating your 
 senses and opening your understanding to the laws and 
 constitution of the world.' These educating media however 
 have no more put themselves there, and determined what 
 they shall do to me when entering on their work, than 
 have my sensible impressions turned up by self-origination. 
 They too demand their causality ; and can have it only in 
 the infinite Mind which is the Cause of causes and the 
 Fount of thought. But if so, what does His agency gain 
 by devolution on a material intermediary system which 
 does nothing but transmit it, and serves no purpose unless 
 it be to hide its author from unawakened eyes ? Remove 
 out of the way this fictitious delegation of power, and 
 nothing is lost. All finite minds are but left alone with 
 the Infinite, to be taught immediately by his method, 
 disciplined by his laws, and drawn into communion 
 with his spirit. The inference therefore is direct, that 
 ' there is an Omnipresent Eternal Mind, which knows 
 and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our 
 view in such a manner, and according to such rules as
 
 Chap. I.] 'THE WORLD OF POWERS.' 225 
 
 he himself hath ordained, and are by us termed laws 
 of nature*.' 
 
 To break the bounds of subjective Idealism on this 
 track was rendered impossible to Professor Royce by his 
 repudiation of the category of causality, as absolutely 
 inapplicable to transcendental thought and religious use. 
 He betakes himself instead to the following inference from 
 the assumed possibility of error : the existence of error 
 involves the existence of truth, in relation to which alone 
 it declares itself to be error. Truth is true thought, the 
 apprehension of reality. But we, as subjectively limited to 
 our own ideas, and unable to compare them with anything 
 beyond, are placed out of reach of this, in common with 
 all created minds. There must therefore be, as seat of 
 truth, a universal 'containing mind,' the measure of all 
 thought In the author's words, 'the agreement or the 
 disagreement of my judgments with their intended objects 
 exists and has meaning for an actual thought, a con- 
 sciousness, to which both these related terms are present, 
 viz. both the judgment and the object with which it is 
 to agree 2 .' This thesis, copiously argued and illustrated, 
 is the author's warrant for finding his sole reality in an 
 ' all-inclusive thought,' ' the one concept of the universe, 
 which constitutes the Divine mind, wherein all the facts 
 of possible experience are comprehended and reduced to 
 perfect unity 3 ,' and variously called 'the Right/ 'the 
 Ideal,' 'the Absolute' mind, 'the Infinite thought/ 'the 
 Judge/ 'the All-knower/ 'the Seer/ 'the All-Enfolder.' 
 The relation of this omniscient to human intelligence is 
 thus presented : ' as my thought at any time, and however 
 engaged, combines several fragmentary thoughts into the 
 unity of one conscious moment, so, we affirm, does the 
 
 1 Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, iii. Cf. Royce, pp. 340, 
 
 341- 
 Royce, p. 377. P. 463. 
 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 226 INDICTMENT AGAINST [Book II. 
 
 universal thought combine the thoughts of all of us into 
 an absolute unity of thought, together with all the objects 
 and all the thoughts about those objects that are, or have 
 been, or will be, or can be, in the universe. This Universal 
 Thought is what we have ventured, for the sake of con- 
 venience, to- call God 1 .' As the being thus revealed is 
 introduced simply to complete the theory of knowledge 
 and save the distinction between truth and error, he is 
 identified with pure cognition, and has infinitude only 
 in the intellectual dimension : his universal consciousness 
 holding ' all the powers as necessary facts in the infinite 
 Thought 2 ,' but unconcerned with any of them : they 
 are not his, except to look at. He is all insight, without 
 agency. 
 
 With sincere admiration for Professor Royce's ' critique ' 
 as a feat of intellectual gymnastic, I am unable to ac- 
 company him to his new base of religious philosophy, or 
 acquiesce in his despair of the ground which he abandons. 
 His leap out of his subjective idealism to the all-containing 
 Reason as the complementary reality cannot, I believe, 
 be made good. The existence of error no doubt implies 
 some reality which is misconceived, and which, to better 
 intelligence, might become rightly conceived. But it does 
 not imply the presence of such intelligence, therefore not 
 the existence of truth, which is apprehended reality. Surely 
 a fallible percipient may sit before an object of perception, 
 and by missing some of its marks, may carry off a wrong 
 concept of it, without anybody, on that account, having 
 a right one. And the same observer, returning to the 
 object, may discover the misfit of his old concept to his 
 new percept, and exchange his error for the truth ; and 
 this possibility of agreement or disagreement of idea with 
 fact, a possibility incident to every finite intelligence, is 
 
 ' Pp. 475, 476. 2 P. 477-
 
 Chap. I.] 'THE WORLD OF POWERS' 227 
 
 all that is needed to ground the distinction between false 
 and true. Never, surely, was a more wonderful a priori 
 necessity discovered, than that, because one mind is 
 ignorant, there must be another that knows. If our errors 
 are to be our only security for the existence of Omniscient 
 mind, the divine light of life is near its final eclipse. 
 Again and again philosophers have looked with more 
 or less of awe upon the intelligence of Man and the 
 marvellous range of truth through which it is permitted to 
 expatiate ; and have accepted this finite manifestation of 
 Reason as a sample and pledge of an Infinite fountain 
 of intellectual light that for ever feeds the lesser fires of 
 thought. But it is a new thing to learn that our blindness 
 is the proof of eternal vision, and our illusions the guarantee 
 of unerring Mind that knows them as facts, but inter- 
 meddles not. 
 
 Not wishing however to stop up any path which can 
 lead reflecting men to the recognition of an omnipresent 
 Reason, I refrain from further critical exception to this 
 affirmative part of our author's theory. My purpose is, 
 not to disturb the intellectual predicates of his 'One 
 universal Mind} but to reclaim the moral predicates of 
 the One supreme Will. I content myself therefore with 
 a few words of protest against the refusal to admit the 
 ' category of causality ' and the ' world of powers,' that is, 
 the entire phenomenal universe, into the study of the 
 religious problem. 
 
 (i) You cannot, if you would, cut away and cast off, the 
 story and drama of the world, as acted out in Time, from 
 its existence as transcendental and eternal. They are two 
 correlates of one thought, and have no significance apart. 
 If you could blot out and forget the life and movement of 
 the scene, the whole contents of your object would be 
 gone, and nothing be left but a metaphysic blank of 
 empty possibility. To condemn me to attend only to
 
 228 INDICTMENT AGAINST [Book II. 
 
 what always is and never happens is to hang me up alone 
 in infinite space to look out for perfection. 
 
 (2) If compliance with the demand were possible, it 
 would forfeit all moral ideas and possibilities on the way 
 to your religion : for they have no meaning and no home 
 but on the field of action and as directors of causation. 
 And similarly, when your goal is reached, you find there 
 a clear ' Seer,' cognisant of facts, but indifferent to them : 
 pure thought, without character, without affection, without 
 will : unmoral intelligence of what is. 
 
 (3) In thus defining the supreme ideal, you set Reason 
 above Righteousness ; and that, not by including Righteous- 
 ness in it, but by dispensing (through denial of Will) with 
 the very possibility of Righteousness. Whatever ' religious 
 significance ' flows into life from such a faith is for the 
 pure Student or Philosopher alone, and has no entrance 
 into the experience of man as actor and as sufferer. 
 
 (4) If Religion has but this one thing to affirm, ' We 
 know only that the highest truth is already attained from 
 all eternity in the Infinite Thought, and that for that 
 thought the victory that overcometh the world is once 
 for all won * : ' if it has no concern with the working of 
 such natural laws as the conservation of physical forces, 
 the evolution of life, the dissipation of energy, or those 
 which determine the rise and fall of nations, the relations 
 of suffering and sin, the conflicts of passion and character, 
 but stands aloo f from all ' the powers in the world : ' if 
 it has nothing to say 'about individual immortality, 
 nothing about any endless future progress of our species, 
 nothing about the certainty that what men call from 
 without goodness must empirically triumph just here in 
 this little world about us J : ' then its speech is thin, and 
 its silence terrible ; the one, almost lost in the infinite 
 
 1 Royce, p. 478.
 
 Chap. I.] THE WORLD OF POWERS.' 22$ 
 
 through which it comes ; the other, with its awful weight, 
 crushing us into despair. What is to become of the 
 problems with which it declines to deal ? Are they to lie 
 dead before us ? Or, if we take them up, are we expected 
 to handle them as we should dissect a corpse, with all the 
 tender reverence gone which guides and lightens the 
 operator's touch of the thrilling nerves of life ? Do they 
 involve no moral issues ? Do they trench upon no vener- 
 ating affections ? Can the pessimism and cynicism into 
 which, it is admitted, some of their possible solutions may 
 plunge me, co-exist with that calm vision of infinite 
 contemplative intellect which constitutes the surviving 
 Religion ? I cannot believe it : this meagre remnant of 
 metaphysical idealism will disappear in the devouring 
 confusion of scorn, compassion and dismay, which ensues 
 when the enigmas of humanity are supposed to be in- 
 different to God and abandoned to blind powers. 
 
 These reasons will at least explain my refusal to strike 
 out, from the treatment of Theism, the whole chapter 
 which deals with the origin and tendency of natural and 
 human affairs. The pathetic weight of difficulty and 
 suspense with which that chapter is overcharged I do not 
 lightly estimate : but I would rather bear its burden for 
 ever, or lay it down in simple trust, than expel from it all 
 that is divine, and freeze the Object of Religion into a 
 crystalline infinitude of Thought that never moves or 
 melts. The particular doubts, the alleged contradictions, 
 which meet us when we try to take up the woes and 
 wrongs of life into any sacred system, will, one by one, be 
 taken into account as we proceed. As a prelude to this, 
 I am here content to show that they are not, in limine, to 
 be banished, by a metaphysical non-suit, from a hearing in 
 the court. 
 
 Reverting then to the starting point of this digression, 
 we rest on the position, that power is known to us ex-
 
 230 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 clusively by our own exercise of it, not in the mere 
 muscular delivery of an act, but in the internal initiation 
 or direction of it ; that in our intuitive belief of causality 
 we mean, that all phenomena, as such, issue from power 
 which is not phenomenal : that each phenomenon is de- 
 termined to be this and not that, by an act of will, 
 immediate or mediate : and that, in thinking of causation, 
 we are absolutely limited to the one type known to us : 
 and so, behind every event, whatever its seat and whatever 
 its form, must post, near or far, the same idea, taken from 
 our own voluntary activity. This, it is plain, is tanta- 
 mount to saying, that all which happens in nature has 
 One kind of cause, and that cause a Will like ours ; and 
 that the universe of originated things is the product of 
 a supreme Mind. And precisely thus, by no less immediate 
 a step, are we carried, by the causal intuition, to the first 
 truth of Religion. 
 
 3. Will and Modes of Force. 
 
 The study of force or energy (for the present purpose 
 it is needless to distinguish them) from the physical end 
 does not at first seem to agree in its results with the psy- 
 chological analysis of its meaning ; for the text-books of 
 science speak of a plurality of forces, and enumerate them 
 as objects of separate investigation, and formulate their 
 laws, in notations which are not interchangeable. If, how- 
 ever, we compare the more recent treatises with the older, 
 we find a progressive reduction of differences ; sound, 
 light, heat, electricity, magnetism transformed from mere 
 qualitative distinctions into varieties of motion ; chemistry 
 invading the astronomer's observatory and aspiring to 
 analyse the sun and stars ; a physiological calculus devised 
 to express the intensities of sensation and the velocity of 
 its transmission ; and the doctrine advanced, that the 
 several kinds of force are capable of passing into each
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 231 
 
 other, and in their apparent contrast are only masks of 
 the same. Far as this doctrine is from being yet thoroughly 
 established, it serves as an index pointing in the direction 
 of future discovery ; and foreshowing as its goal the fusion 
 of all forces into one homogeneous power ; establishing 
 thus at least a numerical conformity between physics and 
 psychology. 
 
 But then comes the other question, how can we work 
 out, with a single cause, an adequate explanation of the 
 most diversified effects ? Homogeneous power will account 
 for nothing in particular, because accounting for all things 
 alike ; or, to use the neat scholastic phrase, it will account for 
 their existence, but not for their essence. If we refer every- 
 thing to Divine Will, we are met by the same difficulty 
 which the Necessarian urges when we claim for the human 
 will a command of two directions, either A or B : a power, 
 he says, which may run down either line, does not explain 
 why the one is taken and the other left, and when we ask 
 for a cause y this is precisely what we want to know ; and 
 to answer us, not with the deciding fact which determines 
 the actual phenomenon and shuts the door on the remain- 
 ing possibilities, but with the force which embraces them 
 all alike, is to tell us nothing. This defect, it would seem, 
 must always attach to a dynamical theory of causation. 
 If to the question, ' What made the temple of Dagon fall ?' 
 I reply, ' The force of gravitation,' I name what also made 
 it stand ; your enquiry being, ' What turned its standing 
 into falling?' it is not met till I say, 'Samson pulled the 
 pillars down.' It will be found that every such question 
 carries an implied alternative, 'why was it this rather 
 than tkatf It is the difference between two possible 
 realizations which we require to have explained ; and the 
 scale will always be turned by a phenomenon, the entrance 
 of something which overthrows an equilibrium, or the with- 
 drawal of something which preserves it, and a consequent
 
 233 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 movement in a definite direction. I hear, for instance, 
 that Captain H. is dead, and apply to you for an expla- 
 nation. If you say ' his ship was caught in the cyclone,' 
 you refer the fact to his being in this place rather than 
 that. If you say 'he would not take to the boat with 
 the mate and passengers,' you tell me why, others being 
 saved, he was lost If you say, ' he was washed overboard 
 before the ship foundered,' you explain his meeting death 
 in this mode rather than that. If you say, ' he was sixty 
 years of age and could not swim to the rock like the rest,' 
 you tell me why the same external conditions were, in 
 different cases, attended by different results. If you say, 
 'he was an organised being and had to come to an end 
 some time,' you distinguish his fate from that of a fairy 
 or an angel. In every case the enquirer is supposed to 
 have an alternative in his view ; and the reply selects the 
 incident which excludes the one possibility and gives the 
 advantage to the other. No one, then, can be in a con- 
 dition to reply, who cannot lay his finger on the one fact 
 which makes the difference ; and this can be found only 
 in the series of concurrent phenomena which meet upon 
 the point. Find there the antecedent which is known to 
 be the invariable precursor of the event in question, and 
 in naming this you set curiosity at rest. Say that you 
 saw the lightning, and the clap of thunder is explained. 
 Here, then, is an advantage, it would seem, in the pheno- 
 menal theory of causality over the dynamical ; it is dis- 
 criminative, and gives a reason for one thing happening 
 rather than another ; whilst the other, deriving everything 
 from a homogeneous source, leaves all differentiation in 
 the dark. Yet, curiously enough, we have seen that in 
 the phenomenal theory there is involved no idea of cau- 
 sality at all. If events were perfectly loose from one 
 another, while preserving their time-order as at present, 
 so that each prior served as a premonitory symptom of
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 233 
 
 what was coming, that is, if there were only laws and no 
 causes, the very same information might be given to the 
 curiosity of enquirers. So that causal questions, which are 
 left unanswered by a true dynamic doctrine, are success- 
 fully disposed of by mere chronological relations, that 
 might be there, though there were only uniformity without 
 cause. Is it possible to relieve this paradox ? Let us see 
 whether any light can be thrown upon it by tracing the 
 natural history of the causal idea in its principal stages. 
 
 In conformity with the primitive intuition 'everything 
 that begins to exist is put forth by a will-directed power,' 
 all nature is at first alive ; hardly distinguished in this 
 respect from the men and creatures that move among the 
 trees and by the streams, and in whom the animation of 
 the world does but culminate. The very contrast, at last 
 so striking, between the ' articulate speaking ' race and the 
 dumbness of the scene around, would not be strongly 
 marked in the first efforts of feeling to make signs for 
 itself; and the blending of man with nature, not indeed 
 by a conscious entering of sympathy, but by an uncon- 
 scious absence of detachment, would exceed any measure 
 which we can now conceive. Every conspicuous change 
 on the earth or in the heavens, or in the lot of those 
 around him, would look at him with fierce or gentle eyes, 
 terrifying him as with anger, or soothing him as with 
 sympathy : the swollen stream that sweeps his hut away, 
 the riven tree that falls and kills his child, being the 
 messages of retributory power ; the happy season and the 
 fortunate chace, the expressions of favouring will. And 
 this would be to him the master-key of the world, the 
 grand difference among its events, what were the volitions 
 that spoke from behind them? were they against him? 
 or were they for him ? If we suppose him (as with pre- 
 ponderating probability we may) to be a virtual mono- 
 theist in his conception, his only philosophy, could he
 
 234 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 shape it into expression, would be, that the great Will 
 looked through the light and dark in changing moods, 
 and determined itself to now this and now that, for the 
 purpose of the hour. Each moving event would have its 
 own volition, just as a simple but narrow piety still sees 
 special providences and evident judgments in exceptional 
 or even ordinary incidents of life. And the sole classi- 
 fication of phenomena would follow the resemblances of 
 volition ; which would themselves be no more than two, 
 according as they brought good or evil to man, and spake 
 of a power propitious or adverse. In other words, all that 
 happens would be grouped according to its feel\ and 
 whatever was felt alike would be referred to a similar 
 power, or exercise of Will. Human sensibility makes the 
 first tentative in classification, and puts together things of 
 like drift (Zweck). 
 
 But this state of things cannot continue. For, quite 
 another grouping is forced upon the experience of men. 
 Perception contradicts sensibility. Judged by their aveng- 
 ing pang, the flood, the hurricane, the bolt of fire, are all 
 of the same kind, gestures of the angry God, differing 
 only as his frown from his voice, or his right arm from 
 his left. But judged by their aspect as objects of per- 
 ception, they are of very different kinds : they speak to 
 separate senses, the ear, the eye, the pressure on the limbs ; 
 and when thrown into order by these relations, divide 
 themselves into the distinct elements, water, air, and light. 
 Can each of these then be referred to one single act of 
 God, and charged upon a motive of favour or of wrath ? 
 It is impossible. For the water which lays waste the 
 wintry fields will irrigate and enrich the summer grain ; 
 the wind which rages in the trees to-day will caress and 
 play with them to-morrow ; the light does not always 
 wander, and flash, and strike, but, keeping at home in sun 
 and moon to bear their messages, sets the earth aglow
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 235 
 
 with life, or, looking through starry eyes, holds watch over 
 it by night. And so, things alike in their drift part in their 
 looks ; and things alike in their looks part in their drift. 
 The question therefore arises, which of the two orders 
 introduces us to the units of Divine volition ? Does that 
 volition change with every phenomenon that plays with 
 different effect on our sensibility, and rise and sink with 
 the undulations of joy and grief? Can we count the 
 numbers of his will by the reckoning of our own vicissi- 
 tudes? Or does his fiat divide itself according to the 
 visible elements and outward resemblances of things, at 
 one moment, ' let there be light/ at another, ' let there be 
 air,' at a third, ' let there be life ? ' Here in its cradle lies 
 a momentous problem, whether the successions of history 
 or the structure of nature more truly give the order of 
 the Divine mind. The answer, always given at first by 
 inward feeling, goes over inevitably to the other side, and 
 falls in with the arrangements of outward observation. As 
 the mind's eye learns to take a wider sweep, the vast and 
 stately universe gains on our small life, and the supreme 
 Ruler is seen to have something else to do than to move 
 with our tides, and work the All by their ebb and flow. 
 The same act or object producing mixed or even opposite 
 effects on human feeling, as the plague which prostrates 
 the criminal may also carry off the saint that tends him, 
 it cannot be for either of these ends, but must come from 
 some thought to which these are incidental ; and we must 
 pass behind them for its source. We are thus driven to 
 seek a separate significance for each group of phenomena 
 similar in look, however different their feel, that is, to 
 construe every law of nature into a single thought or unit 
 of volition. It is not that the significance is killed out and 
 abolished from the phenomena ; but that it shifts its dis- 
 tribution, and is sought in new groupings and by a different 
 rule.
 
 236 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 But this new rule changes the whole interior view of the 
 Divine Agency ; replacing multifarious and fluctuating 
 impulse pro re nata by a few great lines of purpose, each 
 curving round and embracing innumerable particulars, and 
 all forming sections of a universal plan. Every law repre- 
 sents one thought and is the explicit unfolding of one 
 comprehensive and standing volition ; it constitutes therefore 
 a single genus of power, which will not swerve till all its 
 contents be delivered. In relation to its origin, it is still 
 an act of Will, settling what was indeterminate before ; in 
 relation to its effects, it is a dynamic constant, an invariable 
 necessity, and, when we look away from its source, a force 
 of nature which can be depended upon to lend itself to our 
 computation. What in one aspect is a Divine idea in 
 another is a natural force ; and it is simply by forgetting 
 the upper relation and shutting our attention up with the 
 lower, that we pass from the free religious conception to 
 the ministrative and scientific. Further ; since now the 
 proximate object of Divine choice is seen to be always a 
 general law and not the particular phenomena except as 
 comprised in its budget of effects, of the differences among 
 these phenomena there is no longer any account ; they are 
 all upon the same footing, emanations from the same act 
 as the fountain head ; and the question arises, how is it 
 that the same atrta turns out mixed results, now calm, now 
 stern, now life, now death ? We used to account for such 
 variations by a change of will ; but now, confined within 
 the limits of identical purpose, we have to look out for a 
 new explanation. The force being given, what is it that 
 determines the phenomenon to happen so and so, and not 
 otherwise ? There are two possible ways of answering this 
 question. 
 
 It might be said, a Dynamic act, a causal volition, cannot 
 be self-contained : were it even movement pure and simple, 
 it must move something and have space to move in ; it
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 237 
 
 must be directed upon some object, on which it impinges, 
 and which it affects or modifies. This indispensable datum 
 will necessarily have some voice in the effect, and by its 
 nature and constitution will impose limits on the possible 
 achievements of the power. However little you allow to it 
 short of absolute vacuity, there will be some variations 
 which it shuts out ; and it will therefore account for those 
 not being on the list of realizations. To this assumption 
 of a primordial necessity, or conditioning matter, Plato 
 resorts for an explanation of the imperfection of things ; 
 between the Divine ideals as they are in heaven and as 
 they appear on earth there is an inevitable interval ; and 
 the Creator could only make the universe as near to his 
 own thought as this condition allowed. The actual phe- 
 nomena having thus two factors, the second would take 
 charge of whatever the first left indeterminate. 
 
 But without resorting to a dualism which seems to 
 involve the eternity of matter, we may find our answer on 
 undisputed ground. Even if the first dynamic act, or 
 causal volition, took place in vacuo, the second would find 
 the first already there and would no longer have the field 
 to itself; in the course of their histories they might meet 
 and cross : like two systems of undulations in unequal 
 time upon the same fluid, they would variously modify 
 each other, the swifter overtaking the slower, now adding 
 itself on to the crest of the wave, and now subtracting 
 itself from the hollow. A third and a fourth law, launched 
 into the same field, would multiply the variations ; the 
 whole co-existing set furnishing mutually modifying in- 
 fluences. The universe thus constituted would be a vast 
 assemblage of powers, each yielding its own series of 
 effects, yet subject to the mingling encounter of all the 
 rest ; and the actual phenomena would be the resultant 
 arising at the intersection of the crossing lines. The form 
 of each change would be due, not simply to its own generic
 
 238 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II, 
 
 law, but, in its distinctive character, to the concomitant 
 agencies which entered as factors into the equilibrium of 
 the moment. We thus gain the idea of the conditions of an 
 event, as supplementary to its cause, the waiTtai which 
 surround the proper alrta, which qualify its effect, and 
 'without which the cause could not exercise its causality 1 .' 
 And, as attention may fix at will on any one of the forces 
 subscribing to the result, and shift from this to that, we 
 can see how possible it is to treat them all as on a par, and, 
 abolishing any pre-eminence among them, throw them into 
 a democracy of ' conditions ' and call them collectively the 
 ' cause.' This is the principle of the well-known definition 
 of cause which Mr. J. S. Mill has borrowed from Hobbes, 
 and placed in the ascendant by his great authority 2 . 
 
 It deserves remark however that the two accounts of 
 ' Cause,' viz. as the ' invariable antecedent ' of the Effect, 
 and as the 'aggregate of its conditions,' are not inter- 
 changeable ; the former being founded on the successional 
 doctrine of causation, which wants a prior phenomenon ; 
 the latter, on the dynamic doctrine, which looks out for a 
 synchronous balance of forces in the crisis of being dis- 
 turbed. If the essence of the causal relation lies in the 
 Time-order, then ' invariable antecedent ' (by which, I 
 suppose, everyone will understand an . event that happens] 
 is a very proper synonym for ' Cause.' But the phrase is 
 plainly inapplicable to a cluster of ' conditions,' largely 
 consisting of quiescent attitudes and relations of things, 
 and including the non-phenomenal elements of space and 
 time. When we speak of the ' condition ' of a change, we 
 are thinking in terms of the doctrine of equilibrium. We 
 first collect, as the statical ground of the common effect, 
 
 1 Plato, Tim. 46 D. 
 
 3 Mill's System of Logic, B. Ill, chap, v, 3 ; Hobbes' Elements 
 of Philosophy, Part I, chap, vi, lo; Part II, chap, ix, 3 ; Moles- 
 worth, vol. i, pp. 77, 122.
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 239 
 
 the components of the momentary position which balance 
 one another and keep their forces in the potential state ; 
 and then we fix upon the completing phenomenon which, 
 on entering, breaks the equilibrium and, by releasing a 
 portion of kinetic energy, decides the suspended alternative. 
 This determining circumstance is also one of the conditions, 
 and may long lurk among them before we distinguish it 
 from the rest ; but when we detect its peculiarity, we single 
 it out, Kar ffrxnv, as Cause ; though well aware that the 
 liberated energy must be credited in due measure to the 
 equilibrated conditions as well. When we take the dynamic 
 idea as the key of the causal relation, it is at our option 
 either, with Hobbes, to mass all the conditions together, 
 both potential and kinetic, under shelter of the word 
 'Cause,' or, as is more usual, to reserve the term for the 
 latter alone, and allow to the former exclusive possession 
 of the word ' conditions.' And as the potential conditions 
 wait for the interposition of the kinetic to give birth to the 
 effect, it is easy to see how the Time-order of ' antecedent 
 and consequent' enters as a concurrent sign of causality, 
 and so may come to be mistaken for it. But when we 
 take the formula of time-succession as our only key, we are 
 limited to a linear track, and are encumbered by a number 
 of synchronous conditions lying all around, for which we 
 have no provision within our narrow category of ante 
 post, 
 
 I must here guard this exposition from one inference 
 which its language, if left unqualified, would naturally 
 suggest. The segregation, from among the total con- 
 ditions, of the particular determinant emphasized as 
 'Cause,' has been attributed to its kinetic character, as 
 contrasted with the simply potential function of the rest. 
 This does not mean that it is selected for any objective 
 activity it has, as opposed to an objective passivity in its 
 copartners ; but merely, that it is the circumstance which
 
 240 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 turns the scale of the alternative present to our mind and 
 puts one branch of it out of the question. If a cause is 
 that which settles a doubt between this and that, conceived 
 as alike possible, I cannot point it out to you in any parti- 
 cular case, unless I know the two possibles assumed in your 
 thought On learning them, I may perhaps be able to show 
 you that one of them is intrinsically not possible at all ; and 
 then, the other will not have to come into being, but will 
 stand as actual without help of extraneous energy. Or again, 
 if you ask me the cause of the earth's elliptic orbit, I must 
 learn, before I answer, what else you are thinking that its 
 line of motion might be. Should your meaning be ' what 
 keeps it curving round, instead of making straight for the 
 Sun ? ' I shall of course refer you to an original rectilinear 
 projectile force. Should your idea, on the other hand, be 
 ' What prevents it from flying off at a tangent into infinite 
 space?' I shall name its gravitation to the solar mass. 
 Here there are no passive conditions ; and the answers are 
 given by adding on one kinetic energy to another. Again, 
 why did the lightning strike the vicarage and spare the 
 church ? Because the former had not a conductor and the 
 latter had. Here, one condition named is negative, and the 
 other potential. Why did the avalanche not touch the chalet, 
 yet overwhelm the inn that was further off? Because it 
 was flung at an angle that overshot the one and aimed 
 direct at the other. Here, the difference is made by a 
 purely passive interval. Once more ; why is that post in 
 the lake to which I fasten my boat, though straight in 
 reality, crooked in appearance? Because, while its feel to 
 the touch is uniform, its image to the eye is broken by 
 refraction. Here, the answer invokes a new element, that 
 changes the direction of motion, and crosses a tactual by 
 an optical law. 
 
 In short, when you ask for a cause, it is that your pre- 
 conception of a subsisting posture of things has been
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 241 
 
 disturbed by a surprise ; and you want an account of your 
 breach of expectation. Perhaps your preconception was 
 incorrect ; and then, with the error, the surprise will dis- 
 appear. But if you have set things as they were, in their 
 right adjustment, their equilibrium may be subverted in 
 several ways ; just as readily by a subtraction or decrease 
 of any of their component forces as by the addition of a new 
 one ; and the only thing certain is that some plus or minus 
 quantity has found its way into or out of one side of the 
 equation, without equivalent modification of the other ; 
 and this difference, be it positive or negative, will give you 
 the answer which you seek. Hence the various forms 
 which that answer may take. If we remember that the 
 only power required for a Cause is the power of ' making a 
 difference,' and that, for this, inertness may be quite as 
 efficacious as energy, we shall not wonder that passive con- 
 ditions are so often determinants of phenomena. It is only 
 the physical counterpart of the familiar moral fact, that 
 negligence has as large a crop of consequences as the most 
 strenuous diligence. 
 
 Starting then from the intuitive assumption that the 
 non-Ego is the counter-cause to the Ego, Will vis-a-vis 
 to Will, we are led by an intelligible psychological pro- 
 cess first to shift the unit of objective volition from each 
 particular change affecting us to the few great natural 
 forces under which those multitudinous vicissitudes are 
 summed up ; and then, under a balanced assemblage of 
 these forces, to look on the single condition which ends 
 the balance and turns up a phenomenon, as entitled to the 
 name Cause. If it constantly performs this function in 
 relation to a given phenomenon, it becomes the 'invariable 
 antecedent,' and lands us in a mode of conception ac- 
 cordant with J. S. Mill's. 
 
 Natural as this process is, as a piece of psychological 
 history, it clears us from one illusion only by tempting us 
 
 VOL. I. R
 
 743 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 into another. Into this we are betrayed by an easy inad- 
 vertence at the second stage. Among the many concur- 
 rent conditions of an event, what makes us pitch upon one 
 distinctively to be called its Cause ? It earns the name by 
 being the differentiating circumstance, that turns the scale 
 in favour of the event ; and so, by settling an alternative, 
 complies with the terms of the definition of ' Cause.' But 
 it only seems to do so ; for the alternative which it settles 
 is not in Nature, but only in your mind ; it is not that, 
 under the conditions really present there, either of two in- 
 compatible facts may turn up, but that, for want of com- 
 plete insight into the conditions present, your calculation 
 yields two answers ; and that, as soon as the missing 
 element fills up the lacuna in your knowledge, one of the 
 supposed answers vanishes. That element decides nothing, 
 except for you ; it is no agent and makes no choice ; it 
 has to be there, just as much as the other conditions, and 
 can, as little as they, pretend to any function of will ; it 
 comes according to its rule or law, not of its own making, 
 or even given to consciousness. It has won its name 
 therefore by a piece of successful acting, and imposes upon 
 us by simulating the determinant action of a living Will. 
 But it is not really a cause at all as the Ego is a cause ; 
 and in reading causality into it we repeat, in modified 
 form, the mistake of the childhood of humanity in treating 
 the passing incidents of human ill and good as visitations 
 of judgment and reward. The consciousness and know- 
 ledge of causality, it has been shown, do not arise so long 
 as movement is automatic, but first enter when, on being 
 resisted, we take the matter into our own hands and sub- 
 stitute voluntary self-direction for involuntary drift. Till 
 we reach the power of initiative, that is, of determining 
 what is not yet determinate, we have no apprehension of 
 causality; and when we quit this power and pass into the 
 sphere of Necessity, we lose sight of causality again. The
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 343 
 
 very ' invariable antecedence ' therefore, which is claimed 
 as an essential mark of a true cause, is in fact a disqualifi- 
 cation for that name ; and testifies that we are dealing 
 with the contents of a mechanised realm where all succes- 
 sions are predetermined, and neither beginning nor alter- 
 native can be. Were the so-called 'antecedent' a true 
 cause, it would not be bound to be 'invariable.' The ' nexus 
 natures' or law of necessity which ties together the pheno- 
 mena A and B, divests A as well as B of all originating 
 function, and reduces both to mere links of conduction for 
 some entering and transmitted power ; and it is only at 
 the head-quarters of that power that the effectuating 
 causality abides, in virtue of which the phenomena emerge 
 thus and not otherwise. This pre-ordained order, this self- 
 renunciation of creative freedom, constitutes the essential 
 fitness of the world as a theatre for the training of intelli- 
 gence and character. Unless, in studying the sequences of 
 natural events, we found each customary preliminary to be 
 constant, how could we make sure of having hit upon its 
 kind of power, not in a house of call, but in a regular 
 abode, where we may rely on finding it again ? For the 
 purpose of just expectation, we must be secured against 
 our dynamical fund, by change of investment, shifting to 
 new fields, and leaving its old neighbourhood 'without 
 effects.' Still, this perceptible and uniform system is but 
 the middle ground, the instrumental term of understand- 
 ing, between the infinite and the finite freedom which con- 
 stitute the home of all causality. 
 
 Were we wrong then in interpreting the non-Ego as the 
 responding counterpart to the Ego, and reading it by the 
 category of our own self-consciousness ? Must we repent 
 of interfusing through it a Will like ours, because it is too 
 steadfast and its ways seem fatalised ? By no means. 
 That intuitive apprehension has lost nothing of its validity, 
 but has only developed its contents. The just inference is 
 
 R 4
 
 244 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 simply that, in the perceptible course of nature, gazed at 
 from the outside, we have not yet reached the free deter- 
 mining movement of the infinite Will, but only its execu- 
 tive method of carrying out its determination. The visible 
 processes of the natural world bear the same relation to its 
 originating Mind that our linked and co-ordinated organic 
 movements, in accomplishing a purpose decreed, bear to 
 our volitional causality. In both instances they have the 
 automatic character of mechanised media, instituted for 
 the finite nature, self-adopted by the Infinite, to deliver 
 into realization the messages of creative thought. Who- 
 ever shuts up his contemplation within this sphere, as if 
 it were the All floating in vacancy, has left behind the 
 very possibility of initiation, and precluded himself from 
 seeing it even though it be there. Standing in the midst 
 of laws which he prejudges to have been never legislated, 
 he necessarily, with Comte, pronounces all search for causes 
 to be vain. And, in this dictum, the French philosopher 
 planted himself, I must think, on much firmer and clearer 
 ground than that which, with the same theory, J. S. Mill 
 took up, in first misconstruing causality into invariable se- 
 quence, and then reaping the illusory profit of this wrong, 
 by treating the interpretation of laws as equivalent to the 
 discovery of causes. No satisfactory apology for this false 
 worship of 'antecedents' is presented by accepting for 
 them the humbler title of ' second causes,' and claiming this 
 much for them as deputed media of the primary Will. 
 Precisely because they are 'media,' they cannot be 'causes'; 
 and if they are ' deputed,' they come after volition, whereas 
 a ' Cause ' must come before it. By the very terms of the 
 apology, they only execute causality, and therefore do not 
 exercise it. The sole possible ' second causes ' are created 
 minds, in which there re-appears, on the finite scale, the 
 self-determining power, in presence of alternative possi- 
 bilities, which is the essence of the supreme Will. Nor is
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 245 
 
 there any need, as will hereafter be shown, for setting up 
 ' deputies ' at all, as objects or natures interposed between 
 the Divine purpose and its accomplishment ; as if the 
 Primal Agent were mechanical and needed tools, instead 
 of the Immanent and Living Spirit which is all in all. 
 
 By the Education of nature itself, then, the human mind 
 is led over the whole interval between its first reading of 
 Divine motives in every thing, and its latest version of 
 scientific causation, without being called on to part from 
 the essence of its original faith. From Will at the fountain 
 head not a single thing is wrested at any stage of the pro- 
 cess ; only, the inner acts of that will are thrown into a 
 new order, are reduced to a few comprehensive heads, and 
 organised into a system of which the sciences are the re- 
 flection in little. The emergence from superstition which 
 marks this process consists, not in the expulsion of pur- 
 pose from any scene which it occupied before, but in the 
 substitution of larger purpose for less, of plan for impulse. 
 And as the primitive power has not been lost on the way, 
 neither has any other been found ; so that we are still 
 in presence of the originating Mind, whose organising 
 thoughts are prototypes of the rules of nature. Were 
 these rules to merge yet more into one another by further 
 generalization, till at last some one formula should em- 
 brace them all, we should thus be brought to the genetic 
 idea of the known universe, the fruitful conception from 
 which the whole is thought out. This supposition, how- 
 ever fascinating to the mathematician, may seem perhaps 
 to take away all plenitude and living variety from the 
 Divine mind, and reduce it to a stately intellectual mono- 
 tone. But this is an illusion. A true generalization throws 
 nothing away ; and however simple its form when the 
 upper limit is reached, the affluence of its contents is not 
 abated ; all the differences are implicitly there, as surely 
 as in a single acorn may be involved the forests of a con-
 
 346 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 tinent in one age and its coal-fields in another. Two lines 
 suffice to express the law of gravitation ; but to read it 
 through and through, is to count the masses, and measure 
 the velocities, and sweep along the curves, of every body 
 in the universe. A mind that shuts up a cosmos in a 
 thought gives the supreme ideal of Reason. 
 
 Since the dynamic idea reads itself, by easy translation, 
 into the whole phenomenal system of causal language, the 
 resources of the latter are at the command of the former ; 
 and the laws of uniform succession and co-existence, by 
 which the scientific observer learns to predict and explain, 
 do not lose this prerogative when construed into acts of 
 will. The homogeneity of their fountain-head does not 
 prevent the separation of their streams of direction and 
 their various encounter with each other in the windings of 
 their history ; and to the differentiation that thus arises 
 appeal may be made, in exactly the same way by one who 
 takes the laws to be conscious thoughts, and by one who 
 deems them only material facts. In application therefore, 
 in the inductive investigation of all causal questions, the 
 two theories are on a par, and will work their problems by 
 the same rules. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a 
 universe governed by one Will, there must be a deficiency 
 of heterogeneity, and therefore an inability to account for 
 the actual differences of events. The limits of possible 
 variety are no narrower when they diverge from an 
 intellectual power, than when they are ramifications of a 
 physical or of none at all. If we cannot understand how 
 a conscious and seeing nature should differentiate itself, 
 and select a definite number of directions among alterna- 
 tive contingencies, still less can we understand this of a 
 nature blind and dead ; so that the physical doctrine of 
 the ultimate unity of force is burdened with the same diffi- 
 culty as the religious doctrine of unity of will. This will 
 be clearly seen, if we follow the mechanical and the
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 247 
 
 volitional theories up to their conceptions of the beginning 
 of things. 
 
 Will, it is said, may run upon all roads, and does not, 
 without something further, account for its appearance upon 
 some one path. It may put forth any volition ; but the 
 question is, 'Why arises this rather than that?' To this 
 question the determinist gives answer, ' Because the sug- 
 gesting motive is stronger.' The 'motive' is either, the 
 conception of an end in view accordant with the agent's 
 wish ; or, the impulse of some instinctive passion. In 
 appealing to this you go behind the will, and look among 
 the mental conditions which surround it ; and there you 
 find an element, whose superior ' strength ' steps forth into 
 operation, and settles what line the Will shall take. The 
 power thus flies off from the will, and falls back upon the 
 inner relations of the sensibilities and affections ; these, 
 being constituted so and so, admit at the next stage only 
 such and such a volition. But here again the same 
 question recurs ; why are they thus constituted, when 
 they might have been constituted otherwise ? whence this 
 motive's ' strength,' when it might have been weak ? 
 Something is needed still to rescue us from this contin- 
 gency. When we are dealing with the human mind, the 
 determinist is ready with his aid, and says ' the motive 
 owes its ascendency to habit, or to temperament, or to 
 an inherited organisation ; these being what they are, it 
 could not but dominate.' Only, what hindered them from 
 being different ? for them to be so would contradict nothing 
 that we know. The answer does but push us back into 
 another contingent world, where we have to renew the 
 same enquiry. On this track, it is plain, nothing ultimate 
 can ever be reached : we shut the door of each indeter- 
 minate chamber, only to open another; and so far as any 
 closing of the problem is concerned, we might as well 
 be at one end of the corridor as at the other. To this
 
 248 WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. [Book II. 
 
 process there can be no end, except by simply resolving 
 to stop, and arbitrarily cutting off all further retreat, by 
 setting up a definite somewhat to start from, and refusing 
 to say more about it than that, if it be so and so, it will 
 explain all that comes after. It is precisely thus that the 
 atoms are assigned as the primitive data or raw material 
 of nature. Are they competent to determine the whole 
 posterior cosmos? It is in virtue of certain forms and 
 movements and magnitudes, which rank no higher among 
 possibilities than many others, yet of the exclusive existence 
 of which you refuse to give any account. The determinist 
 therefore cannot finish as he begins. However carefully 
 he coasts along and hugs the shore from headland to head- 
 land, and drops the anchor now in this haven and now in 
 that, sooner or later the set of an inevitable wind drives 
 him forth upon interminable seas, without definite line 
 except of an horizon that sails with him as he goes. 
 
 If then it is certain that the mechanical theory, at the 
 top of its staircase of necessity, has, like any other, to 
 make the initial step out of the indeterminate on to the 
 determinate, the only question is, at what point is this 
 ' arbitrary ' step best taken, and in what form is this transi- 
 tion least unintelligible ? In assuming intellectual Will 
 as the given Source, we at least provide something which 
 we know, and which alone seems to have precisely what 
 we want, the power of determining the contingent, of 
 selecting among possibles that which shall become actual. 
 
 We are told indeed that, under the semblance of freedom, 
 there is here concealed a real psychological necessity : but 
 the assertion rests only on the exigencies of the me- 
 chanical doctrine, and is not verified by our self-know- 
 ledge : far from admitting that the play of our motives 
 constitutes a necessity and carries off our personality, we 
 are well aware that they are subject to our estimate, and 
 that we choose for ourselves. We are not the theatre,
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND MODES OF FORCE. 249 
 
 and they the agents ; we are the agents, and they, the 
 data of the problems which we solve. This it is which 
 makes us causes ; that is, beings capable of something 
 more than letting power pass through them as conductors, 
 namely, of excluding this and admitting that; of some- 
 thing which will for ever oblige us to resort to the analogy 
 of Will, when the question is, ' What shall settle for us 
 between alternative possibilities, and fetch the determinate 
 out of the indeterminate ? Do you repeat that such act of 
 choice is 'an effect without a cause?' That is true, if 
 by ' cause ' you mean ' invariable phenomenal antecedent ;' 
 but false, if the word denote the power of making the con- 
 tingent real. As a personal decision is felt to explain an 
 act and leave no more to be said, so is an eternal living 
 Will the simplest conception we can form of the Universal 
 Cause, itself uncaused. Displace this conception in favour 
 of uncreated atoms, and do you ask less from our gratuitous 
 acceptance? are the preliminary postulates of your deduc- 
 tion, before you prove your first proposition, fewer than 
 before ? On the contrary, you demand as data countless 
 myriads of crystal bricks geometrically indistinguishable, 
 quivering within and flying without, in movements never 
 imparted and never directed, but combining and qualifying 
 one another, and forming the original capital of all the 
 force expended and circulating through the universe. By 
 what rule of science can it be called a modest act, to take 
 for granted all possible velocities and all possible direc- 
 tions, and an unlimited store of bodies identical in size 
 and shape, to move in them ? What years of labour and 
 patience are spent in deciphering and resolving a single 
 motion in a single star ; for example, the small circle 
 described by the celestial pole around its mean place ! 
 Yet here are millions of such facts set up and flung into 
 a definition, without so much as raising any problem at 
 all ! to take for granted the law of gravitation or the
 
 350 WILL AND KINDS OF BEING. [Book II. 
 
 chemical rules of definite proportion, would be a small 
 petitio compared with this. And what is the object of so 
 vast an assumption? Simply to turn the back upon the 
 inevitable step from the indeterminate to the determinate, 
 and present the sublime look of never quitting definite 
 ground. It virtually says, 'We will allow nothing to be 
 possible but that from which the universe must come ; as 
 to all else, since it has not turned up, we may presume that 
 it could not, and we may safely neglect it and leave it out 
 in the cold ; what we want for our journey of deduction 
 we take, and ask no questions.' But, in spite of this ignoring 
 resolve, the ' cold ' and dark really remain behind, though 
 you have no eyes in that direction to look into them ; and 
 they hide other possibles than those which you allow to 
 pass 'possibles' because no more excluded than yours by 
 any contradiction ; nor can you help recognising them, 
 at the moment of denying them ; for, while you will not 
 admit any objective Will, to part them from the rest by 
 selection, you perform that very act yourself and choose 
 what you want in the interests, not of a universe, but 
 of a theory. 
 
 4. Will and Kinds of Being. 
 
 In counting off each mode of force, as if it were a single 
 creative thought, we have simplified, but by no means 
 adequately solved the problem of the Unit of Divine 
 volition. We have got rid of our first tendency to treat 
 every phenomenon as a separate act, a tendency which, 
 logically followed out, would give a volition for each drop 
 of rain in a shower, and each pulsation of every heart, 
 and, by taking a whole law at a sweep, have assimilated 
 our conception of the Supreme Mind to that of a perfect 
 scientific intellect. There are two aspects under which 
 minds of different order will survey the accessible contents 
 of the universe; one, characteristic of the artist temperament,
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND KINDS OF BEING. 251 
 
 and the other, of the scientific understanding. In the former, 
 the scene before the observer is made up of concrete objects, 
 trees and rivers, clouds and stars, cattle and men, each 
 complete in itself and with a story of its own, yet all 
 variously related and, by their mutual play, cast into many 
 a picture and many a drama together. In the latter, every 
 one of these objects falls analytically asunder, and is seen 
 to be made up of numerous properties or functions, e. g. 
 weight, colour, growth, feeling, &c., which are by no means 
 confined to it, but appear no less in innumerable instances : 
 and did not a certain number of these subscribe together 
 and concur at a given point of space, no individual could 
 be set up. It is the business of science to take aside each 
 of these functions in turn, now weight, now colour, &c., 
 and pursue it as a single object of attention through its 
 haunts in Nature, till its law has been found and its con- 
 ditions enumerated. To the simply perceptive observer, 
 gold is heavy and solid and yellow ; to the scientific, 
 gravitation and repulsion and ethereal undulation, &c. 
 modify themselves here into gold, there into carbon, and 
 again into ice, &c. The one conceives the powers by gen- 
 eralization from the objects ; the other regards the objects 
 as individualizations of the powers in the course of their 
 history. When all the properties have been thus separately 
 treated, a new grouping of the world's contents has estab- 
 lished itself in the mind. It is not a scene of things, but 
 an assemblage of powers. The units and pluralities have 
 changed places. Instead of each concrete object appearing 
 as a substantive thing with many functions, each function 
 appears as one power contributing to constitute many 
 things : it is the real ; they are but the show-place. The 
 individual which presses upon sense and imagination is but 
 the phenomenal meeting-point, the transient rendezvous, of 
 permanent and universal powers, which are for ever engaged 
 in building and rebuilding the cosmos. The scientific
 
 252 WILL AND KINDS OF BEING. [Book II. 
 
 enquirer therefore visits particular objects of perception, 
 only to keep an appointment with some law which he 
 wishes to interrogate and which he is sure to find at work 
 there. To the Sun, e. g. he goes, if he be a surveyor, to 
 time and measure a planetary transit ; if a physicist, to 
 weigh his mass ; if a chemist, to cross-question his spectrum. 
 When he has carried out this mode of conception to its 
 utmost field, he will have abolished things from his thought, 
 and resolved the universe into constituent powers. If I 
 may borrow a logical phrase, he will find its meaning, not 
 in its denotation or extension, but in its connotation or com- 
 prehension. 
 
 Now this is precisely the result we obtain when we 
 identify each law, or line of power, with a Divine volition. 
 Gravitation is defined by one act of thought, the lu- 
 miniferous undulations by another, the electric by a third, 
 &c. ; and the whole, when gathered together in system and 
 relation, constitute the engagement and contents which we 
 are thus led to ascribe to the originating mind. If these 
 laws are regarded as not primal, but only differentiations 
 of some higher genus, and we are thrown further back upon 
 an ultimate atomic constitution, then must every defining 
 characteristic of that constitution that might have been 
 otherwise count for a volition ; and the first ideas must be 
 reckoned by the number of equations needful for deducing 
 the world. We are thus certainly carried far enough from 
 our initial tendency to read in every change the signs of 
 favour or of anger. Is it possible that we have been carried 
 too far, and that, in losing one error, we have fallen into 
 another? In our flight from the notion of ever-varying 
 impulse or caprice as a motive-cause, we have flung our- 
 selves into a purely intellectual conception of the Divine 
 Will, as eliminating the superfluous terms of the cosmical 
 problem, and defining the elementary relations of the rest : 
 we find ourselves in presence of a Being who thinks out the
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND KINDS OF BEING. 253 
 
 universe ; the general laws of which form the method and 
 calculus of his mind. But is this all ? Can we rest in the 
 recognition of One who, having chosen his conditions, 
 passes thenceforth into a mathematical intelligence, whose 
 faculties do the work of a calculating machine ? Is the 
 world evolved, not only on an intellectual plan, but simply 
 as an intellectual exercise ; so that it would be no less 
 adequate to its cause, though its contents were purely 
 physical, and stopped short of its living and moral pro- 
 ducts? It would in this case be nothing but a work of 
 Art, a play of mental power, whose function is complete in 
 simply being orderly and beautiful. Such a world would 
 comply with one of the marks of Will ; (i) it would con- 
 stitute a determinate system selected from indeterminate 
 possibilities. But the other two marks would be absent 
 from it ; (2) its independent lines of action would converge 
 upon no end beyond themselves, for the sake of which we 
 must conceive them to be ; and (3) there could therefore be 
 no subordination of minor ends to major, framing the 
 scheme into a hierarchy of good. And without these, 
 selection from the many, combination into the one, 
 gradation through the whole, volitional causation is muti- 
 lated of some essential characteristics. 
 
 But neither reason nor fact will permit us to remain at 
 this first stage of Will. Selection from among contin- 
 gencies cannot itself be another contingency : it is not an 
 aimless act, and cannot be conceived except as regulated 
 by some purpose beyond itself ; so that, wherever it takes 
 place, we are led to look out for some end which is the 
 object of preference. Seeking it among the results of the 
 chosen laws, we should find it, were there only a physical 
 universe around us, in the chief concrete bodies that are 
 born from the confluence of those laws, the sun, the 
 planets, the seeming sphere of stars, or the terrestrial 
 elements, water, air, clouds and land that make up the
 
 254 WILL AND KINDS OF BEING. [Book II. 
 
 structure of the earth. On these would our attention fix, 
 as the products which were meant to be, and for the sake 
 of which the natural powers were first sent forth. And 
 thus the universal Will, after having been drawn off into 
 the small group of general laws, returns once more for its 
 contemplated ends to particular things, relatively to which 
 the system of forces is but an appointed means. In the 
 mechanical and chemical department of nature, this relation 
 between means and ends is still inchoate and obscure : the 
 objects that look detached can hardly be said to be there 
 on their own account ; they derive their importance, not 
 from their isolation, but from their being woven into the 
 tissue of reciprocal interdependence. As soon however 
 as we enter the field of organic existence and, especially, 
 stand amid the tribe of sentient beings, such real indi- 
 vidualities are distinctly set up, that it is impossible not to 
 allow each to carry its own end in itself, for the sake of 
 which, as well as to serve the whole, it has been brought 
 upon the scene. This startling phenomenon, of a conscious 
 being, a magical Frankenstein, the reflecting mirror of the 
 world, insists upon its right to be regarded as the crown of 
 nature ; and the mere fact that all the prior laws lead up 
 to this, and set it forth as their supreme achievement, on 
 which all their resources are combined, is only otherwise 
 expressed when we say, that sentient creatures constitute 
 the ends of terrestrial nature, to which its mechanism and 
 laboratory are subservient as means. It is impossible to 
 regard the lines of natural law as volitional yet not to 
 regard the living beings arising from their co-ordination as 
 objects contemplated in their institution ; and accordingly a 
 philosopher who, with Spinoza, denies the latter and treats 
 as illusory the vestiges of final causation in organic nature, 
 is only consistent in assuming all physical law to be not 
 instituted but eternal, the sole possibility, self-existent and 
 uncontingent as the properties of Space. Laws, selected at
 
 Chap. I.] WILL AND KINDS OF BEING. 255 
 
 one extremity, bring us to objects intended at the other. 
 The act may be one in the Divine Mind : for, what we 
 have to separate, the Infinite may blend ; but both factors 
 must be there ; and in the cosmical development of the 
 thought, they will lie apart in time, and be treated by us, 
 as we stand between and look up and down, the one as the 
 means and the other as the end. And this distribution 
 gives us two units of volition : each law set up is a single 
 means; each type of being which is produced is a single end. 
 There is, I have said, a third feature in Voluntary 
 action, without which its idea is incomplete : it includes 
 ends within ends, each serving as a means to the ulterior, 
 and subordinated as lesser to greater, or part to whole. I 
 desire, for instance, to see a friend at my house : the letter 
 which I send, to ask him, appears a simple means, but 
 cannot effect its purpose without a long series of inter- 
 mediate dependencies. To embody my thought, there 
 must be language : to give language to the eye, there must 
 be a visible character for each sound ; to spread these 
 characters in order, there must be paper to receive them ; 
 to inscribe them on which, there must be pen and ink ; to 
 appropriate them to the right person, there must be the 
 folding and address : to present them for transmission, 
 they must be dropped into the pillar ; to . convey them, 
 must be taken out by the carrier ; to be understood, must 
 be delivered and brought under the eye of my friend. The 
 interview itself, which thus comes out as last in this suc- 
 cession, is probably first in another, for it is not held 
 without a purpose ; which again enters as an element into 
 larger plans belonging to a whole scheme of life : so that, 
 in an activity rational and free, there is really nothing 
 isolated and piecemeal, but a hierarchy of innumerable 
 designs, leading up to an all-embracing unity of character. 
 Now when we turn to nature as hitherto described, and 
 ask, among the ends discovered there, which of them gives
 
 256 WILL AND KINDS OF BEING. [Book II. 
 
 us a unit of Divine volition, we find it similarly impossible 
 to arrest ourselves at any one. The physical elements 
 seem to have accomplished their function, when they turn 
 up the living form which transcends themselves ; and the 
 plant might be regarded as their end, were it not itself 
 subservient to the maintenance of sentient existence. When 
 we enter this new field, the scale of dependence still runs 
 up, the lower organisms ministering to the higher, and 
 homologous relations pervading the whole : so that though 
 each nature has a perfection of its own, worthy of being 
 the object of separate intention, it is snatched away from its 
 independence and claimed as a mere constituent of a larger 
 scheme. At last however we reach the acme of created 
 life in our humanity; in whose rational and moral features, 
 so far surpassing all that precedes, and having no visible 
 summit beyond them, there is some excuse for seeking the 
 ultimate end of the whole system. But even here we are 
 soon driven from our rest ; partly by observing, that in all 
 living relations there is a reciprocity, which prevents their 
 being read one way alone, and makes man the means of 
 many things and not merely the end of all ; and partly by 
 discovering, that our ascendency is only local, and that, as 
 the earth that bears us is but as a granule in a universe 
 spanned by a .web of identical law, so can we pretend to 
 no higher place than that of an intermediary link in an 
 interminable chain of being. The volition therefore which 
 creates the individual we cannot detach from that which 
 determines the kind ; or this, again, from that which gives 
 the cognate types ; and so on, throughout the whole as- 
 cending scale ; so that organic nature we can represent only 
 as the object of a scheme of natural history volitions, 
 laterally linked or logically included one with another, as 
 elements in the tissue of a single plan. Hence, we must 
 qualify our statement that each type of being is a single 
 end. It is so, as having something original in it : it is not
 
 Chap. I.] EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. 257 
 
 so, as having nothing else. An absolute end it is not ; but 
 a relative one it is, comprising within it a new destination, 
 and the provisions for realizing it. 
 
 On the whole then we conclude, that the laws of nature 
 are willed as methods, and the sentient beings in nature as 
 ends ; and that, in both instances, the interconnections are 
 so intimate as to baffle our attempt to insulate the units of 
 volition, except provisionally for the needs of our piece- 
 meal mode of conception ; and to visit us again with the 
 old problem how to harmonize 'the many and the one,' 
 and to lay out a Timeless act of Mind in the numbers of 
 our human succession. Throughout this discussion I limit 
 myself to relations between God and Nature : and, for the 
 moment, man is no further included than as he stands on 
 the zoological list. The present conclusions do not apply 
 to him in his moral and spiritual aspects. 
 
 5. Explicit and Implicit Will. 
 
 I have thus far endeavoured to show how causality, 
 dynamically interpreted and identified with Will, both 
 gives us our natural Theism, and at the same time has 
 led, by steps of easy modification, to the scientific concep- 
 tion of distinct forces, and even to the phenomenal maxims 
 of causation which totally forget their dynamic origin ; and 
 how, nevertheless, provision may be made, without breach 
 of the original intuition, for placing all the great lines of 
 relation in nature within the diagram of an intellectual 
 plan. Here however a further question arises. We may 
 be able to carry out through the universe the idea of Divine 
 purpose; but are we obliged to do so? Is it inconceivable 
 that operative power should exist apart from intellectual 
 intention? However true it may be that causality first 
 dawns upon us when we enter upon it ourselves and as- 
 sume the direction of the energy at our disposal, yet this is 
 but the order of our own thought, and not of things as they 
 
 VOL. I. S
 
 258 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. [Book II. 
 
 are ; the power which we take up was there before we dis- 
 covered it, and was carrying us away as its organ before 
 we turned upon it and made it our servant; and we know 
 it retrospectively as automatic, in the very moment of suc- 
 ceeding to it as voluntary. And until it was thus handed 
 over to us, and a Self arose to take possession of it, its seat 
 was in the not-Self, that is, in the organism of our simply 
 zoological life ; and must we not own that, in snatching it 
 thence and setting ourselves over against it as its pro- 
 prietor, we completed the antithesis between the Ego and 
 the non-Ego, as one between the voluntary and the auto- 
 matic, instead of between Will within and Will without ? 
 Nay, does it not seem that, the more accurately the two 
 terms of this dualism face each other, as microcosm and 
 macrocosm, the less admissible it becomes to insist on 
 intention as the indispensable prefix to force ? For, in our 
 own life-experience, it is out of the automatic that Will is 
 born, and that prior term itself belongs to Nature. More- 
 over, had it continued to run its course, without interference 
 from our personality, it would have left its mark in some 
 form of change ; so that without ' final causation ' efficiency 
 is not impossible. How then can it be contended, in spite 
 of the priority in us of blind force to will, that it must be 
 posterior to Will in the not-Self? 
 
 The question with which we have to do is that of 
 Causality in Nature. If Force were all that we required 
 for the answer, the involuntary spontaneity offered to us 
 by the objector might fulfil the conditions. But more is 
 demanded of a Cause than that it should do something, 
 i.e. guidlibet, anything, short of nothing. It has to be 
 the determinant of a specific change, of this rather than 
 that; and unless it can give a discriminative account of its 
 particular phenomenon, it is no cause. Before blind power 
 can earn that name, it must borrow vision enough to see an 
 end from a beginning, and master geometry enough to dis-
 
 Chap. I.] EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. 259 
 
 tinguish one direction from another, so as to have some 
 idea what it would be at ; then, it will be a determining 
 power or Cause ; the meaning of which is simply photo- 
 graphed from the consciousness and idea of Will. Aim- 
 less force, force that cannot define its own path, but may 
 fly off in any radius without prejudice to its identity, 
 misses the essence of causality; and to have an aim, to 
 take a selected path, to negative all radii but one, we know 
 to be the function of Will. 
 
 Nor is it true that in our own experience we gain the 
 conception of voluntary power by adding something to 
 a prior naked idea of automatic power. On the contrary, 
 the idea of automatic emerges as a residuum, after ex- 
 pelling, as far as we can (that is, simply blotting out of 
 sight) the specialty of Will. The very force of blind 
 impulse in ourselves which we take up and turn from 
 spontaneous to voluntary, we never suppose to be really 
 in the dark and without director of its way; only, the aim 
 which is absent from us is given it by Nature instead, and 
 belongs to the counter-will in place of ours. Hardly should 
 we be able to cut down the conception of will to bare 
 automatism, were it not for the interposed steps by which 
 a determination of ours, once passed, seems to execute 
 itself. My aim may be separated from its organic fulfil- 
 ment, in time, in place, in person; what I knowingly do 
 follows on my intention, is at a certain distance from my 
 intention, if only at my finger's ends, and may effectuate 
 itself through intermediary services. So far as this is the 
 case, the execution may be seen apart from the intention, 
 the one being here, the other there ; and when the voluntary 
 element is out of sight, the residual element is the execu- 
 tive movement isolated; and that is what we mean by 
 automatic action. It is a mutilated phenomenon, cut in 
 two by a limitation of our attention to its ulterior half. 
 We call it automatic because, while the cause is kept out of 
 
 S 2
 
 260 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. [Book II. 
 
 view, we know that the creature itself is not causing it ; 
 for then it would be voluntary. The phrase is therefore 
 merely a disclaimer of causal knowledge, not an assertion 
 of some new kind of cause. 
 
 There can therefore be no competition between auto- 
 matism and Will for the causation of things ; for they are 
 respectively non-causa and causa. However large a pro- 
 portion of the phenomena of the universe might come 
 under the former head, they would have to resort to the 
 latter for their explanation. Here accordingly we might 
 consistently regard our problem as set at rest. But to 
 cut short the pleading and non-suit the litigants on an 
 a priori metaphysical ground might appear like a technical 
 evasion of justice; especially at a time when, in various 
 forms, new attempts have been systematically made to 
 galvanize the 'automatic' idol into some semblance of a 
 jrpforayoMnaTTjs on the proscenium of Nature; and the 'In- 
 nate Somnambulism' of Cuvier, the 'Will' of Schopen- 
 hauer, the ' Unconscious ' of Hartmann, are all pressed into 
 the attack upon the intellectual pretensions of the universe. 
 With a view to an estimate, which shall not seem to be 
 a pre-judgment, of this type of doctrine, it will be necessary 
 to see whether, among natural phenomena in which inten- 
 tion is invisible, the distinctive marks appear of undiscerning 
 spontaneity, or of selecting aim. In conducting such an 
 investigation, we cannot attempt to go the round of Nature 
 and take a census of the symptoms, putting in one list 
 those of a waking, in another those of a sleep-walking 
 world; for who could count the votes in an induction of 
 such impossible vastness ? An easier solution is within 
 reach. If anywhere in nature beyond our own case, we 
 encounter characteristics which are possible only to intention, 
 so far we are driven to resort to that full type of Will; and 
 when once found to be there, we cannot limit it to the par- 
 ticular cases on which we have alighted. It is adequate to
 
 Chap. I.] EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. 361 
 
 the whole; while the lower agency breaks down in the 
 midst and throws up the game. 
 
 Now it so happens that the problem, whether we can 
 trust the external signs of invisible Will, is already familiar 
 to us in a narrower field : we have encountered and solved 
 it with regard to the finite causes around us, and have only 
 to extend to this new case our method of dealing with it 
 there. Most of the conduct of our fellow-men we ascribe 
 to minds like our own, acting with conscious purpose. 
 Much of the behaviour of the lower animals we refer to 
 unthinking instinct, resembling our own automatic life. 
 What is the ground of our belief in either case, and of its 
 difference in the two? In both, our inference is strictly 
 anthropomorphic; it is a mere application of the causal 
 principle interpreted as Will : no better or more immediate 
 proof can be given of the existence near us of minds other 
 than our own. Though the assurance thus obtained ap- 
 proaches the highest rank of certainty, it rests on nothing 
 else than the direct rule, checked by no qualification, that 
 all phenomena issue from Will. Whence then the distinc- 
 tion between the two cases before us ? At first, there is 
 no distinction ; and, in spite of their difference of form, we 
 interpret the lower animals as we interpret our fellows, 
 by our own conscious activity. We direct towards them 
 similar feelings; we administer to them the same kind of 
 treatment; we protect ourselves against them by like safe- 
 guards ; nor are the animals stripped, in our idea, of their 
 inner humanity and put upon a reduced list, till special 
 evidence has turned up, enforcing a restriction of our 
 original belief. In what does that special evidence con- 
 sist ? Simply in certain interruptions of the analogy 
 between human and animal art; for example, the failure 
 in the latter of any language which fore-announces a pur- 
 pose ; the instant resort of new-born creatures to congenial 
 elements and food which they cannot have pre-conceived, as
 
 262 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. [Book II. 
 
 the duckling runs to the pond, and the new-fledged fly- 
 catcher seizes the insect on the wing; their constructive 
 skill, complete without learning; their provision for ends 
 which they cannot have in view, as for the nourishment and 
 protection of posthumous young. It is long before we can 
 divest these phenomena of their look of animal intention ; 
 but at last we can no longer credit the animal with fore- 
 sight; and then we think of them as similar to our own 
 automatic, yet not objectless, actions, such as the wink- 
 ing of the eyelids, the concurrent movements of the 
 eyes, and the spontaneous retraction of a hurt limb. If 
 this is a true account of our natural logic, the presumption 
 is in favour of a full-bodied and intending will ; but, on 
 adequate limiting evidence, we are led to expel its purpose 
 from the immediate animal act, which then falls into the 
 category of automatic. Our method of dealing with this 
 problem on a minor scale will help us through it in its 
 whole extent. 
 
 Now we are entitled to say that the three marks already 
 enumerated, selection, combination, gradation, are cha- 
 racteristic of intention, as distinguished from automatic 
 action ; that is, of immediate and explicit as distinguished 
 from mediate and implicit Will : they are descriptive terms 
 of so many exercises of thought in its works of art, and are 
 absolutely unmeaning except as designating relations intel- 
 lectually determined. We personally know them in their 
 process; we read them by their signs, as they go on in our 
 fellow men ; we find their vestiges in the products which 
 they leave behind. We have no more doubt as to the 
 skilled source of the armour dug up from an ancient tomb, 
 or of the poem found in a ruined city, than if we had seen 
 the one fabricated and heard the other recited. These 
 marks, however, are by no means limited to human things; 
 they abound in fields of natural history not visibly occu- 
 pied by any reflective reason. If they are apparent in the
 
 Chap. I.] EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. 263 
 
 structure of a cottage, are they absent from the hut of the 
 beaver and the nest of the wasp ? Does the granary of the 
 farmer provide for the future any better than the store- 
 house of the squirrel ? Is there more skill in a pair of 
 spectacles, than in a pair of eyes ? in a guitar, than in the 
 vocal chords of a Malibran or a Santley? in the hunter's 
 snare, than in the spider's web? in the lover's serenade, 
 than in the nightingale's song ? in the oars of a boat, than 
 in the fin of a fish ? That these combinations have refer- 
 ence to an end which has to be gained, it is impossible to 
 deny. Their whole constitution is relative to it, and must 
 have been determined by it ; yet, so far as they are organ*, 
 they are ready-made gifts of nature to the animal ; and, so 
 far as they are acts, they are automatic, and not elaborate 
 inventions ; for, if you put these wonderful artists off their 
 beat and set them even the plainest new problem, they can 
 make nothing of it, and turn out utter simpletons. The 
 originality is not with them, as it is with us ; they can no 
 more design what they do, than the photographic instru- 
 ment can design the picture which it reproduces. Whilst 
 we have as much right to say that intelligence works there, 
 as in the well-understood products of human industry and 
 genius, certain it is that intelligence is not present, as 
 conscious reflection, in the operative creatures, but works 
 through them, and directs them to their being's end. Hence 
 it is that, in contemplating an instinctive act, we look not 
 upon a whole phenomenon, but only upon a half : there is 
 a suppressed or invisible antecedent, a rational prelude, 
 of which we see the mere outcome : just as we may watch 
 and interpret at one end the telegram whose meaning is 
 put in far out of sight at the other. 
 
 I have pointed out the mode in which the modern 
 ' philosophy of unconsciousness ' turns this argument round, 
 and tries to drive it back to the confusion of its own camp. 
 From the point which we have reached, it may be well
 
 264 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. [Book II. 
 
 to recur to this device. Instead of assuming, from human 
 experience, that our three marks are compatible only with 
 conscious intelligence, and compel us therefore to admit this 
 as the complement to instinct, the disciple of Hartmann 
 assumes, from animal experience, that the three marks may 
 co-exist with unconsciousness, and that the addition of con- 
 scious reflection and purpose in our case is supererogatory 
 and limited to man ; it is only that he, as a more deve- 
 loped being, comes to know a mode of working which was 
 always present throughout the prior realms of Nature. So 
 it is not only possible that the appearance of design 
 Should present itself in the absence of the reality, but 
 certain that it does so ; for it is a positive fact that the 
 animals constantly simulate reason without having it. 
 Their own 'inner idea' or sense works itself out in con- 
 formable action, but realizes its end unconsciously ; a 
 rudimentary mode of activity, which pervades the lower 
 strata of organic life, and gives a forecast of the pre-con- 
 ception which directs the energies of man. 
 
 Comparing together this view and its opposite, we find 
 them agreed with regard to the observable facts, and dif- 
 fering only on the question whether, in seeing these, we 
 see all that there is. The one, from the absence of inten- 
 tion in the animal practising an art, infers that it must be 
 somewhere else ; the other, that it need be nowhere. The 
 former regards the visible phenomena as in excess of any 
 resources in the organism itself, and completes the story 
 by reference to a causality behind ; the latter measures the 
 resources of the organism by what it does, and refuses to 
 go beyond them for a more complete account : if intention 
 is not there, it is because intention is not wanted. The 
 whole phenomenon is there ; and we have no right to 
 double it by a hypothetic antecedent. In estimating the 
 claims of this doctrine, the following considerations appear 
 to be the most important.
 
 Chap. I.] EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. 365 
 
 (i) If the three features which have been mentioned as 
 marks of intention may equally arise from blind drift, 
 either the same effect springs from two perfectly different 
 causes ; or else, proceeding from the same element in both 
 cases, it has no real dependence on our pre-conception, 
 and our conscious purpose deceives us with a false pretence 
 of influence ; and things would go on the same without it. 
 In either case, we contradict the recognised rules of causa- 
 tion. To say that difference in the producing conditions 
 makes no difference in the produced result is to disregard 
 the principle that like effects bespeak like causes. To say 
 that our conscious intention, though seeming to move us, 
 is wholly inoperative, and that, dynamically, selecting will 
 is only automatism over again, is to bring upon the field 
 a phenomenon that ends in itself and has no sequel ; 
 contrary to the received maxim of the indestructibility of 
 force and the perpetual propagation of changes. 
 
 (a) If we are to reduce under one head the two modes 
 of action, the automatic, and the rational direction upon an 
 end, we are bound to ask which of them leaves the least 
 to be explained when resolved into the other. Now if any- 
 thing is intimately known to us, it is the procedure of our 
 own voluntary steps in life. The method of intellectual 
 regress from the pre-conception of the distant end to that 
 of the nearest means, and then of executive progress along 
 the inverse series, was described by Aristotle as it is still 
 described by Bain ; nor can anyone doubt that the first 
 term has the same power over the second as the penul- 
 timate over the last, and that the causality belongs alike 
 to the mental and to the physical portion of the history. 
 In proportion as the activity of our fellow-men assimilates 
 itself to this type, we perfectly understand it, and it is 
 conformable with our expectations. But the movements 
 of a somnambulist present themselves to us as phenomena 
 without a key : the ingenuities of animal instinct never
 
 266 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. [Book II. 
 
 cease to be objects of wonder ; and even our own spon- 
 taneous self-adjustments happen we know not how. Hence 
 the inducement to treat these as defective aspects of the 
 former kind ; and if the missing rational element is sup- 
 plied from behind, the perplexing darkness is removed. 
 But if we invert this order, if we address ourselves to the 
 automatic as the type to which the voluntary must be 
 reduced, we do but explain the clarwn per obscurum, or 
 at least the obscurum per obscuritis ; and we leave off worse 
 than we began. 
 
 (3) Not only does the automatic theory explain less 
 than the intentional ; it explains absolutely nothing. What 
 is the phenomenon of which an account is required ? Not 
 that something happens ; were it only this, that a cer- 
 tain quantity of change took place (that is, of ''work' 
 was done) it would suffice to show that the adequate 
 physical efficiency was there ; but that what happens is 
 evidently determined by a future event to which it leads, 
 and freely (that is, without any apparent necessity) com- 
 bines the select conditions of its realization. The question 
 is, how can the future operate upon the present, that 
 which is not upon that which is? If that future pre-exists 
 in its idea, a real cause is set up which may solve the 
 mystery. But to say, with Schopenhauer, that there is 
 no cause, but only an automatic will, is simply to dispense 
 with all causation and fling the question away. Auto- 
 matism is self-motion ; the word denotes not any cause, 
 but the absence of any nameable cause ; merely saying that, 
 as it cannot be found outside, ?t must be somewhere shut 
 up in the thing itself. Equally negative is the word 
 ' Instinct ' ; to which we never resort except to intimate 
 that the process which we should expect, and which brings 
 the facts under intelligible rule, is not there ; and that 
 the ways of rational action are simulated, we know not 
 how. This theory, therefore, in denying design, substitutes
 
 Chap. I.] EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. 267 
 
 nothing ; so far as it makes the attempt, it erects a blank 
 into a philosophy. 
 
 (4) The variations which this doctrine has undergone 
 betray the difficulty which is felt in retaining the sem- 
 blance of final causation, while getting rid of all conscious 
 intention. Aristotle, with his usual good sense, laid down 
 the rule, ' without a mental representation there can be no 
 action directed upon an end 1 ,' understanding by 'mental 
 representation ' either the vestige of a former perception, 
 such as one of the lower animals may have, or an intel- 
 lectual conception such as only reason can possess. To 
 dissolve this natural conjunction, by eliminating the element 
 of thought, was one of the chief aims of Schopenhauer's 
 philosophy. His mode of effecting it is by boldly trans- 
 posing the two terms in the order of Nature : he maintains 
 that Will operates in the world prior to any idea (Vorstel- 
 lung), and therefore pursues its end blindly, always working, 
 without intelligence, towards intelligent results ; and, as if 
 to reveal to us the source whence he obtained the hint 
 of so strange a doctrine, he remarks that Instinct is the 
 true 'commentary on the creative activity 2 .' Far from 
 denying final causation, he regards it as the only safe clue 
 to conduct us through the study of natural history ; and 
 does not scruple to call the end attained by animal inge- 
 nuity or by structural adaptation, the motive of the opera- 
 tion performed ; while still meaning that of that motive no 
 being is conscious, ' Yes,' he says, ' on closely regarding 
 final causation in Nature, we must not shrink, in expressing 
 its transcendent essence, from boldly saying, the end is 
 a motive, operating on a being that knows it not. For 
 
 1 De Anima III. x. 10. opfK.riK.bv 8 OVK avev 
 
 * Die Welt als W. und V. II, Kap. xxvii, p. 390. Es ist als hatte die 
 Natur zu ihrem Wirken nach Endursachen und der dadurch her- 
 beigefuhrten bewunderungswiirdigen Zweckmassigkeit ihrer organ- 
 ischen Produktionen, dem Forscher einen erlauternden Kommentar 
 an die Hand geben wollen in die Kunsttrieben der Thiere.
 
 268 EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. [Book II. 
 
 assuredly the nests of the American ant supply'the opera- 
 tive motive which has produced the ant-eater's toothless 
 jaw with its long, thread-like, clammy tongue ; the hard 
 egg-shell which imprisons the chick is the motive for the 
 horny tip with which its beak is furnished in order to break 
 through ; after which, it is cast off as of no further "use. 
 And, in like manner, the laws of reflection and refraction 
 of light supply the motive for that extremely complex 
 optical instrument, the human eye ; the transparency of 
 its cornea, the varying density of its three humours, the 
 form of its lens, the black coating on its choroid, the sen- 
 sibility of its retina, the contractility of its pupil, and 
 its muscular apparatus, being all computed accurately in 
 conformity with these laws. But these motives operated 
 before they were apprehended ; so it is, however contra- 
 dictory it may sound V This contradiction, viz. that 
 a cause can propose to itself an end, and realise it by 
 adapted means, without knowing either end or means, 
 that a future which sleeps unsuspected in the dark can 
 act before it exists, and make adjustments in preparation 
 for its birth, was too strong for Hartmann, who insists that 
 it is impossible to will without willing something, be it this 
 or be it that ; that, till there is a determinate object pre- 
 sented, the will is a blank, and without the conditions of 
 action or change ; and that, as it always involves a tran- 
 sition from a present condition to another, it is attended 
 by two representations, viz. of the state immediately felt, 
 and of the state to be realized in its place 2 . Thus, then, 
 the mental element is restored to the will, which is no 
 longer left in the dark, but able to fix its eye on what 
 it wants. Does the will in nature, then, know what it would 
 be at ? does it design and plan, and realise pre-conceived 
 intentions? Nothing can be further from Hartmann's 
 
 1 Die Welt als W. und V. II, Kap. xxvi, p. 379. 
 3 Philosophic des Unbewussten A. iv, pp. 83, 84.
 
 Chap. I.] EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT WILL. 269 
 
 meaning ; and when he seems on the verge of this ad- 
 mission, he flies off from it by an unexpected turn ; there 
 is indeed a mental representation in the instinctive will, 
 but it is an unconscious one: it lives in the creature, it 
 directs the organism, it inspires the movement with regu- 
 lated system, but remains unrecognised and hid. ' It would 
 almost seem,' he says, 'as though Will, per se, were in- 
 accessible to consciousness, and remained so until wedded 
 to an idea. Be that as it may, we may affirm that an 
 unconscious will is a will containing an unconscious idea ; 
 for of will that contains a conscious idea we are always 
 conscious. Although the difference between conscious and 
 unconscious will is thus only thrown back upon the no 
 less perplexing difference between conscious and uncon- 
 scious ideas, we gain thereby an essential simplification 
 of the problem V Hartmann finds in Leibniz and even 
 in Kant some support for his doctrine of 'unconscious 
 ideas ' ; but the ' obscure perceptions ' of which they speak 
 are sensitive, not intellectual, -feelings existing and chang- 
 ing, without being referred home to the subject as their 
 seat, and therefore without being known for what they are, 
 and not Vorstellungen of any kind, much less of an end to 
 be pursued. That such a TrpoKfipfvov should be present to 
 the mind, and yet latent from consciousness, appears to 
 me a mere contradiction ; not less so than an unfelt feeling 
 or an unseen vision. It is true that we sometimes speak 
 of a dreamer or a somnambulist as ' unconscious ' of his 
 state. In doing so, however, we mean, not that he is un- 
 conscious of the images that throng upon his mind, and 
 the ideal scenery to which his gestures and movements are 
 adjusted, but that he is unconscious of the bed which, 
 though he is in it, never suggests itself to his thought, and 
 of the room and the things around him which he does not 
 
 1 Ibid, ad fin., pp. 87, 88.
 
 270 . PLACE OF TELEOLOGY, [Book II. 
 
 see ; and this is an unconsciousness of what is absent from 
 his mind, not of what is present to it Or else we mean 
 that, when he wakes and recovers the objects to which he 
 was insensible, no vestiges remain to him of the drama 
 of his sleep, so that what was then in his consciousness 
 now passes out of it, and leaves it empty for other occu- 
 pants ; and this is no unconsciousness of a present state, 
 but only forgetfulness of a past. Hartmann, therefore, 
 while exposing the error of Schopenhauer, has not suc- 
 ceeded in correcting it. He has only shifted it to another 
 place. Both these writers are determined to eject conscious 
 intention from nature ; and the question with them is, 
 where can they find an open joint at which to fling it out. 
 Schopenhauer tries the dividing point between will and 
 representation ; Hartmann, that between representation 
 and intellect ; but so long as it remains admitted, that 
 the end attained at last supplies the motive operative at 
 the beginning, the excluded consciousness and intention- 
 ality will steal back, and inspire the automatism of instinct 
 with the purposes of reason. 
 
 6. Place of Teleology. 
 
 If Will supplies whatever meaning there is in the word 
 Causality, and must itself be taken to include intention, we 
 are led, by an a priori necessity, to look upon the universe 
 no less than upon the person of a fellow man, as pervaded 
 by intellectual power ; and must assume purpose to be 
 everywhere. It might appear therefore a superfluous thing 
 to dwell upon its presence here and there, as if it alighted 
 only on favoured spots, instead of being impartial and 
 universal ; and the appeal to occasional and select in- 
 stances of design would seem to be superseded by the 
 doctrine which leaves nothing else for the inner life of 
 nature. The unlimited affirmation of will, like the total 
 denial of it by Spinoza, might be held to exclude that
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 271 
 
 appeal to it by partial samples which constitutes what 
 is called the ' argument from design,' or, as Kant desig- 
 nates it, the Physico-theological argument. And this 
 would be true if, in singling out particular cases of design 
 and insisting on their marks of intelligence, we set the 
 rest of the world in contrast with them, and therefore 
 virtually surrendered it to accident. If the whole cosmos 
 is a voluntary product, the features of will can nowhere be 
 absent, and outward nature will not afford the materials 
 for contrasting its action with its negation. The only 
 sphere in which we can hope to make this comparison 
 is our own life, the phenomena of which do really occur 
 with our will and without our will, and carry in them 
 characteristic indications of this difference. But, in seeking 
 out special examples of purpose, there is no need to treat 
 what lies beyond as undesigned. Among the products 
 of artistic skill, some may tell their story at a glance, 
 or may reveal it distinctly and impressively on careful 
 analysis ; others, while still betraying the constructive 
 hand, may hide their purpose from our sight ; just as, 
 of two inscriptions disinterred from a ruined temple, one 
 may be in a well-known tongue and give its meaning 
 forth at once, while the other, in an unknown character 
 of a lost language, may remain undeciphered by the 
 archaeologist. There is place for teleology, in order .to 
 interpret such facts and adjustments in Nature as can be 
 resolved into their significance by help of a well-verified 
 key. It matters not that the key may only partially 
 disclose the thought we seek to penetrate ; the gaps 
 which we leave unread interrupt, but do not destroy, the 
 sense already gained. This is ackowledged even by 
 Gassendi, ' the modern Epicurus,' in opposition to the 
 contempt for final causation which was the humour of 
 philosophers in his time. Descartes had said, 'we shall 
 not stop to investigate the ends for which God has
 
 272 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 created the world, and shall wholly reject from our philo- 
 sophy the enquiry into final causes ; for we must not be so 
 presumptuous as to think that God has chosen to take 
 us into His counsel l :' and again, ' knowing as I do that 
 my nature is extremely weak and limited, while that of 
 God is immeasurable, incomprehensible, and infinite, I 
 have no difficulty in acknowledging that He has com- 
 mand of an infinitude of things of which my mind cannot 
 compass the causes ; and this alone suffices to convince 
 me that the whole class of causes supplied by the end 
 in view is useless in regard to natural things ; for it seems 
 to me, it would be rash in me to investigate and undertake 
 to recover the impenetrable ends of God 2 .' To this Gas- 
 sendi replies, ' However true this may be, if you mean 
 to speak of ends which God has chosen to hide or to deter 
 us from investigating, it cannot apply to those which He 
 has exposed to everybody's view, and which disclose 
 themselves with little trouble, and which besides are of 
 a kind to redound to the great glory of God as their 
 author 3 .' To the same effect is the happy illustration 
 
 1 Principes de la Philosophic, I re Parte, Cousin iii, p. 81. 
 
 * Meditations : 4, Cous. i, p. 297. 
 
 8 CEuvres de Descartes, Cous. ii, p. 179. Gassendi Opp. Omn. Lugd. 
 1658, T. iii, p. 359 a. Gassendi further insists that the final cause, be- 
 sides being in itself evident, may often lead to the discovery of the effi- 
 cient. For example, a forester or mountaineer, coming down into the 
 plain, may reach a covered bridge spanning a river ; and, noticing 
 nothing at first but its mouth, may think no more of it than of some 
 natural cavern, formed by a tumble of rocks meeting from the opposite 
 side of the valley. But when he sees how it gets the travellers across 
 the river and shortens their journey, and observes the regular arch of 
 hewn stones, and everything disposed with most skilful adaptation to 
 one object, he knows that the bridge is neither without a builder nor 
 built by chance, but is due to one intent upon an end, inventive of the 
 means, and competent to the execution. ' How is it possible,' asks 
 Gassendi, ' to say, in view of the structure of our own bodies, that all 
 the designs of God are alike hidden in the inscrutable abyss of his 
 wisdom ? ' and he singles out, as specially unmistakeable, the valves of 
 the heart, so adapted in their material form, number, and position for
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 273 
 
 which Boyle gives of the case in which we find ourselves : 
 ' Suppose/ he says, ' that a countryman, being in a clear 
 day brought into the garden of some famous mathe- 
 matician, should see there one of those curious gnomonic 
 instruments that show at once the place of the sun in the 
 zodiac, his declination from the equator, the day of the 
 
 admitting and discharging the blood to and from the required cham- 
 bers ; and the corresponding provision against regurgitation in the 
 blood vessels ; and also the tendons which close the finger joints 
 upon the palm, and which so artfully divide themselves so as to let 
 others pass through. In such cases, he insists, it is the very reverse 
 of the truth to say that the final cause is inaccessible to knowledge, 
 and only the efficient within our reach. 'Tell us if you know,' he 
 says, 'what agent forms and disposes, in the way observed, these 
 valves at the orifices of the blood vessels in the chambers of the 
 heart ? In what state and from what quarter it borrows the materials 
 for their elaboration ? how it addresses itself to the work ? what in- 
 struments it uses, and how it gets hold of them? What are its 
 resources for making them all right in proportion, consistency, cohe- 
 sion, flexibility, size, form, and position ? tell us, you wonderful man, 
 shall I say? or hero? or demigod? no but downright God, if you 
 know.' Ibid., p. 361 a, b, 362 a. 
 
 It is not without reason that Gassendi selected, as an example of 
 obvious purpose, the valves of the circulatory system, and claimed for 
 such phenomena a place in scientific studies as well as in natural 
 theology. The passage which I have cited belongs to the year 1643 ; 
 and Harvey's great discovery, announced fifteen years before, stood 
 in clear relation with the very structure to which appeal is made. 
 ' I remember,' says Robert Boyle, ' that when I asked our famous 
 Harvey, in the only discourse I had with him (which was but a little 
 while before he died), what were the things which induced him to 
 think of a circulation of the blood ? he answered me, that, when he 
 took notice that the valves in the veins of so many parts of the body 
 were so placed that they give free passage to the blood towards the 
 heart, but opposed the passage of the venal blood the contrary way, 
 he was invited to think that so provident a cause as nature had not 
 placed so many valves without design, and no design seemed more 
 probable than that, since the blood could not well, because of the 
 interposing valves, be sent by the veins to the limbs, it should be sent 
 through the arteries, and return through the veins, whose valves did 
 not oppose its course that way.' Disquisition about the Final Causes 
 of Natural things ; wherein it is enquired whether, and (if at all) with 
 what cautions, a Naturalist should admit them. Works, 5 vols. folio ; 
 with Life, by Rev. Thos. Birch, 1 744. Vol. iv, pp. 5 1 5 seqq. 
 
 VOL. I. T
 
 274 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 month, the length of the day, &c. ; it would indeed be 
 presumptuous in him, being unacquainted both with the 
 mathematical discipline, and the several intentions of the 
 artist, to pretend or think himself able to discover all the 
 ends for which so curious and elaborate a piece was 
 framed ; but when he sees it furnished with a style, with 
 horary lines and numbers, and manifestly perceives the 
 shadow to mark from time to time the hour of the day, it 
 would be no more a presumption than an error in him 
 to conclude, that (whatever other uses the instrument was 
 fit or was designed for) it is a sun-dial, that was meant to 
 show the hour of the day 1 .' 
 
 The justifying object then of teleological enquiry is, to 
 ascertain whether the world answers, in its constitution, to 
 our intuitive interpretation of it as the manifestation of 
 intellectual purpose. As only living beings can be objects 
 of purpose, good and evil, the better and the worse having 
 no other seat, we must resort for our reply to the field 
 of organic nature ; and it will be affirmative or negative 
 according as we find there, or fail to find, in adequate pre- 
 valence, the three marks of intention before enumerated. 
 
 I. Are there indications of Selection ? Lest we go astray 
 in our search for them, consider for a moment what we are 
 to look out for. ' Selection,' you may perhaps say, ' is 
 a mental act, not a visible phenomenon, and cannot there- 
 fore be noticed by any scrutiny of ours ; and if we fancy it 
 discovered, it will be by ourselves putting it into the scene 
 from which we profess to read it off. A little reflection 
 however will show, that this subjective act has an objective 
 side which speaks for itself. He who selects takes for 
 realisation one out of several possibles. Observing him in 
 a single instance, you cannot tell his act from a mere 
 fortuity ; he may have chosen, or he may have chanced, 
 the thing he took. But if, through a score or a hundred 
 
 1 Disquisition about Final Causes : ibid.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 275 
 
 similar opportunities, he repeats the same appropriation, 
 you know that it is no random hit he makes : there is here 
 a new phenomenon over and above the individual events, 
 namely, a certain order among them, consisting in the 
 regular reproduction of the same ; and for this pheno- 
 menon you need a cause, and have it, in the controlling 
 preference of the agent. Selection therefore has its legible 
 external feature, namely among several possibles, steadily 
 one ; and, to find it in Nature, we must plant ourselves in 
 some contingent scene, and notice the cases in which all 
 other contingencies are dismissed in favour of a constant 
 one or few. 
 
 Happily we have no difficulty, under the guidance of 
 the modern naturalist, in finding our scene of contingen- 
 cies. The ' geometrical ' or ' mechanical ' systems of the 
 universe, which linked all its facts together, like the pro- 
 perties of the conic sections, by the ties of mathematical 
 necessity, have retreated before the advance of physiology ; 
 and the world, as it is, is regarded, no longer as the only 
 possible, but as the successful competitor for existence 
 among many that once bid as fair to be. The first prin- 
 ciple of the reigning hypothesis is the extensive openness 
 of all living forms to slight 'accidental' variations, enabling 
 them to diverge from a parent stock in directions in- 
 definitely more various than those actually traced ; so 
 that, of the resources assembled on some early field of 
 Nature we must conceive, as a countless multitude of pos- 
 sibilities pressing towards the entrance gates for a place 
 in the theatre of life. And the method by which their 
 claims are sifted Mr. Darwin himself designates as ' Selec- 
 tion,' ' Natural Selection,' the attainment or increase of 
 some property giving an advantage in the struggle of life. 
 Here then we have plenty to choose from ; and something 
 (we will not at present ask what] that chooses ; and we 
 can consult some of the phenomena of selection. 
 
 T 2
 
 276 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 i. The anterior limbs of vertebrate animals exhibit in 
 the skeletons a fundamental unity of plan and of relation 
 to the whole ; yet in their wide differences attest the in- 
 definite range of variation which is left open to them. 
 The changes that might be rung upon them by extension 
 or contraction of size, by altered proportions of their 
 members, by readjustment of weight, by shifting their 
 leverage, by modifying their muscular apparatus, are end- 
 less'/ in excess of all the actual types. What, then, has 
 limited the number which have found admission ? Is the 
 restriction merely arithmetical, so that we have before us 
 about as many as would be flung down at random at any 
 one time ? If so, they will follow no rule, and will present 
 simply a miscellaneous lot of ' accidental variations.' In- 
 stead of this, the revision of the structure has undeniable 
 reference to the medium in which the creature is to live ; 
 reducing it to the pectoral fin of the fish and the paddle of 
 the seal ; or extending it into the wing of the bird, itself 
 elongated by the primary feathers which grow from the 
 fingers ; and in terrestrial animals terminating it with the 
 hoof or toe for progression, the claw for battle, the hand 
 for prehensile arts. Why are the modifications of form 
 thus accurately relative to the conditions of life ? It can- 
 not be pretended that the medium itself can mould the 
 organs committed to it into congenial shape. Except in 
 mythologic tales no fisherman, like Glaucus of Anthedon, 
 can betake himself to his own element and become a 
 marine inhabitant indistinguishable from the fish, even 
 though he has an immortality to do it in. Nor could any 
 air that blows help the arms that beat it to grow into 
 wings ; whatever force was called into action by incipient 
 attempts to fly would work in opposition to such direction 
 of development and sweep away its first beginnings. The 
 waters and atmosphere can never set up instruments of 
 resistance to themselves. If, then, the determining power
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 277 
 
 does not lie in the play of the medium on the organism, we 
 must seek it in the organism itself. There are but two 
 ways in which its operation there can be conceived. It 
 may be lodged already, as a pre-existent control, in the 
 germ of the whole organism, so that, in conformity with 
 Miiller's doctrine, ' the egg or germ potentially contains ' 
 the entire ulterior structure ; the members of which would 
 therefore appear prefigured there to an eye of keen 
 analysis, and the process of growth would be merely an 
 expansion of all the original relations. To take it thus 
 is to say, with Claude-Bernard, that there is, incarnate in 
 each type, 'a directing and organising idea' or 'vital design] 
 which works up the materials available for its own execu- 
 tion. And what does this mean, but that the future form 
 is already bespoken, and it is too late for anything else ? 
 The selection is only pushed back to the source which 
 implanted that 'directing idea ' and armed it with its 
 gradually waking power ; and if, at that prior moment, 
 other lines were open (and else there is nothing to be 
 explained), their exclusion in favour of a single one is 
 preferential, and carries in it prospective arrangements 
 to be unfolded in due time. The other and more recent 
 doctrine, favoured by M. Robin and the ' Positive' natural- 
 ists, is that of i epigenesisl or growth of the embryo by 
 accretion rather than by expansion. In their rudimentary 
 stages, it is said, animal forms ultimately most divergent 
 are indistinguishably alike, and no microscope enables us 
 to divine what they are to be, or read in them any ' direct- 
 ing idea.' It is not till late in their praenatal history that 
 their differentiation from each other sets in ; and then it is 
 by piecemeal additions of part after part that the whole is 
 at last built up. If this account is accepted, the only 
 change it makes is, that the moulding idea, instead of being 
 folded entire in the germ as its material nidus, distributes 
 itself into successive acts of construction, for the comple-
 
 278 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book If. 
 
 tion of which the whole waits to declare its character. 
 The result being the same, and delivering one creature 
 to the land, another to the water, another to the air, the 
 problem 'Whence the selective causality?' remains un- 
 affected. Whether it be there ab initio, or be consecutively 
 applied, it is charged with the explanation of the same 
 adaptive relations. Though the newer theory is favoured 
 by naturalists who reject the doctrine of design and sup- 
 pose it thus superseded, I am not sure that it does not 
 rather work the other way ; for, if we want to conceive of 
 development within a purely physical circle of processes, 
 with a minimum of temptation to enquire beyond, surely 
 the gradual increase of a given form in all its dimensions 
 at once leaves us less to ask, than the successive aggre- 
 gation of heterogeneous organs of which no hint had before 
 been given. 
 
 But may not the working of Chance on a sufficiently 
 large scale and in the long run, deceive us by simulating 
 selection ? Among the countless ' accidental ' novelties 
 started by the interaction of organism and medium, only 
 those will hold their ground which are in equilibrium with 
 each other and with the whole ; and by the elimination 
 of all the unstable attempts, we shall be left in the 
 presence of the happy adaptations, as the residuary uni- 
 verse ; and it will exhibit just the same aspect as if its 
 contents had been all designed, and no failure had ever 
 disputed the field with them. It is certainly remarkable 
 that the scientific speculation of the nineteenth century 
 should have reverted to the Lucretian doctrine, and set it 
 on high as its culminating light l : if any fact can give 
 
 1 Nam certe neque consilio primordia rerum 
 Ordine se suo quaeque sagaci mente locarunt 
 Nee quos quaeque darent motus pepigere profecto, 
 Sed quia multa modis multis primordia rerum 
 Ex infinite jam tempore percita plagis 
 Ponderibusque suis consuerunt concita ferri
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 279 
 
 plausibility to the pessimist view of human life, it is that 
 this is the point at which we are landed after sailing the 
 philosophic seas of so many proud ages. It is true 
 that in the hands of Darwin and Herbert Spencer, the 
 theory of chances is placed under some reasonable re- 
 straints which were absent from the ancient philosophy : 
 the tentatives open to the organic world are not indefinite ; 
 nor in their origin are they regarded as without determinate 
 cause. But still, the unstable ones are immensely more 
 numerous than the stable ; and as they arise we know 
 not how, they are, relatively to us, fortuitous. Indeed 
 the very candour and conscientiousness of Darwin have 
 led him to leave more to chance in this sense than 
 previous naturalists who had attempted the same problem. 
 Lamarck was ambitious of more fully explaining the 
 course of organic development than is now deemed 
 honestly possible ; not indeed dispensing with an internal 
 power, which he could only describe as a tendency of life 
 to increasing complexity ; but vesting in the external 
 medium a large control over the form and extent of its 
 results ; and attributing to the needs of the animal a 
 moulding action, and to its habits a conservative or stereo- 
 typing force, which observation does not confirm : and so, 
 whatever fails to be thus accounted for has to be taken back 
 into Darwin's category of ' accidental variation.' Hence, 
 
 (a) The range given to chance appears to me quite 
 inadmissible ; so large indeed as to amount to an abandon- 
 ment of the problem as a philosophical whole. The 
 known species of organisms are the residue preserved in 
 
 Omnimodisque coire atque omnia pertemptare, 
 
 Quaecumque inter se possent congressa creare, 
 
 Propterea fit uti magnum volgata per aevum 
 
 Omne genus coetus et motus experiundo 
 
 Tandem conveniant ea quae convecta repente 
 
 Magnarum rerum fiunt exordia saepe, 
 
 Terrai maris et coeli generisque animantum. V. 419-431.
 
 28o PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 the competition of life by some casual advantage accruing 
 to them through natural selection. This advantage is 
 a prize turned up by the wheel of a vast lottery, with the 
 peculiarity that its ticket was not made out and deposited 
 there before, pre-ordained to be drawn by some one ; but 
 formed and inscribed itself by the molecular experiments 
 of the machine. No one can deny that the beneficial 
 feature might thus arise, any more than that a basket 
 of compositor's types emptied often enough upon the floor 
 might tumble them at last into the text of Shakespeare's 
 Macbeth. But the number of trials prior to such an event 
 scares the imagination by its prodigious amount ; and it is 
 the measure of the field allotted to accident. Nor is it 
 only in the first appearance of an advantageous variation 
 that the overstraining of fortuity occurs. In order to 
 preserve and transmit the advantage, it must accidentally 
 arise twice over, once in each parent of the future stock. 
 Even then the novel feature is far from being secured ; 
 if it reappear in one or more of the offspring, it is still 
 a family peculiarity, almost certain to disappear among 
 new mates in the next generation. An ingenious attempt 
 has been made by Mr. Alfred W. Bennett to compute, 
 in a particular instance, the chance of perpetuation for 
 an organic specialty produced by natural selection. Among 
 the dainties of an aviary, perhaps butterflies are the choicest: 
 but, in the gaudy South American tribe of Heliconidae, 
 there is one genus, the Ithomia, which is particularly re- 
 pulsive to birds from its exuding, when attacked, a nauseous 
 fluid ; and through this protection from its natural enemies, 
 it becomes very abundant. By some freak of nature, the 
 colour and appearance of one species of Ithomia have been 
 exactly copied, not in another species, or even within the 
 same tribe, but in one of the species of the genus Leptalis, 
 belonging to the totally different class of Pieridae. The 
 imitation is the more remarkable, because, in size and form,
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 28 1 
 
 in movement, and in colour almost white, most of its con- 
 geners in this class present the strongest contrast to the 
 characters of the Heliconidae. The plagiarism, by a mys- 
 terious restraint of good taste, stops with the bright colours, 
 and dispenses with the accompaniment of the nauseous 
 exudation, as if deeming it a superfluous protection. The 
 disguise completely imposes upon its natural enemies, and 
 secures it from pursuit. At the low rate of change whence 
 new species arise, not fewer than a thousand steps must be 
 taken from the original to the completed type ; and during 
 the earlier stages the modifications would be too slight to 
 have any effect upon the birds, say for the -^ part, i.e. 
 through twenty generations, of the whole process ; and, so 
 long as this lasts, natural selection does not come into play, 
 and the occurrence and recurrence of any determinate 
 step of metamorphosis is a mere chance. This chance of 
 first entrance for the operation of natural selection is thus 
 computed by Mr. Bennett, after reducing the twenty gen- 
 erations to ten, in order to give every admissible advantage 
 to the theory of 'accidental variation,' and to simplify 
 the terms of the calculation. ' Suppose there are twenty 
 different ways in which a Leptalis may vary, one only of 
 these being in the direction ultimately required. The 
 chance of any individual producing a descendant which 
 will take its place in the succeeding generation, varying in 
 the required direction, is ^V : the chance of this operation 
 being repeated in the same direction in the second gen- 
 eration is ^V=T7TT- The chance of this occurring for ten 
 successive generations is ^V'< or about one in ten billions. 
 Now another factor comes into the calculation, and that is, 
 the number of individuals among which this chance is 
 distributed. Mr. Bates and Mr. Wallace agree in stating 
 that, both in South America and in the Malay archipelago, 
 the imitative species are always confined to a limited area, 
 and are always very scarce compared with the imitated
 
 282 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 species. We will assume that the number of individuals 
 of the imitative Leptalis existing at any one time is one 
 million. The chance of there being among these million 
 a single individual approaching the Ithomia to the extent 
 of one-hundredth is TTHnnrVAVAinnr 5 or > the chance 
 against it is ten millions to one 1 .' Against these odds 
 the primitive variety would long ago have been worn out ; 
 the individual deviation being lost amid the renewals of 
 the original type through multitudes practically exhaust- 
 less. 
 
 (b) And this leads me to another difficulty attaching to 
 the hypothesis of survival of the fittest accident. I cannot 
 see that the hypothesis accounts for the total elimination 
 of all but a few successful types, and the non-appearance 
 of the vastly out-numbering swarm of abortive bids for 
 a place in the world. It seems to be always assumed that 
 we can expect to see only the forms that hit the conditions 
 of equilibrium, and that all the rest, though once started 
 on their candidature, must long ago have been driven from 
 the field and been completely run out. If chance had any 
 brains and could learn a lesson from experience, it might 
 get to know when it was beaten, and decline to try it 
 again ; and a failure once incurred would then be whipped 
 off the world and done with. But you have here invoked 
 an ally which, once rashly let in, never tires, and insists on 
 repeating its offers when you would gladly be rid of them. 
 What is there to hinder the perpetual starting of fresh 
 tentatives, and the consequent appearance of animal and 
 vegetable types of every grade cf instability, suppressed in 
 a moment, or fighting the battle of life for days or years 
 or a few generations, and then heard of no more ? Natural 
 selection saves permanent races for the world, not by 
 
 1 The Theory of Natural Selection from a Mathematical Point of 
 View, by Alfred W. Bennett ; a paper read before Section D of the 
 British Association at Liverpool, Sept. 20, 1870. Nature, Nov. 10, 1870.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 283 
 
 preventing the origin of others, but by defeating their 
 effort to hold their ground : its operation therefore implies 
 their presence, and even leads us to expect it more in our 
 age than in earlier periods of the earth's history. For, 
 the more complex and highly differentiated the organic 
 structures are, the more liable are they to variation ; so 
 that the 'accidents' which open possibilities of development 
 grow numerous as we advance, and were never at so high 
 an amount as now. How is it then that a limited number 
 of stable forms appear the only tenants of the globe, 
 instead of being mingled, rari nantes in gurgite vasto, 
 with a fluctuating mass of comparatively evanescent life ? 
 
 (c] Nor does this hypothesis account much better for the 
 conservation of the stable forms than for the total dis- 
 appearance of the unstable. We are apt to assume that 
 when once a determinate type has been set up, there is 
 nothing more to explain ; it will take care of itself by the 
 law of heredity. But what means that law? It means 
 that certain features, hit upon (according to the theory we 
 are discussing) by accident, repeat themselves again and 
 again indefinitely, in successive organisms not necessarily 
 carrying them and open all round to change. Variation, 
 it must be remembered, is a departure from heredity, and, 
 so far as it is admitted, withdraws something from the 
 range of the law ; yet, the very property which you have 
 thus exempted you immediately put under the rule which 
 it disregards, and which, if operative, would have kept it 
 out of existence. In order to get advantages for an or- 
 ganism, you break the law ; in order to keep them, you 
 enforce it. For, though the ' new characters' of which 'the 
 force of inheritance allows the incessant appearance ' may 
 be, as Darwin assures us, either 'beneficial or injurious, 
 of the most trifling importance, such as a shade of colour 
 in a flower, a coloured lock of hair, or a mere gesture : or 
 of the highest importance, as when affecting the brain or
 
 284 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 an organ so perfect and complex as the eye : or of so 
 grave a nature as to deserve to be called a monstrosity, or 
 so peculiar as not to occur normally in any member of the 
 same natural class ' : yet from their often ' being limited 
 by sex,' ' their preservation and accumulation are dependent 
 on their service to either sex^' Thus it is by 'preserving all 
 profitable variations ' that Nature ' improves her inhabi- 
 tants ; ' she ' can act on every internal organ, on every 
 constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life ; ' 
 and in doing so, ' selects only for the good of the being 
 which she tends ; ' and her productions, as compared with 
 man's, are ' infinitely better adapted to the most complex 
 conditions of life, and plainly bear the stamp of far higher 
 workmanship 2 .' 'And this preservation of favourable vari- 
 ations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call (says 
 Darwin) natural selection*! That new experiments in 
 life should incessantly arise, should be put in charge of 
 inheritance to keep, but subject to sifting by ' the good of 
 the being ' they affect, is surely an adjustment not incom- 
 patible with the action of an intending Mind; and therefore 
 improperly appealed to in evidence of the reign of accident. 
 That the animal constitution should thus yield where 
 persistence would bar improvement, and become inflexible 
 where yielding would be mischievous, is surely an arrange- 
 ment beyond the resources of happy fortuity ; nor can it 
 be legitimately permitted to an hypothesis to take up 
 ' accident,' and lay it down again, in this arbitrary way. 
 Even if we were to waive the difficulty of inheritance in 
 the case of accidental organs, and were to concede that, as 
 they lasted through life, they would have time for consti- 
 tutional effects, and so might influence the progeny, we 
 should meet it in more serious form, as Janet has admirably 
 
 1 Animals and Plants under Domestication, ii. 80, 84. 
 
 2 Origin of Species, ch. iv. pp. 82-84. 
 
 3 Ibid., p. 81.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 285 
 
 pointed out, in the case of accidental instincts. Their 
 adaptation to the conditions of the animal's existence 
 Darwin explains by the same method, of happy fortuity, in 
 varying the ways of life : the activity of the creature makes 
 a good hit and does something convenient; this is repeated 
 and becomes an individual habit ; the habit is transmitted 
 to the offspring, and, taking its place among the usages of 
 a species, acquires the dignity of an instinct. In this 
 deduction everything is derived from a perfectly transient 
 act, a mere random dash of spontaneity ; it is not assumed 
 that any sort of immediate good is felt to accrue from it, 
 which could move the animal to try it again ; yet at the 
 next step we find this action treated as a habit: it could 
 become such only by an unaccountable and constant 
 recurrence of the original accident. Even then it is a mere 
 acquired and superficial way of movement, not modifying, 
 like a congenital organ, the structure and constitution of 
 the creature : it is moreover an individiial peculiarity, 
 which cannot be looked for in a second instance ; so that 
 to suppose the descent to another generation of such a 
 freak is to put an excessive strain upon the doctrine of 
 inheritance. It is well known that our great naturalist 
 explains on this principle the strange habit which dis- 
 tinguishes the English cuckoo from the American, namely, 
 of depositing its eggs to be hatched in the nests of other 
 birds. He supposes that this was originally done by some 
 blundering British mother that had lost her way and had 
 got into the wrong house ; and that, from similar dreami- 
 ness about locality, other birds now and then were betrayed 
 into the same awkward liberty with a stranger's domestic 
 arrangements. Some accidental advantage having accrued 
 from this mistake, either to the bird herself or to the 
 progeny she had put out to nurse, they enjoyed a more 
 favourable chance in the struggle for life, survived in 
 preference to their rivals, became the species, and com-
 
 286 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 municated to it the eccentric blunder of their ancestor. 
 If a casual slip, or trick of fancy, can be stereotyped and 
 transmitted, and entered on the books at last as a law of 
 nature, it certainly puts all awkward people under a more 
 serious responsibility than they had suspected. A gen- 
 tleman, knocking at the wrong door for a dinner engage- 
 ment, and shown into the drawing-room, might become 
 the founder of a new race with whom it would be a moral 
 axiom to entertain everybody's guest but your own. 
 
 (d) Though it is impossible to speak with any approach 
 to exactitude of the geological periods of the globe, and 
 they are without any common measure : yet the portion of 
 them which contains the whole history of animal life lies 
 between certain extreme numbers which none of the 
 varying estimates transgress ; and so the question becomes 
 possible, whether the maximum duration assignable to the 
 existence of living forms is adequate to their production by 
 the play of accidental variation with survival of its favour- 
 able hits. No estimate, we are assured by M. Naudin 
 (a 'distinguished botanist' often quoted by Darwin) 1 , 
 goes beyond fifty millions of years. Liberal as this 
 allowance seems for chance experiments in the moulding 
 of sentient organisms, there are grave reasons for doubting 
 whether it is enough. We are indebted to the little ar- 
 borescent madrepore for a possible unit of measurement 
 with which to pass across so vast a time. The coral reefs 
 constructed by this animal have been carefully studied by 
 Mr. Dana, the American geologist ; and he finds that 
 though the branches of a coial rise about \\ inch per 
 annum, yet this is equivalent, when the interstices are 
 
 1 E.g. in Animals and Plants under Domestication, i. pp. 357, 399. 
 See in Revue Scientifique de la France et de 1'Etranger, 4 Annde, 
 Num. 36, 6 Mars, 1875. Naudin sur les Especes affines et laThdorie 
 de PEvolution. Sir W. Thomson, however, reasoning on physical 
 grounds, allows 100 million years for the development of life.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 287 
 
 filled up and the bare patches between the living work are 
 covered with coral debris to the same level, to no more 
 than an upward growth of \ inch for the whole mass of the 
 building. At this rate a reef 2000 feet thick (and some 
 are at least as thick) would require for its construction not 
 less than 192,000 years l ; or, as Agassiz states it, 200,000 
 years. During this period therefore the madrepore has 
 continued as it is to-day, and been building up evidence 
 against its own ' accidental variation.' There are but 250 of 
 such periods in the whole term at disposal ; and who can 
 suppose, after looking at such a sample of the rate of 
 change, that these steps suffice to evolve all existing types 
 of sentient life from the primordial animal cells 2 ? 
 
 I have thought it well, in treating of the first example of 
 selection, to meet at once the doubt whether accident 
 might not put on the same appearance and deceive us by 
 the mask of purpose. If this difficulty is removed, it will 
 be needless to multiply instances of selection ; natural 
 
 1 See Manual of Geology, by James Dana, 3rd Ed u ., New York, 
 1880. Part III. Sect. 5, p. 591. 
 
 2 A curious sample of a somewhat similar argument, mixed up with 
 an arbitrary theory of Providence, occurs in St. Pierre's Studies of 
 Nature, Hunter's translation, vol. ii. pp. 375, 376. 'An irrefragable 
 argument in support of the recent creation of the globe is this : were 
 the globe of very remote antiquity, all the possible combinations of 
 the propagation of plants by seed would have been already completed 
 all over the world. Thus, for example, there would not be an unin- 
 habited island and shore of the seas of India which you would not 
 find planted with cocoa-trees and sown with cocoa-nuts, which the 
 ocean wafts thither every year, and which it scatters alternately on 
 their strands, by means of the variety of its monsoons and of its 
 currents. Now it is unquestionably certain that the radiations of that 
 tree and its fruit, the principal focusses of which are in the Maldivia 
 islands, are not hitherto diffused over all the islands of the Indian 
 Ocean. . . . The philosopher Francis Leguat and his unfortunate com- 
 panions who were, in the year 1690, the first inhabitants of the small 
 island of Rodriguez, which lies one hundred leagues to the east of the 
 Isle of France, found no cocoa-nuts in it. But precisely at the period 
 of their short residence there, the sea threw upon the coast several 
 cocoa-nuts in a state of germination ; as if it had been the intention
 
 288 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 history consists of little else ; one or two samples will 
 suffice. 
 
 (2) The modifications in the organs of sense have, in 
 their leading features, obvious reference to the conditions 
 on which their function is to be exercised, yet cannot have 
 been the result of these conditions. Animals that live in 
 the water, the undulations of which are strong, need no 
 apparatus like a hearing trumpet for collecting them ; and 
 have only the internal ear ; while the terrestrial mammals 
 are furnished with an external concha, often very move- 
 able ; and whilst, in hunting quadrupeds, the ear is turned 
 forward for pursuit, in those which have to escape them by 
 flight, it is turned backwards, to give warning of danger. 
 In the harmless hare, the outer ear is open and exposed, 
 though the delicate parts are safely out of reach : but 
 where the animal frequents the bed of a river, like the 
 
 of Providence to induce them, by this useful and seasonable present, 
 to remain on that island and to cultivate it. 
 
 ' F. Leguat, who was unacquainted with the relation which seeds 
 have to the element in which they are designed to grow, was very 
 much astonished to find that those fruits, which weighed from five to 
 six pounds must have performed a voyage of sixty or eighty leagues 
 without being corrupted. He took it for granted, and he was in the 
 right, that they came from the island of St. Brande, which is situated to 
 the north-east of Rodriguez. These two desert islands had not as yet, 
 from the creation of the world, communicated to each other all their 
 vegetables, though situated in a current of the ocean which sets in 
 alternately, in the course of one year, for six months towards the one, 
 and six months towards the other. 
 
 ' However this may be, they planted those cocoa-nuts, which in the 
 space of a year and a half sent out shoots four feet in height. A 
 blessing from heaven so distinctly marked had not the power of 
 detaining them in that happy island. An inconsiderate desire of 
 procuring wives for themselves constrained them to abandon it, not- 
 withstanding the remonstrances of Leguat, and plunged them into 
 a long series of climates which few of them were able to survive. For 
 my part I can entertain no doubt that, had they reposed the confi- 
 dence in Providence which they had reason to do, its care would have 
 conveyed wives for them into that desert island, as it had sent to 
 them the gift of the cocoa-nut.'
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 289 
 
 hippopotamus, or burrows or dives, like the water-shrew, 
 the external meatus is protected by a membrane which 
 closes as a valve against mud and water. Moreover, the 
 auditory organ is in accurate relation with the vocal appa- 
 ratus whose effects it has to measure. It is simplest and 
 least developed in creatures which have no proper voice, 
 that is, which, being without lungs, produce only sound, 
 and that from other parts of the body than the mouth. 
 In birds, the ear is very large in proportion to the rest 
 of the head ; and, in correspondence with its completeness 
 and delicacy, is the perfection of their vocal mechanism. 
 They possess a second larynx, at the base of the wind- 
 pipe, as well as that at the top ; so that, if a duck's head 
 be cut off, its sound can still be uttered. There are not, 
 it is true, two sets of vocal chords ; they are limited to the 
 lower larynx ; but the power which the other has of 
 modifying its orifice, adds materially to the musical re- 
 sources of the tube. The capacity of differentiation in 
 these related organs, notwithstanding their fundamental 
 uniformity of type, would strike us with astonishment, 
 were we not so familiar with it. If you give an order for 
 10,000 violins, how many of them could you distinguish 
 from each other when they came home? But here is an 
 instrument made up of a pipe, a reed, and a few fibres, 
 which is multiplied vastly more, yet so sharply varied and 
 so constant to its variations, that every creature among 
 myriads instantly knows its own kind by the ear alone, 
 and has certain notice of its enemies from afar. This per- 
 sistency in the same species, with variation through many, 
 is surely an unmistakeable mark of proper selection. 
 
 It is the same with the differences in the organ of sight. 
 Though for several of them the reason is still obscure, the 
 broad features of change in the eye, as it is filled up for 
 the successive members of the animal kingdom, stand in 
 clear relation to the corresponding media and needs of life. 
 
 VOL. I. U
 
 290 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 Common to them all is the fundamental provision, a 
 nerve responding to light alone, constant to this one 
 appeal, dead to every other, with some translucent spot 
 on the surface of the organism through which the rays 
 may have access to the nerve. But for the benumbing 
 influence of custom, this appropriation, this specialty of 
 sense, would in itself strike us as a selective act, of which 
 no account can be given apart from all reference to func- 
 tional use. Who can point out an efficient cause, in a 
 nature indifferent to function, that shall discriminatively 
 weave two nerves, one conducting undulations of light, the 
 other those of sound ? and shall further keep their reports 
 apart in chambers of heterogeneous impression ? Who can 
 give us a reason, drawn from molecular matter and motion, 
 why the dissimilar affections never waver or interchange ? 
 As we follow the increasing refinements and complexities 
 of structure from the mere stemmata or lucid spots of the 
 Annelida to the human eye, we cannot fail to notice how 
 the leading modifications answer to the shifting demands 
 of animal life. The insect, which has no room for a camera 
 within, and a six-muscle apparatus without, to sweep the 
 field of vision, and whose rapid flight no moveable eye 
 could guard with adequate vigilance, is furnished with 
 a stationary compound organ, projecting in a hemisphere 
 from the head, and made up of black-lined tubes converg- 
 ing inwards, each tipped by a cornea, supplied with its 
 iris, and communicating by its nerve-filament with the 
 optic ganglion. Each one of these, of which the dragon-fly 
 has upwards of 12,500, is in truth a separate eye, receiving 
 impressions from a single point ; and it is by the fusion 
 of the aggregate deliverances of the system that the total 
 field is given in perception. The peculiarity is that, from 
 the fixed protrusion of the cone, there is no occasion for 
 the insect to look about it as it flies. When we reach the 
 moveable eye, we find its outfit strengthened here, and
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 491 
 
 here reduced, according to what it has to do. Fish, for 
 example, always in the water, want no washing and wiping 
 apparatus, and dispense with eyelids ; and, as their medium 
 has a refraction about the same as that of the eyeball, the 
 cornea is flat, while the crystalline lens, on which the whole 
 dealing with the light is thrown, is nearly spherical. In 
 one case of special habit, the Anableps, a soft-finned fish 
 (Malacopterygious) of the rivers of Guiana, the eye, 
 through the cornea and iris, is divided by a sheet of opaque 
 horizontal ligament into an upper and lower; the one 
 looking down on the bed of the river for the worms that 
 constitute the animal's food ; the other on the watch above 
 and around, to guard against the approach of natural foes. 
 Where the habits of an animal place it in very faint light, 
 as in the case of prowlers by night, and of some species of 
 fish that live three hundred fathoms or more below the 
 surface of the sea, the eyes are large, to gather all the 
 accessible rays ; and so are they in animals of prey, that 
 have to look at distant and moving objects while in motion 
 themselves ; and in those also which are specially liable 
 to be chased, as the hare and the stag ; whereas, if the 
 animal's size gives it some security, and vision is needed 
 chiefly for near or stationary food, as with the hippo- 
 potamus and the elephant, the eyes are small. Nor is the 
 position of the eyes in the head without reference to the 
 external conditions of existence ; viz. in front for carni- 
 vorous animals that live by chase, and must look before 
 them as they run ; and for herbivorous tribes that live by 
 defensive precautions, on the two sides, so as to give wide 
 command of the lateral fields, and even, by turning the 
 neck, of that behind. Birds that rise to a great height 
 above their prey, as the eagle and the condor, owe the 
 extraordinary keenness of their vision in part to the mag- 
 nitude of their eyes, and in part to their internal mobility, 
 which increases their power of accommodation to distance. 
 
 U a
 
 292 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 With regard to amphibious animals, it has been shown by 
 M. Plateau that, in order to see both in water and in 
 air, they must possess what we actually find, the following 
 peculiarities : ' the cornea always flat, or at least much 
 flattened in front of the crystalline and over a space equal 
 to the diameter of that lens, whilst the lateral portion may 
 be much curved.' ' The crystalline is very nearly a sphere, 
 and the humours have nearly the same density as water 1 .' 
 In some of these cases it may be possible to trace, or to 
 indicate by probable conjecture, the process by which the 
 ultimate adaptation of organ to function has been brought 
 about. This detection of the efficient in no way negatives 
 the final cause. An end-in-view, so far from dispensing 
 with means, imperatively demands them and sets them to 
 work ; and to treat it as disproved by the very actions 
 which it institutes is in the highest degree perverse. The 
 means, if you truly alight upon them, must always be 
 physically adequate to the end ; but, for all that, the 
 position remains untouched that, as simply physical, they 
 are not adequate to the end in its intellectual relations ; 
 any more than the weights and wheels of a clock, and the 
 tools of its maker, are adequate to the invention of the 
 time-piece. 
 
 (3) The modifications of structure, in respect of its 
 specific gravity, and the comparative solidity of its parts, 
 bear upon them the mark of selection, with distinct refer- 
 ence to the varying conditions of life, on the land, under 
 water, in the air. Of all larger animals, probably, fish and 
 the cetacea are nearest in specific gravity to the element 
 in which they live, and so have, practically, least weight to 
 move ; fish are a trifle heavier especially than fresh water, 
 and require therefore a slight expenditure of force to keep 
 their level ; whales are a little lighter, and depend upon 
 
 1 Darwin's Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. ii, p. 223.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 293 
 
 their own action to remain under water : but both of them 
 have nearly the whole of their muscular strength at dis- 
 posal for horizontal progression. The difference between 
 them becomes intelligible, when we remember that, with 
 fish, the respiration is subaqueous, effected by gills in which 
 the distributed blood robs the water of its mingled air ; 
 while with whales, as with all mammalia, it is performed 
 by lungs, and needs to seek the atmosphere. With the 
 one, therefore, life is only in the water ; while the others 
 divide it, breathing in the air and feeding in the water. 
 Though the whale can dispense with fresh inspirations for 
 an hour or more, it usually comes up frequently to breathe ; 
 and at times, particularly in suckling its young, remains 
 vertical in the sea with the head protruded above the 
 surface, a position contingent on a rightly adjusted spe- 
 cific gravity. Relieved from the vertical strain of their 
 weight, the structure of aquatic animals admits of being 
 only moderately compact ; the bones can be light and 
 porous, in some kinds hardly more than cartilages ; and 
 can retain their relative positions with no strong fitting or 
 attachment. The muscular apparatus can be computed 
 with almost exclusive regard to progression, the actions 
 of organic life having once been provided for ; it is accord- 
 ingly concentrated mainly in the posterior part of the 
 body, the tail being the great instrument of propulsion. 
 With the cetacea, whose most important movements are 
 in height, from surface to deep, this member is horizontally 
 flat : with fish, that glide longitudinally, it is vertically flat : 
 in both cases the fins avail chiefly for balance and steering, 
 and preserve the animal, as we see when they collapse in 
 death, from turning upon its back. To allow of the neces- 
 sary attachments for the locomotive muscles, the lumbar 
 vertebra:: are numerous, while the cervical are few, and the 
 whole of the viscera are packed into a small compass near 
 the head. And since in fishes the muscular arrangement
 
 294 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book u. 
 
 is pre-engaged with progression and gives no great facility 
 for changing the depth, a separate provision meets this 
 want ; viz. an air-bladder under the mid-spine, which 
 admits of compression and modifies the specific gravity 
 according as it is fully distended or partially contracted. 
 Were we to descend to minor peculiarities, we should still 
 encounter the same selective signs ; for example, the 
 Greenland whale, living on small marine animals which it 
 drinks in as it advances with open mouth, is furnished not 
 with teeth, but with two rows of baleen or whalebone plate, 
 attached to the jaws and palate, and edged with a fringe 
 that entangles and arrests the food for consumption, while 
 the water is turned out at the sides : but the herbivorous 
 species, that browse on the algae and fuci at the bottom 
 of the sea, have regular sets of molar teeth like cattle, and 
 the overhanging upper lips for gathering up their vegetable 
 meal. Nor is it possible, apart from all nicer observations, 
 to see the lithe and pointed form, the scaly surface or the 
 lubricated integument of these tribes, the wary and watch- 
 ing eye, the poised rest or darting motion, without being 
 struck with their outfit and accomplishment for subaqueous 
 existence. 
 
 When we set foot upon terra firma, the conditions are 
 changed, mainly by the entrance of weight into the prob- 
 lem. Instead of the whole body being soft-bedded amid 
 equal pressure, all its parts now tend to fall ; and a system 
 of support is required that everything higher may be kept 
 in position by that which is immediately below. The 
 vertebras, densely ossified, must be sufficiently interlocked 
 to prevent their falling asunder ; and for the longitudinal 
 column thus compacted, the extremities must be turned 
 into props, while still used as instruments of locomotion. 
 To combine these two offices involves more than one 
 problem of maxima and minima ; to insure the utmost 
 strength of support the legs of a quadruped should be
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 295 
 
 short ; to insure the utmost speed of movement they must 
 be long. To relieve the muscles of the weight of the body 
 when at rest, the four extremities should all be vertical 
 columns, like the elephant's, which sleeps standing and 
 hardly ever lies down ; to give the muscles propelling 
 power, the hinder extremities need extending into a longer 
 line, which can only be done by straightening them from a 
 previous inclination of their segments at alternate angles ; 
 and such a zig-zag stem can be held to its duty as a prop 
 only by the tightening action of the extensor muscles. 
 The practical solution of these problems is no less unim- 
 peachable than that which gives five vanes to the windmill 
 of greatest force. The front legs which have to bear by 
 far the greater part of the weight, viz. the projecting head 
 as well as their share of the trunk, are vertically set ; while 
 by great elongation of the metatarsal member (all its bones 
 being thrown into one shank), the heel is elevated far 
 above the ground, and the whole hind leg is so divided 
 into angular segments, as both to keep the trunk horizontal 
 when at rest, and, by pulling the segments into a straight 
 line, to fling it forward in running action. The transfor- 
 mation of the phalanges from flat paddles in aquatic 
 animals to feet for use on land, is differently effected 
 according as an instrument is required for safe footing 
 only, or for predatory prehension too. With the rumin- 
 ants, the third set is tipped with hoofs, affording by their 
 horny make the surest hold upon even rock or snow, where 
 no pursuer can follow. With the carnivora, the first set of 
 phalanges remains vertical, the second stands at right angles 
 with it to plant the foot, while the third makes another 
 right angle in order to hold the terminal claws in the 
 vertical position ready for use ; and this appendage, not 
 being wanted for progression, is usually held back by an 
 elastic within a protecting sheath, and only darts out by 
 the action of the prehensile muscles. If these are plainly
 
 396 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 weapons of offence, fitted to co-operate with the car- 
 nivorous teeth, not less obviously are the horns of the 
 graminivorous tribes weapons of defence, whenever they 
 must stand at bay. The distribution of the viscera, the 
 insertion of the muscles and their strength for flight or for 
 attack, the digestion slow or quick, the vision best by night 
 or day, all fall in with the general scheme of modifications 
 required by the conditions of existence upon land. 
 
 The remaining element, the air, presents a world so 
 different that it might seem impossible, in devising in- 
 habitants for it, to take any hints from the other realms, 
 and preferable to start from some point of new invention. 
 At first view, the proposal so to trim and remodel a fish or 
 a quadruped as to domesticate it in the atmosphere pre- 
 sents no hopeful look. Yet the type already familiar to us 
 is made to serve, and vindicates its flexibility by gracefully 
 chiming in with all the new conditions. It is impossible 
 to be indifferent to weight, as with an animal that never 
 quits the ground. It is impossible to balance the weight 
 with the medium, as with an animal that lives in the sea. 
 A portion of the locomotive strength must be spared from 
 its work of progression to lift and sustain the body in a 
 fluid lighter than itself ; and to minimise what is subtracted 
 for this purpose must be the fundamental problem in 
 constructing this new order of being. The bird accord- 
 ingly is a complete study of economy in weight and 
 intensity in muscular power. By relegating to the gizzard 
 the triturating process of the food, the head is lightened of 
 its teeth and greatly reduced in size. The viscera and ribs 
 are thrown far back, and packed in small compass under 
 the dorsal vertebrae, several of which are anchylosed (united 
 into one bone), to give a firm base of support for the wings ; 
 but, these central solidities secured, all beyond is arranged 
 with a view to lightness. The cylindrical bones are hollow, 
 and filled not with marrow but with air, which also has
 
 Chap. 1.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 297 
 
 access to the interior of the broad bones, honeycombed as 
 they are with cells ; similar cells run through the mem- 
 branes of the abdomen ; so that the small lungs have the 
 power, through their connexions, of permeating the whole 
 body with air. As the arms are pre-engaged for flight, 
 the mouth is the only prehensile organ, with some help 
 from the feet ; and, to perfect it for this function, it is not 
 only furnished with a beak varied according to the dietary 
 of the species, but is set upon a single condyle to turn 
 every way ; and at the end of from ten to (in the swan) 
 twenty-three cervical vertebrae, instead of the seven allotted 
 to the mammals : so that there is never any part of its 
 body which a bird cannot reach with its beak. The 
 flexibility and range thus given may be judged by the 
 habit of relieving the muscles, when tired of bearing the 
 head's weight, by laying it down under the wing during 
 sleep. With all this provision however for lightening the 
 body, there is still need of a most powerful apparatus to 
 counterbalance its gravitation, and give it its free passport 
 through the air. Weight enough must be left to supply 
 the counter force to the relative motion of the atmosphere 
 and the wing : for the line of flight is but the result of 
 these two ; and the real problem is to have neither of them 
 excessive in comparison with the other, while both are 
 allowed their play. Often, in a moderate wind, you may 
 see a hawk or other bird hanging aloft, with its axis not 
 far from vertical, and half folded wings apparently at rest : 
 in this case, the sails are set and the helm is turned at so 
 nice an angle as to play off the line of the wind against 
 that of gravitation, and so sustain the body at its height ; 
 and though it cannot also be held from all drifting on the 
 breeze (since the two forces mentioned are at right angles), 
 yet the residuary impulse of the wind is counteracted by 
 inconspicuous exertion of the bird. If, instead of hovering, 
 he wishes to go to leeward, he has but to lift his wings and
 
 298 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book IT. 
 
 set them at the right inclination, and he will be borne 
 thither without any effort ; though, in order to see his way, 
 instead of moving backward he will prefer to spend some 
 exertion in either tacking or rising high, that he may then, 
 with his vanes obliquely spread, fall before the breeze upon 
 the spot he seeks. When the atmosphere is still, the only 
 difference is, that the business of creating the wind is 
 thrown upon the bird : by the beat of his wings he com- 
 presses the air into motion and rises and advances by its 
 reaction, the direction which he takes being determined by 
 the angle of the stroke. The elements of structure needful 
 to meet these conditions are not difficult to define, but 
 very delicate in fact. The wing must be set at an angle 
 variable at will, for more or less of ascent or of progression. 
 It must present a closed surface underneath for the down- 
 ward stroke, and open for the air to flow through and off 
 with little resistance on the upper side. It must have an 
 area duly proportioned to the weight of the body and the 
 locomotive requirements of the animal. It must be as light 
 as is consistent with the strain to which it is exposed. It 
 must admit of being folded and put by, when its work is 
 done and its owner wants his rest at home. It is needless 
 to say how all these demands are fulfilled : what steerage 
 so perfect and so swift as that of the sea-bird shooting 
 down his long incline, yet, ere he dips, altering his mind 
 and sweeping up again on the counter line, and wheeling 
 around some tempting eddy in the waters, now facing 
 the breeze with rapid beats, now leaning on his side to 
 turn, then trimming his sails to flight towards his starting 
 point again ? The form, not of the wing only but of every 
 feather, hollow and close-tiled below, rounded and opening 
 above, rigid and compact in front, soft and free behind 
 where the air flows off, long and pointed for birds that live 
 in the air, short and rounded for those that feed on the 
 moor or dive in the sea, has every quality and every
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 299 
 
 variety demanded by the exigencies of life. Nor does the 
 instinctive feeling ever fail, which directs to the skilled use 
 of this delicate instrument. Would the bird poise itself at 
 a given point, like the humming bird looking for insects in 
 a flower below? He so inclines his body as to let the 
 plane of the wings be horizontal and their stroke rectangu- 
 lar, and thus prevents progressive motion by any backward 
 beat. Would he turn to the left? he depresses that side 
 as compared with the other and inclines the head and tail 
 upwards, and the flow of the air on the sails thus altered 
 does the work for him, and he wheels like a skater circling 
 without a stroke, by more or less rotation on its axis ; 
 determining the curvature to be sharp as the swallow's or 
 deliberate as the heron's. The habit of the wing he accom- 
 modates to its strength and to his own needs ; if it is short, 
 multiplying its beats, till they quiver out of sight, enabling 
 him to put forth fits of velocity, as with divers pursuing 
 shoals of travelling fish ; if it is long, demanding from it 
 less vivid strokes, but trusting it for distant ventures of 
 hundreds, even thousands, of miles, and effecting them at 
 the rate of from fifty to a hundred miles an hour *. 
 
 These few facts sufficiently indicate the presence of selec- 
 tion in nature, that is, the limitation of erratic possibilities 
 to definitely chosen lines, and the steady production of 
 
 1 At times it would seem as if the adaptation between structure and 
 medium cruelly failed ; as when insects made for life and movement 
 upon the dry ground, and dependent for their food upon what it 
 yields, find themselves thrown upon a land of overflowing rivers and 
 flooded plains. But curious instincts come to the rescue in ways which 
 rival the ingenuities of reason. ' There is found, on the banks of the 
 Amazon, a species of reed from twenty-five to thirty feet high, the 
 summit of which is terminated by a large ball of earth. This ball is 
 the workmanship of ants, which retire thither at the time of the rains 
 and of the periodical inundations of the river. They go up and down 
 along the cavity of this reed, and live on the refuse which is then 
 swimming around them on the surface of the water.' St. Pierre's 
 Studies of Nature, Hunter, ii, p. 414.
 
 300 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 these to the exclusion of the rest. In following them out, 
 we have had to watch the divergence of one fundamental 
 type of structure into several directions of variation, com- 
 puted mainly from the medium in which the organism was 
 to subsist ; and the problem has been how one idea can 
 obtain control over a plurality of conditions. In looking 
 for the next objective mark, viz. combination, we shall have 
 to invert this order, and notice how, following the traces of 
 many independent series of operations, we find the ter- 
 minus of them all in one functional result ; numerous and 
 separate as they are, they have contrived to .pick out a 
 common end, and to club their subscriptions for pro- 
 ducing it. 
 
 i. This kind of combined action is seen in Cuvier's 
 celebrated law of ' correlation of organs ' thus strikingly 
 announced in his ' Essay on the Theory of the Earth ' : 
 ' Every organized being forms a whole a peculiar system 
 of its own, the parts of which mutually correspond, and 
 concur in producing the same definitive action, by a reci- 
 procal reaction. None of these parts can change in form 
 without the others also changing ; and consequently, each 
 of them, taken separately, indicates and ascertains all the 
 others. Thus if the intestines of an animal are so organ- 
 ized as to be fitted for the digestion of flesh only, and 
 that flesh recent, it is necessary that its jaws be so con- 
 structed as to fit them for devouring live prey; its claws 
 for seizing and tearing it ; its teeth for cutting and divid- 
 ing it ; the whole system of its organs of motion for 
 pursuing and overtaking it ; and its organs of sense for 
 discovering it at a distance. It is even necessary that 
 nature have placed in its brain the instinct necessary for 
 teaching it to conceal itself, and to lay snares for its vic- 
 tims.' After showing how this general rule works in its 
 application to the several organs in succession, he sums up 
 the result thus : ' In a word, the form of the tooth regu-
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 301 
 
 lates the form of the condyle, of the scapula, and of the 
 claws, in the same manner as the equation of a curve regu- 
 lates all its properties ; and as, by taking each property 
 separately for the base of a particular equation, we find 
 both the ordinary equation and all the other properties 
 whatever, so the claws, the scapula, the condyle, the femur, 
 and all the other bones taken separately, give the tooth, or 
 are reciprocally given by it ; and thus, by commencing 
 with any one of these bones, a person who possesses an 
 accurate knowledge of the laws of organic economy, may 
 reconstruct the whole animal.' He adds that this theo- 
 retical principle needs to be checked and supplemented by 
 observation of empirical connections which, though con- 
 stant, do not explain themselves ; with the method thus 
 aided, he tells us, 'we arrive at astonishing results. The 
 smallest articulating surface, or the smallest apophysis, has 
 a determinate character, relative to the class, the order, the 
 genus, and the species to which it belonged ; insomuch 
 that, when one possesses merely a well-preserved extremity 
 of a bone, he can, by careful examination, and the help of 
 a tolerable anatomical knowledge, and of accurate com- 
 parison, determine all these things with as much certainty 
 as if he had the entire animal before him. I have often 
 made trial of this method upon portions of known animals, 
 before reposing full confidence upon it in regard to fossil 
 remains ; and it has always proved so completely satis- 
 factory that I have no longer any doubt regarding the 
 certainty of the results which it has afforded me 1 .' 
 
 Notwithstanding this impressive testimony from the 
 great naturalist himself, Professor Huxley denies that 
 Cuvier was ever guided, in any of his wonderful recon- 
 structions of extinct forms, by the principle which he so 
 
 1 Essay on the Theory of the Earth, by Baron G. Cuvier ; with 
 Geological Illustrations by Professor Jameson : 5th ed., 1827, pp. 83, 
 85-92.
 
 302 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 eloquently announces ; and declares that, if he had used it, 
 it would have completely misled him ; just as Hunter had 
 been deceived by the pointed teeth of the mastodon into 
 the belief that the animal was a carnivorous elephant. The 
 real clue, it is affirmed, which Cuvier followed, was merely 
 that of empirical conjunction, apart from all functional 
 idea, and ever liable to correction as experience became 
 enlarged by new examples 1 . I cannot pretend to have 
 tested this strong assertion by carrying it throughout the 
 ' Ossemens fossiles ' ; but I am the more inclined to trust 
 Cuvier's account of his own method than his critic's con- 
 tradiction, because he describes it as a mixed method, in 
 which his theoretic principle needs to be qualified and 
 restrained by the empirical observation which Professor 
 Huxley credits with the whole result. An observer who 
 thus cautiously analyses his own procedure and betrays 
 his full consciousness of both its elements, is more likely 
 to have known what he did, than his reader of a later 
 generation who sweeps one half of the process away. It 
 is obvious that, however perfectly the different elements of 
 an organism may be adapted to its conditions of life, the 
 prediction of the remaining group from any given part 
 must always be precarious, so long as the conditions of 
 life which give the determining factor are imperfectly 
 known, as in the case of extinct kinds. And if, from this 
 cause, a mistaken inference is drawn, the error will be 
 found due, not to the theoretic assumption of adaptation, 
 but to a hasty confidence in empirical conjunctions. Were 
 I, for example, to have put into my hands the spoon-bill 
 
 1 I am unable to refer to any passage in Professor Huxley's writings 
 which contains this criticism on Cuvier, though I seem to remember 
 reading it as well as hearing it. I trust that my statement of it is no 
 unfaithful recollection of a discussion at a meeting of the late ' Meta- 
 physical Society,' at which he presided, and in his powerful summing 
 up gleaned the evening's scanty ears of reasoned truth and bound 
 them up with his own copious sheaf.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 303 
 
 of an animal, I should probably picture to myself its feet 
 as webbed and its body as covered with plumage ; yet it 
 might belong to the ornithorynchus paradoxus, which has 
 the one but not the other. Am I then misled by trusting 
 to the theory of final causes ? Not in the least ; that 
 would have authorized me to say nothing more than that 
 the spoon-bill was for spoon-meat; or, at most, that, as such 
 food was most likely to be found in the water, the web- 
 foot might be expected ; but the additional reckoning on 
 feathers has nothing to do with the principle in question, 
 and is the pure result of empirical association, which hither- 
 to had presented this structure to me only in birds. The 
 fault lies, not in my adherence to the theory, but in my 
 going beyond it. 
 
 The same law which Cuvier announces as ' correlation 
 of organs,' appears in Darwin's writings as ' correlation of 
 growth ' ; and it may be useful to contemplate the pheno- 
 mena it includes under this dynamic aspect, which fixes 
 our attention on their origin and development rather than 
 on their final form. ' The whole organization,' says Dar- 
 win, 'is so tied together during its growth and develop- 
 ment, that when slight variations in any one part occur 
 and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts 
 become modified 1 .' Some of these modifications might 
 fairly be regarded as included in the original variation and 
 part of the same phenomenon : just as, in the formation of 
 a crystal, the molecules deposit themselves around an axis, 
 and equal increments take place on any two halves which 
 you may define, so, in an organism, a variation on the left 
 side may be supposed to carry with it a corresponding 
 change on the right. Whatever be the cause of the varia- 
 tion may conceivably enough be the cause of its symmetry ; 
 and we cannot confidently claim the two as independent 
 
 1 Origin of Species, ch. v, p. 143.
 
 304 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 changes. But there are other of the concomitant varia- 
 tions which cling together by no apparent internal tie, and 
 seem associated merely by their common relation to the 
 needs of the animal life. No scrutiny of the earliest stages 
 of growth explains to us how it is that the complex 
 stomach of the ruminants is inseparable from a hoof ; or 
 how the modification of the teeth carries with it an altera- 
 tion of the thigh and the claw : or why the web-foot goes 
 with the spoon-bill in the duck which discusses the mud 
 and feeds on the soft ground, and with the sharp-pointed 
 bill in the gull and the petrel that have to catch and hold 
 their fish. We cannot, it is true, always discover a purpose 
 to be served by such conjunctions : for example, it is im- 
 possible to say why hen-birds should be denied gay cloth- 
 ing and sweet song ; or why blue-eyed cats should be also 
 deaf. But it is the rarity of these seeming incongruities 
 that so much moves our curiosity ; and in the vast majority 
 of correlations we recognise without difficulty the con- 
 fluence of separate provisions to a single type of life. If 
 you set aside the end in view, what reasonable account can 
 be given of the preparation, visible throughout the animal 
 world, for new creatures about to enter it ; a preparation 
 various in form, sometimes intentional on the parent's part, 
 sometimes instinctive, and sometimes simply organic ? That 
 the human mother gets the cradle ready we treat as an act 
 of rational foresight ; is it less so, that at the same time 
 and only then, the natural food spontaneously comes which 
 shall lay the babe there in the sweet sleep of satiety ? Is 
 it by calculation of its own, or by inspiration of prescient 
 nature, that the bird knows when to build its nest, and the 
 salmon when to ascend the rivers ? More perhaps is here 
 involved than mere ' correlation of growth.' But the same 
 principle is involved ; for with an organic change of one 
 kind the approach of the birth-season is conjoined an- 
 other a special direction of muscular activity ; and the
 
 Chap. T.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 305 
 
 only connection which can be traced between the two is 
 their common subservience to the requirements of the 
 future young ; it is a partnership for a prospective re- 
 sult. 
 
 2. This combination becomes more impressive, when it 
 takes place in the complete absence of one of the related 
 elements, so that all interaction is excluded. It is in the 
 atmosphere that the ear is to have its history : yet not 
 there, under the thrill of aerial tones, but in a silent 
 chamber, are the parts of its labyrinth put together, its 
 cavities supplied with lymph, its otoliths provided, its two 
 thousand fibres of Corti stretched ; and there too the vocal 
 chords and the tuning pipes are adjusted which shall play 
 upon the ear ; a musical instrument and a hearing appa- 
 ratus formed in a site which has no elastic medium ! It is 
 in the light that the eye is to learn its lesson and have its 
 life : yet not there, amid etherial undulations, but in the 
 dark, is that most marvellous and mobile of optical instru- 
 ments built up, as Helmholtz says, ' of leather and jelly ' ; 
 its cornea cleared and polished, its lens curved and set, its 
 humours poured in, its curtain hung, its sensitive tissue 
 spread, and the very spot pre-designated on which the image 
 may best be thrown. A microscope invented in a city of 
 the blind could hardly surprise us more ; it is a correct 
 vaticination of the laws of refraction in a realm that has 
 never even heard of light. Is it possible for imagination 
 to conceive of a clearer case of pre-established harmony 
 between elements that have no acquaintance with each 
 other, and that can be made ready for their future relation 
 only by a mind that embraces them both ? 
 
 Yet from this inference a method of escape is sought by 
 that universal solvent, the doctrine of evolution. It is 
 only, we are assured, the visual organ of the present indi- 
 vidual, fully constituted in its complexity, that is formed 
 in the absence of its medium ; and, in order to estimate its 
 
 VOL. I. X
 
 306 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 process of genesis, we must remember that it is now no new 
 creation, but a mere inheritance, and must cast our glance 
 backward over its whole organic history from the earliest 
 date of sentient existence upon the earth. We shall then, 
 it is said, find the light no longer reserving itself for future 
 intervention on the scene, but an immediate and active 
 factor of the organ itself. If I rightly understand the 
 suggested physiological deduction, we are to think of a 
 mass of protoplasm or some primordial jelly as lying 
 exposed to the sunshine and the air, till it is tickled into 
 some sort of feeling by the play of the one and the vibra- 
 tions of the other ; and, as the two feelings are not the 
 same, they betake themselves to different centres in the 
 previously homogeneous substance, and set up in it a pro- 
 cess of differentiation. In this response of the living body 
 to the two constituents in the medium, we have the rudi- 
 mentary points of an eye and an ear ; and when plied with 
 new varieties of appeal under each head, these incipient 
 organs will answer still with fresh differentiations, always 
 transmitted by the law of descent ; so that, after adequate 
 accumulation of refining change, the original sensitive 
 spots, which we still perhaps find represented in the stem- 
 mata of some insect larvae, elaborate themselves into the 
 complex instrument of human vision. In this theory 
 therefore all the successive improvements which make the 
 organ what it is, are wrought in presence of the light and by 
 its co-operation ; and in its absence nothing takes place 
 beyond their preservation from age to age. Without 
 disputing this theory, let us consider the logical bearing of 
 its assumptions. 
 
 It starts with introducing protoplasm to light and air, 
 and carries us back therefore to its pre-existence without 
 them, during which no beginning is made of visual or 
 auditory life. In itself therefore the protoplasm is blank 
 as regards these functions, and would no more yield them
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 307 
 
 than the dark Kentucky cave develops eyes in the fish of 
 its waters. The first beat upon it of the sun's rays tells 
 upon its material, nay far more, wakes up an inchoate con- 
 sciousness : the undulations of sound tell upon it also and 
 otherwise, in its molecules and in its feeling ; and its con- 
 stituents must already, I presume, be moving away from 
 their homogeneity towards the apposition and selection of 
 parts that make a nerve, and the dissimilar apposition and 
 selection that will make another. Be it so ; but, in order 
 that all this should take place, there is need of a pre- 
 established concord between the material and the medium ; 
 mere matter and motion, taken at random and unselected, 
 will not do it ; your protoplasm must be constituted so and 
 so, in this way to answer to the light, in that way to 
 answer to the vibrating air, and must carry, as it were, 
 among its cells, here the elements of a retina, there, of an 
 auditory nerve. And what is this but to say that, in the 
 latent state, the organs are already provided there, which 
 shall advance to meet the approaches of the two new 
 media, whenever they shall stream forth and give their 
 challenge ? Thus, at the very outset, we are thrown back 
 upon a preconceived relation, for the realization of which 
 provision is made before the component terms are brought 
 together. In short, the protoplasm in this case holds, prior 
 to the change of medium, precisely the same position in 
 regard to the future organs which the embryo creature 
 holds in regard to the animal fully born ; i.e. it contains in 
 itself rudimentary elements, on the due segregation of 
 which different senses will be formed, and for the segrega- 
 tion of which there is security in a coming change of 
 medium. We have here, on a scale magnified to the whole 
 range of living nature, nothing more than has always been 
 familiar to us in each single birth ; and if the growth of 
 the egg and its subsequent conversion into the bird do not 
 trouble our discernment of design, it is a mere confusion of 
 
 x 3
 
 308 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 thought to be staggered by the suggestion of a protoplas- 
 mic ovum whence the whole fauna of the world has been 
 hatched. In the instance we are considering, there is 
 indeed one distinction between the cosmic and the indi- 
 vidual case, viz. that the differentiation of the two senses 
 is in the latter complete before the new medium is entered, 
 while in the former that medium itself plays a part in its 
 establishment. But this too is only in conformity with 
 well-known varieties in the history of organic growth ; the 
 stages of which are differently distributed ; in the viviparous 
 races carried near to completion, in the oviparous little 
 more than incipient, before the new organism is separated 
 from the parent : and the fact that some portion of the 
 process is reserved for the appropriate medium to mature, 
 in no way alters the need of a predetermined relation, 
 enabling it to do this particular work and no other. You 
 cannot get rid of this predetermined relation, unless you 
 say that it has been hit upon among myriads of experi- 
 ments yielding all sorts of divergent effects, and survives 
 as alone qualifying an organism to live ; and this brings us 
 back to the theory of chance on which we have already 
 commented. 
 
 A still higher type of combination presents itself when 
 the adaptation subsists, not between organ and medium, but 
 between one living being and another. That among the 
 mammalia the offspring should be able to take the nourish- 
 ment which the mother is made ready to give, a special 
 muscular aptitude, by no means an easy one (that of suck- 
 ing) is indispensable ; and it is there, as soon as the first 
 trial comes. The instinctive art in one being finds the 
 conditions of its use in another. Yet it would seem as 
 if this adjustment must fail in a large class of cases where 
 the same need exists : for many mammalia live under 
 water ; and the act of sucking is pneumatic and can be 
 performed only in the air. The new born whale, however,
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 309 
 
 suffers no disadvantage from this apparent difficulty ; for 
 in the mother the mammary gland is surrounded, as 
 Geoffrey St. Hiiaire has shown, by a muscular apparatus, 
 which by compressing the reservoir of milk, ejects the fluid 
 into the applied mouth, and dispenses with the action of 
 the young creature ; though it is certainly probable, as 
 Owen observes, that by first closing the lips upon the 
 nipple and then drawing back the tongue to make a hollow 
 in the mouth, the pressure of the water on the breast is also 
 brought into play ; so that the provision is doubled rather 
 than replaced. In this instance, the constituents of the 
 relation are two individuals of the same species. But 
 often they enter it from distinct and even remote provinces 
 of nature, which seem to know each other's ways, and form 
 a partnership for some end which they can achieve together. 
 That some kinds of plants, irises, birthwort (Aristolochia), 
 barberry, are dependent upon insects for their fertilisation 
 has long been known ; and the very existence of Dioecious 
 plants would else be inconceivable : but it is only of late 
 that the extreme refinement of adaptation by which the 
 end is often accomplished has been ascertained by the 
 patient vigilance of Darwin and other contemporary 
 naturalists. The orchids of Madagascar would be barren 
 but for the services of a certain moth. To attract him, 
 they have honey stored in nectaries of unusual length, in 
 correspondence with which his proboscis also is particularly 
 long. Once enticed in, he alights upon or presses a stamen, 
 which proves to be a ' spring-gun,' and, on its release, flings 
 the anther against his body and leaves its pollen there ; 
 and, charged with this, he passes in his excursions to 
 some pistil flower, and fertilises it by his exploring touch. 
 This class of cases elicits from Burdach the following 
 suggestive comment : ' The animal, like the elder brother, 
 plays the guardian to the plant, and comes with his freedom 
 to relieve its thraldom. For this end, there is need of an
 
 310 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 animal of freest movement, therefore winged ; with inner 
 life more closely related to the whole, therefore impelled 
 by adaptive instincts ; and lastly, connected in its whole 
 existence with the Flora of the world, and therefore, from 
 its entrance upon life, nurtured on vegetable products. 
 These conditions find their fulfilment in the insects which 
 effect fructification. This is no mechanical botch, no 
 make-shift, as if Nature, having committed a blunder 
 yesterday in forming plants, tried to-day to make the 
 insect mend it : rather is it a deeply implanted sympathy 
 between the vegetable and the animal world. The identity 
 of their forms had to find expression ; and it was only 
 right that both, children of one mother, should subsist with 
 and through each other. It is from a single Source that 
 all Life brings its creations forth : delighting in variety, 
 it streams out thence in thousands upon thousands of 
 different directions 1 .' As two provinces of nature thus 
 unite for one end, so do two successive portions of time 
 which are out of sight of each other ; a combination speci- 
 ally visible in the elaborate arrangements made by many 
 insect tribes for the subsistence of the future progeny which 
 they will never see. The burying beetle (Silpha or Necro- 
 phorus Vespillo), for example, looks out for the body of a 
 dead mole or frog or mouse, and when she has found one, 
 sets to work with her companions to scrape away the earth 
 from below it till it sinks into a pit : this is then carefully 
 covered up with sand and soil ; the eggs are deposited in 
 the carcass, and when the larvae are hatched, they find that 
 they are born in a well-stored larder containing all they 
 want. Though these beetles can have no anticipation of 
 the need for which they are providing, they are not easily 
 baffled in their procedure, and can meet obstacles to it with 
 
 1 Karl Friedrich Burdach : Die Physiologic als Erfahrungswissen- 
 schaft, i tor Band, 2 te Buch, 263, 2 te Aufl. S. 441, 442.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 311 
 
 some adaptive intelligence. Gleditsch relates an experi- 
 ment instituted to test the flexibility of this instinct. A 
 dead frog as it lay on the ground was tied by a thread to a 
 rod stuck in obliquely a few inches off, so that the carcass 
 could not fall any lower. The beetles went to work as 
 usual ; when they found it was in vain, they ran about in 
 great excitement, as if to see what was the matter ; and at 
 last attacked the foundations of the rod, and never ceased 
 till they had undermined and buried it also, as the only 
 means of securing their prey. The singular habit of the 
 female ant, of biting or shuffling off her wings as soon as 
 she is about to deposit her eggs, and confine her attention 
 to the establishment of the future colony, affords a similar 
 illustration of action unconsciously uniting life that is with 
 life that is to be. And yet another is found in the fact 
 that insects which, before they die, attach their eggs or 
 cocoons to the branches of trees to tide over the coming 
 winter, adjust exactly to each other the seasonal chronology 
 of their offspring and of its abode ; so that the young creep 
 out into life precisely when the buds of the trees are open- 
 ing. The aphis of the ash, for example, remains for yet a 
 month undeveloped, after that of the birch has been revel- 
 ing on the new leaves. The mutual understanding here 
 seems to be doubled, and to lie both between two separate 
 generations of an animal species, and the seasons of two 
 provinces in nature. More complex forms of combination 
 for a given end are presented by what may be termed the 
 social instincts of animals. In the bee-hive, for example, 
 the distribution of functions is so exact, that each con- 
 stituent member of the community seems to be, not so 
 much a complete individual, as a mere organ of the col- 
 lective life ; the drone dosing his existence away as a 
 gentleman at ease, or as the former Dai'ri of Japan ; the 
 queen, content to be the mother of the hive and to lead 
 the first swarm ; and the neuters dividing all the work
 
 312 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 among them, some to nurse the young, changing the food 
 from day to day, some to forage ; now to build the royal 
 cells, now to seal them up ; or to play the jailer to the 
 rising candidate for queenship, till she is able to take the 
 field and fight it out against competitors amid the buzz of 
 general applause. Here we have the very phenomenon of 
 the ' correlation of organs ' reproduced, with the difference 
 that each member is now a living being, and the whole is 
 not an individual but a social organism. The meaning of 
 the parts is found only in the constitution to which they 
 belong ; and their intelligent relations must owe their 
 adjustment to some thought, evidently absent from the 
 creatures themselves, embracing and pre-conceiving the 
 whole. Less composite than this, organising instinct, but 
 not less surprising, is that which places the same creatures 
 in relation, at different seasons, with widely separated 
 regions of the earth, and enables them, as if they were 
 accomplished geographers, to steer their course infallibly 
 from the one to the other. Shoals of turtles, for example, 
 regularly swim from the bay of Honduras to the Cayman 
 islands near Jamaica, a favourable spot for laying their 
 eggs, and make this distance of 450 miles with such pre- 
 cision, that in thick weather ships can sail under the guid- 
 ance of their rustling in the water 1 . And migrating birds 
 sweep over immense tracts of air, amounting to several 
 thousands of miles, with a punctuality so sure that the 
 Persian calendar is reckoned by them ; the voice of the 
 nightingale inaugurating one festival, and that of the stork 
 another : so true is the word of Jeremiah (viii. 7), ' The stork 
 in the heaven knoweth her appointed times ; and the 
 turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of 
 their coming 2 .' Nor are they less exact in their local than 
 in their seasonal habits ; for on their return they recover 
 
 1 Stanley on Birds, i, p. 103. 8 Ibid., p. 134.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 313 
 
 not only the same country, but the same village and the 
 same nest ; so that the vast flocks in which they travel 
 must part and diverge as they arrive, to resume the life of 
 their separated homes. We can imagine readily enough 
 how changes of temperature might awaken in these birds 
 a desire to secure perpetual summer by keeping a second 
 country house not deserted by the sun ; but by what 
 mysterious sympathy between their nature and the latitudes 
 and longitudes of the earth their lines of flight are directed, 
 by what magnetic needle within them they trace their 
 unerring path, by what secret chronometry they hit upon 
 the date of passage and keep the appointment with their 
 old habitat, is inexplicable except as part of the intellectual 
 combinations of the world. 
 
 The third and last mark of intentional action we stated 
 to be Gradation of arrangement ; by which a given end is 
 attained through a train of independent means, each making 
 provision for the next, till the series is consummated and 
 crowned by the fulfilment. This feature also it is impos- 
 sible to miss in the constitution of the world. Nay, so 
 impressive and all-pervading is it, so conspicuous, espe- 
 cially in the organic realm, that a living being has been 
 defined as one in which all the parts are means and ends 
 in turn ; and throughout nature our attention, wherever it 
 alights, is so handed on to the next step of the climax, 
 that the only difficulty is to arrest ourselves at a place of 
 pause, having breadth enough to rest on, as not only a 
 means of ascent, but also an end in itself. Such landing 
 places there are, however, which it is impossible to pass 
 without owning that, if there were nothing higher, the 
 world would not have been in vain ; but, since there are 
 stages beyond, its good, instead of being a finality, is a 
 relative system of ends within ends ; not fixed in absolute 
 perfection, but advancing in asymptotic approximation to it. 
 
 j. Of these Stages in the edifice of nature, Life is the
 
 3H PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 first at which every theory is obliged to stop and take 
 breath. Below this, we may perhaps admit something 
 like an order of rank among the inorganic processes, and 
 treat the mechanical relations of homogeneous atoms as 
 more rudimentary than the play of chemical elements. 
 But, if this were all, there would hardly be room for the 
 teleological principle of arrangement here. To mere ma- 
 terial data it is indifferent whether they exist or not, 
 whether they exist in this form or in that ; and however 
 various their metamorphoses, we cannot say that any one 
 is there for the sake of another, the cubic molecules for 
 the sake of the crystals, the oxygen and hydrogen for 
 the sake of water. But the moment we open our eyes 
 on the physiological world, and see how one of its or- 
 ganisms feeds on the surrounding elements and turns 
 them to its own account, and, after holding its own footing 
 for a while, leaves similar successors to repeat the tale, 
 a new light flashes upon us : we understand what the 
 elements are for ; we speak of them now in a different 
 tone ; we congratulate them on the triumph of their work. 
 It matters not, in this respect, whether we regard them as 
 having themselves become vital by their own resources, or 
 as utilized by the access of a new transforming power ; 
 intrinsically or extrinsically, they have found their way 
 to their proper end ; and henceforth we can never treat 
 their differing properties as final, or regard them but as 
 means to this ulterior development. The action, it is true, 
 of vegetation on the one hand, and the air, the light, the 
 rain, on the other, is reciprocal . the surrounding medium 
 takes as well as gives. Yet we naturally think, not of the 
 tree as nourishing the atmosphere, but of the atmosphere 
 as nourishing the tree : it is the later and fuller idea 
 which includes and wields the earlier. Nor is it possible 
 to examine the structure and history of the plant, either 
 singly or comparatively, without recognising an internal
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 315 
 
 subordination among its parts, all tending to the ma- 
 turation of its seed. It is constructed on the assumption 
 that it has an interest in the continued existence of its 
 kind ; and exhibits, in its different systems of fertilization, 
 a series of marvellous adjustments which cannot be inter- 
 preted without this key. The exhalation from the leaves 
 secures absorption by the spongioles of the roots, and the 
 intervening vessels distribute and appropriate the aliment 
 thus drawn from the mineral world ; and the whole growth 
 culminates in the production of the flower, secreting within 
 it the ovule whence new plants shall spring. To this every 
 detail in the structure leads up ; the adjustment of the 
 perianth, the relative length and position of stamens and 
 pistil, the pendent or upright blossom, the texture and 
 size of the capsule, which in due time the seed is to 
 unlock from within. It is a history which can be read 
 only in one order a consecutive plot, in which, step by 
 step, we are brought to a d/nofiment which explains the 
 whole. 
 
 2. It has been said that we do not enter upon the pro- 
 vince of ends, till we reach the animal kingdom : in as 
 much as only a sensitive being can have any interest in 
 life, it can make no difference whether inferior life goes 
 this way or goes that. For the reason just given, I think 
 that even in the vegetable world the conception irresistibly 
 forces itself upon us ; so that if it really be inseparable 
 from the idea of sensitive existence, we shall have to suspect, 
 with Fechner, that the flora of the earth is not without its 
 share of feeling. But at all events we find another and 
 higher landing place in the structure of nature, when we 
 touch the stage of Consciousness. Whatever internal adap- 
 tations to purpose the physiology of plants may carry, 
 their external subservience to the maintenance of sentient 
 creatures is indisputable, and must be accepted as their 
 raison d'etre. Without them, no animal could live : they
 
 316 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 constitute and administer the great chemical laboratory in 
 which the primary elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen 
 and nitrogen are wrought into such proximate principles 
 as can be taken in and turned to account by the animal 
 frame ; only that, unlike our chemists' apparatus and 
 processes, their experiments are all silent, their alembics 
 all sweet, their products the grace and beauty of the world, 
 and their very refuse a glow of autumn glory. The de- 
 pendence of the animal tribes upon vegetation is often 
 circuitous ; for they extensively prey upon each other: but, 
 in the last resort, the flesh consumed by carnivorous 
 animals owes its formation to plant-food. That mere life 
 should thus be used up in the service of conscious existence 
 strikes us at once as a legitimate adjustment of means to 
 ends ; and that we feel at first some repugnance to the 
 subsistence of one animal upon another, is itself a testi- 
 mony to our estimate of sentient being, as so much entitled 
 to be an end, that we do not relish its reduction to the rank 
 of means. Since, however, organisms must pass away and 
 be successive, the economy which turns their disappearance 
 to account and appropriates death to the renovation of life 
 can offend only an unreasoning feeling. And the general 
 law is undeniable that, in this commissariat of nature, it is 
 the inferior life that supports the superior ; insects and 
 worms being the victims of birds and edentata (e. g. ant- 
 eaters) and cheiroptera (e. g. bats) ; reptiles, as young 
 snakes and tortoises, of the larger birds ; the smaller fish, 
 of the greater or of the marine mammalia ; and the gra- 
 minivorous animals, as the sheep and the stag, of the 
 feline orders. Finally, it is in the chase of these, or in 
 conflict with them, that man learns his first arts, and wins 
 his place at the head of all terrestrial races. If, at each 
 step of the series, the life produced were merely an end, 
 only so much of it need be born as might remain in 
 permanence; but, serving also as a means to other life,
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 317 
 
 it is provided in large excess of this measure ; and the 
 numbers are kept down by the exigences of the next 
 stage ; with the general result that what in each individual 
 creature acts as a struggle for existence and looks like 
 unmitigated war, ends in the equilibrium of a well-pro- 
 portioned whole, where all the parts are mutually supple- 
 mentary, and are constrained to serve as well as permitted 
 to rule. Scarcely are the organs of a single animal body 
 more closely related to each other as factors of one life, 
 than are the different groups of natural history as com- 
 ponents of one system of sentient existence ; so that no 
 part could be withdrawn without affecting the balance 
 of the whole and shifting its centre of gravity. It is a 
 many-lived organism, wrought into a vast tissue of inter- 
 dependencies ; not indeed consisting of a single chain of 
 linear means and ends, but of countless ones, radiating 
 through all dimensions, yet tracing the continuous pattern 
 of a comprehensive thought. 
 
 3. It is surely no illusory self-exaggeration if we erect 
 human life into a third platform, which carries a separate 
 and ulterior end, served and realized through all that goes 
 before. Without attempting to measure the interval be- 
 tween civilized man and other tenants of the globe, we 
 must own it sufficiently great to set him apart as the goal 
 of terrestrial being to which all else leads up. It is im- 
 possible to invert this order, or to surrender it to any 
 persuasive force that may lie in external facts. If in any 
 land he were to be mastered and devoured by beasts of 
 prey, or poisoned by morbiferous germs, we should still 
 refuse to say that he was called into being in order to 
 supply flesh-meat to tigers or a nidus for parasitic insects ; 
 feeling it not less grotesque an overstrain of the teleo- 
 logical idea than the suggestion of Bernardin de St. Pierre 
 that the preference of fleas for white things as a play- 
 ground is given in order that they may be easily caught
 
 3 1 8 PLACE OF TELEOLOG Y. [Book 1 1. 
 
 upon our linen 1 . The internal make and constitution of 
 humanity point distinctly to ends which, whether baffled 
 or fulfilled by outward conditions, constitute its true idea 
 and inherent possibility ; precisely as the aeration of the 
 venous blood is the proper office of the lungs, though some 
 pulmonary defect should hinder the adequate decarboni- 
 zation. Perhaps you will admit that man is the culmi- 
 nating point in the system of nature here on earth ; but 
 will object that he is the inevitable result, not the con- 
 templated end, of all its prior history. And if he were the 
 contemplated end, would he not equally be the inevitable 
 result, of the instrumentality instituted for attaining it? 
 In insisting on this necessary sequence, you only declare 
 that the purpose is not left without provision for its ac- 
 complishment. With or without design, this feature of 
 adequate physical efficiency cannot be absent, and the 
 
 1 Studies of Nature, by James Henry Bernardin de Saint Pierre ; 
 translated by Henry Hunter, D.D., minister of the Scots Church, 
 London Wall, 4th edition, 4 vols., 1801. Vol. ii, pp. 198, 199, note. The 
 passage is worth quoting : ' Fleas in whatever place resort to white- 
 coloured objects. If you enter into a room where there are many of 
 these insects, if you happen to have white stockings these will in- 
 stantly attract them. They will even crowd to a single sheet of paper. 
 And this is the reason why light-coloured dogs are much more in- 
 fested by them than others. I have likewise observed that wherever 
 there are dogs of a white colour, the black and brown pay court to 
 them, and give them a decided preference as playmates, undoubtedly 
 to get rid of the fleas at their expense. In saying this however I do 
 not mean to throw an imputation of treachery on their profession of 
 friendship. Were it not for the instinct of these minute, black, nimble, 
 nocturnal insects towards the white colour, it would be impossible to 
 perceive and to catch them.' The Insect tribes had apparently a 
 singular power of tickling the fancy of St. Pierre ; he consoles himself 
 for their presence by the benevolent reflection that they are evidently 
 meant to supply occupation and wages to the unemployed : ' The 
 insects which attack the human body oblige the rich to employ those 
 who have nothing, as domestics, to keep up cleanliness around them.' 
 'How many poor wretches would go naked, if the moth did not 
 devour the wardrobes and warehouses of the rich !' Vol. i, pp. 311, 
 312.
 
 Chap. I.] PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. 319 
 
 specific mark of intention lies in the ascending scale by 
 which the series of means mounts to a supreme result, 
 and presents a hierarchy in which the lower serves the 
 higher, and each succeeding step bears more the character 
 of an end and less that of a mere means, till you rest on the 
 summit which completes the scheme. To mere necessary 
 causation no such ascent belongs : it is not physical, but 
 intellectual, and speaks to our thought because spoken 
 from nature's. 
 
 Not only is man the crown of a system of conscious 
 life, but he contains within himself a graduated hierarchy 
 of functions supplying him with a series of ends, not 
 of equal validity, but arranged in an order of natural 
 ranks. The appetites that wake his energies, the passions 
 that drive away assailing ills, the affections that take him 
 out of himself in devotion to others, the sentiments that 
 draw him to truth, beauty, and goodness, fall into their 
 place, as they struggle within him, under the disposing 
 eye of conscience, and learn to feel that the lower must 
 serve the higher, till in a perfect subordination the moral 
 ideal is realized. And while this is the plan of his indi- 
 vidual nature, it does not stop there, or content itself with 
 any internal personal equilibrium ; it implicates him at 
 every turn with his fellows, his dependents, his superiors, 
 and throws him upon the reciprocal relations of Society for 
 the unfolding of even his solitary mind. Till we come to 
 the State and the Church we do not reach the highest 
 organism of human life, into the perfect working of which 
 all the disinterested affections and moral enthusiasms and 
 noble ambitions flow. Here at last we find, born into full 
 self-consciousness the organizing principle which holds 
 together the parts of a living system in unity, and gives 
 them progressive development ; inertia replaced by habit, 
 impulse by will, composition of forces by conflict of 
 motives, instinctive drift by intelligent selection, mechanical
 
 320 PLACE OF TELEOLOGY. [Book II. 
 
 stability by moral cohesion, gregarious co-operation by 
 deliberate justice, and blind order by ideal aims at 
 perfection. Of this supreme phenomenon all that precedes 
 is the preparation and the foreshadow ; and in the human 
 Polity the lower laws, even of physical nature, still more 
 of animal existence, first reveal their full meaning, and are 
 transfigured from arbitrary necessities into a skilled tissue 
 of rights and duties. It is not without reason that so 
 many chiefs of philosophy have had their vision of a 
 faultless Society as the last fruit and highest possibility of 
 the world ; and that Plato, Lessing, Comte, have, in different 
 forms, treated the 'education of the human race' as the 
 end of ends, reserved for the future by the working of the 
 past If it is to this that all really tends, then we have 
 only to cast our glance back from this altitude, in order to 
 see how all-pervading is that feature of Gradation in the 
 causality of nature which is a distinguishing mark of all 
 intention. 
 
 Slight and rapid as this survey has been, it suffices to 
 attest the presence, throughout the range of natural history, 
 of all the characteristics of intellectual purpose ; and to 
 place that living nisus which we mean by ' Force ' under 
 the direction of intending Thought I hardly care to 
 decide whether the reason which leads to this result 
 amounts to an induction or is simply an analogy : the 
 distinction between the two is not very definitely fixed. 
 In both instances we argue, from the resemblance of two 
 things in certain particulars, that what is predicable of the 
 one is likely to be predicable of the other ; and if we 
 accept Mill's decision, we gain an induction, wherever 
 a connection is known to exist between the predicate and 
 the properties in which the resemblance lies ; but where 
 they merely turn up together without known connection, 
 the resemblance gives us only an analogy 1 . In the present 
 
 1 Mill's Logic, vol. ii, pp. 85, 86, ch. xx, 2.
 
 Chap. I.] OBJECTIONS TO TELEOLOGY CONSIDERED. 321 
 
 instance we compare together the work of man and that of 
 nature ; and, on the ground of three resemblances specified 
 between them, we treat the predicate of intentionality, 
 which is true of the former, as likely to be true of the 
 latter. Do we know this predicate to be connected, in the 
 human case, with the three features, selection, combination, 
 gradation ? or, do they only appear in mysterious com- 
 panionship ? Plainly, the former ; for the three characters 
 are nothing less than direct effects of the predicate as 
 cause, operating in the very seats of our own consciousness. 
 By this rule therefore the argument rigorously conforms 
 to the inductive conditions. And this is admitted by Mill 
 himself, who says, ' the design-argument is not drawn from 
 mere resemblance in nature to the work of human in- 
 telligence, but from the special character of this resemblance. 
 The circumstances in which it is alleged that the world 
 resembles the works of man are not circumstances taken 
 at random, but are particular instances of a circumstance 
 which experience shows to have a real connection with 
 an intelligent origin, the fact of conspiring to an end. The 
 argument therefore is not one of mere analogy. As mere 
 analogy it has its weight, but it is more than analogy. 
 It surpasses analogy exactly as induction surpasses it. It 
 is an inductive argument V This judgment of Mills finds 
 little favour however among the prevailing schools either 
 of philosophy or of science ; and we must notice, before we 
 push our reasoning further, the grounds on which chiefly 
 the place which we have vindicated for Teleology has been 
 disputed by great writers. 
 
 7. Objections to Teleology considered. 
 The criticism of the argument from design may address 
 itself either to the logical principles involved in its structure, 
 or, to the contents of its component propositions ; in the 
 
 1 Three Essays on Religion. Theism, pp. 169, 170. 
 VOL. I. Y
 
 322 KANT'S CRITIQUE ON [Book II. 
 
 former case, denying the conclusiveness of its reasoning ; 
 in the latter, the truth of its statements. 
 
 I. Of the former, the most remarkable example is 
 furnished by Kant ; and that, not in any express dis- 
 cussion, but in an incidental hint parenthetically dropped, 
 and not further pursued. In this (which I will immediately 
 quote) he gives his sanction to an a priori rule often 
 affirmed as if self-evident, viz. 'That no Cause which 
 operates within Nature in conformity with its general laws, 
 can be also the principle which gives origin to Nature ; '- 
 a rule which of course cuts off all extension of intelligent 
 activity from within the world to a supramundane sphere. 
 ' Natural reason ' indeed invariably impels us to such 
 extension, but in doing so betrays us into an illusion. He 
 states the argument of ' Natural reason ' thus : ' In as 
 much as our human Art can apply successful violence 
 to Nature and compel her to work out our ends instead 
 of pursuing her own, we conclude that underlying the 
 analogy between some of her products and ours (e. g. 
 houses, ships, watches) the same cause will be found, 
 namely, Understanding and Will ; and that by recourse to 
 this we may deduce the free adaptive action of Nature 
 (itself the prior condition of all Art and perhaps of Reason 
 itself) from another superhuman Art.' Of this argument 
 he says, it must be granted, that, ' if we are to name a 
 First Cause at all, we cannot follow a safer clue than the 
 analogy of those purposed products of which alone we 
 perfectly know the cause and methods of production. It 
 would be inexcusable in the Reason, to pass by the 
 causality with which it is familiar in favour of obscure 
 and unverifiable explanations.' Yet he neutralizes this 
 concession by the significant remark, that ' possibly the 
 reasoning would not bear a very keen transcendental 
 criticism 1 .' He does not himself stop to furnish this 
 
 J Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Ros., ii, p. 487. See also the
 
 Chap. I.] TELEOLOGICAL THEISM. 323 
 
 keener criticism ; but doubtless its principle is contained 
 in the previous parenthetical intimation, that as Art and 
 Reason come from Nature, Nature cannot come from Art 
 and Reason. On the validity of this rule everything 
 depends. If it be true that, prior to existent nature, all 
 art and reason were impossible, actum est, the question 
 is settled as soon as stated ; and nature must look out for 
 some origin unlike all that it contains. But 
 
 (1) The rule is so far from being self-evident that it is a 
 perfectly arbitrary dictum, the contradictory of which is 
 equally easy to believe, and has actually been believed by 
 the immense majority of philosophers in every age. What 
 does the rule affirm ? that in Nature there cannot possibly 
 be anything homogeneous with what was prior to Nature ; 
 the mere fact of its being an effect removing it in aliud 
 genus from its cause. There is scarcely a causal speculation 
 in the history of the Schools which is not pervaded by 
 precisely the opposite assumption, that effect and cause 
 cannot be heterogeneous ; an assumption formulated by 
 Empedocles, ' that like is known by like, and that things 
 exist by their first elements 1 ,' and of wider influence in 
 philosophy than perhaps any other maxim which is 
 without pretentions to be a first truth. I claim no ad- 
 vantage for it over its rival ; their co-existence proves that 
 neither of them is self-evident ; both are, I believe, mere 
 dogmas, which may be left to settle accounts together in 
 the struggle for existence. 
 
 (2) If what is prior to Nature must not be supposed to 
 
 same objection advanced in Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, ii. 
 334 : ' I had learned that whatever conception is transferred by in- 
 stinct or supposition from the human mind to the universe cannot 
 possibly be the true solution, as the action of any product of the 
 general laws of the universe cannot possibly be the original principle 
 of these laws.' 
 
 1 Tii><acrKT6ai rtp 6p.oia TO o/zoiop, ra 8e irpdyfiara e* ra>v dp%S>v fivai. 
 
 Arist. de An. I. ii. 7, quoted from Plato ; cf. I. v. I, ad init. 
 
 Y 2
 
 324 KANT'S CRITIQUE ON [Book II. 
 
 be like what is in Nature, the rule applies not only to Art 
 and Reason as exercised by man ; it equally forbids us to 
 carry out beyond the world any kind of mundane cause, 
 and explain the genesis of things by its analogies. If 
 intentionality in us is a product of Nature, so too are the 
 automatic instincts of animals, and the vegetative processes 
 of plants, and, lower still, the chemical and physical laws of 
 change which would be there though life were not ; and 
 these are placed under the ban of the same disqualification 
 which affects the argument from design. With the re- 
 ligious theory, therefore, all other speculations respecting 
 the origin of Nature also are swept away ; and no bio- 
 morphic or hylomorphic doctrine can raise its head against 
 the decree of Kant. It is, in short, not directed against 
 Theism in particular, but is a decree of general agnosticism, 
 limiting the idea of Causality to the sphere of natural 
 phenomena. It is not that we must not answer so and so 
 respecting the cause of the world ; but that the question 
 itself respecting its cause it is forbidden us to raise. 
 
 (3) Suppose Kant's rule to be valid : then we cannot 
 admit the possible existence, before Nature, of any such 
 cause as we find in Nature ; in particular, the possible 
 existence of Mind. If then there really were a supreme 
 creative Intelligence, it follows that his existence would be 
 inaccessible to our recognition : our Reason, simply because 
 it is Reason, would be an organ, not for apprehending, but 
 for missing, his being ; and the truth would be lost through 
 the constitution of the very power appointed to grasp it. 
 What can be more paradoxical than to say, that if there 
 were a God, he could not set up a created Intelligence, 
 except at the cost of being denied as impossible by the 
 very faculty he imparts? He calls into being an orb of 
 intellectual light, which, in the moment and in the very act 
 of kindling, is fixed in eternal eclipse. This monstrous pecu- 
 liarity attaches distinctively to all such agnostic doctrine.
 
 Chap. I.] TELEOLOGICAL THEISM. 325 
 
 The possible existence of a supreme Causal Mind is in no 
 way called in question ; but the possible knowledge of Him 
 is. The strange combination may therefore present itself, 
 of an almighty Being who cannot reveal himself, and of an 
 organ of knowledge that cannot know ; each hindered from 
 the other, though through the separating veil, the Creator 
 is ever acting in the dark, and the Creature trying with 
 vain thoughts to press through towards the light. 
 
 Even after waiving this fundamental objection, Kant 
 finds the argument from design inadequate. If the 
 analogy is to hold between the works of man and those of 
 nature, we must remember that human skill is shown in 
 subduing given materials and moulding them to its own 
 purposes ; and to speak of adaptations in Nature similarly 
 presupposes, as data to be adapted, the properties and laws 
 of the matter used in realizing the end. These constitute a 
 certain limit in conformity with which the idea must act ; 
 and the art is shown in overcoming the difficulties which 
 this limit imposes, and making the best of the possibilities 
 which it allows. But to suppose this pre-existent substance 
 as a necessary condition, and to reserve only the form it is 
 to take as contingent upon the act of Will, is to leave room 
 merely for an Architect of Nature, instead of a Creator, and 
 to burden him with a quantity which is not subject to his 
 ideas and variously restricts their execution. Such a 
 Demiurge is no absolute God, but only a Superior Being 
 who works under conditions ; and all that can be inferred 
 from the orderly results of his action is that he has wisdom 
 and power adequate to these ; very great, no doubt, and 
 wonderful, but not definitively perfect and exhausting all 
 possibility. For when we speak of what is proportionally 
 or exceedingly great, we use only a subjective measure, 
 taken from our own standard of experience and con- 
 ception ; and an object might earn this predicate either 
 by its own magnitude or by our littleness ; so that it
 
 326 KANT'S CRITIQUE ON [Book If. 
 
 indicates no more than the interval between our faculty 
 and that which it contemplates. This relative superiority 
 however is short of the required conclusion. We want to 
 establish the Almightiness, the unconditional perfection, the 
 inclusion therefore in himself of the totality of being, of the 
 Author of nature ; and this step from the relative to the 
 absolute, the argument from design does not enable us to 
 take !. 
 
 This objection of Kant's is usually considered as two- 
 fold, viz. that the design argument involves (a) the pre- 
 existence of matter, (3) the limitation and relativity of God. 
 The author however makes no such division, and aims 
 only a single blow at the reasoning which he assails. He 
 takes for granted that in the conclusion is to be established 
 the existence of an unconditioned being ; and as the pre- 
 misses present him only under the conditions of matter, 
 and measure his attributes by their management of these 
 conditions, they fall short, to an indefinite extent, of the 
 proposed result. He says that they cannot possibly be 
 stretched so as to carry them over the chasm which they 
 leave ; for how can we tell what the ratio may be between 
 the observed scale of the world and the All of Might, 
 between its order and the Supreme of Wisdom, between 
 its unity and the Absolute Unity of its Author ? In order 
 to pass this immeasurable interval, we must have recourse 
 to other than empirical arguments ; assuming the con- 
 tingency of the world, in matter as well as form, (i. e. that 
 it is not self-caused, and might not have been), we place it 
 in dependent relation on necessary being, (cosmological 
 proof) ; and necessary being we identify with the totality 
 of real being, (ontological proof). These supplements to 
 the reasoning from design are subject to difficulties of their 
 own ; and without them, that reasoning gives us only one 
 
 1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Ros., ii, pp. 488-490.
 
 Chap. I.] TELEOLOGICAL THEISM. 327 
 
 or more ingenious world-wrights, whose relation to the 
 whole is undetermined. What weight must we attach to 
 this criticism ? 
 
 (i) The argument from design has not the ambitious 
 aim which Kant attributes to it. It attempts no more 
 than, by his own admission, it attains. It undertakes to 
 show the pervading presence of intentionality in nature, 
 where no intending creature, like man, can be supposed to 
 exist ; to find evidence of unity of idea in this intention, so 
 far as it can be traced ; and so, to exhibit a vast tissue of 
 relations, apparently a fair sample of the system to which 
 we belong, as having all the marks of origination from 
 one Mind. It does not undertake to show that Mind to be 
 infinitely adequate, equal to more than the cosmos, or 
 exempt, even within the cosmos, from all conditions. To 
 reproach it with failing to prove ' creation out of nothing ' 
 is to mistake its whole drift. To detect the working of 
 Mind in Nature, Nature must already be there : whatever 
 be the terms on which its material occupies the field, 
 whether by eternal possession or by some evoking fiat, 
 there cannot be intelligent dealing with it, till it exists ; 
 nor can Mind evince itself at all without data to engage it : 
 it is in the manipulation of conditions, in the treatment 
 of problems, that the difference comes out between the 
 stupid and the wise, the blind and the seeing ; so that, if 
 we are to search at all for signs of thought, it can only be 
 amid a scene of things. To ask for unconditioned Mind is 
 no less contradictory than to ask for an infinite ellipse. In 
 proving therefore an ' Architect of Nature,' our argument 
 attains its only end. In failing to prove the ' Absolute 
 and Necessary Being,' it misses nothing that it seeks. 
 
 (a) Though however this argument starts upon a ready- 
 made field, to see whether Nature treats her materials with 
 skill, it does not affirm that these materials were there from 
 all eternity. It merely steps in when they are there, and
 
 328 KANT'S CRITIQUE ON [Book II. 
 
 asks no question as to how they came to be there. It is 
 compatible with their eternal existence : it is compatible 
 with their objective creation. Whether the intellectual 
 Will which it now finds operative among them and 
 moulding them to various ends had, by a prior system of 
 volitions, called them up into Space, and charged them 
 with their several deposits of power, is a question which is 
 here left unapproached : in treating the form of the world 
 as contingent there is nothing to prevent its matter being 
 regarded as contingent too ; only, the argument has to do 
 with it at a later stage. It is not necessary to conceive of 
 the Divine thought as having, like the human, to struggle 
 with the difficulties of refractory foreign substance : created 
 matter would still supply the conditions of a problem, 
 though the limits would then be self-imposed. If a sculptor 
 had power, not only to model, but to call his materials into 
 being too, would his genius no longer have scope for 
 exercise, and, when the statue or the frieze emerged, 
 would it be no work of art ? The only difference would 
 be, that the total act of the artist would be divided into 
 two, first the creation of the matter, then the elaboration 
 of the form : though both were his, neither could the 
 order be changed (for form presupposes matter), nor does 
 the first in any way supersede the last. The analogy be- 
 tween Divine and human art does not therefore fail for the 
 purpose of our argument, though it be true that man finds, 
 and God makes, that which he moulds to his purposes. 
 
 Kant indeed, while pressing this alleged failure of ana- 
 logy, is evidently conscious that the argument from design 
 does not exclude the creation of matter; for he remarks 
 that if, in order to complete the case, we try that tack, we 
 shall have to resort to a transcendental argument which 
 has no business here 1 . Even supposing the proof at- 
 
 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Ros., ii, p. 488.
 
 Chap. I.] TELEOLOGICAL THEISM. 329 
 
 tempted, does it, we are asked, really leave the process of 
 intentionality as conceivable as it was before ? Would 
 Divine Wisdom first originate elementary substances not 
 in themselves carrying its purposes, but leaving their 
 realization still contingent, and then apply itself to bend 
 these materials to its will ? Does God gratuitously make 
 difficulties for himself, simply in order to solve them ? 
 Why this circuit to the end in view, this prelude of ob- 
 stacles warded off and tools constructed, when a fiat of 
 volition would command it at a stroke ? ' How,' says 
 Professor E. Caird, ' can the Divine Being be conceived as 
 creating a nature which has no reference to his purposes, 
 in order that afterwards he may, by skilful arrangements, 
 subject it to his purposes 7 ?' Or, if you choose to look at 
 matter under the opposite aspect, not as something needing 
 to be coerced and managed into the service of ideal ends, 
 but as created expressly with qualities for attaining them ; 
 then, where is the wonder that the end is compassed, when 
 it is just for that that the means are what they are ? There 
 is no longer any difficult problem to solve when the Master 
 of the end is also the Master of the means. Whether as 
 resistance therefore, or as instrument, matter, if created, 
 seems to disturb our admiration of the adaptations of the 
 world. 
 
 The real question here raised is this : Why have any 
 institution of means at all, when everything can be sum- 
 moned by a ' Let it be,' and every ' end ' be had at the 
 beginning ? To this question it is sufficient for our present 
 purpose to answer, that the proposal to abolish means, and 
 order up at a flash whatever was wanted, is a proposal to 
 do by sheer will what now is wrought out by intellect ; and 
 if it took effect, no trace would remain of thought or plan 
 in nature; what is now a scheme of unity and relation 
 
 1 Philosophy of Kant, p. 635.
 
 330 KANT'S CRITIQUE ON [Book II. 
 
 would be nothing but an arbitrary volley of dynamic dis- 
 charges. It means the repeal of all law and reduction of 
 all phenomena to incoherent surprises. Whether an intel- 
 lectual being, absolutely almighty, might be expected to 
 prefer such action by miraculous shots to the circuitous 
 method of orderly development, merely on the ground that 
 it was the shortest cut to the end required, I will not pre- 
 sume to say. But it is at the least conceivable that, where 
 there was Mind as well as Will, the path of thought and 
 the method of development, revealing as they do the inner 
 reason of nature to the observing nature of man, might 
 commend themselves rather than detached spurts of power. 
 It is hardly correct to represent God, in setting up matter, 
 as ' creating a Nature which has no reference to his pur- 
 poses,' and which he has to subdue to their service, as if 
 he barricaded the track of his will in order that he might 
 clear it. It is simply that the elements of nature have 
 reference, not to this particular purpose or to that, but to 
 an immeasurable range and variety in provinces of the 
 world apparently remote : and the real ground of our 
 wonder and admiration is, that the same provision should 
 avail, by subtleties of movement and proportion, for the 
 working out of such countless heterogeneous ends ; so that 
 one key is fitted to unlock a Universe of problems, and one 
 formula may be imagined to wrap up the whole. The 
 simple fact that, if there were Mind behind nature, it could 
 no otherwise appear as Mind, and would altogether forfeit 
 that aspect by an abrupt almightiness, is surely enough to 
 reconcile our reason to the unfolding scroll of evolution. 
 It makes the Universe an intellectual organism. 
 
 At the same time, if any one objects to the idea of self- 
 set problems, as applied to the Divine Mind, he is not 
 obliged by our argument, though he is permitted, to regard 
 Matter as created out of nothing. He may let it remain, 
 if he pleases, in some form like the Platonic (WyKrj, as an
 
 Chap. I.] TELEOLOGICAL THEISM. 331 
 
 original datum, under the conditions of which the Supreme 
 Intellect works out its designs. Some objective conditions, 
 viz. those of Space and Time, every one but the pure idealist 
 must admit as present ; and to let them carry with them 
 also some elementary v\ri, though involving difficulties of 
 another kind, at least has the advantage of exhibiting the 
 problem of the world as not gratuitously made, but really 
 found. 
 
 (3) Let us look in the face the limitations and rela- 
 tivity which our argument is said to impose upon the 
 Divine Being. What are these limitations ? (i) We let him 
 organize, and not create : so he is limited by his material. 
 (2) We attribute to him what we find in the cosmos ; but 
 we do not know the ratio between the cosmos and the 
 totality of the possible : so he is limited by the invisible 
 beyond. (3) We describe his attributes by intense expres- 
 sions, very great power, wisdom, etc.; but these are com- 
 parative terms, simply marking the depth of our wonder, 
 and measuring from the standard of our imagination : so 
 he is limited by our subjective capacity. 
 
 As to the first, he is certainly limited by his material ; 
 but only as in every relation each term is limited by its 
 correlative. Causality without conditions, agency with 
 nothing to act out of or act upon, thought with no possibi- 
 lities to define, are simply contradictory conceptions : it is 
 precisely the limiting element in them that first turns them 
 out of non-sense into sense. The limitation moreover, 
 were it a subject of regret, is surely the fault, not of the 
 argument, but of the facts. Is not the organizing power in 
 Nature limited by the constitution of matter? wherein 
 would organizing consist, if it were not ? Whether the 
 limits are created in order that the organizing may follow, 
 or are co-existent data, makes little difference ; for though, 
 in the latter case, another necessary existence is admitted, 
 it is admitted only to receive orders from the Divine Cause
 
 333 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book II. 
 
 and afford the occasion for the victory of Thought; so 
 that it is not the rival but the servitor of the supreme 
 Mind. The objective world limits the Divine sway, only 
 as the kingdom of a sovereign limits his sovereignty; that 
 is, it is the sphere of its exercise. 
 
 The second limitation, viz. of the known realm of order 
 by an outlying unknown, is simply that which attaches to 
 all inductive certainty. When we call the law of death 
 common to all organized bodies, and the law of gravitation 
 1 universal/ we say more than we can prove, precisely as 
 when we speak of God as all-wise and all-powerful; we 
 draw an unlimited conclusion from a partial experience. 
 The presence of this feature is the characteristic of all 
 scientific generalization ; and it only indicates that the 
 inference does not lie within the compass of necessary 
 truth. To an a posteriori argument this is no disparage- 
 ment. If there is as little chance of the Divine Wisdom 
 coming to an end at the confines of our experience, as of 
 Matter ceasing to gravitate among invisible stars, we may 
 be content for the present, and postpone our anxieties till 
 this cosmos is done with or no longer shuts us in. To its 
 scope all our ' universalities ' are confessedly relative. 
 
 The third limitation, viz. of the predicates of God to our 
 own conceptual capacity, is equally inevitable and equally 
 innocent. Qualities of mind and character are known to 
 us only by subjective experience, or by observation starting 
 from this base : they have no possible measure except such 
 as is taken from human life ; and when we speak of them 
 in intensifying terms, it is because, in their scale of breadth 
 and depth, they transcend the standards with which we are 
 familiar, and fill us with admiration beyond all bounds. 
 Thus, our estimate of them doubtless depends, in its dimen- 
 sions, on the interspace between our nature and that to 
 which we look up, a quantity that may grow either by 
 the sinking of the lower term or the raising of the higher.
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 333 
 
 In all this however we have, not an accident of our argu- 
 ment, but the essence of all knowledge ; which, being a 
 relation between things and thought, is determined by the 
 nature of both, and cannot be saved from varying with the 
 faculty that seeks it. Whenever anyone pretends, by help 
 of the reasoning from design, to escape from the egoistic 
 factor of cognition, and to lose himself in the ' Absolute,' it 
 will be time for Kant to recall him by appeal to ' the rela- 
 tivity of knowledge.' But at present the argument not 
 only consents, but claims, to conform to the conditions of 
 all intelligence. 
 
 II. This third limitation in our theistic conception (viz. 
 from its subjective origin) is often thrown into a form of 
 its own and worked up into an independent objection to 
 final causation. To think of the universal Cause as Mind 
 is said to be ' Anthropomorphism', a word which, when 
 once fastened upon a belief, is apparently supposed to 
 make an end of it for everyone above a ' Philistine.' To 
 estimate the justice of this reproach, we must fix the exact 
 meaning of the term in which it is conveyed. 'Anthropo- 
 morphism' denotes the ascription to God of a human form 
 and members. It is habitually charged by the early 
 Christian apologists on the Pagan worship, especially by 
 Justin Martyr ; and in the fourth century, by the orthodox 
 Fathers on a body of African Christians, including for 
 awhile Serapion, the friend of St. Anthony ; so that Chris- 
 tianity has at least claimed to be the characteristic corrector 
 of this error. And in this it only fulfilled, as Clement 
 of Alexandria informs us, the earlier protest of the Greek 
 philosophy itself: for he cites the memorable poem of 
 Xenophanes of Colophon, ' Mortals believe the Gods to be 
 begotten, and to have senses, voice, and body, like their 
 own. But if oxen and lions had hands with which to 
 paint and execute human works of art, the horse would 
 draw the figures of the gods like horses, the oxen like
 
 334 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book II. 
 
 oxen, and would give them bodies such as their own. 
 Thus, the ^Ethiopians represent their gods as black and 
 flat-nosed, the Thracians theirs as tawny and grey 1 .' To 
 this type of belief the word was strictly confined, its con- 
 stituent pop(f>r) denoting nothing but bodily figure; nor did 
 any Greek incur its opprobrium by affirming of God intel- 
 lectual and moral attributes akin to the human. If 
 Anaxagoras, who identified the active principle of the 
 universe with vovs, was exiled from Athens for his opinions ; 
 if Socrates, who held fast to the Divine righteousness and 
 the ethical government of life, was condemned to drink the 
 hemlock; it was not that they gave the Deity too much, 
 but that they left him too little, that was human ; and if, on 
 their trial, any charge of anthropomorphism was heard, it 
 would be, not in the indictment, but in the defence. No 
 words however are more sure to run out of bounds than 
 terms of reproach : pressed beyond their limits by the 
 strain of controversy, they lose all exactitude of thought, 
 and become at last mere depositaries of impatient feeling. 
 And so now you can scarcely recognize any quality, how- 
 ever spiritual, as common to the Divine and the human 
 nature, without incurring the imputation of 'anthropo- 
 morphism.' With different writers, it is true, the offence 
 begins at different points : in order to avoid it, Theodore 
 Parker forbids us to say that God ' thinks,' but allows us to 
 believe that he ' loves' 2 : Mr. Arnold will not allow that he 
 either 'thinks or loves' 3 : Caro insists that he both thinks 
 and loves, yet declares that to conceive of him as resem- 
 bling and transcending such faculties as ours involves us in 
 the mischief of anthropomorphism 4 . Prof. Tyndall has so 
 
 1 Xenophanis Carm. Rel., 5, 6, ap. Mullachii Fragmenta Phil. Grace, 
 i, pp. 101, 102. 
 
 8 Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion, B. II, ch. i, pp. 167, 
 1 68, Boston, 1842. 
 
 8 Literature and Dogma, passim. 
 
 4 L'Ide'e de Dieu, ch. viii, pp. 490, 499.
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 335 
 
 keen a vision for this offence that he detects it even in Mr. 
 Darwin ; on the ground that, after sweeping away all 
 reiterated acts of creation into lines of evolution, he still 
 leaves the supreme Cause answerable for at least one * pri- 
 mordial form' to start the series, and sanctions the statement 
 ' It is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe he 
 created a few original forms capable of self-development 
 into other and needful forms, as to believe he required 
 a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the 
 action of his laws.' This residue of Divine agency is too 
 much for Prof. Tyndall, who adds, ' What Mr. Darwin 
 thinks of this view of the introduction of life I do not 
 know. But the anthropomorphism, which it seemed his 
 object to set aside, is as firmly associated with the creation 
 of a few forms as with the creation of a multitude 1 .' It 
 would seem then that if the Deity performs a free creative 
 act, though it be but one, he becomes thereby like a man ; 
 and, to prevent this, we must get rid of the act by sub- 
 stituting a process of material necessity. In that case, man 
 would be left, (would he not?) with a monopoly of free crea- 
 tive action. Yet the thesis which, in his Birmingham address, 
 this deservedly popular philosopher set himself to prove 
 was, that man can perform no free creative act, but is only 
 an aggregate of links for the unarrested transmission of 
 physical forces. Of originating power he has no personal 
 experience ; yet, in ascribing it to God, he is an anthropo- 
 morphist ! From these examples it is obvious, that the 
 term so variously used has become a mere vehicle for the 
 expression of dislike ; and that to estimate the grounds of 
 that dislike, it must be defined in other and more accurate 
 terms. It has become but too common a device, for the 
 discrediting of reasonings imperfectly analysed, to dismiss 
 them with a term of contemptuous description ; and I 
 
 1 Fragments of Science, p. 523.
 
 336 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book II. 
 
 regret that even the philosophic and considerate Dr. Hedge 
 yields now and then to this temptation ; as when he speaks 
 of Schopenhauer's view of the principle of life in Nature as 
 'a very opportune correction of that carpenter view of 
 creation which, under the name of the argument from 
 design, has been made so offensive by theologians of the 
 Paley and Bridgewater school 1 .' 
 
 (i) Is it then contended that, by simply being present 
 in man, an attribute is disqualified for being referred to 
 God ? and that nothing that we learn from ourselves can 
 be predicated of him ? This position is already met by the 
 preceding reply to Kant. It can hardly be maintained by 
 anyone who is content to speak of the supreme Power or 
 the universal Cause of nature ; for, as has been shown, 
 of power and causation no suspicion even could arise 
 within us but for our own conscious exercise of will. No 
 mere passive being could be carried beyond the time- 
 succession of appearances ; and the energy which we read 
 into the scene of things and which makes them not sequent 
 simply but active too, is but the counterpart of our own. 
 This is true, not only of the intending agency which we 
 recognise in our fellow men, but of the automatic functions 
 of all animal tribes, and even of the purely mechanical 
 movements of the inanimate world : were we not ourselves 
 an epitome and sample of them all, we should carry into 
 the world no interpreting consciousness. There are but 
 three forms under which it is possible to think of the 
 ultimate or immanent principle of the Universe, Mind, 
 Life, Matter : given the first, if is intellectually thought 
 out : the second, it blindly grows : the third, it mechanic- 
 ally shuffles into" equilibrium. From what school do we 
 draw these types of conception? from our home experience : 
 if it is because we are rational, that we see reason around 
 
 Atheism in Philosophy, 1884, p. 81.
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 337 
 
 us, no less is it because we are alive, that we believe in the 
 living, and because we have to deal with our own weight 
 and extension, that we make acquaintance with material 
 things. Take away these properties of the ego, and should 
 we ever find what they are in the non-ego ? Assuredly 
 not Man is equally your point of departure whether you 
 discern in the cosmos an intellectual, a physiological, or a 
 mechanical system : and the only question is whether you 
 construe it by his highest characteristics, or by the middle 
 attributes which he shares with other organisms ; or by the 
 lowest, that are absent from no physical things. In order 
 to mark the differentia of these three theories, we may 
 certainly call them respectively Anthropomorphism, Bio- 
 morphism, and //y/^morphism : but in descending from 
 the first to the second, and again from the second to the 
 third, we do not leave our own nature behind ; we only 
 step from its specific to its generic properties : the /3to's and 
 the v\r) too lying within its comprehension, and rising to 
 the surface as soon as the superior stratum is withdrawn. 
 In every doctrine, therefore, it is still from our microcosm 
 that we have to interpret the macrocosm : and from the 
 type of our humanity, as presented in self-knowledge, there 
 is no more escape for the pantheist or the materialist, than 
 for the theist. Modify them as you may, all causal con- 
 ceptions are born from within, as reflections or reductions 
 of our personal, animal, or physical activity : and the 
 severest science is, in this sense, just as anthropomorphic as 
 the most ideal theology. Unless therefore we say, with 
 Kant, that the law of causality belongs exclusively to the 
 interior order of phenomena among themselves, and cannot 
 be pushed back beyond their margin to their nativity as a 
 whole, we cannot cut the tether of our personality : and if 
 we adopt his dictum, it is not that we learn to speak better 
 of origination, but that we cease to speak of it at all. 
 
 (2) If not all that is human must be excluded from the 
 
 VOL. I. z
 
 338 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book II. 
 
 divine, at what point does the error of the false ascription 
 begin ? By what rule shall we trace the line we are not to 
 transgress? We must beware, it is usually urged, of as- 
 signing to God anything incompatible with his Infinitude : 
 as all-embracing, there is nothing outside of him : as 
 universal source, there is nothing from any other power: 
 as eternal, that is exempt from the conditions of time, the 
 past and the future coalesce with the present in him, and 
 memory and prescience merge into immediate apprehen- 
 sion : as absolute, he stands in no relations, but includes 
 them all. By the application of this test, Theodore Parker 
 clears away from the idea of God all that appears to him 
 partial and relative, all mental processes and purposes, 
 all successive or differentiated feeling, all discriminative 
 reply to prayer, all action here any more than there ; 
 leaving at last unconditioned Being, with the predicates of 
 Causality, Knowledge, and Love 1 . Is it however certain 
 that the predicates thus saved can stand the test, of 
 belonging to an Infinite subject, any better than those 
 which are discarded ? Who, for example, can love without 
 ceasing to be the 'Absolute' being, and entering into 
 relation towards an object of love ? How can love exist in 
 undiscriminating ' universality,' never alighting on this or 
 that, never other for A than for B, never changing with the 
 changes of either, but still identically resting on opposite 
 attributes ? There is neither meaning nor value in Love 
 that is not selective, variable, proportionate, sympathetic 
 with the character and history of its object ; that does not 
 distinguish a person from a thing ; the sorrowing from the 
 joyful, the noble from the mean ; that is not only ' partial,' 
 but individual ; that does not express its constancy by 
 ever-shifting lights. A motionless immensity of com- 
 placency, that is always and everywhere alike, and loves 
 
 1 Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion : Boston (U.S.A.), 
 1842, B. II, ch. i, pp. 166-168.
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 
 
 nothing in particular, I find indistinguishable from utter 
 neutrality, with its contents a blank, like a universal ether 
 that never vibrates to give forth magnetism, heat, or light. 
 Nor is it easier to reconcile the affirmation of knowledge 
 with the denial of all ' mental processes,' and all relativity 
 in God. To know is to distinguish ; and that, in three 
 ways; (i) an object known, from the mind that knows it ; 
 (2) what the thing is, from what it is not ; (3) the features 
 it contains, from one another. In the first, the knowing 
 mind is itself one term of a relation: in the others, its 
 apprehension is of relations foreign to itself, subsisting 
 among finite things. Contrast as you may our modes of 
 cognition with God's, say that what we gradually learn 
 he sees eternally, that what we separately discern he 
 embraces with simultaneous omniscience ; still, however 
 fused into synthesis and condensed into a Now, these 
 relations must be there, if the knowledge is there : if you 
 take them away, the intellectual act is emptied of all it 
 holds. Whoever knows, whoever loves, knowing and 
 loving what is other than himself, must so far abnegate 
 infinitude as to leave place for a finite to stand before him : 
 and no further encroachment than this can be charged on 
 the special acts which Parker repudiates. The argument 
 must go further, or stop short. It is the same with the 
 third predicate, of Causality. We are required to at- 
 tribute to God ' infinite action or causation, 1 yet no ' partial 
 action,' not the lamb's gentleness more than the lion's 
 fierceness, nor the calm sunshine more than the storm. 
 This rule evidently means that we must not except any- 
 thing from his agency, but refer all phenomena alike to 
 him : identifying the properties and forces of material 
 nature with his causality. Nor does the application stop 
 with the physical world : in spirit his causality is no less 
 comprehensive and universal than in matter : and in the 
 exercise of reason, of imagination, of affection, we are to 
 
 Z 2
 
 340 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book II. 
 
 recognize his inspiration, as in 'gravitation, electricity, 
 growth ' his ' dynamic modes of action.' It would seem 
 then that he is the only Cause : as of storm and sunshine 
 in nature, so of error and truth, of sin and sanctity, in the 
 world of spirit : and there is nowhere any faculty to resist 
 him, any object to arrest or modify the flow of his power. 
 Short of this, the causation is not infinite and universal, for 
 something else stands up and makes good its ground, and 
 claims a part in the effects that crowd the field of time. 
 But the old difficulty, of the co-existence of the finite and 
 infinite, returns upon us here. If One cause is to have 
 absolutely all to itself, nature and man vanish into it and 
 disappear: there is no longer matter to be moved or mind to 
 be inspired ; both are but parts of the mover and inspirer, 
 functions of himself with which he eternally plays : reflex 
 movements circulating within a being that is agent and 
 patient at once. These metaphysical terms then, the 
 Infinite, the Universal, the Absolute, cannot, I submit, be 
 worked as tests of the predicates assignable to the Divine 
 Nature. If your 'infinite 'covers all finites and means Sole 
 Subject and subject only ; if your ' universal ' denies the 
 partials and merges their distinctions; if your 'absolute' 
 transcends or excludes all relations and what belongs to 
 them ; then, in a Being thus described, Love is no more 
 possible than anger or pity, knowledge than memory or 
 imagination, causality at large than action here or there. 
 
 But is not God, I shall still be asked, infinite and 
 absolute ? And if He is, must we not carry our rejections 
 further and dismiss even what Parker saved ? I reply ; 
 there are two ways of taking these wonder-working words : 
 the Infinite, the Absolute, the All-acting may be construed 
 monistically, as embracing and absorbing the finite, the 
 relative, the passive ; or dualistically, as antithetic to them 
 and implying them as their opposing foci. It is in the 
 latter form alone, as I have endeavoured to show, that
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 341 
 
 they are given to our thought : the infinite which we 
 cognize as the background of a finite is all except the thing : 
 the absolute is the sphere of the relation we contemplate, 
 so far forth as exempt from it: and the universal causality 
 is apprehended by us only as that which is other than our 
 own, and planted out in the non-ego, without displacing 
 our personal activity. In all these cases, our thought holds 
 on to a definite locus whence its survey is taken of all else : 
 it sails in its little skiff and looks forth on the illimitable 
 sea and the great circles of the sky, and finds two things 
 alone with one another, the universe and itself: the meta- 
 physicians who, in their impatience of distinction, insist on 
 taking the sea on board the boat, swamp not only it but 
 the thought it holds, and leave an infinitude which, as it 
 can look into no eye and whisper into no ear, they con- 
 tradict in the very act of affirming. Now, when kept true 
 to their antithetic meaning, these terms no longer lend 
 themselves to the easy magic of negation. If we have 
 causality as well as God, there is room for saying, this sin 
 is ours, that rebuke is his. If for him, as Omniscient 
 subject, there are objects of knowledge that have been, are, 
 and will be, they must be present to his mind in their 
 distinctions, their connexions, their consequences : and 
 that which in us is memory and foresight, and apprehen- 
 sion of rational relations, must have some intellectual equi- 
 valent in him. If, besides himself, there exist, in a sphere 
 left free, living persons for his Love, there are innumerable 
 definite and variable lines of selective movement on which 
 that love may go forth ; nor need we scruple to think of 
 it as carrying shadows as well as lights, and as hid in 
 eclipse from our unfaithfulness, though ready to warm us 
 again when we emerge. An infinite of which these attri- 
 butes must be denied would only be inferior to a finite 
 being of whom they might be affirmed ; and where the 
 boundary between the human and divine so gradually
 
 342 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book II. 
 
 fades, an intellectual, moral and affectional fulness of con- 
 ception will secure more truth than the most spacious 
 metaphysical void, where names alone can float without 
 a meaning or a home. 
 
 (3) Though, however, the infinitude of God is not to be 
 understood, with Spinoza, in a sense which excludes intel- 
 lect, will, and affection, the scale of his existence undoubt- 
 edly forbids us to carry into our idea of him more than 
 a few supreme attributes of our own nature. Between an 
 eternal being and a mortal, a self-existent and one of 
 borrowed powers, an ever perfect and a progressive mind, 
 a will above and one within the sphere of temptation, 
 a vast range of dissimilarity extends, and justifies the 
 caution, if only it be duly limited, against humanising the 
 religious conceptions. Where the due limits are to be 
 found will appear, when we have more fully consulted the 
 sources of our knowledge of God. At present I am content 
 to show that they do not shut out the attributes involved 
 in the selection and execution of pre-conceived ends. 
 
 III. But, again, it is urged that, even if the ascription 
 to God of causality and intellect be in itself admissible, 
 the particular mode of their exercise insisted on in the 
 evidences of design is of a comparatively low order, even 
 for a finite mind, bringing the Author of nature into the 
 likeness, not of those who are endowed with intuitive 
 genius and original creative power, but of the clever con- 
 structor and dexterous artisan. The former act from an 
 interior inspiration of truth, of beauty, or of good, and 
 surprise the world with fresh ideals ; the latter are pressed 
 by some outward want and, from the materials at hand, 
 fit together this and that in order to relieve it. And so, 
 the teleologist gives but a poor conception of God, when 
 presenting the cosmos to us, not as a poem or a symphony, 
 but as a mechanic's museum of ingenious instruments. It 
 is an infringement of the perfection of God, says Spinoza,
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 343 
 
 to suppose that he acts for an end ; for if so, he is in quest 
 of something that he wants, and confesses to an indigence l . 
 Similarly, Mr. Mill asserts that every indication of design 
 in the cosmos is so much evidence of limitation of power : 
 and all the more, when there is careful and skilful choice 
 of contrivances : for wisdom and contrivance are shown in 
 overcoming difficulties, and there is no room for them in 
 a being for whom no difficulties exist 2 . So, it would 
 seem, to pursue an end proves want, to select the means 
 proves weakness in the Divine nature, especially when the 
 selection is particularly skilful : the greater the wisdom, 
 the greater the weakness. The same charge is implied 
 in the disparaging terms habitually applied to Theism by 
 Professor Tyndall, terms borrowed from Carlyle's esti- 
 mate of the older Deism, and misapplied to the modern 
 type of belief. He describes the doctrine as 'a theory 
 derived not from the study of nature, but from the obser- 
 vation of man, a theory which converts the Power whose 
 garment is seen in the visible universe into an Artificer, 
 fashioned after the human model, and acting by broken 
 efforts as man is seen to act 3 . Speaking of the nebular 
 hypothesis, he contrasts the scientific opinion that ' life 
 was implicated in the nebulae ' with the belief that it ' was 
 the work of a being standing outside the nebulae who 
 fashioned it and vitalised it 4 ': and because Father Perrone 
 suggested, as Babbage did, that, in organising a constant 
 law, the ruler of nature might institute another and slower 
 that crossed its path with the surprise of an apparent inter- 
 ruption, he says that the Jesuit's ' God is obviously a large 
 individual who holds the leading-strings of the universe, 
 and orders its steps from a position outside it all 5 ' : and 
 
 1 Eth. I, Appendix, Van Vloten und Land, vol. i, p. 72. 
 
 2 Three Essays on Religion, pp. 176, 177. 
 
 3 Fragments of Science, p. 527. * Ibid., p. 547. 
 6 Ibid., pp. 554, 353.
 
 344 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book IT. 
 
 he adverts, with re-iterated contempt, to the belief of his 
 scientific compeers, Herschel and Clerk Maxwell, in a 
 ' Manufacturer of atoms ' and ' Artificer of souls ' *. Under 
 all their different turns of thought and phrase, these 
 writers urge in effect the same attack ; they do not object 
 to ascribe Causal action to God : but the particular mode 
 of action by means and ends they deprecate, as low and 
 unworthy of a perfect being. It implies a want : it implies 
 a weakness : it is mechanical : it is external. 
 
 (i) It cannot be denied that whoever wills seeks in the 
 future some condition which is not present, and so far 
 moves towards a better than he has. Whether the subject 
 of this process is, eo ipso, chargeable with imperfection, 
 depends upon the alternative emerging when it is excluded. 
 Is there anything better ready to replace it ? Surely, so 
 far as we know, or can conceive, it is the characteristic 
 of all Mind ; the whole living activity of which, beyond 
 the range of deductive reasoning, is prospective, and de- 
 pends on some ideal in advance of the actual, on a disturb- 
 ance of equilibrium between the present and the future by 
 overbalance of the latter. Absolute content is motiveless 
 stagnation, and can lead to nothing : without a better and 
 a worse to break a universal neutrality, there can be no 
 true and false for thought, no right and wrong for charac- 
 ter : and a power from which they should be absent, 
 instead of escaping from an imperfection, would be as 
 little Divine as elasticity or weight. Divest the Supreme 
 Cause of all consciousness of these, and of free selection 
 among their possibilities, and what can you substitute for 
 it, so as to retain the causality at all? Where no ideal 
 future speaks from the front, there is only necessary force 
 to propel from behind : for you displace the preferential 
 for the inevitable : your ' infinitely perfect Being ' cannot 
 
 1 Fragments of Science, pp. 354, 355.
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 345 
 
 help himself: the thing that he does is what alone he can 
 do ; and your contempt for a machine-maker ends in 
 setting up a machine instead. 
 
 Besides, in a continuous life, the aim at an end hereafter 
 hardly implies an immediate need : the measure may be 
 full for the moment, yet exhibit a possibility to come, the 
 approach to which it may be a part of the present perfect- 
 ness to prepare. It is not therefore a want now, but a want 
 then, which comes before the Will, and which, ere it arrives, 
 is already provided for, and disappears. We might with 
 good reason retort Spinoza's charge, and assert that, in 
 the Divine nature, action for an end is the eternal anti- 
 cipation and prevention of need, and keeps the universe in 
 harmony with the creative thought 
 
 The objection, moreover, presses equally, if at all, upon 
 every theory, not excepting Spinoza's, of the genesis of 
 things from an Infinite Cause. If that Cause were self- 
 sufficing per se, why did it come out of itself and develop 
 a cosmos? How came it that the Absolute and Perfect 
 divaricated into the Natura naturans and the Natura 
 naturata ? In criticising Hegel's process by which the Idee 
 is conducted from indeterminate Unity through the steps, 
 the antitheses and syntheses, of determinate pheno- 
 mena, Schelling (it will be remembered) asked him f what 
 then induced the Idee to issue forth in this history of 
 development, whether it was ennuye'e with its abstract 
 condition, and so tried the concrete? 1 This is the same 
 stricture as Spinoza's. If we admit the difficulty to be 
 insuperable, of penetrating to the primary end of all ends, it 
 is certainly no greater to the Theist than to his Pantheistic 
 critics. 
 
 (2) Mill, without sharing Spinoza's objection to the end, 
 finds only weakness in the use of means ; with which, he 
 appears to think, it is incumbent on Omnipotence to dis- 
 pense. If we grant his requirement, what is the alternative
 
 346 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book I L 
 
 which he will provide ? Let the end be, to people a world 
 through long ages with happy living creatures : how is 
 that to be accomplished without resort to any means? 
 Does not the very hypothesis require a world to carry 
 the inhabitants? and inhabitants to occupy the world? 
 and relations between the two which render life enjoyable? 
 and, since finite natures must complete their cycle, pro- 
 vision for successors as the first tenants pass away ? And 
 how can you imagine a constitution given to a world, and 
 faculties to sentient races, and a due order of birth and 
 death established, without condescending to method and 
 contrivance? However instantaneous the Omniscient 
 thought, however sure the Almighty power, the execution 
 has to be distributed in time, and must have an order 
 of consecutive steps : on no other terms can the eternal 
 become temporal, and the infinite articulately speak in the 
 finite. To complain that limits are thus imposed upon the 
 unlimited, is to forget the very essentials of the problem of 
 creation ; which is first resolved, when the unconditioned 
 has descended into conditions, and, by self-abnegation, 
 withdrawn from the open infinitude to the lines of method 
 and of law. The proposal to reach all ends and skip all 
 means abolishes the problem, instead of solving it ; and, 
 instead of illuminating it with any natural radiance, strikes 
 it dead with a flash of supernatural lightning. 
 
 (3) Consider next the objection to treat the Divine In- 
 telligence as in any sense inventive or ingenious. The 
 grand air with which this conception is resented, and all 
 exact reckoning of causes and effects, with foresight of the 
 resulting attitudes of things, dismissed with sarcasm, as 
 something low and belonging only to the plebeian cast of 
 mind, would be natural enough in an Athenian sophist, at 
 a time when aesthetic and rhetorical culture was all in all, 
 and the inductive analysis of nature was despised, and the 
 skilled crafts which constitute the economy of civilized life
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 347 
 
 were left to slaves and named by a synonym for bad 
 taste (j3avav<ria) ; but sits ill upon the modern man of 
 science, whose highest intellectual operation is in com- 
 puting the problems of physical law, of whose method 
 delicate instruments are the indispensable aids, and pre- 
 science the crown and pride. He can hardly be in earnest 
 when he affects to think meanly of the type of intellect 
 which constitutes his class, which looks upon him from the 
 busts and portraits of his library, and kindles his emula- 
 tion as he studies the books of predecessors or fellow- 
 labourers in the same field. With his belief in mathe- 
 matical Physics and familiarity with their logical structure, 
 he must know that the cosmos, whatever else it may be, is 
 mechanical : and that to read back any one of its systems 
 into its elementary dynamical equivalents, and from these 
 to return forward and predict its still future phases, is one 
 of the most admirable exercises of Reason. That which 
 it immortalizes the genius of a Newton to interpret, as a 
 datum for contemplation, does it degrade the Creative 
 Mind to order and adjust, as its quaesitum ? If it sullies 
 the heavens to carry thither our calculative ideas, must we 
 not reprove Laplace for instructing us in the Mfaanique 
 Celeste ? You cannot take the relations which are there 
 investigated to be instituted at all, yet deny that they were 
 instituted by a mode of thought which embraced them in 
 its pre-conception, and measured them out for the birth. 
 
 It does not follow, however, that in this process, indis- 
 pensable as a method, we are to rest, as if it carried us 
 home to the central creative impulse. The universe is a 
 work, not only of constructive skill, but of perfect beauty ; 
 nor of beauty alone, but of wide beneficence : nor does it 
 only provide for enjoyment, but opens also a field for con- 
 science and a school of discipline for all righteousness : 
 and under each of these aspects, if we insist on separating 
 them, with just as good a right as under the first, we may
 
 348 MEANING AND LIMITS [Book II. 
 
 seek for the spontaneous spring of originating power. For- 
 get, if you please, that the cosmos subsists by relations of 
 motion, weight, and measure, and look on it as a work of 
 sublime Art, a Divine Poem : conceive of it as elaborated 
 from within, like a product of creative genius, owing its 
 grandeur of rhythm and proportion, not to ingenious calcu- 
 lation and tentative experiment, but to the inner harmony 
 and spontaneous insight of the mind whence it issues : it 
 will still carry in it its countless adaptations, though they 
 be not its inspiration but its incidents, not the germ but 
 the fruit of its processes ; just as a symphony is a complex 
 of numerical and physical relations uncomputed by the 
 composer : and an ode will parse and scan without being 
 consciously built up of grammar and prosody ; and a 
 movement of living grace the play of the athlete, the 
 bound of the stag, the flight of the bird exemplify a com- 
 position of forces unfelt in the impulse whence it springs. 
 In such cases of origination, the product does indeed 
 implicitly contain a mechanism of relations which is amen- 
 able to a calculus : i. e. were it not susceptible of decompo- 
 sition into elements correct in their order and proportion, 
 it would be no expression of intelligence : but the originat- 
 ing act may be one and indivisible, with no explicit 
 reckoning of its contents, no delay till all their possible 
 problems have been worked out : an intuitive truth of 
 affection, hiding in the beauty of end the accurate but 
 uncounted store of means. But when, in illustration of 
 the genesis of things, you have made the most of the 
 analogy to the operations of human genius in the fine 
 arts, you cannot still escape all recognition of mechanical 
 skill. In the labour even of a Phidias there is a stage 
 when the chisel and the drill do the work of the journey- 
 man stone-mason ; and to give shape to his inner idea, 
 every iroirjTrjs must be a 57j/xioupyo's also : but where the 
 product, besides its use of fitness, has its beauty and its
 
 Chap. I.] OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 349 
 
 meaning too, we take the higher thought to be the 
 dominant, and though we may analyse the rules and pro- 
 cess of its material formation, do not cease to regard it as 
 a creation that is divine. 
 
 (4) Finally, is it true that in acknowledging Design we 
 separate the Designer from the world, and leave him 
 'standing outside'? Why not insidet What hinders a 
 ubiquitous indwelling power from consciously taking such 
 lines of direction, such modes and proportions of activity, 
 as may realise a system of pre-conceived ends ? ' Plant,' 
 says Aristotle, ' the ship-builder's skill within the timber 
 itself, and you have the mode in which Nature produces ' : 
 'or, better, take the case of a physician healing himself: 
 Nature is just like him 1 .' Theism is in no way committed 
 to the doctrine of a God external to the world, but is at 
 liberty to regard all the cosmical forces as varieties of 
 method assumed by his conscious causality, and the 
 whole of Nature as the evolution of his thought. How- 
 ever wrongly defined may have been the spheres of the 
 Universe and of Himself, they have, in no religious theory, 
 been held to exclude each other. The presence of God in 
 the world, even when invested with the least significance, 
 has detained some little sanctity within the realm of 
 material things : and though separate existence and a sort 
 of self-action have been often attributed to their Laws, yet 
 room has been even then reserved for what was called the 
 Concursus Divmus, without which, it was believed, the 
 secondary causes would come to a stop. To go thus far, 
 however, in the disarming of secondary causes, is hardly 
 possible without advancing a step further and giving them 
 their discharge from the physical world altogether : and 
 
 1 Phys. L., ii. 8, sub fin. : Ei ei/jji/ eV TW uAo> fj vavmjyucri, 6/toteoj &v 
 <f>v(Tfi 7TO('et . . . p.d\i<TTa 8e 8^\ov, orav TIS larpfvrj airrbs eavrov' TOVTW yap 
 toiKi> i] fptcriy.
 
 350 ANTHROPOMORPHISM. [Book II. 
 
 accordingly, religious literature has been largely imbued 
 with the doctrine of 'continuous creation,' maintaining 
 that, from moment to moment, nature is withheld from 
 non-existence only by the same fiat as that from which it 
 came. The belief in final causation has nothing whatever 
 to do with the seat of the intending Mind within or with- 
 out the objects which it directs to their ends : and why a 
 supramundane Disposer should be obliged, in order to 
 carry out his purposes, to absent himself from the scene 
 and succession which he orders, and ' stand outside,' is 
 altogether unintelligible. Is it that, in order to act at 
 all, he must have something other to act upon, something 
 therefore separate from himself? This need of a dualism 
 is a difficulty which equally besets every theory of the 
 originating power, and belongs no more to the Theist than 
 to the Physicist or the Hegelian. It is no harder to 
 understand how a transcendent Mind should set forth an 
 object of its thought, than to conceive of a blind homo- 
 geneous Force splitting into itself and its opposite, or of 
 the Idte issuing from itself to become other. Nor does 
 intelligence require, in order to gain an object, to give it 
 externality : we can think of whatever is away from us in 
 time, the images, the plans, the reasonings, of any moment 
 no longer present, though they lie within the compass of 
 our own history: and so, if you throw the order of Nature 
 into the life of God, you do not on that account disqualify 
 it for being the object of his intellect and will. I admit 
 indeed that, in order to secure a consistent Theism, this 
 Immanency of God must be subject to two reservations : 
 (i) it must not annex and absorb the faculties of created 
 minds, but leave room for their personality : (2) though 
 pervading the rest of the world, it must not stop at the 
 cosmical limits, but spread beyond them as an infinite sea 
 of possibilities, other than the realised legislation of reason, 
 righteousness and love. These reservations, however, hardly
 
 Chap. I.] BLEMISHES IN NATURE. 351 
 
 touch the theistic view of Nature, the caricature of which 
 by inconsiderate critics I am seeking to correct. 
 
 IV. A more serious objection to the teleological inter- 
 pretation of the system of things I have reserved to the 
 last. The plausibility of teleology depends, we are told, 
 on our exclusive attention to picked instances, which 
 successfully simulate the characters of intention : but it is 
 not these alone that ought to be cited as witnesses : we 
 have only to enter another compartment of Nature, and we 
 shall find them not only unconfirmed, but contradicted. 
 Numerous cases are adduced of natural arrangements 
 which attain their ends so clumsily as to leave but a poor 
 impression of their originating intelligence : or, worse, 
 which work such mischief as can never have been an 
 end to any intelligence at all. These cases undoubtedly 
 demand a patient estimate. We have no right to exercise 
 an appreciative judgment on the methods of nature, yet 
 resent the criticisms of inculpatory observers as pre- 
 sumption and impiety. At the same time, we must bear 
 in mind the real position of the argument, and not suppose 
 that the positive marks of intention and intellectual method 
 can be cancelled or neutralised by any appeal to inex- 
 plicable or seemingly opposite instances. Even if they 
 implied the absence from them of intelligent causation, 
 they do not withdraw it from the field which it already 
 occupies ; but only embarrass us with the problem, how it 
 is that the Disposing Mind, conspicuous through so vast 
 a range, has not left its vestiges everywhere. The clear is 
 not set aside by the obscure : and if the utter helplessness 
 and absurdity of the hypothesis of fortuitous concurrence 
 in the face of well-understood natural order have been estab- 
 lished, the threatened sufficiency of final causes to account 
 for a residue of ill-understood and exceptional phenomena 
 will add nothing to its competency. What is shown is 
 simply this : that there are some facts which do not rise
 
 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 high enough to escape the grasp of a low theory. These 
 things premised, let us look at the alleged miscarriages of 
 Nature's plan. 
 
 (i) Complaint is made of several useless and unmeaning 
 arrangements. Even in the inorganic world, faults have 
 been freely pointed out by scientific critics from the time 
 of Empedocles to that of Comte and Mill : on our earth, 
 the surrender of the polar regions to ice that never melts 
 and of the equatorial to heats that never cease to parch ; 
 and of enormous areas between, to barren deserts and 
 inhospitable seas ; the recurring desolation of fertile lands 
 by earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes ; in the moon, 
 the absence of atmosphere and water, its one-sided gaze 
 upon the earth, its awkward periodic time, tantalising 
 us with scanty glimpses of its face ; in the solar system, 
 the great gap between Mars and Jupiter, given up to petty 
 asteroids, of which you could survey a sample in a day's 
 walk, and half a dozen, if they were worth anything, 
 might be sold in an auction-room in a single lot ; the 
 excessive heat of Mercury and cold of Neptune ; the 
 fifteen years of alternate night and day near Saturn's 
 poles ; the progressive cooling, contraction and resistance 
 which must reduce the whole to a dead mass ; and, 
 throughout the stellar regions, the enormous waste of 
 space unclaimed by worlds, and of light diluting itself 
 through vacancy. Advancing into the organic kingdom, 
 we are reminded of organs, like the spleen, and some 
 glandular bodies, which have no assignable function ; or 
 which, like the wings of the ostrich, and the feet of the 
 sloth, and the branching antlers of the deer, perform their 
 function ill. And again, it is asked what meaning there 
 can be in organs never developed in the animal that bears 
 them, but only representing such as other creatures have in 
 active use. The embryo whale, for instance, carries teeth 
 in the upper jaw, though, when grown, he ' has not a tooth
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 353 
 
 in his head,' and even in embryonic birds, traces of teeth 
 are said to be observable. Numerous insects that never 
 fly have a pretence of wings, sometimes glued down under 
 the cases which cover them. The muscle under the skin, 
 by the twitching of which a horse throws off a fly, is 
 traceable also in man, though he has no power to use it 
 And in the males of most mammalia, the breast is furnished 
 with the mammae which have their function only in the 
 other sex. 
 
 Facts of this kind may fairly enough be called un- 
 meaning, if no more is intended by the phrase than that 
 we do not know their raison d'etre ; and useless, if, in 
 order to try them, a purpose is assumed which they fail 
 to serve. On the supposition that the arctic and antarctic 
 latitudes, that the Sahara, that the Pacific regions, were 
 intended for the residence of man, no doubt the ice, the 
 sand, and the salt flood are so many blunders. If the laws 
 of heat which determine the currents of the atmosphere 
 and work in subterranean depths, have no end but to 
 secure the tiller of the soil in his dwelling*and his crops, 
 they certainly incur a failure in every outburst of Etna 
 or Boreas. Are the satellites to be criticised as lamps 
 alone ? then, it must be admitted, they might, by dis- 
 pensing with their phases, have given more light. But 
 by what right do we judge a solar system from a mere 
 geocentric, nay, from a purely humanistic point of view ? 
 Look at its age, its scope, its history, its relations to in- 
 numerable systems vaster than itself; and say whether the 
 last comer on one of its planets is entitled to measure the 
 ends which it embraces by his particular needs. Included 
 though they be in the whole, what part of it are they 
 Likely to occupy? If it be anthropomorphic to admire an 
 arrangement of Nature because it is useful to man, is it 
 less anthropomorphic to condemn one because it is useless 
 to him? No considerate Theist imagines Man to be the 
 
 VOL. I. A a
 
 354 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 central object of the universe, by the standard of whose 
 requirements all things are to be judged : even if he did 
 apply this narrow rule to the constitution of the globe on 
 which he lives, he need hardly be much disturbed by 
 Lucretius' bad opinion of the equator and the poles. The 
 Roman poet, it seems, would have preferred a human 
 estate all under culture, compact and occupied, uniform 
 in temperature, and with no more water than was needed 
 for irrigation and for drink ; with no moor and mountain 
 to part the fields, no freshening play of ocean and air 
 where man is not, no refrigerating winds to fling a wreath 
 of snow, no African glow to cross over and move the 
 Alpine glaciers ; but a snug little planet, without a waste 
 place or a wild beast, and so comfortable that it would 
 soon swarm like a Chinese empire or an ant-hill, and 
 no 'one could be alone on all the earth.' This is the 
 landscape-gardening of philosophy ; from which, for my 
 part, I gladly escape back to the wild forest or the open 
 sea, or even the stern wonders of the icebergs and the 
 northern lights. On Comte's proposal for improving the 
 moon by haying it full every night, I can pass no mathe- 
 matical judgment : his scientific critics say it would be 
 fatal to the satellite's equilibrium ; but I confess to such a 
 love of the monthly story of her orb from the first crescent 
 to the last decrescent phase, that, to save it, I would accept 
 a gaslight or even carry a lantern on dark nights. 
 
 And the further we remove from our terrestrial home, 
 the more absurd becomes our pretension to amend the 
 system of which it forms a part. Why fret about the leap 
 from the orbit of Mars to that of Jupiter ? What obligation 
 are the planets under to take any notice of Bode's empirical 
 law ? And if in that great zone a stage is cleared for 
 the circling maze of asteroids interposed as a chorus 
 between more stately and royal orbs, how does the vari- 
 ation harm either them or us ? What good does it hinder?
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 355 
 
 What purpose disappoint ? To test the measures of heat 
 and light, the length of the day and of the year, the 
 density of atmosphere, and the weights of things, by the 
 conditions which are suitable here, is to forget the affluent 
 flexibility of resource which, already handing the torch 
 of life unquenched from air to land, and land to water, 
 is not likely to be baffled by the passage from world to 
 world. As for the destination of the solar system to spend 
 its motive power and fall dead, why, if it be so, should we 
 deem it proof of failure, any more than that the annual 
 plant is not perennial ? Finite structures may have a 
 longer or a shorter period ; but their end is attained at 
 last ; and they bear witness to the creative thought, not 
 by their perpetuity, but by their succession. Most perverse 
 of all appears the complaint of so much unfilled room and 
 scattered light in the universe ; as if Space were a precious 
 bit of city building-ground, a hundred guineas a yard, 
 in dealing with which the architect is bound to be a very 
 niggard in economy; and as if it cost the Creator anything 
 to stir the ethereal waves and say, ' Let there be light ! ' 
 So long as there is an infinitude to roam in, I know not 
 why we should begrudge the universal ether some ample 
 fields to itself ; and if it is at hand, with its gift of vision 
 to all actual eyes, it is surely captious to find fault with its 
 luminous play upon the road, which, by a 'Here I am,' 
 announces it ready for any others that may be possible. 
 This kind of disaffection towards the cosmos appears to 
 me more like the mutiny of an atrabilious temper than 
 the expression of any reasoned conviction. Can any one 
 who appreciates the ratio between himself and the universe 
 feel competent to criticise that between the solid matter 
 and the free spaces of the world? Can he claim such 
 a grasp of the whole tissue of relations as to undertake 
 its reconstruction by cutting among its meshes and with- 
 drawing its threads ? Of single problems, looked at by 
 
 A a a
 
 356 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 themselves, it may often be easy to imagine a shorter or 
 neater solution. But the universe has no single problems ; 
 all are under reciprocal relations and run up into more 
 comprehensive formulae, and to simplify one may com- 
 plicate another ; so that it is only under the most strictly 
 defined conditions of possibility, and in concrete instances 
 approaching insulation, that our reckoning avails for the 
 estimate of method in the attainment of natural ends. 
 
 These conditions are fulfilled, if anywhere, in the field of 
 organic existence ; and to the naturalist's criticisms we are 
 bound to listen with patient respect. His most formidable 
 assault however upon our doctrine is yet in reserve; and so 
 far as he merely challenges us to find a use for certain 
 animal structures that look superfluous, he raises questions 
 more curious than disturbing. That the functions of the 
 spleen and of the lymphatic glands are unknown, does but 
 leave these organs in the position once occupied by the 
 auricles and ventricles of the heart, the pulmonary arteries 
 and veins, the afferent and efferent nerves ; and does not 
 prejudice the expectation of physiologists that an office 
 will yet be discovered for them. That the spleen can be 
 removed without perceptibly impairing the powers of life 
 certainly indicates that it has no primary function in the 
 animal economy; but the same may be said of the pancreas, 
 which Nature omits till she arrives at the cephalopoda, and 
 which may also be removed without material injury, yet 
 which is acknowledged to be a serviceable partner in the 
 process of digestion. Neither our ignorance of any organ, 
 nor its subordinate duty, warrants our condemnation of it 
 as good for nothing. 
 
 A different answer must be given to the objection 
 founded on what are called ' rudimentary organs,' i. e. 
 organs of which the form is given without the function. 
 So long as we shut ourselves up with the individual and 
 his wants, and estimate his build by reference to this alone,
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 357 
 
 it may perplex us to meet with parts which he cannot use. 
 But Nature, far from being utilitarian only, is ideal too; 
 and in setting up each single life takes but one step of 
 a long history, and pursues an old type into new and 
 modified exemplifications. The perfection which is aimed 
 at in the individual is not unconditional, but subject to the 
 limits of the species ; and that of the species, subject to the 
 limits of the genus ; that is, the working out of a compre- 
 hensive pre-conception through its lines of capability is 
 adopted as an end, side by side with the production of 
 beings without defect or excess, taken one by one. These 
 two ends, pursued together, cannot but indent and bend 
 each other ; fresh conditions demanding new formations ; 
 yet long inheritance restraining the deflections from which 
 they arise. The great problem of animal existence is to 
 maintain in equilibrium, under every change, the relations 
 between the organism and the surrounding medium. This 
 might be done, no doubt, by absolutely cancelling an organ, 
 when the want of it ceases, and by setting up an original 
 invention to meet a new-born need. But it may also be 
 done by simply leaving the superseded provision unde- 
 veloped and unapplied, and turning some existing organ, 
 rendered adequately flexible, to larger account. The 
 former method advances through natural history per 
 saltum, abolishing, as it goes, the vestiges of affinity be- 
 tween step and step, and accumulating, as it were, a 
 museum of independent patents for separate purposes. 
 The latter, by moving gradatim, never drops the clue of 
 orderly genesis, but, in giving free scope to younger forms 
 of life, scrupulously preserves the archives of the elder 
 time. It is impossible to deny the superiority of the latter; 
 and it is secured by the rule that through use an organ 
 shall be developed, through disuse shall be atrophied. 
 This only expresses, in another form, the well-known 'Law 
 of Economy' laid down by Milne-Edwards; 'When a phy-
 
 358 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book H. 
 
 siological property, begins to establish itself in a series 
 of ascending animals, it avails itself at first of some part 
 already existing in the organism of lower species, modify- 
 ing the structure to suit the special function. Sometimes 
 the general structure serves as a common base for supplying 
 the several faculties with their particular instruments ; at 
 others, some part already devoted to special use lends itself 
 to the new function ; and it is only after exhausting this sort 
 of resource that the creative Power sets up a new element in 
 the constitution of beings of more perfect organisation V Far 
 from offering testimony against final causes, this law affords 
 them an emphatic support. The position of their opponent 
 is, that the use comes from the organ, not the organ for the 
 sake of the use; Anaxagoras, for instance, contending 8ta TO 
 \flpas ^X e6r <Ppovi}jLa>TaTov ttvai T&V u>(*>v avdputirov 2 ; and 
 Lucretius arguing that 
 
 ' Nil ideo [quoniam] natumst in corpore ut uti. 
 Possemus, sed quod natumst id procreat usum 8 .' 
 
 But here, in the 'law of economy,' the inverse order is 
 distinctly established as a physiological fact : it is the 
 function that looks out for the organ ; selects and modifies 
 it, if it be there ; and if not, builds it and incorporates it in 
 the type ; completely justifying Aristotle's position, in 
 answer to Anaxagoras : ei/Aoyoy be bia TO (^povi^rarov fivcu 
 \elpas Aa/z/3ai>iy. at jxei> yap X e ^P f ? opyavov flcriv, 57 8e fyvcns det 
 btavejJ.fi. Kaddnrep avOpcairos $porifios, exaoToy rw bwapevto XP*]- 
 <r9ai 2 . Of this method of Nature, the phenomena under 
 consideration are a collateral indication. 
 
 The dormant organs, called rudimentary, though not 
 serviceable to the individual, are remanets of a related 
 type, and constitute a record of great importance, for read- 
 
 1 Introduction a la Zoologie ge'ne'rale, ou considerations sur les 
 tendances de la Nature dans la constitution du regne animal, izmo. 
 Paris, 1851, p. 61. 
 
 2 Cited by Arist, rrtp\ foW popiwv, IV. x, p. 687 A. 
 
 3 De rerum Natura, iv. 834, 835.
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 359 
 
 ing the method of Nature. Without these finger-posts, 
 the branching and crossing roads of evolution so skilfully 
 tracked by Darwin, would have been vastly more obscure, 
 and the survey of the organic kingdom would have lain in 
 its elementary fragments still. 
 
 (2) The objection assumes a graver form when it asserts 
 that the system of means and ends in Nature includes ad- 
 justments that are positively hurtful. This charge presses 
 upon Theism on two sides ; impugning the wisdom of the 
 creative Power ; and again, the goodness. It is with the 
 former only that we are concerned in defending teleology : 
 the moral difficulty will come under consideration when we 
 treat of the attributes of God. At present it is not the 
 cruelties, but only the blunders, imputed to Nature, which 
 we have to estimate. To take the measure of all the dis- 
 contents would be as little possible as to fill the vessels of 
 the Danaids ; but a sufficient sample will be afforded if we 
 examine the faults found (A) with single organs of the 
 animal economy; (B) with the law of birth which regulates 
 the arrival of new beings ; (C) with the law of death which 
 regulates the dismissal of superseded beings. 
 
 A. (a) No organ has supplied the teleologist with more 
 striking illustrations of design in Nature than the eye. It 
 commends itself to his selection not only by its wonderful 
 performance as the inlet of almost boundless knowledge, 
 and the revealer of more than half the beauty of the world, 
 but by its close resemblance to the most refined instru- 
 ments invented by human skill, some of which seem to 
 attain their end by externally reproducing the adjustments 
 already exemplified in its interior. Yet the investigations 
 of the last half-century are said to have detected so many 
 faults in its structure as to show that the admiration be- 
 stowed upon it was misplaced. Instead of being an 
 instrument of precision, it is inexact in all its indications, 
 (i) It has a chromatic aberration, which breaks up the
 
 360 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 white light as it passes, and fringes objects with violet 
 tints. (2) It has a spherical aberration, which prevents 
 some rays from hitting the proper focus, and confuses 
 vision by astigmatism. (3) Its lens, composed of fibres 
 with six diverging axes, radiates the passing light, break- 
 ing the point of each star of the sky into divergent beams. 
 (4) Neither its lens, nor its humours, are perfectly tran- 
 sparent ; and the latter have floating specks which, in 
 certain conditions, have all the effect of dancing insects, 
 and occasion the malady known by the name of the musca 
 volitantes. (5) Its retina has a blind spot that bores a 
 hole, as it were, in each of the two fields of vision, only not 
 in the same place for both. (6) A network of blood- 
 vessels stands a little in advance of the sensitive retina, 
 and casts shadows upon it, interruptive of pure vision. 
 (7) The centre of distinctest vision, the yellow spot, is 
 less sensitive to faint light than the other parts of the 
 retina ; so that just where you are looking, there is always 
 arising a comparative dulness of impression. After enu- 
 merating the first three counts of this indictment against 
 the eye, Helmholtz makes this comment : ' Now it is not 
 too much to say that if an optician wanted to sell me 
 an instrument which had all these defects, I should think 
 myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the 
 strongest terms, and giving him back his instrument. Of 
 course I shall not do this with my eyes, and shall be only 
 too glad to keep them as long as I can, defects and all. 
 Still the fact that, however bad they may be, I can get no 
 others, does not diminish their defects, so long as I maintain 
 the narrow but indisputable position of a critic on purely 
 optical grounds 1 .' 
 
 We owe so considerable an advance of our optical know- 
 
 1 Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, translated by E. Atkin- 
 son, with an Introduction by Professor Tyndall, 1873, vi ; Recent 
 Progress of the Theory of Vision, translated by Dr. Pye Smith, p. 219.
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 361 
 
 ledge to the admirable researches of Helmholtz, that it may 
 seem ungracious to abridge the honours which he claims for 
 recent science in this department. But when he asserts 
 that the defects on which he comments have been disclosed 
 by investigations 'chiefly during the last ten years ' [i. e. prior 
 to 1872], I must observe that they were familiar to his pre- 
 decessors, and are mentioned by Brewster in writings nearly 
 half a century old. In his treatise on Optics (1831) he 
 describes most of them ; and though he speaks of the 
 spherical aberration as corrected by the unequal density of 
 the lens, he declares the eye to be chromatic, and enters at 
 considerable length into other of the defects 1 . The same 
 is true of Dr. Roget's Physiology, published in i834 2 . 
 And in his larger work, Helmholtz himself gives an ac- 
 count of the researches, as far back as 1801, of Dr. Thomas 
 Young, on the spherical aberration of the eye, and the star- 
 like diffraction of light transmitted through it 3 . If there- 
 fore the older physiologists thought better of their eyes than 
 is agreeable to the modern estimate, this is not due to 
 ignorance of the defects now emphasised; but rather to 
 a temper somewhat more loyal to Nature than is usual in 
 our cynical age. 
 
 In estimating a charge, against any contrivance, of 
 failure to answer its end, we must start with a clear con- 
 ception of that end ; else we may measure the means by a 
 false or variable standard. What is the problem to which 
 the eye is offeree! as an answer ? Within what limits does 
 it lie ? It is not required that we should count the stars of 
 the Milky Way, or make portraits of the people of Jupiter, 
 or classify the minerals of the moon ; or, on the other 
 hand, that we should get a view of the ultimate atoms of 
 
 1 Treatise on Optics, Lardner's Cyclopaedia, ch. xxxv, pp. 289 seqq. 
 
 2 Animal and Vegetable Physiology (Bridgewater Treatise), vol. ii, 
 pp. 471-476. 
 
 3 Physiologische Optik, 14.
 
 362 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 matter, or count the undulations of light as they fly. That 
 we avail ourselves of the telescope and microscope to give 
 us new fields of vision, is no imputation on the capabilities 
 of the eye. Its functions lie between those extreme ranges 
 of the vast and the minute, and may be perfectly per- 
 formed, though shut out from these. It is the same with 
 the precision, as with the range, of the organ ; there is a 
 degree of nicety on which it would be a sort of physiologi- 
 cal pedantry to insist : that all distances within our field 
 should at the same moment be equally clear ; that there 
 should never be a difference between apparent and real 
 form ; that the ocular media should have absolute im- 
 munity from the prismatic effects which have free play in 
 the air and mists and waters, are needless demands, and 
 would be in place only if man were an optical instrument 
 pure and simple, without the wants and resources of a 
 swift-moving and complex nature. The rule of Aristotle is 
 here applicable, that, ' both in theoretical exposition and in 
 the practical arts, the degree of precision and finish on 
 which we insist must vary according to the subject which 
 we are handling x : ' and that ' mathematical exactitude is 
 not to be looked for in everything, but only in things 
 incorporeal (y-r\ lyovvw v\r]v) ; not therefore in the field of 
 Nature; for everything perhaps in Nature is material 2 .' 
 You do not employ a micrometer to measure calico, or 
 send a miniature-painter to get up the scenery of an opera- 
 house. And if the eye enables you to interpret the size, 
 distances, and colours of objects around you, to distin- 
 guish them by their appearance, to regulate your steps, to 
 estimate the speed of moving things, to wield and construe 
 the visible signs of thought, in written language and in the 
 countenance of men, to penetrate outlying fields of space 
 and fetch in their contents and relations for the enrichment 
 
 1 Aristotle, Eth. Nicom. I, iii. 2 Aristotle, Met. a. 3, ad fin. 995 a.
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 363 
 
 of knowledge and the enlargement of thought, all accusa- 
 tions against it as incompetent to its work fall under the 
 condemnation of Aristotle's rule. 
 
 The proof that the organ will stand this test is, that the 
 defects enumerated, unless raised into morbid exaggera- 
 tion, are known only to the scientific, and have needed the 
 most refined observation for their discovery at all. Other 
 persons with healthy eyes hear with astonishment that 
 they see nothing distinctly, nothing uncoloured ; that their 
 field of vision is all speckled and laced over with entoptic 
 shadows ; that there is an invisible spot blotting the picture 
 before each eye ; and that of all the visible points before 
 them, the very faintest is that which is full in their view. 
 These are the paradoxes of optical experiment, not the 
 statement of ordinary conscious experience. There is 
 always something to prevent our feeling the disadvantage 
 which the critic detects, and practically to remove it, if not 
 scientifically to compensate it. The astigmatism, for in- 
 stance, caused by the different focus of the axial and the 
 peripheral rays through the lens would be annoying, if 
 the organ were a fixed tube with a stiff stare : the clearness 
 and the blur would both be stationary and would confuse 
 the picture by their union. But, from the mobility of the 
 eye, every peripheral direction passes swiftly into central, 
 and takes its turn for clearness ; and as the total impres- 
 sion is the summary of these quick successions, the 
 indistinctness is evanescent, and -the precision survives. 
 And it deserves remark that this restless life of the organ 
 that covers so many of its sins, is, in part at least, actually 
 due to one of its alleged imperfections, viz. that the yellow 
 spot, or point of maximum distinctness, is less sensitive to 
 light than the surrounding zone of the retina ; so that, if 
 you steadily gaze at a bright point, for instance a star, it 
 soon begins to grow dim, while smaller objects in the 
 neighbouring field force themselves more upon your notice.
 
 364 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 What is the natural effect of this variation of relative 
 intensity ? That you are tempted to shift your look from 
 the fading to the brightening points ; and as each in its 
 turn visits you with the same experience, the eye is in 
 perpetual motion, in the instinctive quest of its own most 
 perfect sensibility. In virtue of this inequality, the centre 
 being distinct but faint, the peripheral zone bright but 
 indistinct, the imperfection of neither has time to tell 
 upon the resulting vision : under the attraction of light, an 
 itinerant distinctness flies over every point and, from a 
 picture never faultless on the retina, sends an image perfect 
 to the mind. 
 
 Similar remarks apply to all the other alleged ocular 
 defects. They are psychologically null. It needs special 
 and artificial adjustments to make them manifest at all, so 
 completely are they masked and counteracted on their way 
 to our perception. Present in technical form, they are 
 neutralised in practical operation, and impair the eye for 
 no service which it has to render to our life. No less than 
 this, indeed, is admitted by Helmholtz himself; and he has 
 done some wrong to his own final judgment, by drawing an 
 indictment in an optical sense, which he has to withdraw 
 and disown in a physiological. ' The eye,' he says, ' has 
 every possible defect that can be found in an optical in- 
 strument, and even some which are peculiar to itself; but 
 they are so counteracted, that the inexactness of the image 
 which results from their presence very little exceeds, under 
 ordinary conditions of illumination, the limits which are 
 set to the delicacy of sensation by the dimensions of the 
 retinal cones 1 .' Yet more explicitly he says, 'All these 
 imperfections would be exceedingly troublesome in an 
 artificial camera obscura and in the photographic picture it 
 produced. But they are not so in the eye ; so little 
 
 Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, p. 227.
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 365 
 
 indeed, that it was very difficult to discover some of them. 
 The reason of their not interfering with our perception of 
 external objects is not simply that we have two eyes, and 
 so one makes up for the defect of the other. For even 
 when we do not use both, and in the case of persons blind 
 of one eye, the impression we receive from the field of 
 vision is free from the defects which the irregularity of the 
 retina would otherwise occasion. The chief reason is that 
 we are continually moving the eye, and also that the 
 imperfections almost always affect those parts of the field 
 to which we are not at the moment directing our attention V 
 Nay, as if entirely to neutralise his own startling censures, 
 and, like a Jewish prophet, to wind up with words of peace, 
 he makes concessions yet more thorough, which are none 
 the less weighty, because delivered in the interest of the 
 theory of evolution : ' The adaptation of the eye to its 
 function is therefore most complete, and is seen in the very 
 limits which are set to its defects. Here, the result which 
 may be reached by innumerable generations working under 
 the Darwinian law of inheritance, coincides with what the 
 wisest Wisdom may have devised beforehand. A sensible 
 man will not cut firewood with a razor ; and so we may 
 assume that each step in the elaboration of the eye must 
 have made the organ more vulnerable, and more slow in 
 its development. We must also bear in mind that soft 
 watery animal textures must always be unfavourable and 
 difficult material for an instrument of the mind V Since, 
 therefore, the instrument which, a little while ago, was 
 handed back to its maker with a good rating for his bad 
 workmanship, is now returned to us in a state worthy of 
 ' the wisest Wisdom,' we may consider the case against it 
 closed, and withdraw it from the court under cover of so 
 honourable an acquittal. 
 
 1 Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, p. 224. 
 8 Ibid. p. 228.
 
 366 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 (b} Another instance of unskilfulness in Nature is cited 
 with more effect. ' Can we consider/ says Darwin, ' the 
 sting of the wasp or of the bee as perfect, which, when used 
 against many attacking animals, cannot be withdrawn, 
 owing to the backward serratures, and so inevitably causes 
 the death of the insect by tearing out its viscera 1 ?' 
 Darwin himself suggests that this is a case of a misapplied 
 tool, diverted to a purpose foreign to it, and not yet 
 sufficiently modified to fulfil it well. Originally the organ 
 was a drill for cutting grooves in wood, like the ovipositor 
 of the saw-fly, and the poison was the corroding liquor 
 dropped into the groove, like that by which the gall-fly 
 produces the tubercle upon the oak. For the purpose of 
 such work, the barbed teeth would answer well ; but when 
 the instrument that carries them was tempted, by the 
 exigencies of war, into use as a bayonet, they proved fatal 
 alike to the defence and the attack. It may be expected, 
 I presume, that, in course of time, natural selection will 
 get rid of the teeth ; some insects being born with the 
 fortunate variation of a smooth-edged sting, and conveying 
 the improvement to the species through their advantage in 
 the competition for existence. If so, Nature is at least 
 working out a perfect result, and has already in view a true 
 adjustment of means to ends ; and it is only because we 
 are in the workshop with the unfinished product, and are 
 watching the conversion of one tool into another at the 
 half-way point, that we are unable to recognise her skill ; 
 and the complaint will be, not that her work is bad, but 
 that it is long about, notwithstanding the provisional 
 suffering which is involved in the delay. The objection 
 thus moves off from the teleological problem and falls into 
 the moral question of the existence of evil. Leaving it 
 there, we shall, at least implicitly, meet it again. 
 
 1 Origin of Species, ch. vi, p. 202.
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 367 
 
 But meanwhile, without resorting to Darwin's genealogy 
 of the sting, something may be said to stay the hasty 
 judgment with which the implement is threatened. Is it 
 true that the wasp or bee that uses its sting commits 
 suicide ? In particular cases, no doubt it is so ; but 
 naturally enough, they have been observed chiefly when 
 men or their domestic animals have been the objects of 
 attack ; and from their thick leathery skin it may well be 
 difficult to withdraw with impunity the jagged hair-like 
 needles which compose the weapon of these insects. 
 Though however they pierce it to the depth of one-twelfth 
 of an inch, they are even here often extricated with safety. 
 But it is not against such giant enemies that the armour of 
 these little creatures is for the most part provided ; but 
 against the foes of their own household. A hive, though a 
 model of industry, is not exempt from the passions and 
 perils of war ; nay, its economy, utilitarian as it is, in- 
 cludes some scenes of severe fighting. If an old queen 
 dies, chambers are built in which several candidates for 
 the royal state are nourished and imprisoned till the 
 fitting age ; and then the strongest of them stings all the 
 others to death, and reigns unquestioned. Of course, she 
 has kept her sting. So, when the hive has been deserted 
 by its authorities and thinned by successive swarms, a com- 
 petition arises among the royal ladies for the sovereignty 
 over the remaining elements of the state ; and is determined 
 by survivorship of battle, the crown being awarded to the 
 most triumphant sting. And again, after the swarming, 
 there regularly occurs a general massacre of the drones 
 which, having no weapons, terminate, like defenceless aris- 
 tocrats, their large and leisurely existence, at the hands of 
 the industrious neuters. On all these occasions it is ob- 
 vious that the assailants do not sacrifice themselves ; so 
 that, in all the constitutional use of their stings, the bees 
 appear to be perfectly safe ; and it is only when they sally
 
 368 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 forth to war against monsters and Titans, that they are 
 liable, like our hunters of elephants or fishers of whales, to 
 be punished for their temerity. 
 
 With these illustrative samples of criticism addressed to 
 particular organs I must be content : they are fairly repre- 
 sentative ; and nothing would be either gained or lost by 
 pursuing the same type of difficulty into new instances. 
 I proceed therefore to consider a more general criticism, 
 affecting 
 
 B. The law of birth which regulates the arrival of new 
 beings ; whether (a) of individuals, or (b] of species. 
 
 (a) In the former of these relations, a protest seems at 
 first sight to be justifiably made against the enormous 
 over-provision for replenishing the world. Looked at in 
 itself, the apparatus in the flowering plant or tree for con- 
 tinuing its kind in the next generation comprises a mar- 
 vellous series of adaptations. So delicate and elaborate a 
 mechanism seems computed for the fabrication of some 
 costly product, worthy of the most scrupulous care. With 
 amazement we observe that, of the blossoms which open, 
 a vast proportion drop without fructification ; and, of the 
 seeds that are matured and scattered, millions perish for 
 one that takes effect ; and again, of those that begin to 
 germinate, only a scanty few carry their history any 
 further. The brilliant promise appears to vanish in general 
 frustration ; and the nicest of economies, to inaugurate 
 the wildest waste. It is the same with animals : their 
 fecundity, especially in the lowest types, apparently 
 amounts to a frightful excess. Within a year a single 
 Aphid (lanigera) will be the progenitor of a quintillion 
 (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) of descendants. It is impos- 
 sible to look at a herring's roe, and to reckon from it the 
 increase promised by a single shoal, without wondering 
 how long the sea will hold the countless multitude. A 
 duck will lay in a year nearly a hundred eggs, and the
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 369 
 
 goose about thirty. Even among quadrupeds the pro- 
 vision of successors is profuse ; the offspring of a rabbit 
 amounting to upwards of thirty, and of the sow to half that 
 number in a year ; and even with animals whose annual 
 produce is limited to one or two, the rate of increase over- 
 shoots the requirements for adequate maintenance of the 
 race. Of all these preparations for life, only a small por- 
 tion can fulfil its apparent end ; the rest is cut short and 
 sacrificed. In such disproportion, in such doing and un- 
 doing, is it possible, it is asked, to trace any purpose of 
 wisdom ? 
 
 In treating of this difficulty as bearing on the animal 
 world, I shall at present put out of view one of its ele- 
 ments, viz. the pain of multiplied deaths ; the considera- 
 tion of the law of death being reserved for our next head. 
 The premature extinction of organic beings we may well 
 contemplate as if it -were the same for animals as for 
 plants, an observed but unfelt failure of the end ex- 
 pressed in the organism. 
 
 Now, when we are offended by the superabundant 
 genesis of things as so much waste, we forget that Nature 
 has no occasion for parsimony, and that it is only in our 
 finite economy that a close reckoning of resources acquires 
 an appropriate place. With Plato, the crowning glory of 
 the creative Power was its ' ungrudgingness ' ; and if, in 
 tenanting the elements with life, a liberal margin was left 
 for its possibility beyond its actual range at any moment, 
 it expressed the large thought and ample readiness of the 
 Maker, without harm to any creature that he had made. 
 With all the copiousness of supply, there are times, in 
 the history of every species, which so reduce it here and 
 there as to threaten it with local extinction, were it not on 
 the average superfluously prolific ; for the physical laws of 
 its abode are not made for it alone, and in working out 
 their more comprehensive ends may often bear hard on its 
 
 VOL. I. B b
 
 370 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 particular interests, and sweep its promise away by frost or 
 wind or flood ; and then it is that, by moving forward its 
 reserves, which else would never come into play, it saves 
 the field. And at seasons when they are not wanted, why 
 should we grudge to the forest its rich carpet of super- 
 fluities the beech-mast, the acorns, the fir-cones, the 
 whortleberries and the bracken, that are content to give 
 their variegated pattern to the grass before they die ? 
 Would you prefer to count out the exact number of seeds 
 and spores that are destined to become adult, and prohibit 
 all the rest ? Is it possible to apply a more niggardly con- 
 ception than this doctrine of waste to the universal Cause ? 
 It is worthily answered by Madame Dudevant when she 
 says, ' Dirons-nous que la floraison exuberante des arbres a 
 fruit est une erreur de la nature? La nature est prodigue, 
 parce qu'elle est riche, et non parce qu'elle est folle V 
 
 But again ; it is a mistake to treat as a failure every 
 germ that misses its development into an adult specimen 
 of its kind. This is no doubt the internal end towards 
 which its own constitution tends. But it is not a solitary 
 unrelated object, set up for itself alone ; and over and 
 above its internal end, it has external subserviencies to the 
 needs of surrounding forms of life. Every grain of wheat 
 is a seed, capable of raising a new plant ; but who would 
 be offended at the miscarriage by which it finds its way 
 into a loaf of bread ? Does this frustrate, or does it 
 execute, the purpose of Nature ? It is plain that the pro- 
 vinces of the organic world constitute a scheme of inter- 
 dependencies, and that the measure of each is taken, not 
 by any rule of self-sufficiency, but by reference to the equi- 
 librium of the whole. The subsistence of animals hangs, 
 directly or indirectly, on the vegetable kingdom ; and is 
 
 1 Nouvelles Lettres d'un Voyageur, Lettre III. Le Pays des 
 Anemones, p. 40. (Euvres completes, Paris, 1877.
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 371 
 
 simply contingent on the surplus of seeds and fruits be- 
 yond the requisites for reproduction ; so that the ' waste ' 
 of the plant-world is the economy of the sentient. The 
 same law runs through the various groups of carnivorous 
 creatures : each lives upon the surplus of some prolific 
 race below, and for the life that is sacrificed there is sub- 
 stituted other that is saved. Whatever may be said, from 
 considerations of humanity, against the system of prey (and 
 of this we shall treat hereafter), it thus escapes the charge 
 of breach of promise ; for, of two ends that are combined 
 in the same nature, it disappoints the one only to fulfil 
 the other. Nor should we entirely disregard yet a further 
 end which is incidentally realised by this method ; viz. 
 the investiture of the world with a glorious exuberance, 
 furnishing it as a majestic palace with endless galleries of 
 art and beauty, instead of as a cheap boarding-school, with 
 bare benches and scant meals. How much of the splen- 
 dour and significance of Nature depends upon its fulness, 
 upon the irrepressible rush of life into every open inlet and 
 over every surface newly spread ! Would you have the 
 teeming elements less hospitable ? The waters you could 
 not keep empty, unless you boiled them ; or the air silent, 
 unless you froze it ; or the rock naked, unless, like Hanni- 
 bal, you dosed it with vinegar : invisible candidates for 
 growth and movement and voice will steal in and soon 
 crowd the most guarded solitude. The gardener may be 
 vexed with the indefatigable weeds upon his trim beds ; 
 but were the wild plants fewer and less persevering, where 
 would be the careless hedge-bank and the mossy wall ? 
 He may vow vengeance upon the nests that harbour the 
 pilferers of his fruits ; but who would purchase the richest 
 table at the cost of an air less musical ? On sultry days 
 we are sometimes provoked by the vivacity of creation ; 
 but he who would indulge his languid mood, and cannot 
 throw his heart into the jubilee of the strong sunshine, 
 
 B b 2
 
 372 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 should certainly not go abroad when summer is at full 
 tide. Nature will be jealous, if, when pretending to seek 
 her haunts, you after all want only to retire into yourself. 
 When you bask in your boat upon the lake to compose a 
 sonnet or work out a problem, she startles you with gleams 
 of silver and golden scales that open the perspective of the 
 waters on which you float. When, like Phaedrus, you carry 
 a book under your cloak as you stroll by the Ilissus, and 
 think to master it, cooling your feet in the brook and your 
 head under the shade of a tall plane, you soon find, unless 
 a Socrates is there to steady you, your philosophy chir- 
 rupped away by the grasshopper and your reverie ex- 
 ploded by the flash of the dragon-fly, with a thousand 
 other peremptory hints to quit your own interior, and 
 mingle with the gladness of the world. When the greedy 
 axe has performed its massacre and left only the grave- 
 yard of a forest, and the tangle of brushwood has been 
 consumed by fire, the industry of Nature begins again : 
 new families of plants, never suspected to be there, seize 
 upon their chance, and spring into the vacated place, 
 quickly followed by the old ones, waking again into life 
 at the competition. It is this vital elasticity of Nature that 
 gives to even her untracked solitudes the double interest of 
 a picture and a history; and were its tension slackened, 
 her communion with our inner life would lose its vivid 
 charm, and her voices would speak to us in muffled tones. 
 
 It will perhaps be admitted that the surplus of lower 
 forms of life is fairly, explained by the law of subsistence 
 which makes one tribe the prey of another. But what are 
 we to say of the same phenomenon in human kind, where 
 we still meet with infant promise nipped in the bud, and 
 every gradation of intercepted development? What external 
 use can here compensate for the failure of the internal end, 
 where the lute is broken ere the strings can play? This 
 question runs up so much, in quest of its answer, into the
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 373 
 
 moral structure and discipline of this life, and the prospect 
 of another, that, in the present connection, only its secondary 
 aspects can come into view. The fact that really troubles 
 us here is not the exuberance, but the severity of Nature ; 
 not the superfluous births, but the ' premature ' deaths : the 
 evil we deplore is, that life, having once begun, does not 
 fulfil its course, but leaves the major part of its possibilities 
 in embryo. This evil, it is evident, is wholly relative to 
 a pre-conception of our own : but for our expectation of a 
 certain term to follow, the allowance that precedes would 
 be acceptable, and while it lasted, no grievance would be 
 found: it is the imagination of seventy years that measures 
 the loss, when only three are given. Were there a short- 
 lived race, triennially replaced, its members would receive 
 the same notice of departure without disappointment or 
 special complaint ; just as now we lay down our burden in 
 peace, without begrudging Methuselah his centuries. If, 
 without offence, races may be of various longevity, from 
 diurnal to millennial, why may not individuals too ? The 
 only difference is, that where the average term for the race 
 is not reached by the individual, he seems to incur the 
 privation of frustrated possibilities : exclude the idea of 
 these, and judge his case by the abbreviated standard of 
 his actual years, and you lose the temptation to say that he 
 has lived in vain. If each section of life were worthless 
 except as prelude to the next, it would indeed be wasted, 
 were the next denied. But each is good on its own 
 account, over and above its relation to a contingent sequel ; 
 childhood is already dignified by its ends within itself, as 
 well as brightened by its prospective outlook, and has its 
 immediate duties besides its eager hopes ; and, even short 
 of the moral drama of existence, who can watch the play of 
 the infant's limbs and look into the pure eyes, and doubt 
 that there is a gift worth having in action and perception 
 at the very outset, in the fresh answer of the sensitive
 
 374 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book 1 1. 
 
 nature to the light and warmth and pressure of the world ? 
 There is therefore, in these swift-passing cases, an end in 
 the present which is realised; and another suggested for 
 the future, which is not. If the former were there alone, all 
 would seem well ; and from the co-presence of the other, it 
 surely suffers no harm : the momentary fulfilment is not 
 lost, though it be not the means to an ulterior. Would 
 you prefer to take away the suggestion of growing possi- 
 bilities? would you say, 'where the human being is to have 
 only his lustrum, let him be made upon a short pattern, and 
 not built as if for seven decades ?' You would indeed be 
 thus saved from your disappointment ; but on what terms ? 
 Not only by curtailment of your hopes, but by dwarfing 
 the nature so precious to your affections, and rendering it 
 less than human. Unless it carry on its face the whole 
 assemblage of our possibilities, you cannot know its scale, 
 or guide yourself to its real contents ; and the tone of your 
 love, and the reverence of your care, will be inadequate to 
 the measure of your trust. The perfect human organism 
 is needful, to advertise what the nature present with us 
 really is; with what voice therefore we are to commune 
 with it, with what embrace fold it to the heart. 
 
 It must be admitted, however, that though, in these cases 
 of early blight, the total end is not defeated, there is a resi- 
 due of frustrated possibility ; the organism being apparently 
 computed for a work more durable than it performs. This 
 fraction of difficulty we shall encounter with more advantage 
 hereafter. At present I will only add, that shortened life is 
 by no means the only form under which we meet this phe- 
 nomenon, of baffled capabilities : it repeats itself wherever, 
 from any cause, men, be they young, adult, or old, remain 
 with faculties undeveloped and character perverted. If we 
 are to ask why it is that not all men become what they 
 might be, the question will recur with equal right on many 
 occasions not contemplated by our objector, and rise to our
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 375 
 
 thoughts wherever we meet with the savage, the criminal, 
 the selfish, the ignorant ; and it is a question which would 
 have to be reiterated without ceasing, so long as there are 
 inequalities of level that separate us, and the ideal of 
 humanity is anywhere unrealised. The problem therefore 
 finally generalises itself in this shape : how is it that, an 
 ideal end being proposed for an order of created beings, 
 individual members of the order are found at various 
 grades of approximation to that end, and only a few attain 
 the goal ? And here the difficulty vanishes ; for wherever 
 there is growth, there must be gradation ; wherever a final 
 perfection, a prior range of imperfection ; wherever a finite 
 organism, functions liable to disturbance and arrest. It 
 cannot be shown that there is any purpose disappointed ; 
 for that purpose itself is not absolute, pointedly fixed at the 
 ultimate limit, but embraces also every partial tentative and 
 spreads over all the lines and stages of approach. Design 
 is not the less apparent, that sometimes we can see it only 
 part way to its accomplishment. 
 
 (d) Still sharper criticism is applied to the birth-law 
 of new species, on the assumption that it is correctly 
 defined in the Darwinian hypothesis. Of the numerous 
 ' accidental variations ' which living organs may spon- 
 taneously take, myriads may be tried, and, for want of 
 stable equilibrium, quickly disappear ; and those alone will 
 stand, which give some advantage to the animal for hold- 
 ing its footing on the world. The co-partners in these 
 happy changes find each other out, and start the successful 
 families which, handing down the favourable characters, 
 found a fresh species. Nature therefore, in stocking the 
 earth by this method of survival, destroys infinitely more 
 of her own work than she preserves : proceeding by blind 
 tentatives, she makes countless failures for one hit ; and 
 though, having unlimited time for her game of chance, 
 she arrives at what is congruous at last, it is by no skill,
 
 376 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 but by the most wasteful and destructive of processes, when 
 compared with the selective foresight of human intelli- 
 gence. ' We can no longer doubt,' says Lange, ' that 
 Nature proceeds in a way which in no way resembles 
 human design ; indeed, that her most essential means, if 
 estimated by the rule of the human understanding, must 
 be regarded as equivalent to the blindest accident. On 
 this point, no further proof is to be looked for ; facts speak 
 so plainly, and with such unbroken accord in the various 
 provinces of Nature, that no view of the world is longer 
 admissible which is at variance with these facts and their 
 irresistible significance. If a man, in order to shoot a hare, 
 fired off millions of gun-barrels in all random directions upon 
 a great moor ; if, in order to get into a shut room, he brought 
 ten thousand keys at haphazard, and tried them all ; if, in 
 order to obtain a house, he built a city, and abandoned the 
 superfluous houses to wind and weather, no one, I suppose, 
 would call such action an example of design, and much less 
 should we suppose that in this procedure there lay any 
 higher wisdom, recondite reasons, and superior skill V 
 
 Since Lange here speaks ' many things to us in parables,' 
 we must beware lest ' seeing we do not perceive, and hear- 
 ing we fail to understand.' Premising therefore an inter- 
 pretation, I assume that the shot hare, the fitted key, the 
 occupied house, stand for any new species which Nature 
 sets up, or a new organ which has been wrought out, for 
 the purpose of the argument it matters not which. The 
 millions of random discharges in all directions, the myriads 
 of wrong keys, the city of empty and tumble-down houses, 
 represent the aimless, fumbling, wasteful activity expended 
 by Nature on her way to the new species ; and in these 
 instances, the fact that the ammunition does nothing, that 
 the keys open nothing, that the city perishes without 
 
 1 Geschichte des Materialismus, Zweites Buch, 2 ter Abschnitt, 
 p. 246, 1873.
 
 Chap.l.] IN NATURE. 377 
 
 inhabitants, expresses the disappearance without trace of 
 innumerable abortions from the world. If this is a true 
 version, one thing is plain ; viz. that, in Lange's view, the 
 Darwinian hypothesis derives the products of Nature from 
 the protracted working of Chance, indifferently shaking out 
 all imaginable combinations, till something tenable turns 
 up ; for in this idea alone we find the common point of all 
 his illustrations. Yet the advocates of the hypothesis are 
 in the habit of resenting any comparison of it with the 
 older theories of fortuitous creation, and any attempt to 
 estimate it by the recognised rules of the doctrine of 
 chances. Professor Huxley says : ' I apprehend that the 
 foundation of the theory of natural selection is the fact that 
 living bodies tend incessantly to vary. This variation is 
 neither indefinite, nor fortuitous, nor does it take place in 
 all directions, in the strict sense of these words 1 ;' not in- 
 definite, ' because limited by the general characters of the 
 type,' 'a whale, for instance, not tending to produce 
 feathers ; ' not fortuitous, because arising from definite 
 ' molecular forces residing within the organism ; ' not in 
 all directions, because regulated by the laws of these 
 molecular forces. Variation, thus qualified, is not however 
 thereby removed from the domain of chance ; for there 
 too, within the very conditions of all problems of chance, 
 these same qualifications are invariably assumed. Though 
 a spilled basket of printers' types might tumble on the 
 floor in the form of any known book and of a pretty wide 
 range of nonsense, its possible combinations are not in- 
 definite, but are limited by the numbers of each particular 
 letter ; nor are they fortuitous, since they dispose them- 
 selves according to the line and force of the fling, and the 
 relative weights and positions of the types that are flung ; 
 nor do they exhibit themselves in all directions, for the law 
 of gravitation prevents their appearing on the ceiling, and 
 
 1 Critiques and Addresses, xi ; Mr. Darwin's Critics, p. 298.
 
 378 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 confines them to the floor. Yet this is a perfect example 
 of what we mean by chance. It cannot begin till there 
 are definite elements to play with ; and instead of exclud- 
 ing determinate causes, it presupposes them in such 
 numbers that their relations evade us and they cannot 
 be measured, one by one, and we have to treat any single 
 event among thousands or millions as equally possible. 
 I could understand Huxley, if he took up the position 
 of denying fortuity altogether, so as to recall the whole 
 realm of chance within the dominion of determinism ; 
 but in saying that variation is not fortuitous, he either 
 makes an unmeaning statement, or implies that there is 
 something which is, and from which therefore variation 
 is distinguished : yet, in rescuing variation from this pre- 
 dicate, he endows it with nothing that does not equally 
 find place in the most unquestioned phenomena of chance. 
 We are indebted to Lange for the clearness and force with 
 which his illustrations bring out this feature in the modern 
 book of Genesis, as interpreted by its most appreciative 
 expounders. 
 
 Now the position which I will take up in answer to 
 Lange is this : I will not dispute the Darwinian record of 
 natural history; yet shall decline to accept the description 
 of it given in Lange's parables. The contrast between 
 Nature's way of working out an end and Man's is said to 
 consist in this, that, for want of any guiding idea, Nature 
 makes millions of failures for one hit, whilst man follows 
 his pre-conception straight to the mark. Take then any 
 end which has at last been reached by Nature, say, the 
 setting up of human kind : where are the millions of failures 
 from the midst of which this success has emerged ? With 
 what facts, actual or supposed, of the earth's history are 
 they identical ? Are the real steps of evolution that have 
 now advanced to man, the intermediaries between the 
 Ascidian and Shakespeare, to be regarded as missing shots?
 
 Chap. 1.] IN NATURE. 379 
 
 That can hardly be, since they are the very means that 
 have conducted to the end, and have not failed. Must we 
 then turn to the other lines of pedigree, the variations 
 which have resulted in the salmon, the pheasant, the ele- 
 phant, the dog, the ape, and treat these as failures, because 
 issuing in something other than human ? This would 
 assume that living beings can have no worth except as 
 means for the ulterior production of man ; whereas every 
 surviving race contains and realises its own end, whether 
 or not it plays a part in subsequently winning ours. Per- 
 haps then we should search the cemeteries of Nature for the 
 vestiges of her mistakes, and class all extinct species as 
 abortive, simply because they lost their footing in the world. 
 Such a sentence, however, would condemn many of the 
 probable progenitors of the existing kinds, whose very 
 presence vindicates their ancestors' archaic place in Nature. 
 Nor is there any reason for setting up present survivorship 
 as a test of success against past ; for all alike are but lease- 
 holders on this planet ; and the fossiliferous rocks assign 
 to the extinct races as large a share of geologic time as 
 those which are now living can reasonably claim. We 
 must then, it seems, go beyond the whole natural-history 
 record, past and present, to find these alleged miscarriages 
 of the producing power, and seek them in some hypotheti- 
 cal region prefixed to the known flora and fauna of the 
 globe ; and must excuse the non-appearance of these 
 blundered forms, partly by ' the imperfection of the geologic 
 record,' partly by their perishable character. On these 
 terms, they pass into wholly imaginary beings, postulated 
 by a theory, but unattested by a single fact ; and there we 
 may leave them. Unless everything is to be condemned 
 as abortive which, in leading to an ulterior nature, at pre- 
 sent stops short of it, though carrying in it its own minor 
 end, there is not the slightest resemblance between the real 
 process of the organic world and the senseless actions with
 
 380 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 which Lange compares it. Take the maximum of what he 
 calls failure in Nature, and what does it amount to ? 
 Simply this : that a variation of organ, occurring once, does 
 not repeat itself, but, like a personal peculiarity, a mole- 
 spot or a white lock of hair, disappears with the individual ; 
 while other variations, chiming in with the present condi- 
 tions of life, gain more or less persistence, and some embody 
 themselves in permanent novelties of race. In all but the 
 extreme case, we have here nothing but vitalities, longer or 
 shorter ; the extreme case, if useless, is harmless ; and when 
 regarded not in itself alone, but as part of a general provi- 
 sion for starting everywhere new possibilities of advance 
 and enabling them to try their strength, its inutility at a 
 particular conjuncture dissolves itself away in the beneficent 
 intention of the comprehensive law. Evolution, rightly 
 interpreted, sustains rather than contradicts Aristotle's 
 principle that ' Nature makes nothing in vain V 
 
 (C.) The last objection which I need notice is drawn from 
 the Law of Death, which regulates the dismissal of organised 
 beings from the world. Did we look only at the delicate 
 and ingenious structures of sentient creatures, we might 
 naturally attribute them to a providing intelligence ; but, 
 it is said, when we follow these finely-finished products into 
 their field of existence, and see how roughly they are 
 treated there, abandoned to a host of dangers, and hustled 
 out of life without having secured any appreciable term, we 
 must own that Nature sets no value on her work, but by 
 reckless desertion of it renounces the pretension to any 
 directing and preserving thought. The more we insist on 
 the elaborate perfection of a living organism, on the won- 
 derful instincts that animate it, on its accurate fit to the 
 scene of its activity, so much the ruder must be the revul- 
 sion, when we find these adaptations neutralised by the 
 assaults of unreckoned enemies that sweep away its promise 
 
 1 De partibus Animalium, i. i : Ou3V 9 foais KO
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 381 
 
 unfulfilled. Does not Nature play the devouring wolf to 
 the very offspring she affects to nurse? Why invite the 
 fly into a place hung round with spiders' webs ? and breed 
 the shoal of herrings, only to float into the whale's jaws ? 
 and shape the dainty antelope to be torn to shreds in the 
 tiger's claws ? And even man, with his superior power of 
 self-protection, has yet so many exposures to fatal ills from 
 infancy to age, that he is in bondage to the fear of death 
 through all his years. How is this surrender of the living 
 world to destructive possibilities or destructive laws recon- 
 cilable with the seemingly constructive care in building it 
 up ? We will consider first the case of other races ; then 
 that of human kind. 
 
 (a) Death is in itself simply the application to organised 
 beings of a universal rule, that whatever takes a beginning 
 must reach an ending too. It is the necessary correlative 
 of birth ; and to ask for the one and protest against the 
 other is no less inconsiderate than to cry out for light that 
 shall cast no shadow, or fuel that will never burn out. 
 Nature, in its very meaning and idea, is the assemblage of 
 phenomena, i.e. of what comes and goes ; it consists of 
 cycles larger or smaller, and has no infinite lines ; and to 
 be exempt from exit by the returning curve would be to 
 transcend Nature and merge in God. Whatever ends there- 
 fore are pursued in Nature must be temporary ends, admit- 
 ting of realisation within the term of a limited existence ; 
 and the vanishing of that existence affords no evidence 
 that its purpose has broken short or failed : as well might 
 we say, because the clock runs down, that it can never have 
 been intended to mark time. When the function has been 
 performed for its contemplated period, its cessation, instead 
 of disappointing, completes its design. Nor can it be 
 shown that the design would be improved, were it possible 
 to find some other means of renovation than by substi- 
 tuting new organisms for old. What alternative could be
 
 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 proposed ? Sleep periodically repairs the waste in indivi- 
 dual living beings, and sends them back with the full 
 tension restored to their springs of vigour ; and it has been 
 said that what sleep is to the individual, death is to the 
 race. Could not sleep then, it may be asked, be made 
 to serve all through? Might it not continue indefinitely 
 to effect a new creation, and endow the organism with 
 perpetuity ? Be it so ; the only effect would be that in 
 respiting the old from extinction you debar the new from 
 its birth ; and occupy the field with a few persistent 
 individuals, instead of with a constant succession of ever- 
 fresh natures. What advantage would there be in this stiff 
 conservatism, this nature without nativity, this world 
 without young life? It is said, that it is unworthy of a 
 product of thought not to have some decent durability, and 
 that in the quick havoc made by death among the ' crea- 
 tures of a day ' there is something unwelcome to our idea 
 of Divine Intelligence. This is to forget the relativity of 
 time, and how small a portion of it is adequate for no small 
 history. Nor could we charge it as a fault in a work of 
 human art, that it lasted only for a day, if it diurnally 
 replaced itself before it ceased to act. The skill which can 
 secure spontaneous succession may well dispense with 
 continuity. In the organic world therefore, Death does not 
 baffle, but execute the design of Nature. 
 
 Though however death is no evil to the race, it is un- 
 doubtedly feared as such by the individual ; and the objec- 
 tion we are considering gains whatever power it has by 
 arming itself with this instinctive dread. I call it instinctive, 
 because it is common to all living beings, however little 
 capable of reflection, nay, even without knowledge of the 
 very state from which they recoil. The wild animal's 
 sensitiveness to dangers threatening its existence, or that 
 of its offspring, is one of the most powerful springs of its 
 activity; inspiring the most timid with courage, and the
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 383 
 
 least intelligent with clever stratagems. It is independent 
 of the value of life ; for it asserts itself without abatement 
 under conditions of misery, and the very wri things of tor- 
 ture are still a convulsive effort to live. Its intensity is 
 greatest in young creatures that have never been witnesses 
 of death, and can have none of its meaning and its con- 
 trasts in their conception. There is no more marked 
 example of an a priori passion, a passion which precedes 
 the apprehension of its object, instead of springing from it. 
 Nor does it lose this fundamental character in presence of 
 the higher faculties of Man. With him also, Death is the 
 evil from which he most shrinks himself, and which he 
 most deplores for those he loves ; it is the utmost that he 
 can inflict upon his enemy, and the maximum which the 
 penal justice of society can award to its criminals. The 
 fear of it it is which gives their vivid interest to all hair- 
 breadth escapes, in the shipwreck, or amid the glaciers, or 
 in the fight ; and secretly supplies the chief tragic element 
 in Art. Even where these effects are modified, they still 
 bear the same testimony: if a country repudiates capital 
 punishment, it is because Death is deemed an evil greater 
 than we have any right to inflict. It would seem therefore 
 that, if we are right in claiming a beneficence for Death, 
 each individual, in conducting himself with horror towards 
 it, is subject to an illusion, and his instincts are out of 
 harmony with the realities of the world. 
 
 Be it so. It is the nature of each instinct to seize its 
 object as if there were nothing else, therefore to exaggerate 
 and overstrain it ; and in following it, the living being 
 would soon be out of harmony with the world, did not 
 some other impulse supervene which changes his direction 
 and restores the balance. It is by the joint action of a 
 complex system of incentives that the just equilibrium of 
 animated nature is maintained ; and no one of them, 
 deserted by the rest, can be expected to give the true
 
 384 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 measure of objects around. As the egoistic and altruistic 
 affections, monstrous in their isolation, find an ethical 
 symmetry in their just combination, so is the dread of 
 death an indispensable counterpoise to that war of races 
 which for ever threatens the existence of the weak. It 
 secures a conservation of life duly proportioned to the 
 vehemence with which it is liable to be assailed, and 
 equalises the defence and the attack. Suppose it slackened 
 in its vigilance, and every creature valuing its existence 
 and that of its offspring at their exact worth, and do you 
 think this mild force would preserve it from perishing? 
 Snatch from life this fiery inspiration, and what front could 
 it present to the sleepless foes by which it is beset ? As 
 Anger arms the unarmed and makes the weak equal to 
 the strong, so the love of life redresses the balance of 
 external dangers, and saves many a nature which would 
 else collapse. It is a provision for the self-asserting main- 
 tenance of organisms long enough to complete their 
 functions, and hand down their territory entire in the 
 terrestrial system ; and may be regarded as part of that 
 ascending force that either finds a higher step of being, or 
 clings to it when found, and by which all nature betrays its 
 sympathy with the Life-giver. It matters not that this 
 passion is over-provided, when measured by the standard 
 of individual wants, and if left to itself, creates superfluous 
 alarms: its reasons are found, not in the individual history, 
 but in the life of the Kind, or rather of the whole family of 
 kinds ; and in the part which it plays in the economy of 
 the world, there is no excess and no illusion ; it admits as 
 much death as is beneficent ; and urges on the steps of life 
 wherever they can ascend. 
 
 Still, it may be said, the high pitch to which this univer- 
 sal love of life is strung is rendered necessary only by the 
 constant perils to which animals are exposed : it is because 
 the destructive forces are so numerous and great that the
 
 Chap.l.] IN NATURE. 385 
 
 conservative provision has to be made intense ; it is there- 
 fore itself a measure of the terrors and miseries of existence. 
 Each creature spends itself in struggles for its own protec- 
 tion, because all other tribes are either indifferent or hostile 
 to it. Is not indeed all nature a shocking scene of strata- 
 gem and carnage, where the most delicate organisms are 
 ruthlessly sacrificed to satiate the appetite of some more 
 savage monster? If Death is the inevitable terminus of 
 created beings, why entrust the administration of it to 
 such ferocious and undiscriminating instincts, that spare 
 the immature as little as the old ? Is not the predacious 
 system which pervades animated nature more like a 
 scramble of chance than an instance of design ? 
 
 This impression is largely due to our habit of extreme 
 interest in individual life ; whereas Nature, careless of the 
 individual, is intent only on the life of her several types of 
 being. So long as the race is adequately secured, it seems 
 not to matter what accidents befall its members, one by 
 one. The rain which tempts out the worm upon the grass, 
 or the frog upon the road, brings them under the fatal eye 
 of the bird and the wheel of the carriage. As you walk 
 through the wood, the life of a hundred insects depends on 
 the tread of your foot an inch this way or that. The cock- 
 chafer that makes the mistake of flying in a boy's face is 
 spitted and racked to death, while his fellow buzzes merrily 
 on his way. An unseasonable spring storm will rend a 
 thousand nests from the trees, and strew the ground with 
 broken eggs or lifeless broods. The field-mouse, stealing 
 through the grass in the safe darkness, catches the night- 
 eye of the owl, and is devoured. In all such cases, there 
 is undoubtedly a sacrifice of single organisms without 
 realising their capabilities ; and if it were the end of 
 Nature (as it is ours) to preserve each of her offspring to 
 full development, this would constitute failure. But so 
 long as the life that drops into her bosom re-appears in 
 
 VOL. I. C c
 
 3 86 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 new births, nothing is really lost, and her purpose is 
 untouched by mere change of instances. The teleology of 
 nature must be sought, not in individuals, but in kinds ; 
 and there are no examples, so far as I am aware, of species 
 with habitually disappointed capabilities. Their organisms, 
 taken as a distinct type, have had their proper place in 
 nature, and have played out their part ; and if they have 
 become extinct, it is not without performing their office, 
 and, ere they drop from the chain of being, leaving the link 
 which replaces and improves their function. The only 
 race in which there really is an apparent failure of design, 
 an over-provision of faculty whose promise is constantly 
 baulked by death, is our own. But here, the contrast is so 
 strong with the well realised ends of other natures, as to 
 lift the case into a clear exception, and force upon us the 
 conviction that the story is unfinished and has yet a sequel, 
 and that what is elsewhere the drop-curtain is here but the 
 lighter veil that hangs between scene and scene. Estimate 
 as you may the value of this argument, the fact of our 
 resort to it attests our experience that, as a rule, Nature 
 observes true measure between her means and ends ; and 
 that where there is an apparent disproportion, it is because 
 we see only a part, and cannot trace the unexhausted 
 power through its later stage. Did the failure of promise 
 occur merely in individual instances of death before 
 maturity, we should no more draw such an inference in the 
 case of man than in that of the cattle or birds ; it would 
 fall under the same head with the miscellaneous animal 
 extinction which takes place under the law of prey. But 
 the peculiarity is, that human nature itself, instead of this 
 or that individual, carries immense capabilities and realises 
 small achievements, and gives the unique example of a race 
 with broken hopes and unaccomplished ends. This we 
 find in violation of all analogy ; so well assured are we that 
 organic nature never goes into any game except to win.
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 387 
 
 Apart then from this special case, Death disappoints no 
 animal race of its proper ends ; and its destructive ten- 
 dency is adequately held within limits by the conservative 
 instinct of self-defending life. Nor, as we have seen, does 
 the unequal longevity of the several members of the same 
 species contradict the internal marks of purpose in their 
 creation. If, therefore, in virtue of this law, there are 
 always organisms that have to be removed, it cannot be 
 denied that this object is effectively accomplished by 
 setting the different tribes of animals to prey upon one 
 another, and filling land, air, and waters with foraging- 
 parties, that act as the grave-diggers and scavengers of the 
 world. What reformed method could you propose ? Ac- 
 customed to the interposition of the cook, you object 
 perhaps to the eating alive ; would you then prefer that all 
 hungry creatures should abstain till natural death ' spread 
 their table in the wilderness ? ' that the fox in the farm- 
 yard should politely stand by till the breath was out of 
 the old hen's body? and the weasel patiently follow the 
 venerable rat until he drops ? and the robin show respect 
 to the worm till he was stiff and dry ? Would it really be 
 any improvement, if Nature thus played the vulture instead 
 of the eagle, and fed on carrion instead of life ? So far are 
 we from looking on natural decay as the euthanasia, that 
 we seldom allow our own favourite domestic animals to 
 meet it, and think it kinder to terminate their weariness. 
 Violent death, however terrible to witness, is almost the 
 easiest to meet ; the wounds that occasion it have no 
 future, and without a future wounds are hardly felt ; death 
 anticipates their agony, and almost their discovery. Of 
 some forms in which sudden death comes on, the whole 
 experience is known by testimony of those who have 
 emerged from their unconsciousness ; and we are thus 
 assured that in drowning, in suffocation, in strangulation, 
 there is no considerable suffering ; and these are physio- 
 
 C c 2
 
 388 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 logically analogous to large classes of animal extinction. 
 The prolonged organic disturbance which we call sickness 
 brings repeatedly during life as much animal distress as 
 that from which there is no recovery ; and where it is not 
 prolonged but momentary, the feeling is extinct ere the 
 pain can overtake it. Nor must we forget that the wars of 
 nature are wars of surprise, and spare their victims the 
 ideal miseries of anticipation ; and these it is, the care, the 
 suspense, the love, the regretful pity, that for us invest 
 the crisis with a pathetic atmosphere, and swell the pointed 
 moment into a full orb of sorrow. Take them all away, and, 
 as with the infra-human animals, strip the fact to its mere 
 sentient nucleus, and death becomes less grievous, it is 
 probable, than a night of nipping frost or the day of a 
 missing meal. 
 
 The objections therefore to the predacious law will not 
 bear a reasoned scrutiny. That law undeniably utilises, 
 in the simplest way, the excess of production, and serves 
 as its proper complement ; determining the limits of each 
 race ; making the lower life, after a certain fulfilment of 
 its own end, tributary to the higher ; and, while main- 
 taining the equilibrium of the series, rendering it con- 
 sistent with a movement of continuous ascent ; for it is 
 one of the largest elements in that competition for ex- 
 istence which supplies the dynamics of organic advance. 
 
 () It is more difficult to make good the plea for Death 
 in the case of mankind. For here, as I have admitted, it 
 does involve a systematic abbreviation of hope, a sacrifice 
 of power, an unfulfilled ideal, quite unlike its aspect 
 elsewhere. On this fact we must dwell for a few moments, 
 if we are to determine how far Death disappoints, and how 
 far it works out, the possibilities of our nature. 
 
 Every man, it must be admitted, is capable of more 
 than he does or becomes in this life. .In amount, there 
 is in him a reserve of faculty beyond what he puts forth,
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 389 
 
 the pressure of which is the source of that sense of short- 
 coming which haunts all his performance. In intensity, 
 there is a depth of affection which his personal experiences 
 are inadequate to fill, and which, transcending the history 
 of life, gain freedom in its poetry. In purity, there is a 
 claim of conscience on his springs of action, in his heed- 
 lessness of which he is flung into remorse and burdened 
 with a debt impossible to pay. If he had but time, 
 he could repair the wastes of error and unfaithfulness ; 
 but ere his moral economy has any gains to count, the 
 hour strikes, and his day's labour is over. His mind is 
 not done for, when his body is ; for, so far are they from 
 always declining pari Jassu, that thought, will, affection, 
 may be quenched in their highest glory, not only by the 
 sudden rush of physical catastrophe, but by the last 
 quivering movement of long physical decay. The chief 
 sadness of repentance now unavailing, the plaintive sounds 
 of the words ' Too late ! ' are due to the fact that every- 
 thing else is there the insight, the resolve, the power 
 except the time to give it play and seize the end. Nor 
 does the world seem without partnership in the loss to the 
 individual. When he has trained his faculties to some 
 high service, and turned them into finished implements 
 of truth and good ; when he has gathered into himself 
 priceless stores of special knowledge ; when he has emerged 
 from the illusions of inexperience and his counsels have 
 attained a balanced wisdom, he vanishes into night, and 
 takes it all away ; and whatever crisis may come, there 
 is no one to see it with his eye, or interpret it with his 
 voice. No new beginning can be pieced on to the tissue 
 which he has woven and left upon the loom. Some poor 
 record there may be of what he found or felt ; but though 
 processes of thought may be saved by words, character 
 is its own record ; and the most precious elements of 
 wisdom have a personal evanescence which no photography
 
 390 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 can fix. So that Death, besides arresting him, robs the 
 world also of a treasure which cannot be replaced. In 
 general we may say, mental and moral power has a 
 natural longevity of growth and influence far exceeding 
 the years allowed to the physical organism. The two 
 seem to be ill-matched together : in the human being 
 there is a very long-lived nature wedded to a very short- 
 lived ; and to bring them into accordance, either one of 
 the terms should be shortened, or the other lengthened. 
 This is the allegation we have to meet. 
 
 Now, whoever complains of Death means to lament the 
 early arrest of the physical life ; his wish would be to have 
 the short term extended and made equal to the long ; so 
 that, however persistent the capabilities of mind and 
 character, the bodily organism should remain at their ser- 
 vice unimpaired. Let us follow out this proposal, and see 
 how it would work. 
 
 Something will depend on the duration which may be 
 assigned to the longer term, which we assume as our 
 standard measure. Are we, with Plato, to take Mind as 
 imperishable, and therefore its term as indefinite ? or, are 
 we content to claim for it only an existence that much 
 overlaps the term of the body ? If the former, the or- 
 ganism, to be synchronous, would have to be immortal, and 
 absolutely exempt from waste or disaster ; and this no 
 organism can be. So long as we are within the realm 
 of Nature, there is no choice except between periods less 
 and greater ; the materials for endless structures do not 
 exist. Any receptacle which fc to serve for perpetuity 
 of being must be provided with the opportunity of change 
 and renewal, i. e. must be subject to Death. Even the 
 Eternal himself appears in the garment of measurable 
 order and changeful beauty : neither the solar system nor 
 even the stellar spaces comprising any story that is not 
 a cycle, or any cycle that is more than the twinkling of an
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 391 
 
 eye to his existence. In this case, therefore, the equali- 
 sation of the two lengths is simply impossible ; and to 
 keep pace with the continuity of the one, the other must be 
 liable to intermittency and recommencement, i. e. to the 
 transitions of mortality. 
 
 In the other case, where nothing more is asked than a 
 physical life less disproportioned than at present to the 
 unspent capabilities of the mind and character, it would be 
 possible, no doubt, to grant the prayer. The only question 
 here is, whether the result would answer to our hopes. 
 It would realise a very ancient human dream, that has 
 shaped itself into an ideal primitive history of mankind ; 
 for it would give us a world of patriarchal generations, 
 whose venerable biographies reckoned by the century 
 where we count by the lustrum or the decade. The effect 
 of such a change would evidently depend on the con- 
 current rate of growth and development in the human 
 constitution. If it reached its maturity as soon as with us, 
 and if the present average of annual increase of numbers 
 prevailed, it would take but a few families to fill the world. 
 The generations indeed in a given time would be as many 
 as they are now ; but, to an enormous extent, they would 
 exist together, instead of coming to the front in rapid 
 succession. If, on the other hand, the elongated life were 
 divided into its seasons, of childhood, youth, manhood, old 
 age, in segments bearing the same proportion as at present, 
 so that the whole growth and decline were slackened, then 
 each generation would be no fuller than it is now, and it 
 would require no fewer to fill the world ; but the time 
 from first to last would be hugely increased, and every- 
 thing which depends on augmenting numbers would go 
 slowly, and experience would linger. 
 
 When we picture to ourselves a society growing up in 
 either of these forms, we must be conservatives of the 
 deepest die if its tendencies attract us more than those
 
 392 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 of our own world. Under the first supposition, let Shem 
 live five hundred years, and receive his first-born when 
 he is thirty, and his last when he is four hundred and 
 seventy ; and allow him an addition of one to his family 
 every three years. If we assume, as we must in redressing 
 the complaint against death, that they all live, he can 
 gather round his table on his last thirty fete-days, a hun- 
 dred and forty-seven sons and daughters. Meanwhile, 
 their life also will, in each case, have followed the same 
 rule ; which, without applying it further than to the single 
 case of his first-born, would enrich him with a hundred and 
 forty-six grandchildren, and if carried through his family, 
 would increase that number to 10,731, and make up his 
 party to 10,878. We need not carry the calculation to 
 lower limits ; its effect will be sufficiently apparent when we 
 remember that these lower limits extend over fifteen gener- 
 ations ; so that, if he were the Czar of all the Russias, he 
 might be the father of his people in a sense unavailing for 
 our mock paternal governments. The tendency of such 
 a constitution of the human world is obvious. It would 
 throw the societies of men into immense clans, which, in 
 spite of their vastness, would be held internally together 
 by powerful causes of cohesion. The head, living long 
 enough for great accumulation of property, would by this 
 influence alone occupy the position of a chief \ and ad- 
 ministering his resources at will, would be looked up to by 
 an army of descendants more or less dependent on him, 
 and ready to serve him for the favours he can bestow. 
 Nor is it easy to exaggerate the effect, upon the sentiments 
 of men, of so long a personal presence which is the centre 
 of deference and the supreme depository of experience. It 
 would immeasurably intensify that wondering loyalty to- 
 wards the past which has now to find its aliment in his- 
 torical associations only. Little difficulty is felt, it is true, 
 with our younger generation, in discarding the reverence
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 393 
 
 for age ; but it would be otherwise in a society where 
 longevity, without infirmity, was the constant rule, and all 
 the powers of life continued to mature, from century to 
 century, a yet vigorous and capable personality. The 
 young would indeed possess a large numerical advantage 
 over their seniors ; but this would be neutralised by their 
 distribution in small groups under the series of fathers, 
 grandfathers, &c. of several generations, all interested in 
 maintaining the patria potestas on which the whole fabric 
 hangs. In such a community, inherited habits, feelings, 
 beliefs, would set into tenacious forms, as under the in- 
 stitution of caste ; and the characteristics of a Zeitgeist, 
 incurring but little contradiction, would last much longer 
 than with us. In other clans, the same long existence of 
 habit would simultaneously stereotype different sets of 
 traits, marking them off by strong distinctions, which 
 would keep them alien from each other, and covering the 
 earth with Chinese centres of seclusion. Instead of the 
 peaceful competitions which elicit the powers of mixed 
 and equal populations, there would be always present the 
 risk of feuds between separated and uncongenial clans. 
 This whole assemblage of conditions would favour a 
 stationary social attitude, and reduce to a minimum the 
 agencies which have secured the progress of the western 
 European nations. 
 
 Under the second supposition that the protracted life 
 of men had its stages proportionately retarded and 
 stretched the influence of age would be still more pre- 
 ponderant. The young lives with which it would be called 
 to stoop in sympathy, instead of swarming fast around it, 
 would stir it by appeals only few and far between ; and 
 through long uniform intervals the reign of habit would 
 consolidate itself, and while perfecting the aptitudes of art 
 and thought by experience, would render fresh affections 
 less ready, and unopened tracks of mental and moral
 
 394 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 movement less inviting. To new comers into the world, 
 the old would be older, and the companions would be 
 fewer than before ; there would be a greater height to look 
 up ; and, in looking round, a scantier band of equals to 
 give courage to the heart. Think too what would be the 
 effect in the intellectual world, whether of science or of 
 letters, if its brilliant stars remained above the horizon for 
 centuries. Give Newton four hundred years in the pleni- 
 tude of his powers, and where would he have left astro- 
 nomy and optics on his departure ? Certainly at a stage 
 not reached by the patient labours of a dozen followers 
 in succession. Discoveries, now widely distributed, would 
 thus be concentrated in some great individual, who would 
 become Master of a whole department, and in his own 
 person constitute not simply an epoch in its history, but 
 for a vast period that very history itself. This pre- 
 eminence in the Princes of science would invest them with 
 an overwhelming authority ; would mischievously dwarf 
 the minor contributions of less gifted enquirers, and dis- 
 courage the useful questionings of dissentient criticism ; 
 and render the next great advance difficult, without some- 
 thing like an intellectual revolution. And in literature, 
 what would the prolific genius of a Walter Scott have 
 accomplished with the labour of four centuries ? The 
 capacity of libraries and the possibilities of reading would 
 be filled by a few such claimants, whom no one could dis- 
 regard and no one rival. Time is a great element in the 
 influence of exceptional minds and strong personalities ; 
 they gradually create the tone of taste and feeling that 
 returns to them with reverberating admiration ; and while 
 they continue to wake it anew by their living breath, it 
 spreads faster and further, and so loudly swells that feebler 
 voices are scarcely heard. Thus, the tendency would be, 
 in Art as in Science, to discourage minor aspirants, and 
 overshadow them by successive intellectual dictatorships.
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 395 
 
 And as each of these would be consolidated by a long 
 sway, it would be little in the mood either for considera- 
 tion towards any contemporary dynasty of thought, or for 
 loyal acknowledgment of the next and perhaps reactionary 
 reign ; so that the feuds of opinion would be vehement, 
 and the movements of advancing culture be liable to take 
 place by uneasy jerks, if not by revolutionary shocks. 
 
 If even the guides and benefactors of mankind may live 
 too long, what could we expect from the secured longevity 
 of their foes and tyrants ? What would become of the 
 world, if its greatest empire were leased, for half a mil- 
 lennium, to a Domitian, a Philip II, or a Napoleon? With 
 time enough to wear out the experience and almost the 
 tradition of historic liberties, to strangle the protesting 
 voices of the good, to drive the virtues and the arts into 
 retreat, and muster and equip the body-guard of bad 
 passions and pay it with corruption, such rulers would 
 weigh as a blight upon all lands, poisoning the germs of 
 good, and nurturing to a frightful luxuriance whatever 
 grows of rottenness. After so persistent a sway, resting 
 upon a cynical contempt for mankind, and appealing only 
 to the low elements which would justify it, recoiling from 
 no cruelty, hesitating at no perfidy, and decorating every 
 vice, what hope would there be of a return for the exiled 
 and forgotten humanities ? It is Death alone that hurls 
 this kind of intolerable incubus from the breast of sleeping 
 nations ; and unless it comes soon to their deliverance, 
 they do but gasp and die. True, if it makes haste to 
 snatch the despot, it cannot be slow to take the patriot 
 and the sage ; but we can better spare the good to die, 
 than bear the bad to live. When we are rid of the curse of 
 the latter, its products will wither in the ground ; from the 
 former, there survives an essence which is imperishable and 
 finds an endless fertility in other minds. Nay, we may go 
 further ; the abiding essence of a great mind and noble
 
 396 ALLEGED BLEMISHES [Book II. 
 
 personality, preserved in his writings and example, post- 
 humously acts, if with a weaker, yet with a purer power 
 than could be permanently exercised by himself. For, 
 after all, belonging to his place and age, he bears their 
 stamp upon him, and cannot be exempt from the effects of 
 their partial lights and refracting atmosphere : not all his 
 wisdom can secure him from some false conjunctions of 
 thought ; not all his largeness of heart from some preju- 
 dice of feeling. With the justest attainable balance, he 
 may be indifferent to some things which merit his enthu- 
 siasm, and fired by others that less deserve his zeal. On 
 these mixed elements, the law of habit, which knows no 
 discrimination, seizes, and so blends them into one vital 
 tissue of character, that separation is impossible ; and the 
 temporary and the wrong appropriate a borrowed glory 
 from the companionship of brilliant and unfading virtues. 
 History, in the record of his career, posterity, in the study 
 of his writings, can shake them free from their entangle- 
 ment ; but in his own person they live, and look, and 
 speak, in unison, and wield the same authority. For his 
 influence, as well as for himself, it is Death that cuts the 
 tie between the mortal and the immortal. Precisely at the 
 juncture of two generations it is, that errors and prejudices 
 drop out, and the dead resistance of habit to new enter- 
 prizes of thought and affection falls away. However true 
 it may be that, where the faculties are not allowed to rust, 
 but are kept awake by constant exercise, advancing years 
 need not induce any lazy conservatism and arrest the 
 spiritual growth, it is impossible to doubt the retarding 
 influence of old age ; and needful though it may be, to 
 steady the impulsive forces of younger life, it too often 
 puts the drag upon the most beneficent advance. The 
 history of thought and of society abounds with instances of 
 veterans garrisoning some citadel of error, and standing 
 siege with more bravery than wisdom. Tycho Brahe,
 
 Chap. I.] IN NATURE. 397 
 
 though a Copernican in relation to the planets, and, in 
 applying the theory, himself the discoverer of three lunar 
 inequalities, stood out against the diurnal and annual 
 motion of the earth. Huygens and John Bernouilli, en- 
 tangled in the vortices and plenum of Descartes, set their 
 faces against the Newtonian physics, and struggled to ac- 
 commodate the earlier hypothesis to the planetary ellipses 
 and the lunar relations of the tides. Priestley, the dis- 
 coverer of oxygen, could never let go Stahl's phlogistic 
 theory of combustion : nor could Brewster surrender to 
 the undulatory doctrine of light. It is not easy for these 
 firm- set and venerable forms, however vigorous, to wield 
 new weapons, to learn new steps, to gain expertness in a 
 new play of thought ; and their very energy prevents them 
 from abandoning the old and quitting the field. Death 
 then must not too long delay his discharge of these 
 Emeriti, if the future is not to be clogged, instead of 
 cleared, by the conquests of the Past. Even for them- 
 selves, as well as for the society they quit, is it too much 
 to believe that it is an emancipation from clinging preju- 
 dice ? The power of habit, it is probable, is rather organic 
 than spiritual, connected with the discipline and subjuga- 
 tion of the corporeal mechanism to the service of the 
 mind ; and if so, it may well be weakened or dissolved in 
 the transition which surrenders or changes the organism ; 
 the bonds may of themselves give way which constrained 
 thought and affection into attitudes few and fixed, and, 
 under new conditions within and without the transfigured 
 nature, a freedom and largeness of mental vision be given, 
 of which we have no experience. However painful it may 
 be to be torn away from the habits of a household, the 
 fixed ideas of a clique, the familiar sympathies of a sect, 
 the institutions of our native country, we know that thus 
 to cast the mind adrift upon untried currents of tendency 
 is a sure way to its enlargement. The youth, sent forth
 
 398 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 from his home with sinking heart, is flung into contact 
 with other groups, whose different characteristics wake up 
 parts of his nature slumbering before, and melt away the 
 narrowness without abating the fervour of family affection. 
 The devotee of a system, thrown into the midst of an 
 uncongenial community, begins with feeling only repulsion 
 from all that it contains ; but, ere long, through its unwel- 
 come forms, gentle humanities and noble pieties peer out, 
 and look with a new light upon his heart ; and he dis- 
 covers how his party-aversions had blinded the insight of 
 his love. The insular patriot, cast forth by ill-health or 
 fortune upon the world, is chafed at first by every sound 
 and sight of foreign things, and thinks he has left all good 
 behind ; but, as he grows to the scene around him, he is 
 hit by many a happy phrase and won by many a graceful 
 usage, and fairly conquered at last by a literature and art 
 and national life, which reveal to him an unimagined type 
 of human culture. The migration which thus dissipates 
 the prepossessions of the family, the sect, the nation, we 
 may well suppose effective against the prejudices of a 
 world ; so that Death may be but the provision for taking 
 us abroad, ere we have stopped too long at home, and 
 unsealing the closed inlets of wisdom, affection, and re- 
 verence, by the surprise of new light l . In this aspect, 
 Death, instead of frustrating the ends of life, becomes the 
 greater arrester of ills, the liberator of souls, for both the 
 visible and the invisible worlds. 
 
 8. Implicit Attributes of God as Cause. 
 In the foregoing sections I have aimed to set forth, and to 
 surround with adequate protection, the first psychological 
 
 1 For further illustrations of the beneficent operations of Death, see 
 an impressive sermon by the late Dr. T. Southwood Smith, entitled 
 ' The Wisdom and Beneficence of the Deity in the Ordination of 
 Death, a discourse occasioned by the death of the Rev. Thomas 
 Howe, delivered at Bridport, Nov. 26, 1820,' particularly pp. 12-18.
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CA USE. 399 
 
 source of Theism, the recognition of a living Will as Cause 
 of the phenomena of the world. Accepting this position 
 as determined, we may now pass into its interior, and 
 examine what are its contents : what it enables us to say 
 respecting the Being whom it reports to us as an ascer- 
 tained object of thought. It cannot surprise us if our 
 reasoning on this single line carries us but a little way, and 
 leaves us with only a restrained and colourless range of 
 speech respecting the Author of all ; for, contemplating 
 him exclusively as manifest in the physical sphere, it 
 reaches no more than his ' natural attributes,' as they are 
 called ; and simply prepares the intellectual outline for the 
 moral features which define themselves from another 
 source. It will not of course be supposed that our mind 
 reaches its religious faith by the successive steps into 
 which we lay out our exposition, working its way now by 
 one path of reflection, then by another, and enriching the 
 results of the first by adding on those of the second. 
 What we enumerate separately lives in us all together; but 
 it is the necessary infirmity of analysis, to spread out in 
 consecutive order simultaneous elements of conviction, 
 which are but as the petals of the same flower, and grow 
 from the concordant action of Reason, Affection, and 
 Conscience. 
 
 To identify Causality with God is to ascribe to him all 
 Power ; for the terms are interchangeable. The only 
 question which can be raised is as to the range which may 
 be assigned to the attribute. All that we can rigorously 
 affirm is, that it is sufficient for the production of the cosmi- 
 cal system of phenomena. These it is that carry our mind 
 to their great Source ; and when they are provided for, our 
 demand for causality goes no further ; and if, notwithstand- 
 ing their vast amount, they are still within some bounds, 
 so too must be the exercise of energy from which they 
 come. From the finite we cannot legitimately infer the
 
 400 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 infinite. When therefore we speak of God as almighty^ 
 the epithet is, thus far, warranted only if it is content to 
 cover all the might there is, and must not be understood to 
 mean mighty for absolutely all things. This distinction 
 might seem at first sight an unimportant refinement : what 
 more need we ask, it may be said, than the immense 
 resources which have constructed and administered this 
 universe? Who can conceive of more, or even strain his 
 conception a hundredth part as far? What use could we 
 make in our thought of any margin spreading beyond this 
 into real infinitude? And it is true that to insist on im- 
 puting to the Divine Power a strict metaphysical infinitude 
 is a necessity in only a scholastic and artificial sense and, 
 like all applications of this idea, involves us in insuperable 
 difficulties. But, on the other hand, if we take the actual 
 universe as the measure of God's power, we enable any one 
 who complains of its arrangements to attribute them to 
 weakness, and say, ' He could not have done otherwise.' 
 Of such mode of thought we have a distinguished example 
 in the late J. S. Mill ; who was obviously inclined to believe 
 in a well-meaning, but baffled, not to say blundering 
 intelligence, as the Designer of the world. It is not there- 
 fore unimportant to withdraw this supposed limit from the 
 Divine ability to effectuate a creative idea, and allow it a 
 wider range than the present constitution of things. The 
 means for this extension are readily afforded by the 
 principle from which we start. All causality being voli- 
 tional and selective, the line of realized action is only one 
 out of a plurality of possibilities, and the cosmos which has 
 come into being is but a sample of an unknown number 
 that might have been. In its Author is vested therefore 
 not only all operative power, but all that is conceivably or 
 inconceivably alternative and has been left out of operation. 
 Is this vast enlargement not enough to give security against 
 frustration of design ? Will it be said that, though other
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CAUSE. 401 
 
 orders were feasible than that which we observe, yet there 
 was but a poor choice after all, so that the limit, pushed 
 back from the actual, reappears a little further on at the 
 frontier of the possible ? To that frontier then let us go, 
 and scrutinize the mysterious boundary-line between the 
 possible and the impossible. What is that barrier of 
 Necessity, on which our thought strikes, when it attempts 
 a further step? Ideally, and a priori, nothing is impossible 
 which does not carry a contradiction ; and who can say 
 that, after a scanty lot of practicable universes, you come 
 upon nothing but contradictions? Physically, whatever 
 stops a power must be a power itself; it exercises causality ; 
 and all original causality is identified with God, and falls 
 within and not without his nature. The barrier therefore 
 again gives way, and lets the Divine flood flow on and 
 submerge the pretended empire of the impossible. 
 
 Here, however, arises another question. Granting that 
 all original power, actual or possible, is Divine and voli- 
 tional, can we be certain that it is all predicable of the same 
 Will? Is there anything to forbid its distribution among 
 a plurality? Is not the principle of Causality equally 
 satisfied, whether the phenomena are lodged in one home 
 or in more, provided they find a parentage? In the face 
 of so considerable a fact as Polytheism, it may seem hasty 
 to nonsuit its theory, as having no claim to a hearing in 
 any philosophical court. Without attempting here any 
 historical justification of this verdict, I will briefly state 
 some of its rational grounds. 
 
 The psychological or intuitive principle which leads us 
 to read a causal Power behind phenomena makes that 
 power the external counterpart of our own. This is the 
 constant type assumed by our thought in every instance ; 
 it repeats itself with no more variation than in the refer- 
 ences we make of our several actions to ourselves. Nature 
 is here but the mirror of the mind ; and Cause without 
 
 VOL. I. D d
 
 402 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 differs from Cause within only in the adverb of place : nor 
 is anything in the Self negatived by the not-Self, except 
 numerical sameness. Now of the personal consciousness 
 it is the essence to retain its unity through all experiences ; 
 every issued act of ours goes forth from the same agent ; 
 every delivered phenomenon comes home to the same 
 recipient; all the lines of self-reference meet in a single 
 changeless centre. This feature cannot desert the Self when 
 externalised ; there too its individuality remains ; and every 
 time that the observer discerns a living energy in Nature, 
 and recognises its action in some event, he thinks after the 
 pattern of himself, and cannot help investing it with a 
 like identity. It can no more change than the image of 
 his face reflected from half a dozen plane mirrors at once. 
 In each one's mind therefore, left to the play of its own 
 laws without foreign disturbance, there is a native provision 
 for monotheism, in the intellectual dominance of his own per- 
 sonality ; and with whatever varieties the Divine idea may 
 present itself in different minds, precisely in this element of 
 Unity, it is the same in all. This datum of Nature is entitled 
 to stand, till some writ of ejectment can be shown. 
 
 The logical rule, that no more causes are to be admitted 
 than are needful for the effect (the law of parsimony], for- 
 bids us to wander beyond the all-sufficient single Divine 
 Will. For it cannot be pretended that a plurality of divine 
 beings increases our resources for explaining the constitu- 
 tion of the world. Limiting one another by their co-exist- 
 ence, they do not supply so much power as a universal 
 Cause, unless they absolutely concur ; and, if they concur, 
 that is itself an additional phenomenon of which an account 
 is required. Indeed, the weakness which the hypothesis 
 introduces is usually admitted, and is even treated as its 
 great recommendation ; conflicting divine purposes, thwart- 
 ing and cancelling each other, being resorted to in explana- 
 tion of supposed discords and contradictions in the world.
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CAUSE. 403 
 
 No one would favour such a conception, unless he felt 
 that any approach to omnipotence was too much for the 
 phenomena, and that, to restore the proportion between 
 cause and effect, there must be a large abatement of the 
 former. The minor force, he fancies, will give the better 
 reason. It is needless to say, that the facts do not lend 
 themselves to any such hypothesis : what are called the 
 ' contradictions ' of the world are not events which indicate 
 any conflict or collision of independent powers, or could be 
 accounted for by assigning the universe in provinces to 
 dissonant deities ; they arise upon the line of the very 
 same law which also yields the greatest harmonies ; and 
 must therefore be covered by the same Will. Nor is it 
 possible to rest in the assumption of a plurality of self- 
 existent agencies, each finite and all different. The whole 
 object of philosophy is to drive back such facts into a 
 higher unity which reduces them to comprehension ; we 
 want to know what settles their limits, what varies their 
 contents, what counts their number, what presides over their 
 equilibrium ; in short, we cannot accept them as self- 
 existences, but, in spite of ourselves, press upon them and 
 interrogate them as effects ; and till we subordinate them 
 to an embracing and determining Infinite, do not reach the 
 repose of a Ratio sufficient. 
 
 The Physical Unity of Nature is no less incompatible 
 with any partnership than with any rivalry in its produc- 
 tion, and plainly bespeaks the Oneness of its Cause. 
 Neither in section of its integral parts, nor in analysis of 
 its constituent elements, is it divisible into provinces with 
 administrations of their own. There are indeed clusters of 
 bodies, as in the solar system, which in certain relations 
 may be detached for separate study, and in each case 
 treated as a whole ; but, all the while, every particle in 
 them is at play with those of Sirius and of stars invisible 
 beyond ; and through the interstellar spaces an ether 
 
 D d 2
 
 404 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 spreads whose undulations, carrying messages from system 
 to system, assume a language common to all. The light 
 which started on its way to us before there was a human 
 eye is broken by the prism into the same scale of colours 
 as that which is nearest and newest born ; and the vibra- 
 tions in its spectrum repeat the very changes which our 
 experiments produce from incandescent chemical elements ; 
 indicating that not our mechanical workshop and our 
 observatory only, but our laboratory too, would be at home 
 in any world. And if a network of universal media weaves 
 the contents of space into one system, a running thread of 
 progressive history is equally manifest in Nature, and blends 
 its successive acts in time into one drama. Imperfectly as 
 we can read the record, even on our own planet, its geologi- 
 cal memorials, obscure at first, work out by degrees their 
 chronology and relations, and, reasoning towards the pre- 
 sent, catch hold at last of the links of existing life ; exhibit- 
 ing an order and movement of idea which makes the 
 knowledge of Nature not a miscellany of memories, but an 
 articulated intellectual organism. 
 
 In truth, the very idea of a World or Universe, as a 
 whole, is rigorously impossible, except on the assumption 
 of a substantive unity incompatible with diverse origins 
 and independent directions. If you define it as the aggre- 
 gate of all synchronous things working out the order of all 
 successive phenomena, you have already proclaimed its 
 empire to be One. Or, do you think that the aggregation 
 is of your own ideal making, a mere verbal tying up into 
 one name a bundle of heterogeneous objects, having nothing 
 to do with one another beyond their juxtaposition in your 
 own thought ? So, doubtless, it would be, if they were a 
 levee of representatives from mutually foreign dynasties: 
 they would then have no more contact than an hour of time 
 with a pound of weight. Instead of this, you admit in your 
 definition that they interact. A change of position in one
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CA USE. 405 
 
 body is attended by change in another more exact and 
 regular than any contract could secure. And this apparent 
 joint understanding is but a type of the whole method 
 pervading and constituting the universe. You call it a 
 relation of its parts : but relation there cannot be between 
 things simply detached and belonging to systems without 
 common predicates ; and here, the relation is one of con- 
 currence so intimate as to make two things into one by 
 charging them with the same phenomenon. And as with 
 the synchronous, so is it with the successive elements of 
 the world's story. How are we to conceive of one state of 
 things working out another, unless they be organically 
 united in the same whole ? Can an item of fact, by prior 
 occurrence ever so often, make itself the ground of a deter- 
 minate consequent which completes the law? Must we 
 not rather say that the order of combination contradicts 
 their numerical separateness, and plants them together 
 within the essence and among the pulsations, of the same 
 Nature ? Nothing short of two or more universes would 
 be needed, to bring within the possibility of thought more 
 than One Divine Will as the Source of all. 
 
 These reasons surely authorise us to reckon Unity, as 
 well as universal Power, among the predicates of God. One 
 remark, however, is still due to this topic before I leave it. 
 In denying that a plurality of Self-existences is possible, I 
 mean to speak only of self-existent causes. A self-exist- 
 ence which is not a cause is by no means excluded, so far 
 as I can see, by a self-existence which is a cause : nay, is 
 even required for the exercise of its causality. Metaphysi- 
 cians have made wonderful efforts to conceive of ' Uncon- 
 ditioned 1 or 'Absolute' causality, developing everything out 
 of the unit of itself \ and have gathered around them 
 disciples in more than one school, by whom they are 
 credited with success. For myself I must confess that 
 these epithets carry a contradictio in adjecto. I think of a
 
 406 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 Cause as needing something else in order to work, i.e. some 
 condition present with it ; as constituting one term of 
 a relation, and as being a cause only by reason of its so 
 standing ; as incapable therefore of being either uncon- 
 ditioned or absolute. If there be a condition requisite for 
 the Divine Cause, it must from the nature of the case be 
 already there, i. e. be self-existent with him. What can it 
 be that holds this rank, and yet is not itself a cause ? There 
 are but two forms in which it is presentable to thought : 
 either it is matter, to be moulded to the divine purpose ; or, 
 if we strip it of solidity, it is Space, ready to have forces 
 thrown into any of its points. The difference between these 
 two modes of conception consists in their treatment of. 
 Force. You cannot assume any material to be given, how- 
 ever low you reduce its properties, without leaving it 
 invested with resistance, form, magnitude, in short with 
 what the older nomenclature distinguished as the 'primary 
 qualities ' of body ; and as these all affect our perceptions, 
 and modify also the action of bodies on each other, they 
 must be regarded as endowed with force. The Divine 
 agency therefore, when applied to turn this datum to 
 account in the work of creation, does but contribute fresh 
 forms of force to those which are already there ; and thus 
 power, instead of being all given to the causality of God, 
 is assigned to a double seat, being partly in Him, and partly 
 in matter. When, on the other hand, you cut down the 
 co-existing datum to Space alone, you leave a pure condition 
 which has no pretensions to a dynamic character ; and the 
 whole volume of Force has to ack for its genesis, and finds 
 it singly in the divine causality. The ontological simplicity 
 of this hypothesis, which recommended it to Boscovich and 
 Faraday, gives it undoubtedly a great advantage. When 
 once we attempt the task of partitioning Force between the 
 material and the Creator, we find ourselves at a loss for a 
 definite line of separation between the given store and the
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CAUSE. 407 
 
 added contribution, the necessary and the contingent 
 elements. If we allow solidity to be self-existent, can we 
 arrest ourselves there? Is not solidity conceivable as a 
 play of attraction and repulsion ? and is not their interaction 
 the equilibrium which terminates motion ? and if motion, 
 attractions and repulsions of any kind are treated as 
 inherent in matter, why not all kinds, resolvable as they 
 probably are into varieties of the same ? May not gravita- 
 tion also be a function of the original datum ? and polarity 
 in its several forms ? And so the negociation extends for 
 the transfer, one after another, of the modes of force in 
 Nature from the self-existent free Cause to the co-existing 
 necessary datum ; and this is possibly what is meant by 
 the modern physicist's demand that we should radically 
 alter our conception of matter, and far more richly endow 
 it with unimparted properties than has hitherto been deemed 
 admissible ; putting into it, in short, at first, whatever we 
 require to take out of it at last. It is clear that the pro- 
 cess, pushed to this extent, is simply a handing over to the 
 register of postulates of all that was before derived : by 
 flinging the whole qucesitum into the datum, it relinquishes 
 the problem of causation instead of solving it, and retires 
 within the relations of phenomena as if there were no 
 cause at all. The thorough-going hypothesis of Boscovich 
 declines the first step upon this uncertain and beguiling 
 track ; and assuming only Space which can do nothing, 
 and Mind which can do everything, excludes all contro- 
 versy between two self-existences, and leaves the total 
 causality with God. This perhaps does but interpret into 
 philosophical form the popular doctrine of creation out of 
 nothing ; for the ' Nothing ' is hardly, to ordinary thought, 
 so sweepingly negative as to bar the assumption of Space, 
 as the eternal condition of a universe. On the side of 
 Psychology, there are difficulties attending this theory ; but 
 if they can be overcome, its metaphysical neatness, and its
 
 408 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 effectual discharge of the perplexities of Dualism, strongly 
 recommend it to acceptance. 
 
 It is hardly necessary, after the defence which has been 
 offered of Teleology, to specify Intellect as predicable of 
 God ; for the pre-conception of ends, and the realization of 
 them by the apparatus of appropriate means, are the char- 
 acteristics of rational existence. If we give to the word 
 ' Intellect' its wider scope, and include in it the movements 
 of thought which result in great works of finer Art, who 
 can deny that the creative genius of Nature even tran- 
 scends its intending skill ? What sublimer architecture 
 than the dome of the midnight sky ? what richer picture- 
 gallery than the sunset effects, even on the same landscape 
 through a single year? what more pathetic drama than the 
 story of human life, for ever enacted on the stage of ten 
 thousand homes ? Of these, indeed, or their equivalents in 
 Nature, all our Art is but the copy ; and he is the greatest 
 master in this field, who most patiently studies the com- 
 binations of the world, and gains the deepest insight into 
 their language of expression. Of all that we can know, of 
 all that we can admire, the original lies in the universe 
 around : there are the prototypes of all intellectual relations ; 
 and how can they be Thoughts in their reflection, unless 
 they be so in their incidence? Both Science and Art 
 among men we measure by one test, viz. their Truth ; and 
 what is this, but their accurate reproduction of the Methods 
 and aspects of Nature ? In the former, system after system 
 is set aside, when its alleged laws turn out to be fictitious ; 
 in the latter, style after style is superseded, when in form, 
 or colour, or feeling it declares itself artificial and con- 
 ventional : and was it ever known that the change involved 
 an intellectual loss that the obsolete theory in science 
 was a tissue of nobler thought that the discarded type 
 of art-production was of more majestic beauty than the 
 more faithful representative of reality which succeeded it ?
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CAUSE. 409 
 
 On the contrary, the highest past achievements of the 
 human mind are, one after another, transcended in pro- 
 portion as larger discovery and deeper insight reveal the 
 scope and affluence of natural relations ; and we are made 
 to feel the childishness of our own intelligence at each new 
 glance from the eye of the creative Reason. With what 
 consistency can we do homage to the decipherer of Law, 
 and see no wisdom in its Institution ? and crown with bays 
 the brow of a Dante or a Shakspeare for reading to us the 
 poem of the world, yet have no reverence for the Author of 
 its harmonies ? 
 
 There is, no doubt, a difference not to be overlooked, 
 between our conceptions of human intellect and of Divine. 
 Our understanding is applied to things already given us : 
 we perceive them, we compare them, we analyse them, we 
 notice their grouping and their succession ; till the law of 
 their history discloses itself to us, and the map of their 
 relations fills itself in. Our knowledge is altogether se- 
 quacious, and feels its way by a clue present to its hand 
 and sure to conduct to its remoter end. But the Divine 
 thought, instead of learning, goes before the objects that are 
 known, invents their constitution, determines their re- 
 lations in time and place, and reads their history through- 
 out, ere they have begun to be. With this inverse mode of 
 knowledge we have nothing to compare, unless it be the 
 process of working out the consequences of an assumed 
 hypothesis ; and the difference still remains, that with us 
 the hypothesis itself has to be reached by some previous 
 induction, whilst for the creative thought it is the starting- 
 point. These opposite orders of thinking were recognised 
 by both Plato and Aristotle, and by the latter were fur- 
 nished with distinct names 1 : and the Divine order was 
 regarded as pre-eminently, if not alone, entitled to the 
 
 1 The nporepov 777 <pv<Tfi and the irporepov irpbs fi
 
 410 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 
 
 name of Intellect (vovs). Spinoza, on the other hand, 
 limited the word to the apprehension and distinguishing of 
 what is given, of Self from not-Self, of this from that ; 
 and denied intellect to God, precisely because, in an abso- 
 lutely infinite being, this condition fails : to him there is 
 nothing other or external ; else he would not be infinite 
 and all-inclusive. ' If intellect belongs to the Divine 
 nature,' he says, ' it cannot be, like ours, posterior to the 
 objects understood, or simultaneous with them, since God 
 is the antecedent Cause of them all ; but, vice versa, their 
 reality and objective essence is what it is, because it so 
 exists ideally 1 in the intellect of God.' This priority to 
 
 1 Sed contra veritas et formalis rerum essentia ideo talis est, quia 
 talis in Dei intellects existit objective. For the meaning of this anti- 
 thesis compare Descartes' Meditations, III, Cous. i, p. 272-275, where 
 it will be observed that 'formellement ou /mt'nemment' = our objec- 
 tively, or in the external type of thing itself : while l realitt objective* 
 = our subjective or ideal ascription of essentiality. For instance, 
 among our ideas, when compared inter se, those of substances have 
 more independence than those of qualities; while our idea of God is 
 still more self-sufficing than those of created substances ; i.e. carries 
 in it a higher character of being. 
 
 The mode in which the words Subject and Object, with their related 
 adjectives and adverbs, have slipped into their modern meaning from 
 one completely the inverse, is curious ; and unless it is well under- 
 stood, the literature of philosophy through the mediaeval period 
 and down to the time of Wolff will often be unintelligible. The 
 former word, like the Aristotelian \nroi(tiii(vov, of which it is a transla- 
 tion, denoted originally anything which exhibited properties, activity, 
 or phenomena a substantive existence to which qualities and effects 
 belonged ; and this idea was expressed by any one of the three com- 
 pounds, subjectum, substantia, substratum, employed as equivalents 
 of the Greek. As the attributes or phenomena of a thing may always 
 be predicated of it, the Subject was thus introduced into a gramma- 
 tical relation, and came to denote the term in a sentence of which you 
 predicate something. This is evidently not a different meaning of 
 the word, but only the application to language of the meaning it 
 already had in logic. So far, then, the word fitted any substantive 
 existence : the fire was the subject of heat, snow of cold and white- 
 ness, the bird of flight, the mind of thought. Hence it came to mark 
 what lay beneath all phenomena and impressions, and was anchored 
 in the nature of things, all the same whether this or that effect came
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CAUSE. 411 
 
 the things known so completely, in Spinoza's opinion, 
 destroys all analogy to our understanding, that the two 
 
 out or not, and whether we missed it or whether we knew it ; and thus 
 it is that William Occam says, ' Subjective existence is that which 
 constitutes, as it were, a reality in nature irrespective of the mind's 
 ideas, and is no mere shape of thought.' Curiously enough, that 
 which was a mere shape of thought, known only as such and un- 
 secured beyond the mind, was designated by the other term of the 
 antithesis, ' Objective? The source of this usage will appear on con- 
 sidering the difference between the conditions of a thing's existence 
 and those of its being known. It may exist, though it be alone and in 
 presence of nothing ; but, in order to be known, it must be thrown or 
 presented before a mind which it can affect and which can attend to 
 it. Hence, this relative position or 'objectivity' became synonymous 
 with an affection of the mind by that to which it attends, the idea or 
 concept of which we are conscious, the contents of the act of thought 
 within us, as distinguished from the thing without us ; and Occam 
 accordingly defines ' objective existence ' to be ' the cognition itself, 
 and in so far a kind of shape of thought' (ipsum cognosci, adeoque 
 esse quoddam fictum). Thus the two words stand in the literature of 
 the seventeenth and previous centuries with meanings which appa- 
 rently change places with ours ; the ' subject ' denoting existence in 
 rerum naturd, ( the object,' existence in thought. As a good example 
 of these meanings, I borrow a passage of Occam's from Prantl's 
 Geschichte der Logik (1867), vol. iii, p. 357, note 808. 'A universal is 
 not something real having subjective existence either in the mind or out 
 of the mind ; but it has only objective existence in the mind, and is a 
 figment, having just such existence in the objective sphere of existence 
 as the external thing has in the sphere of subjective existence ; and 
 this in such a way that the understanding, on seeing some reality 
 outside the mind, feigns a similar thing in the mind ; so that, if it had 
 creative power, it would produce such a thing externally in the sub- 
 jective sphere of existence, numerically distinct from the former, with 
 resemblance and proportions like a workman's.' 
 
 It is a curious question how this usage could come to be changed ? 
 To answer it in full is impossible within the compass of a note : 
 but one important link may be supplied. I have said that anything 
 which had properties was a viroKei^evov, and that in rendering this, 
 any one of three Latin words might be used subjectum, substantia, 
 substratum. When, in dealing with the problem of cognition, and 
 criticising the experience-philosophy, Kant endeavoured to assign 
 their respective rights to the Mind itself on the one hand, and the 
 field of experience on the other, the Ego was necessarily set up as a 
 capital term over against all else as an antithetic non-Ego : it was no 
 longer a mere member of a miscellaneous herd of natural substrata,
 
 412 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 can only equivocally receive the same name ; ' just as 
 the same word dog is applied to a constellation in the 
 heavens and to a barking animal 1 .' In this limitation of 
 the word ' Intellect ' to the human order of learning to 
 
 on the same footing with anything that had attributes; but stood 
 alone, as regulating by its constitution all else that was given to our 
 knowledge. This primary position was marked by appropriating ex- 
 clusively to the Ego one of three Latin terms which had been inter- 
 changeable : the word Subject was withdrawn from all other things 
 that have attributes, and reserved for the self-conscious Mind alone ; 
 while the word Substance was either left in its old extension, or sur- 
 rendered to the things in the non-Ego to which attributes had to be 
 referred. This change moreover is not a mere division of the Latin 
 words between the two spheres, leaving the ' substances ' in the latter 
 on a footing with the ' subject ' in the former. The idealism of Kant 
 set up the Ego as 'master of the situation,' and reduced all outer 
 substances to its phenomena ; so that nothing remained to be viroKfi- 
 ptvov except the mind itself. It is less easy to trace the alteration of 
 the other word, though, as antithetic to ' Subject,' it would naturally 
 be drawn into corresponding modifications. But, besides this, it was 
 affected by a separate variation of its own. At first denoting, gener- 
 ally, whatever the mind might set up to think about, it was brought 
 within narrower limits by Kant's doctrine that all the ' matter' of 
 thought was supplied by the ' outer sense ' ; that, for the ' objective ' 
 action of the mind there must be mental representations, and for 
 representations, perceptive apprehension. We are thus at once driven, 
 with our word 'Object,' upon the sensible world, and compelled to 
 wed the two together. And though, to the idealist who conducts us 
 hither, the change effects no removal out of the mind into reality 
 beyond it, but only a limitation within the mind to the special pheno- 
 mena of Sense, yet the restriction, once introduced, passes into the 
 current language of philosophy : it affects those also who are not 
 idealists, but believe, like John Gerson, in a ratio objectalis insepa- 
 rable from perception, carrying the mind's cognition not only inwards 
 to its own representation, but outwards also to the thing represented. 
 Thus the word Object, through its limitation to the faculty of ' Sense,' 
 became transferred to that external world, the belief in which natur- 
 ally clings to our experience as percipient beings. So complete an 
 inversion of the meaning of technical terms in constant use, as this 
 antithesis has undergone, is nowhere else to be found, so far as I am 
 aware, in the history of philosophy. On this account I have thought 
 it deserving of some explanation. See an excellent note of Trende- 
 lenburg's in his Elementa Logices Aristoteleae Adnotata, I (p. 52), 
 to which I am indebted for one of the citations from Occam. 
 1 Ethic. I. xvii, Schol.
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CAUSE. 413 
 
 know, Spinoza is far from consistent. In his theology it has 
 this inductive meaning, and is on this account removed 
 from the predicates of God. In his anthropology, it is 
 contrasted with this inductive meaning (which is referred 
 to the ' Imagination 'j 1 , and denotes the identification of 
 Thought with the necessity of things 2 , the intuitive appre- 
 hension of the supreme principle of Causality, and the 
 deductive evolution of its determinate consequences, the 
 coincidence, in short, of our order of ideas with the real 
 order of things 3 . This it is which frees us from the thral- 
 dom of passion 4 , and in its higher stage constitutes ' the 
 intellectual love of God 5 .' It is true that in the anthro- 
 pology, the word Intellectus is for the most part replaced 
 by Mens, Ratio, Cognitio ; but the process or act of the 
 Mens is still said to be ' Intelligerel and that ' sub specie 
 ceternitatisl i. e. to ' conceive of things as implied in God 
 and consequent on the necessity of the Divine nature 6 . 
 And we even meet with the proposition that ' infinite 
 intellect comprises nothing but attributes and affections 
 of God.' (Infinitus Intellectus nihil praeter Dei attributa 
 ejusque affectiones comprehendit 7 .) What Spinoza denies 
 to God is therefore something which he afterwards declares 
 to be less than intellect in Man, and reduces accordingly to 
 the inferior category of ' imagination ' or lower ' ordo cog- 
 nitionis.' In the difference of order between the human 
 and the Divine intelligence there is nothing to prevent its 
 being intelligence in both ; whether it follows or precedes 
 the genesis of the cognita, whilst it is there, it is a cognitio. 
 Even if in the form of creative foresight it had no counter- 
 part in us, still, as objects and events, subsequent to their 
 creation, no less continue to be divinely known, and we 
 
 1 Part II, Pr. xlii. * Part II, Pr. xliv. 
 
 3 Part II, Pr. xlvii. * Part V, Pr. vi. 
 
 8 Part V, Pr. xxxii, xxxiii. 6 Part V, Pr. xxix, Scholium. 
 
 7 Part II, Pr. iv.
 
 414 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 have to speak of a present Omniscience as well as of a past 
 pre-ordination, we cannot deny to the mind of God an 
 intellectual apprehension indistinguishable in nature from 
 our own. If the distinctions of time disappear in his 
 infinitude, and melt into one the knowledge of future, 
 present, and past, they cannot vanish from our cognition of 
 him as Cause, with which alone we are here concerned ; for 
 this itself carries in it a ' before and after ' ; so that, rela- 
 tively to us, he is presented as the intending originator of 
 the cosmical order prior to all its beginnings, and as per- 
 manently cognisant of all its history. The mere difference 
 of our a posteriori method from his has always been familiar 
 to contemplative religious writers, and plays a great part 
 in the books of devotion from the school of Eckhart and 
 Tauler and the Theologia Germanica; but, instead of being 
 felt as a difficulty in the doctrine of God, it has been 
 applied to the humbling of man, and thence to the uplifting 
 of his piety and the completeness of his self-abnegation. 
 Thus far, i. e. in deducing the predicates of power, of unity, 
 of intellect, we have been concerned either with the quali- 
 tative attributes of God, as Cause ; or, in the case of unity, 
 with their numerical concentration. But as they operate 
 in space and time, we cannot avoid the consideration of 
 their quantitative range ; and must ask ourselves in what 
 terms we can warrantably speak of the extent and the 
 duration of the Divine nature. 
 
 All our conclusions are at present to be drawn from 
 the phenomena of the world. We certainly cannot affirm 
 the cosmos which these phenomena constitute to be infinite \ 
 that it passes our little measures is no proof that it has no 
 measure. So far as we can pretend to speak of it, it is 
 finite ; and as a conclusion must not go beyond its pre- 
 misses, we cannot infer from it as an effect the infinitude of 
 God as its Cause. If this be all, we can only speak of the 
 Divine perfections as indefinitely great.
 
 Chap. I.] OF GOD AS CAUSE. 415 
 
 But from the primary Causality itself let us turn to its 
 self-existent condition. Space we can affirm to be infinite ; 
 so that one of the two prerequisities of phenomena is in 
 possession of the predicate which we are investigating, and 
 offers it to the other, if the partnership can be made good. 
 There is unlimited scope ; is there adequate resource to 
 make use of it ? 
 
 The Supreme Will can operate by planting out force 
 either in any points of space whatever ; or in only some. If 
 in any whatever, then his potential causality is co-extensive 
 with Space itself, and therefore infinite. If only in some, 
 how is it excluded from the rest ? Does the hindrance lie 
 in them or in itself* Are they externally pre-occupied? or 
 is it internally limited in its range ? Take each of these 
 cases in turn. 
 
 Is the space which the Creator leaves empty of his 
 agency pre-occupied ? It must be either by some pheno- 
 menon, or by some entity. If the former, then his Will, 
 as sole power, is its cause ; and the alleged external 
 province lapses into the interior, and annexes itself to 
 his being. If the latter, the entity which excludes him 
 ipso facto exercises a repulsive causality ; and as all 
 causality is his, this too falls back within his dominion 
 and proves to be no foreign territory. In no way 
 therefore can he be finite by the presence of conterminous 
 existence. 
 
 Is he so however by internal limitation, i. e. by having 
 in himself a fixed range of being, subsisting in a circum- 
 ambient void ? If so, you might pass through that void, 
 with exploring organs of divine apprehension, and, after a 
 long blank, suddenly alight upon the edge of his presence ; 
 or vice versa, he might move from one portion of space 
 where you were not into another where you were. He 
 would thus become phenomenal, and raise, with respect 
 to himself, the alternative questions which, in relation to
 
 416 IMPLICIT ATTRIBUTES [Book II. 
 
 all else, it is his function to lay to rest. We need a Ratio 
 sufficients to explain why the limits of his being are of 
 this measure and not of that-, why it is here in space 
 and not there : for it might as well have been otherwise, 
 so far as the definition of his essence is concerned. These 
 are indeterminate possibilities ; and we demand something 
 to determine the selection from among them, just as much 
 as in the case of any other finite nature ; i. e. we are 
 compelled to treat such a being as an effect, and look 
 beyond for some other Will on which this depends for 
 its constitution. That other and determining Will then 
 assumes the place of God, reducing the former into the 
 position of a creature, and converting its alleged internal 
 limitation into an external boundary to its power. 
 
 Thus it is impossible to maintain a disparity of scope 
 between the Cause and the Condition of all things. They 
 share the same dimensions ; and though we cannot directly 
 infer the infinitude of God from a limited creation, in- 
 directly we may exclude every other position by resort to 
 its unlimited scene of existence. 
 
 By a similar method of exclusions we may justify 
 the assertion of the eternity of God. It is not necessary 
 for this purpose to settle whether the cosmos itself, like all 
 the events which compose its history, has had a beginning. 
 If not, if the effect be eternal, the cause must be so too. 
 But even in the other case, the pre-existence of the uni- 
 versal Cause cannot be limited ; for, if there was ever 
 a time in which as yet it was not, it has come into being, 
 and is itself only a phenomenon or effect ; which is a simple 
 contradiction. Its self -existence, its being other than phe- 
 nomenon, is its essential feature as a causal explanation of 
 phenomena ; it cannot therefore have a nativity, and must 
 always have been a parte ante. Nor can it be subject 
 to any limit a parte post\ for this also would reduce 
 it to a phenomenon, and bring it under the operation
 
 Chap.].] OF GOD AS CAUSE. 417 
 
 of some superior cause ; to which, until similarly dis- 
 possessed, the supreme name and attributes would have 
 to be made over. 
 
 To sum up then the results which are yielded by the 
 principle of Causality : there is One universal Cause, the 
 infinite and eternal seat of all power, an omniscient Mind, 
 ordering all things for ends selected with perfect wisdom. 
 Further advance we cannot securely make upon this line 
 of thought ; and were we only intellectual free agents, 
 devoted wholly to the study of external nature, and 
 looking through it to its transcendent Source, here our 
 religious apprehensions would stop : or rather, hence they 
 would develop themselves into forms consonant with their 
 origin. It would be interesting to seek, in the history 
 of mankind, for actual religions constituted on this type 
 and exhibit their overgrowth in one direction, their atrophy 
 in another. But this fascinating bye-path would withdraw 
 us too far from our main track ; and we must enter at 
 once upon its next stage, which introduces us to a new and 
 independent source of religious truth. 
 
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