A R I A
 
 Ex Librif 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 VARIA 
 
 STUDIES ON PROBLEMS OF 
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 
 
 BY WILLIAM KNIGHT 
 
 PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 
 
 1901 
 
 '

 
 TO 
 THE RIGHT HONOURABLE 
 
 ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR 
 
 STATESMAN AND PHILOSOPHER 
 
 THESE NUG& 
 
 ARE 
 
 DEDICATED
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 WHAT is contained in this volume was spoken, in 
 the first instance, to students of Philosophy at St 
 Andrews. 
 
 It has been my custom to begin the work of 
 each session at the University by an address on a 
 topic detached from, and yet related to, the course 
 of lectures which followed. The introductory one, 
 while dealing with matters of permanent interest, 
 has also borne upon a question of the hour. A 
 selection of twelve is now published, as a humble 
 addition to the work which my predecessors have 
 done, in the direction and enlargement of philoso- 
 phical studies at St Andrews. I well know what 
 the greatest of them Chalmers, Ferrier, and Flint 
 accomplished ; and that I cannot add to it except 
 in a secondary way. A few of the lectures of 
 Chalmers, and many of those by Ferrier, have 
 been published ; while much of Professor Flint's 
 work at St Andrews is embodied in his Philo- 
 sophy of History. 
 
 The ordinary class-lectures delivered by teachers 
 of Philosophy in Scotland, however, have not usually
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 been published in full. Except in the cases of 
 Thomas Reid at Aberdeen and Glasgow and of 
 Dugald Stewart, Thomas Brown, and Sir William 
 Hamilton at Edinburgh the outside world has not 
 had a complete course of University lectures on 
 Philosophy presented to it in book-form. This 
 has been wise, for an obvious reason. What has 
 been used in oral teaching, on the vast subjects of 
 Logic Psychology Ethics and Metaphysics, has to 
 be entirely re-cast, and re-adjusted, for publication 
 in a volume ; and the appearance of new treatises, 
 the continuance of discussion, and the rise of fresh 
 discoveries, have necessitated writing "up to date" 
 in recent years, within the department of Philo- 
 sophy, in a way unknown before. 
 
 In addition to this, it should be remembered 
 that a large part of the teaching done by means of 
 lectures in our University class-rooms is a prepara- 
 tion for the Scottish academical degree. It is 
 therefore not designed ab initio for the wider public 
 of readers and students of Philosophy. 
 
 Portions of the following essays and addresses 
 have appeared, although in a different form, in 
 several of the Magazines of the day ; e.g. in Mind, 
 in the International Journal of Ethics, and in some 
 College Reviews and University Records in this 
 country and America. Others have not been 
 published in any form. Many of my introductory 
 lectures, given at St Andrews but not included 
 
 ' o
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 in this volume, have appeared in The Nineteenth 
 Century, the Contemporary, the Fortnightly, etc., 
 and in Essays on Philosophy, Old and New. 
 
 It is somewhat late in the day for any one to 
 offer a new " System of Thought : ' to the world ; 
 and any offered now would only be an old one, 
 "writ larger" or "smaller," as the case might be. 
 Nevertheless each of the great historic systems of 
 human thought must, from generation to generation, 
 be re-set, re-cast, and re-interpreted in numerous 
 ways. 
 
 Although primarily addressed to University 
 men and women, no one will suppose that these 
 fugitive utterances cover the whole extent of the 
 problems discussed. 
 
 The ground gone over in some of the essays 
 has been slightly re-traversed in others from a 
 fresh point of view ; but each discussion, as now 
 published, has been either expanded or contracted 
 since it was originally written. 
 
 The volume is more especially addressed to 
 those who wish an introduction to Philosophy.* It 
 may be of some use to persons interested in its 
 perennial problems, who do not intend to enter a 
 University, as well as to those who mean to be- 
 come academic students ; and while only advanced 
 investigators, or original contributors, will care for 
 
 * My own Introduction to Philosophy will be subsequently published by 
 Mr Murray, as one of the "University Extension Manuals."
 
 x PREFACE 
 
 new Systems or Treatises, a way may be prepared 
 for an appreciation of the work to be done by the 
 specialists and experts of the future, through a 
 perusal of what is now given to beginners, who 
 wish to know what Philosophy is, and what it can 
 do for all of us. W. K.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE PRESENT TIME I 
 
 II. NATIONALITY AS AN ELEMENT IN THE EVOLUTION OF 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 23 
 
 III. OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK ... 44 
 
 IV. POETRY AND SCIENCE, THEIR CONTRASTS AND 
 
 AFFINITIES 63 
 
 V. THE UNSEEN ROOT OF ETHICS 85 
 
 VI. THE CORRELATION OF THE MORAL FORCES ... 94 
 
 VII. CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY : FRANCE, AND THE 
 
 TRANSVAAL 106 
 
 VIII. PRACTICAL ETHICS 114 
 
 IX. PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN THE UNIVERSITIES OF 
 
 SCOTLAND I3 2 
 
 X. THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION . . . -IS 1 
 
 XI. DESIDERATA IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY . . . 1 68 
 
 XII. THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 180
 
 I 
 
 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY AT 
 THE PRESENT TIME 
 
 BEFORE this subject can be discussed with any 
 profit, we must have a true idea of the nature of 
 Philosophy itself; not a complete idea of it, but one 
 that is approximately correct, and valid as a pre- 
 liminary to the discussion of its functions. The 
 latter, in fact, arise out of the former ; and, since 
 the use of a thing is almost self-evident when its 
 nature is understood, in unfolding the characteristics 
 of Philosophy, we at the same time define its 
 functions. 
 
 To begin with, various misconceptions as to its 
 real nature may be dealt with. By some it is 
 supposed to be a region of intellectual haze ; a misty 
 territory, where one will be inevitably lost if he 
 wanders far. By others it is regarded as a sphere 
 of crotchets and intellectual vagaries ; a quagmire, 
 in which will-o'-the-wisps are everywhere to be seen; 
 in other words, as a realm of dreams and fancies. 
 
 Again, it is supposed to be a mere arena for in- 
 tellectual athletics, useful only for training people
 
 2 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 to excel in mental combats. Sometimes it is looked 
 upon as a pastime or luxury, for the few who have 
 leisure to carry out archaeological research, but with 
 no universal or world-wide significance. In other 
 quarters by those whose convictions are traditional, 
 and who think that enquiring into the bases of 
 belief may possibly end in its destruction it is 
 supposed to be a dangerous territory to enter, where 
 one may become irreverent, if not sacrilegious. 
 Doubt, or suspense of mind that earnest honest 
 doubt which, in striving to conquer itself, has given 
 rise to Philosophy is misconstrued, as the prologue 
 to indifference, or as incentive to unbelief of every 
 sort. And so it comes to this that while Philosophy 
 is as old as the origin of man, or at least of civilised 
 humanity, and as universal as are the races that 
 inhabit our globe, there have been many in every 
 country who have regarded it as dangerous, in so 
 far as its cultivation has disturbed the status quo, 
 and led to " new departures " generally. 
 
 There are other popular objections to Philo- 
 sophy current in our time, but all that are worth 
 considering may be summarised under the two 
 misconceptions of its unreliability and its danger ; 
 in other words, the impossibility of reaching 
 definite and trustworthy conclusions in a sphere 
 over which mists continually brood, and the risks 
 that are run and must be run by all who study 
 it. 
 
 In answer to these irrelevant and prejudiced 
 objections, I think it may be said that, so soon as
 
 ORIGIN OF PHILOSOPHY 3 
 
 one begins to think and to wonder to wonder, 
 and again to think the problem of what Know- 
 ledge is, and curiosity as to what Belief and 
 Certainty are, inevitably arise ; and that is the 
 rise of Philosophy. 
 
 A distinguished modern thinker, and poet, once 
 said, "In wonder all Philosophy is born, and in 
 wonder all it ends ; while admiration fills up the 
 interspaces." And what Coleridge emphasized, in 
 that happy sentence, Plato and Aristotle had said 
 before him, more than two thousand years ago. 
 The fact is that so soon as we ask the meaning 
 of anything that exists, or the reason for our 
 believing this or that to be true so soon as we 
 enquire into the evidence of what is set before 
 us, or try to discover the basis on which Authority 
 rests we begin to philosophise. 
 
 And why ? Simply because we scrutinize. We 
 endeavour to understand tradition, by examining 
 the causes, the reasons, and the sources of things. 
 We have reached that stage, in mental develop- 
 ment, at which we desire to escape from the 
 passive reception of ideas, inherited by us ab ante, 
 or thrust upon us ab extra; and, instead of doing 
 so, to adopt our opinions, and hold our convictions, 
 on valid evidence, which is both rational and 
 verifiable. 
 
 We are born into a world of external influence, 
 which dominates over us, whether we will or no ; 
 and, in infancy and youth, this world is met and 
 dealt with by us, in very different ways. We
 
 4 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 begin the journey of life with an intellectual outfit, 
 not only meagre, but which may be described as 
 nil. As Robert Browning put it, in Bishop 
 Blougrams Apology : 
 
 We mortals cross the ocean of this world 
 
 Each in his average cabin of a life, 
 
 The best's not big, the worst yields elbow-room. 
 
 The fact is we start from a zero-point of 
 absolute nescience. Whether we arrived on this 
 planet from a sphere beyond it, and are only for 
 a time incarnated in flesh, or started in it de novo, 
 it is certain that we began experience in the world 
 not merely ignorant, but as regards sense-experi- 
 ence blind, and deaf, and dumb. It was only by 
 slow degrees that those senses which are our 
 normal gateways of communication with the outer 
 world -- were developed. In other words, we 
 commenced our mundane journey in fetters, most 
 useful fetters ; nevertheless tied, and manacled to 
 sense. I believe that our earliest ideas reached 
 us not from the external world, but from a remoter 
 realm, out of which we emerged, and into which 
 we at length re-merge. Nevertheless, at our 
 entrance into the present sphere of sense, from 
 which we are taking numerous outlooks into the 
 ideal realm which surrounds and enfolds it, we 
 were (each of us) only a germ of possible fulfilment. 
 We started on our journey unequipped, save with 
 the possibilities of achievement. And so, when 
 we began it, we were inevitably the victims of
 
 THE ONE AND THE MANY 5 
 
 illusion, as well as the heirs of all the knowledge 
 
 ' o 
 
 of our ancestors, and the inheritors of what they 
 have consciously or unconsciously bequeathed to us. 
 
 Then, as soon as we were able to do so, we 
 picked up this or that bit of information. We got 
 to know various facts, in reference to the world 
 and ourselves, in isolation ; that is to say, we 
 apprehended a number of truths detached from one 
 another. We gathered our knowledge piecemeal. 
 It is the process by which we all proceed, as a rule. 
 We pick up what we can get, from this province 
 and from that. But by degrees, a stage is reached 
 when we discover that the knowledge of facts is 
 fragmentary knowledge. Whenever we see that a 
 mere acquaintance with details has no unity and 
 coherence in it, we become tired of merely collecting 
 facts ; and wish, if possible, to get some knowledge 
 of the laws which explain the facts, and of the 
 principles which comprehend them. 
 
 And here it is i.e. when this stage is reached 
 that Philosophy arises. It is born for each human 
 being whenever he becomes dissatisfied with the 
 mere accumulation of facts in detail, however 
 interesting each may be ; when he is tired of 
 miscellaneous or scattered information, however 
 fascinating it may have become ; and when he 
 wishes to obtain some idea of the Universe as a 
 whole ; i.e. when he desires to know the One, 
 rather than the many. This is, at the same time, 
 a desire to get to the fundamental root, or under- 
 lying principle, of knowledge and experience.
 
 6 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Whenever we realize that we have been living 
 on the surface of things, and have been content to 
 do so a state or condition which was quite natural 
 for a time, child-like and even beautiful while it 
 lasted and whenever the longing for a knowledge 
 of arcana springs up, at that moment Philosophy 
 emerges. It arises, spontaneously and naturally, 
 in every unsophisticated being, so soon as enquiry 
 into the foundations of belief begins. It is a hunger 
 and thirst for reality, for all that is verifiably true, 
 beyond the illusions of our early experience ; and 
 thus, it is the natural sequel or corollary to a 
 knowledge of the facts and the laws of the world, 
 whether these are inductively or deductively 
 acquired. More especially, as it endeavours to 
 rise to the primal Source which comprehends all 
 that has emanated from it it is a quest for unity, 
 and for repose in the "last clear elements of 
 things." 
 
 On the other hand, the immense vistas opened 
 up by the Sciences of the nineteenth century, and 
 the " sure and certain " knowledge acquired in each 
 of them, has led many to think that we should 
 content ourselves with what is fragmentary, and 
 reaches us in sections ; especially when we find that 
 our powers of acquisition are extremely limited. It 
 is said that the wisest, and the most modest, thing 
 to do is to give up aerial flights and aspirations, and 
 to travel slowly along the lower lines of experiential 
 evidence. These will yield us, at least, the sober 
 lessons of worldly wisdom, and they will prevent us
 
 THE TWO SPHERES 7 
 
 from being quixotic day-dreamers. If we cannot 
 find the great "secret of the world," the philosophic 
 quest for it teaching us the limits of our faculties 
 may at least be of use in helping us to acquiesce. 
 
 But then, so soon as we begin to enquire 
 what is it in this multitudinous assortment of 
 statistics, this long array of discovered laws that 
 we really do know ? and what is it that we have 
 reached ? so soon as we ask, what is the relation of 
 the knower to the known ? we find that we must 
 either rise above the whole series, or penetrate to 
 its remotest depths. The mere sequence of 
 phenomena, and those generalizations from them 
 which we call Laws of Nature, are of little use, 
 unless we can see the inner affinity of each element 
 in the cosmos with every other, and unless we can 
 contemplate the whole as Spinoza put it sub 
 specie <zternitatis, i.e. unless we can escape from 
 the particular to the General, from the relative to 
 the Absolute, from the finite to the Infinite. 
 
 Nay more, we find that the two spheres the 
 one within, the other without are both illusive, 
 unless each is contemplated in relation to the other. 
 We cannot understand either of them, unless we 
 take into account what is supposed to be its 
 converse, but is really its ally, and counterpart. 
 Philosophy asserts that the Infinite and finite are 
 known in correlation, just as all other antitheses are 
 known. It maintains that the finite and the 
 Infinite, the relative and the Absolute (just like 
 the part and the whole), are not fundamentally
 
 8 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 opposed, any more than mind and matter are 
 absolutely antithetic. It asks why should the 
 finite and the Infinite present such a tremendous 
 intellectual chasm that they cannot be known 
 simultaneously and that there can be no comings 
 and goings between them ? It asks, does not the 
 one yield us a point of immediate departure towards 
 the other ? And it replies in the affirmative, simply 
 because they are corollaries, and because the 
 knowledge of the two is reciprocal ? In knowing 
 anything of the finite, our foot is on the first rung 
 of the ladder which leads us to the Infinite ; and, 
 unless the finite gives us such a ladder of ascent, 
 it is a mere congeries of atoms discordant each 
 from each. In other words, it affirms that we can 
 find the Infinite within the finite, the Absolute 
 within the relative, and the Divine within the 
 human ; just as we find the One within the many, 
 and the Ideal within the real and the actual. 
 
 In this longing to escape from the miscel- 
 laneousness of information to the realm of orderly 
 conviction, or from the manifold to the One, we 
 have a true explanation of the origin of Philosophy. 
 But there is much more to be said, in explanation 
 of it. 
 
 So soon as we begin the acquisition of know- 
 ledge, in its various sections and compartments- 
 devoting ourselves to each of them separately for 
 a time we find that, from our relation to the world 
 of sense, and from the fact that we ourselves are 
 soul and body combined, we express all our
 
 LANGUAGE A MOSAIC 9 
 
 knowledge of each of these realms in terms of the 
 other. That is to say, we speak of external Nature 
 in language derived from our inner consciousness ; 
 and we describe that consciousness in terms derived 
 from external Nature. In other words, we think 
 in pictures; and express our knowledge meta- 
 phorically, or allegorically. We discover that, 
 because we ourselves are dual, soul and body 
 combined, all human speech is a record of the 
 process of defining things by means of their 
 opposites. 
 
 So soon as this is understood, that is to say, 
 so soon as we see that Language is a mosaic, in 
 which everything is described by its contrary, and 
 that our most exact speech is full of subtle instances 
 of this reciprocity of terms while we are all captive 
 in the bondage it involves the wish to escape from 
 such thraldom is a very natural desire. But we 
 cannot escape from it. The fetter is a continuous 
 one. It encompasses us from our birth till our 
 death ; and it is bound upon us, as already said, 
 in virtue of our being body and soul combined 
 together in one. Nevertheless, in the desire to 
 understand this peculiarity of our nature, to find 
 out why it is that we think in pictures, and speak 
 through metaphors why it is that we interpret the 
 two realms of Sense and Thought each in terms of 
 the other in that Philosophy arises, and in that 
 it lives, and has its being. We gradually come to 
 see that, while we must think by the aid of pictures, 
 and express our thought allegorically or metaphori-
 
 io THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 cally, never to get beyond such representations of 
 reality, is to proceed lamely, or supported by 
 crutches ; instead of walking straight and erect, 
 along the highway of knowledge. 
 
 No greater service can be rendered by Philo- 
 sophy to the zealous, patient, successful workers 
 in other fields of labour, than the humble suggestion 
 that every one should ask himself, " What is the 
 real meaning of this or that term ? the ultimate 
 significance of this or that phrase ? of which I have 
 hitherto been making use, without any scrutiny or 
 cross-examination of their contents ? " 
 
 Another characteristic of Philosophy which 
 gives special significance to its many functions, 
 may be stated thus. We come into this world 
 inheriting vast traditions traditions which include 
 many truths and many errors these being inter- 
 twisted variously. At first, and quite rightly, we 
 are satisfied with tradition. It rules us from our 
 birth, and from the very urns of the past. But a 
 time comes when we must ask, "What is the 
 meaning of this mass of inherited opinion, of these 
 many-sided convictions, and of this traditional 
 belief which environs and hems us in ? Why 
 should it control and guide us?" Now, in that 
 enquiry into the meaning of tradition, and in the 
 desire to escape from it either as directly imposed 
 upon us, or as indirectly enfolding and compelling 
 us to act Philosophy, and the philosophic spirit, 
 come to life within us. 
 
 It does not follow that, when this desire or
 
 FOUR USES OF PHILOSOPHY n 
 
 longing arises, we must discard our inherited 
 traditions or ignore them. The beliefs in which 
 we have been educated may be re-adopted by us 
 in their full integrity, or they may be set aside in 
 part, or entirely abandoned. But, in any case, 
 they must all be scrutinized. They must be dis- 
 cussed and re-discussed, tested and re-tested, until 
 their inherent evidence finally appears. 
 fc-.v; In previous paragraphs the nature of Philosophy 
 has been indicated in a general way ; and, while it 
 is with its functions and uses that we are now 
 especially concerned, the discussion of its nature 
 may explain its function so far. In what follows, 
 its uses will be more definitely dealt with. Some 
 of these change from time to time, others are 
 everlasting. I think that the permanent ones may 
 be defined as follows. Philosophy is needed at 
 all times, first, as the dispassionate critic of 
 antagonistic systems of thought ; secondly, as the 
 arbiter and adjudicator between rival claimants in 
 the realm of knowledge ; thirdly, as the reconciler 
 of things and systems apparently, bitt not really, 
 opposed ; and therefore, fourthly, as a guide to all 
 specialists, conducting them to unity in the midst 
 of diversity ; and, as an intellectual lamp which 
 will enable them to see the One within the 
 many. 
 
 i. As the critic of antagonistic systems, it need 
 only be pointed out that the supreme function of 
 Philosophy is to penetrate to the root of each one 
 of them, to discover its origin, and impartially to
 
 12 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 weigh the evidence in its favour or against it. 
 By thus trying to understand the source of every 
 system, it endeavours to explain not only its origin, 
 but also its subsequent development, and to account 
 for its present position. It shows, to quote familiar 
 words, " the rock out of which it has been hewn, 
 and the pit out of which it has been dug." 
 
 Thus, a study of History comes to the aid of 
 Philosophy, and the history of Philosophy explains 
 in the most noteworthy manner, the sequence of 
 ideas in the great Systems of the world. None 
 of these is intelligible, or can be adequately criti- 
 cised, apart from that which originated it, and that 
 to which it subsequently gave rise. All of them 
 even those great ones which come down to us with 
 the sanction of the ages, and the prestige of time 
 are an evolution out of earlier elements. They are 
 the product of manifold influences, which have 
 moulded them into the shape in which they now 
 exist. 
 
 2. Next, as an arbiter and adjudicator between 
 rival claimants in the sphere of knowledge and 
 belief, the function of Philosophy is supreme ; and 
 it acts in this way. Having explained how each 
 system has emerged its earlier function it next 
 endeavours (or should endeavour) to mitigate the 
 fierceness of the quarrels which have arisen between 
 their respective champions. It should restrain their 
 animosities, by adjusting their differences. As in 
 the case of great international disputes, where 
 diplomacy is needed to prevent the more dreadful
 
 AN ARBITER AND ADJUDICATOR 13 
 
 " arbitrament of war," Philosophy intervenes to 
 shew diplomatically that in almost all disputes 
 there was truth on both sides of the question at 
 issue, and therefore that neither combatant had a 
 monopoly of justice. 
 
 And here, its use as an arbiter in questions 
 outside its own domain may be indicated. Take 
 those problems which constantly crop up in political 
 and social life, or in our current controversies on 
 Literature and Art ; or, again, the questions 
 which occur in theological and religious debate. 
 The function of Philosophy is to shew to all 
 combatants that while they may usually be " right 
 in what they affirm," they are for the most part 
 "wrong in what they deny"; and that their chief 
 error has lain in not making allowance for antago- 
 nistic forms of thought, and for rival theoretic 
 schemes of this mysterious Universe in which we 
 live and work. 
 
 It has happened over and over again that the 
 leaders, or champions, of intellectual systems so 
 soon as they come to the front, and are honoured 
 by the homage of a large following assume an 
 arrogant air, and endeavour to run down opponents. 
 In other words, they try to bring about a dead 
 level of uniformity in the realm of knowledge. 
 Now, here it is that the function of Philosophy 
 comes in, to vindicate the rights of minorities, and 
 to raise up down-trodden reputations, if there is 
 anything to justify them in their ancestry. 
 
 Serenely impartial, and sitting as a judge in the
 
 14 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 realm of knowledge, Philosophy has a noble part 
 to play, simply in adjusting rival claims. It looks 
 before and after. It is not indifferent to the turmoil 
 of present controversy, but it knows that " the thing 
 which hath been, it is that which shall be, and there 
 is nothing new under the sun." When genuine, 
 Philosophy is never carried away by the fashion 
 of the hour. It sees as much in the opinions of 
 the past as in those of the present day, and it also 
 believes that there will be new truth in doctrines 
 not yet formulated ; while it rigorously scrutinizes 
 all that happens to be meanwhile in the ascendant. 
 
 3. The third function of Philosophy is closely 
 kindred to the second ; although it differs from it, 
 and is an addition to it. It is that of being a 
 reconciler of things opposed. Its noblest office 
 is to say to the thousand combatants in rival 
 intellectual camps, and territories of social estrange- 
 ment, " Put up your swords into their sheaths, for 
 ye are brethren." It asks, "Why waste your time 
 and strength in assaulting one another, in mini- 
 mising the good which each of you achieve, and 
 in misconstruing the results to which each of you 
 attain?" It says, "Let warfare cease throughout 
 the whole realm of Knowledge. Let it only be 
 carried on against ignorance and error, unreality 
 and fraud." 
 
 But to come to particulars. Suppose that rival 
 sects are not only in arms against each other 
 antagonists on the immemorial battlefields of belief 
 but that, within the speculative camp itself, the
 
 RECONCILER OF THINGS OPPOSED 15 
 
 two great parties into which philosophers have been 
 divided throughout all time, viz. the Realists and 
 the Idealists, are at war. The leaders and repre- 
 sentative partisans of each school proceed to write 
 ingenious books, and brilliant papers in " Inter- 
 national Journals," in defence of their own speciality. 
 Intellectual combats as exciting as the political 
 tournaments between Conservatives and Liberals 
 are industriously carried on. There is prolonged 
 incisive controversy, and brilliant meetings of 
 opposing forces, within the arena of debate ; until 
 at last Philosophy itself conies in, behind these 
 rival disputants. It suggests that each antagonist 
 in the intellectual warfare of the world has had 
 some reason on his side ; and also that, because 
 each once flourished, it will flourish again, vindicat- 
 ing itself against attack ; and that it will 
 compensate for its temporary absence by assuming 
 new aspects when it rises again from the dead. 
 
 It has been already said that one great function 
 of Philosophy is to shew to rival disputants and 
 claimants in whatsoever field they work that their 
 adversaries are as good as themselves ; because 
 nothing, worthy of their own energy in combating 
 it, could ever have emerged in the world's history, 
 unless it had a real foothold in human nature, and 
 was as worthy of continued existence as the doctrine 
 which the partisan espouses. Thus, while Philo- 
 sophy is the enemy may I make use of an Irish 
 bull, and call it the peaceful enemy ? of all 
 faddists, doctrinaires, and vendors of universal
 
 i6 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 specifics for mankind, its noblest function is to 
 reconcile every possible opposing system in a 
 larger and a world-wide unity. 
 
 But the " reconciliation " referred to in this third 
 function of Philosophy is not to be effected by 
 milk-and-water compromises, or by such effusive 
 common-places about unity as that " You are right, 
 and I am right, and all are right ! " The only 
 reconciliation and adjustment that is of permanent 
 use is one which brings out into clear prominence, 
 and articulate statement, the elements of truth in 
 each of the systems thus philosophically dealt with. 
 Philosophy knows that intellectual differences must 
 remain to the end of the last chapter of human 
 history ; and that they may probably increase in 
 number in days to come, while our controversies 
 accentuate themselves with the lapse of time. But 
 it hopes to find underlying future debate a far 
 larger recognition of the truth taught by opponents, 
 and of the legitimacy and permanent value of systems 
 that are nevertheless diametrically opposed. 
 
 Great, therefore, as is the service which 
 Philosophy renders in exposing impostors of all 
 sorts, and the advertisers of specifics in the realm of 
 belief which are nearly as bad as those issued by 
 the vendors of medicine for the body a still higher 
 function is discharged, when its analysis gives place 
 to a subsequent synthesis. When it becomes 
 constructive, and proves by the light it throws on 
 all problems, that (as Bossuet put it) " every error is 
 a truth abused," that heresy is mere exaggeration,
 
 THE SYNTHETIC FUNCTION 17 
 
 and that an opponent should first try to discover 
 the root of truth whence the system he opposes has 
 sprung its service to mankind is the highest 
 possible. To harmonize and unify is a far higher 
 aim, and its realization is a much loftier achievement, 
 than to analyse and to disintegrate. 
 
 If the study of Philosophy a knowledge of its 
 problems, and a course of discipline undergone by 
 means of it enables one to pronounce a sane 
 verdict on pretentious claimants in other depart- 
 ments, who would try to win people over to this 
 intellectual fad or that irrelevant practice, it cannot 
 be regarded as a trivial pursuit. If one is saved by 
 means of it from belief in universal specifics, if one 
 is made a doubter full of reverence, or a modest 
 questioner of ancient beliefs acquiescent, and yet 
 hopeful in his out-look he may surely be thankful 
 for the result. 
 
 But it is a greater and better result if one learns 
 by means of it to see fragments of truth in what 
 has hitherto been construed as error, and some 
 error, in what has been supposed to be truth. And 
 why ? because there is thereby discovered a way of 
 reconciling opposites. There can be no doubt that 
 the rivalries of sects and parties, in the State and 
 in the Church, as well as of cliques and coteries in 
 social life, will go on. They may even be increased 
 and accentuated as time advances, because with the 
 advance of civilization so many new elements will 
 arise, which must cause temporary friction mis- 
 understanding and perplexity, and which may even
 
 i8 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 end in positive recoil. Still the function of 
 Philosophy will remain, viz. to indicate, and to 
 vindicate, the truth and value which exists in every 
 one of these apparently alien developments. 
 
 In this connection it is worth mentioning that 
 many of the leaders of opposite schools and parties 
 have admitted at the close of their life-work, if not in 
 the mid-time of their career that it was an accident 
 which led them to take the particular side they did, 
 and that they see quite as much to justify the action 
 and the policy of the other side as of their own. 
 
 Now, if Philosophy be (as already briefly 
 indicated) a quest for unity within multiplicity 
 or for singleness and harmony within the distract- 
 ingness of detail it may surely be considered one 
 of the perennial interests of the human race. 
 Science differentiates, and is analytic ; Philosophy 
 consolidates, and is synthetic. Science must of 
 necessity break up our knowledge into sections, 
 parts, provinces, and independent groups ; but it 
 shows no unity between them, except the unity of 
 law, and the everlasting correlation of forces. 
 
 ? o 
 
 Philosophy, on the other hand, tries to unite our 
 miscellaneous knowledge of detail at its fountain- 
 head. It thus draws our knowledge up from lower 
 levels, and connects it organically part with part 
 in a living whole. 
 
 In one sense it may be admitted that analysis 
 is the starting-point of Philosophy ; because when 
 we split up divide and dismember, we are on the 
 way toward accuracy in detail. But the multi-
 
 THE QUEST FOR UNITY 19 
 
 tudinous view of things, which results from this 
 analysis, is vague and unsatisfactory. In the 
 synthetic process, which gathers details together 
 in a new unity, and interprets them by their 
 relations and correlations each to each, a far 
 higher stage of insight and appreciation is 
 reached. 
 
 It is on this ground that a supreme position 
 may be claimed for Philosophy amongst the 
 achievements, and the disciplines, of the human 
 race. It has done more for the world than its 
 best exponents have surmized. It has been the 
 connecting link between other regions of labour, 
 research, and discovery ; being an unconscious 
 guide, and regulator of activity in intellectual 
 domains far beyond itself. 
 
 Robert Browning once wrote a poem beginning 
 thus, 
 
 I only knew one poet in my time 
 
 and, in it, he described that wonderful man who 
 
 Did the King's work all the dim day long 
 
 in obscurity, unrecognized and almost unknown to 
 his contemporaries. He was no "poet" in the 
 conventional sense of the term. But he possessed 
 a power, and exercised a function, superior to any ; 
 and so Browning called him the one poet of his 
 time. In much the same way Philosophy comes 
 in, to influence and direct the work of the world in 
 spheres beyond itself, spheres in which the most
 
 20 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 representative workers, and prominent exponents, 
 are often quite unconscious of its presence. 
 
 It would be easy to point out the influence of 
 the higher ideal Philosophy, on the Poetry, the 
 Art, the Literature, and the Politics of the nine- 
 teenth century. The whole of our Victorian 
 Literature, to whatsoever section of it one turns, is 
 permeated saturated one might almost say with 
 the inner spirit of Philosophy. Our best politicians 
 are philosophers at heart. Several of those who 
 " lead " their parties, in the House of Commons, 
 have done noble work in the speculative litera- 
 ture of this subject. But far more important than 
 the books they have written, is the philosophi- 
 cal wisdom which they have brought into many a 
 national, and many an international debate. Their 
 very career has been philosophical, in the sense that 
 they have introduced Philosophy into the political 
 strife of their time. 
 
 Then, in the literary criticism of our age 
 although one may be compelled to be a critic of 
 the critics there never was a period in which the 
 higher criticism was more philosophical than it is 
 now. That is a happy omen for its future.* 
 
 If understood in the sense in which it has been 
 stated, Philosophy has manifold and most noble 
 functions to discharge, not only to the present age, 
 but to all time coming ; functions which can never 
 be superseded. They are essentially permanent, 
 
 * The subject referred to in this, and the previous, paragraph is 
 dealt with more fully in other essays which follow.
 
 A FORECAST 21 
 
 because Philosophy itself is amaranthine. Its best 
 symbol and, we must both think and speak 
 through symbols is that of the phoenix. It 
 invariably rises immortal, from the ashes of the 
 fire that seemed to consume it. It may therefore 
 be presented in new phases, and may fulfil un- 
 expected functions, in the generation that succeeds 
 our own. These coming developments will not 
 only prove its continuity ; they will also demonstrate 
 its power of renewing its youth for ever. 
 
 It would be rash for the wisest contemporary to 
 forecast the future of Philosophy, whether in this 
 country or elsewhere ; but those who are familiar 
 with its more recent developments see the in- 
 evitableness of two results. 
 
 (1) That the principle of Evolution and 
 Development and that is to say of processes 
 leading on to products must very largely influence 
 all our future philosophizing. In other words, the 
 historical method of studying every problem 
 (including pre-historic material, and archaeological 
 research) tracing our developed opinions and beliefs 
 back to their antecedents, will be the greatest 
 possible aid to an understanding of its nature 
 and significance. 
 
 (2) That after our knowledge of processes has 
 been elaborated, and our acquaintance with pheno- 
 mena and laws has become relatively complete, 
 there will still exist an intellectual vacuum, which 
 Philosophy alone can fill. What it seeks for, and 
 tries to find, is a knowledge of what lies behind
 
 22 THE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 phenomena and their laws, an acquaintance with 
 what outsoars and transcends them ; while at the 
 same time it lies within, and penetrates to the core 
 of, the very humblest. Thus understood, Philo- 
 sophy is what I think Novalis called it a sort 
 of " home-sickness," a longing to be at home every- 
 where, to understand the meaning of the most 
 trivial thing in its relation to the Infinite, and to 
 apprehend the significance of the greatest as it 
 bears upon the meanest. 
 
 If, with a clear eye and a candid mind, one 
 examines those great philosophical Systems which 
 have succeeded one another throughout the ages, 
 watching their rise decline and fall if one studies 
 their evolution, and their relation to that vast world 
 of Humanity which they enfold in the friendliest 
 manner, the historic survey will prove that 
 Philosophy is not a region of darkness, or even 
 of mist ; that it is not a sphere of guess-work, and 
 conjecture ; but a clear-cut realm of verifiable 
 knowledge. Also, that it is, as it has always 
 been, a magnificent intellectual observatory for 
 further outlook. It is not an ocean in which 
 great ships have foundered, or a shore from which 
 their wrecks have been gathered. It is rather an 
 arena of nig-h endeavour, into which have descended 
 
 O ' 
 
 one by one the mightiest spirits of our race, to 
 wrestle in no ignoble manner with the problems 
 which never grow old, and cannot become stale, 
 because they lie close to the universal heart of man.
 
 II 
 
 NATIONALITY AS AN ELEMENT IN 
 THE EVOLUTION OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 THE Philosophy of the World is an organic whole, 
 which has moved forward in uninterrupted con- 
 tinuity, although not always at the same speed, 
 or on the same lines, from the first to the last 
 stage of its evolution. What has occasionally 
 seemed to the casual observer to be a break in its 
 development, owing to the absence of visible links, 
 has afterwards when the missing links have been 
 discovered become part of a chain of evidence, 
 demonstrating the unity of the whole process. 
 
 The theory of a continuous mundane develop- 
 ment, creating by slow evolution those products, 
 which are themselves destined to be superseded 
 by new ones in other words, the theory of "a 
 perpetual becoming " - has grown in scientific 
 clearness from the day of Heraclitus to our own ; 
 and is now accepted, with few dissentient voices, 
 by those who have been initiated in Philosophy. 
 But this doctrine of becoming is the theoretic 
 interpretation of only one aspect of the universe.
 
 24 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 If " all things are double one against another," 
 what endures is as important as that which 
 changes ; and the Eleatic Philosophy is as true 
 as the Heraclitic. Unity and variety together 
 constitute the totality of existence ; and each is 
 necessary to the other. Paradoxical as it may 
 seem, permanence lies at the background of every 
 change ; while perpetual change is the conditio 
 sine qua non of all endurance. 
 
 To apply this generalization at once to the 
 subject to be discussed. In a certain sense, the 
 whole Philosophy of the World is radically one. 
 Being the outcome of a continuous cosmic process, 
 operating in all lands, its problems are fundamen- 
 tally the same ; but, within each country, they 
 differentiate themselves in detail. The surface 
 variety has been necessary to exhibit the under- 
 lying unity, while the latter has been equally 
 needed to unite the miscellaneous fragments in 
 a single whole. 
 
 The truth embodied in the law of Evolution 
 has proved, to most thoughtful persons, that the 
 numerous phases of opinion and belief, as well as 
 the manifold types of national character which have 
 arisen in the course of History, have in no single 
 instance been matter of accident or chance. They 
 have been due to radical, if not to racial, character- 
 istics of Human Nature ; and they are therefore 
 likely to be as persistent as any of the types of 
 organic structure, which the sciences disclose. The 
 bent, or national tendency, of every people is due
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF OPINION 25 
 
 to myriad influences playing upon it from the dawn 
 of time. These influences which have, in a subtle 
 way, marked it off from all others, are often 
 occult, and underworking. They are not always 
 known by those who inherit them from within, or 
 receive them from without ; and they are seldom 
 visible to others. What becomes apparent in the 
 recorded history of a nation is but a fragment of 
 that which has gone to the formation of the national 
 character. The latter has been due to the joint 
 operation of causes both external and internal, and 
 of forces which have worked beneath as well as 
 above the stream of development. 
 
 This principle applies to all the elements which 
 go to constitute the life of mankind. Like every 
 other product, the Philosophy of the World has 
 passed through multitudinous phases ; widely dif- 
 ferent each from each in the amount of insight 
 they have shewn, but all of them of value to the 
 race at large. If the Literature, the Art, the 
 Politics, the Social Life, and the Religion of the 
 world together constitute a vital whole - - which 
 assumes different phases here and there, because 
 of the localities in which it works its Philosophy 
 is certainly no exception to this law of development. 
 While there has been an organic unity operating 
 underneath all change, and even guiding apparent 
 anomalies of form, variety of aspect has been 
 equally necessary ; and the expansion of Philosophy 
 throughout the ages has been due to the joint 
 influence of them both.
 
 26 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 If, however, the historian of Philosophy at- 
 tempted to trace its developments from a cosmo- 
 politan point of view, ignoring the differences of 
 race and nationality, he would pass from country 
 to country in a somewhat bewildering fashion. 
 Organic differences would baffle him, in any 
 attempt to trace the underlying unity with a 
 steady hand. It is therefore necessary not only 
 to recognize, but to emphasize, the differences 
 which now exist ; and to trace them carefully 
 in detail, while indicating their common origin. 
 The old historians of Philosophy were, for the 
 most part, mere chroniclers. They put down in 
 their books a series of statements, more or less 
 accurate, as to what this or that philosopher 
 thought, or " held," or taught. These recorded 
 opinions were mere isolated dicta, chronicled in 
 an irregular manner, with no attempt to trace their 
 origin, their connection, or their influence. Others, 
 since the time of Ritter, have tried to exhibit the 
 course of Philosophy as one of organic growth ; 
 and all the numerous and noteworthy histories of 
 it, which have been written in Germany, France, 
 and England since Ritter's time although their 
 interpretations and criticisms may have been 
 coloured by the particular school of thought to 
 which the writer belonged have adopted, more 
 or less, the guiding principle of his book. 
 
 It has now become so obvious as to amount 
 almost to a commonplace, that an adequate history 
 of Philosophy can be constructed, only when the
 
 RACIAL INFLUENCES 27 
 
 thought of the world is regarded as an organic 
 whole ; and when every phase of it including 
 those which to us in the present century may be 
 grotesque, or even repulsive receives its due, as 
 the passing aspect of an underlying tendency. But, 
 while every link in the chain is seen to be a real 
 element in the cosmos and some of the things 
 which a mature civilization considers " least honour- 
 able " are nevertheless recognized as having con- 
 tributed to the final result it is absolutely necessary 
 for the historian to take up nation after nation, 
 seriatim; to deal with each of them individually, 
 tracing those collateral influences which have come 
 into it from abroad, as well as those which have 
 reached it by direct inheritance within its own 
 area. 
 
 It is easy to over-magnify the local influences 
 which have shaped the Philosophy of a particular 
 people ; while the wider racial ones, underlying 
 all provincial tendencies, are ignored. But, while 
 many histories of Philosophy, since Ritter's time, 
 have been compiled with the view of exhibiting 
 the "increasing purpose" of the whole, few writers 
 (if any) have tried to unfold the characteristics of 
 each race, as an organic growth within its own 
 domain, or province. I therefore think that it 
 should be the aim of future historians to shew 
 the fundamental differences inherent in each race 
 and thus to explain the local phases and peculiari- 
 ties of development rather than to emphasize the 
 underlying unity of the thought of the world.
 
 28 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 That there is a distinctive national colour, in 
 all the great philosophies, cannot be denied by any 
 competently informed person ; nor can it be ignored 
 in an adequate historical treatment of them. It is 
 also important to note that a scientific examination 
 of the provincial aspects of Philosophy is, on the 
 whole, a return to precision, from the vagueness 
 which a sense of the unity of the thought of the 
 world is apt to engender. If we start with the 
 cosmopolitan idea, and with the two main "streams 
 of tendency "- the real and the ideal and traverse 
 the centuries with their aid, setting down so much 
 as due to idealism and so much to realism, we do 
 not achieve much in the way of explanation, and 
 we are apt to become nebulous or hazy. 
 
 Nowadays, when every one in the world is a 
 sort of " next door neighbour " when we have 
 " thrown a girdle round the earth " in less than 
 " forty seconds," and may soon be able to telephone 
 to the very ends of the world we are probably 
 inclined to over-estimate the unity of the race. 
 But there is no evidence to shew that acquaintance 
 with other communities, and a knowledge of their 
 distinctive features knowledge which grows so 
 rapidly in an age of scientific progress will tend 
 to produce greater uniformity of type, will lessen 
 the differences which exist, or minimize the dis- 
 tinctive features of each man, woman, or child. 
 
 Besides, the abolition of its differences would be 
 a serious loss to the world at large. Even were 
 it possible, it would be a prodigious mistake to
 
 DEVELOPMENT AB INTRA 29 
 
 attempt to reduce the races of mankind to a dead 
 level of uniformity, to europeanise the Indian, to 
 asiaticise the African, to americanise the Polynesian, 
 and so on. It would not only be a very wasteful 
 policy to each of them while it lasted, but it would 
 involve a serious loss to the world, were it even 
 partially successful. What we need is the removal 
 of every obstacle to individual and national develop- 
 ment. Each race demands the freest possible 
 evolution of opinion, character, belief, and action 
 in all directions ; " live and let live " being the law 
 of the house, alike in individual families, and in 
 mixed communities of men. Every extreme 
 corrects, if it does not neutralize, the rest ; and if 
 the differentiation of the race be carried much 
 further in the future, its unity instead of dis- 
 appearing will become more and more apparent. 
 
 Within each nation, however, normal develop- 
 ment proceeds from within outwards, not from 
 without inwards. The higher culture must not be 
 superimposed ab extra, it must be evolved ab intra, 
 It must be reached by the slow processes of interior 
 growth, and subsequent expansion. We cannot 
 raise a people low in civilization up to a higher 
 level, by thrusting upon it an alien type of life and 
 culture, still less by making use of compulsion. 
 We may graft, with the utmost skill, a new branch 
 on the old stem ; but, even in that case, the old 
 will dominate the new, not the new the old. A 
 conviction which is to last, and to bear fruit, must 
 invariably proceed from within. If it is to endure,
 
 30 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 it must be educed ; and that involves a long, and 
 often a tedious, historic process. The result is 
 very seldom accomplished by argument. It is 
 much more largely due to unconscious agencies 
 than to conscious forces. It would seem to be the 
 case that there must be a concurrent development 
 of the physical frame and the animal functions, with 
 an increase of brain-power, and a refinement of 
 feeling; in other words, a growth of "the senses 
 and the intellect" on the one hand, of "the 
 emotions and the will " on the other, before any 
 radically new manifestation of Human Nature can 
 take place. 
 
 Another point of importance is this. The time 
 during which the several races of mankind have 
 already lasted has some bearing on the question of 
 their probable duration. If the lower types began 
 their career much further back, and have therefore 
 a greater ancestry than the higher ones, it may be 
 asked, " Have they none of the prescriptive rights 
 of primogeniture ? " In the physical cosmos outside 
 of man we find organisms persistent for millions of 
 years, and doing great service to the world ; and 
 it is most natural to ask why all the lower types of 
 Human Nature should be uprooted, to make room 
 for what we call (and rightly call) the higher ones ; 
 while every type is relative to a zero-point, from 
 which they all have started, which gives us a 
 standard for comparison, and by which the excel- 
 lence of each may be appraised ? We may surely 
 ask, why all the lower races should be sacrificed
 
 UNNATURAL DEVELOPMENTS 31 
 
 for the good of the higher ones ? And we may 
 answer the question in the same way in which most 
 humane persons object to the callous vivisection 
 of our canine friends, for a remote possible benefit 
 to the human race. Then, have we not found 
 historically that the higher races have occasionally 
 (and most righteously) been superseded by the 
 lower ones, although only for a time ? 
 
 More important it is to note that many persons 
 who forsake a lower for a higher creed bring with 
 them, and cannot help bringing, much that passed 
 current in the lower ; while the two cannot amal- 
 gamate. Many who abandon the customs of their 
 country, who give up it may be on conviction, or 
 it may be through bribery the faith of their 
 ancestors, adopting a new cult, and becoming 
 "proselytes of the gate" at the instigation of the 
 missionary, develop sundry vices in the course of 
 the process. Any one who, on a sudden, accepts 
 ideas which are not native to him, and practices 
 which are not hereditary, becomes unnatural. He 
 loses, rather than gains, by the process. Contact 
 with the higher types of civilization has not always 
 elevated the lower. It is so much easier for the 
 latter to assimilate the vices, than to imitate the 
 virtues of the former ; and the healthy relation 
 between the two, when they happen to be brought 
 into contact, is not that the higher should force its 
 customs or practices, its Religion, or Government, 
 or Philosophy upon the lower still less that the 
 lower should try to extinguish the higher but that
 
 32 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 each should tolerate the other, and gain from 
 contact with it, as much as it can healthily 
 assimilate. 
 
 It follows that it is not only a weakness, it is 
 practical folly for the votaries of any one type of 
 civilization to act upon the principle " this is the 
 best for all mankind." A system of belief or 
 practice which is not indigenous even although it 
 is the outcome of a higher civilization, developing 
 itself elsewhere if transplanted to a foreign soil, 
 is doomed to failure ab initio. If it seems to 
 succeed for a time, its success is always more 
 apparent than real ; and in a vast number of 
 instances, the reactions are stupendous. The 
 reason is that the old currents of belief and 
 practice, which were hereditary race - elements, 
 continue to operate silently, underneath the new 
 "stream of tendency." Differentiation is of course 
 incessantly at work, never ceasing for a moment 
 of time amongst any people : but the healthful 
 changes are always slow and gradual ones, which 
 do not record themselves at once. If written at 
 the time, it is by a sort of invisible ink, which only 
 becomes apparent after being subjected to the fire. 
 
 If, on this matter, we appeal to history wisely 
 recorded and interpreted we find that, although it 
 has been possible to force new laws, manners and 
 customs, even a new Language, Philosophy, and 
 Religion, on a conquered people, the success of 
 the victor has been a deceptive triumph. The 
 conquered people are crushed for a time. They
 
 MISSIONARY EFFORT 33 
 
 are humiliated, perhaps made sullen by defeat ; but 
 they are usually ready for a fresh trial of strength, 
 at the earliest possible opportunity. By the curious 
 glamour of reaction from antiquated habit, what 
 has been artificially introduced, even by conquest, 
 may be welcomed for a time ; and it is almost 
 certain to be hailed by those who appreciate 
 novelty; but the superior race, thrusting its latest 
 ideals on one with which they have no constitutional 
 affinity, may by its sudden dominancy destroy the 
 native bloom of character and habit in the inferior 
 people ; while a subsequent reaction may drive the 
 latter race to a lower level than that from which it 
 was apparently but only artificially raised. 
 
 It must be admitted that some crude develop- 
 ments, or diseased products, of our humanity may 
 be dealt with at once by drastic processes ; that is 
 to say, by the rapid incoming of new, and at times 
 of militant influence. Such an advent of beneficent 
 power may legitimately extinguish, by its strong 
 hand, the excesses of a rudimentary civilization ; 
 and humanity at large is the gainer by such a 
 process of physical and moral surgery combined.* 
 Nevertheless, in all cases of one civilization 
 superseding another, the transitions should be as 
 gradual as it is possible to make them. 
 
 Even were it possible artificially to combine two 
 races (a higher and a lower), as provinces can be 
 
 * For example, infanticide, slave-dealing, the burning of suspected 
 witches, cruelty to all who differ from you, etc. etc., might be dealt 
 with, as every civilized people now deal with cannibalism. 
 
 C
 
 34 * NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 territorially annexed, this would not prove either, 
 first, that all the members of the lower were able 
 to receive the higher type of thought, feeling, and 
 action ; or secondly, that the higher might not be 
 injured by receiving and assimilating the practices of 
 the lower. If a higher race cannot intermarry with 
 a lower, and have a progeny that is healthful, it is 
 surely worse than useless to attempt a forcible 
 intermarriage of ideas. But what is often aimed at 
 is not the intermarriage of ideas, but the complete 
 substitution of one set for another. It is the 
 inoculation of the lower races, by the opinions of 
 the higher ; and the superimposition of the latter on 
 the former, so as to raise them to a new level, by 
 external means. 
 
 This applies not only to the African, the 
 American, and some of the Asiatic races, but also to 
 several European ones. Contact with the people 
 of a different race amongst ourselves in the West, 
 has often hindered rather than helped their develop- 
 ment. The prejudices and the vices of the new 
 race have been transmitted, and even intensified, 
 more quickly than its virtues ; while some of the 
 dormant excellences of the inferior people have 
 died away in the process. 
 
 On the other hand, there can be little doubt 
 that the introduction of a new type of civilization 
 in the midst of an old one has at times touched 
 the latter in its deepest parts. It has occasionally 
 quickened the development of powers, which have 
 been lying latent for centuries. What has at first
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 35 
 
 seemed a disaster to a nation, which has lived for 
 generations in a particular groove, and been there 
 under the influence of a few provincial ideas, 
 has afterwards led to more than a renewal of its 
 youth. The introduction of elements, which have 
 coalesced naturally with those which were verging 
 to decay, has given a fresh lease of life to such 
 a people ; and here we reach the sole ground on 
 which the work of the missionary of another creed 
 who aims at being the pioneer of a new civilization 
 can be defended. There is no limit to the influence 
 which may be exercised by the higher races over 
 the lower, if such influence be exerted naturally, 
 and by wise methods. 
 
 Turning now from these semi-anthropological 
 considerations, I reach the more strictly philo- 
 sophical problem of the relation in which the race 
 stands to the individual, and the individual to the 
 race or of the many to the one, and the one to 
 the many in the matter of intellectual system- 
 building. There is no doubt that the two factors 
 in the historic evolution of the human race have 
 been the power of the individual in leading the 
 masses, and the power of the masses in controlling 
 the individual. These two are complementary 
 forces, centrifugal and centripetal. The power of 
 the individual in determining a new forward move- 
 ment amongst the mass of his contemporaries is 
 quite as great as any power they can exert in 
 restraining him from a too rapid, it may be a 
 meteoric progress. When a community has sunk
 
 36 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 into a somewhat monotonous uniformity whether 
 of belief or of practice when it has been working 
 steadily on in the grooves of tradition, a longing, 
 half understood at first, begins to arise within it 
 for the appearance of a new Leader, for the guid- 
 ance of an Individual, for the "coming man," who 
 will be able to focus contemporary wants, and to 
 interpret them. 
 
 In every corporate body whether it be a State, 
 or a Church, or a Philosophical School there must 
 be leaders ; and it is by the commanding force 
 of its greater minds and wills, by their individuality 
 and their special power, that all re -formations of 
 opinion and practice are wrought out. The 
 stronger have always given the law to the weaker, 
 although it is also true, as a poet puts it, that 
 " strongest minds are those of whom this noisy 
 world hears least " : but to suppose that the great 
 movements of history, and the formation of its 
 chief Philosophies, or Social Institutions, have been 
 due to the unconscious working of blind forces is 
 as great a mistake as it is to ignore or undervalue 
 the latter. The brain power of the individual has 
 been a potent factor in the formation of every 
 philosophical system, and it comes out in many 
 ways. It is needed ist, adequately to understand 
 the spirit of the age, 2nd, to divine its latent 
 tendencies, and appraise its underworking currents, 
 3rd, to guide it onwards in a wise and fruitful 
 manner, 4th, to reconstruct and reinterpret ancient 
 theories, by bringing them into vital relation with
 
 GREECE, THE LAND OF THE IDEAL 37 
 
 the present age, and 5th, to sow the seeds of future 
 development in a natural manner. 
 
 These and many other points, might now be 
 considered in detail ; but as the aim of the present 
 discussion is rather to urge the importance of the 
 opposite and balancing truth of the influence of 
 Race and Nationality in determining the great 
 systems of opinion, an illustration of this thesis 
 founded on the contrast between Greek Philo- 
 sophy, and its Oriental types may be more 
 appropriate. 
 
 Greece was the land of the ideal, in every 
 sense of the word ; and there it was that the ideal 
 was first made real to the human consciousness. 
 The fascination which the race inhabiting that little 
 promontory of the Aegean has exercised over the 
 thought and the art of the world over its letters, 
 its science, and its politics has had no parallel 
 in subsequent history. While each nation has 
 contributed its own share to the progress of 
 humanity and we may say in general that from 
 the Semitic races we have inherited our Religion, 
 from Greece our Philosophy and Art combined, 
 and from Italy our Law the Hellenic spirit has 
 ruled the world in a manner altogether unique. 
 
 This has been due to many concurrent causes. 
 Perhaps the most remarkable feature, in the Greek 
 world taken as a whole, is its manifoldness, and 
 its manifold completeness ; in other words, the rapid 
 development of the human intellect and genius, 
 in many different directions simultaneously, and
 
 38 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 its perfection in each ; so that the productions of 
 Greece remain to this hour, the admiration and 
 the despair of the world. No subsequent type 
 of civilization has transcended it, so that the great 
 Hellenic achievements remain in the very forefront 
 of the world's development, even while an " in- 
 creasing purpose" has been running through the 
 subsequent ages. In the department of Philosophy, 
 while the speculative thought of the world has of 
 necessity changed, we find in Greece the germs 
 of every subsequent theory ; and, what is perhaps 
 of still greater consequence, we find the later 
 opinion of the world continually reverting to the 
 positions taken up in the earlier Greek schools. 
 There we find the teachings of Philosophy ex- 
 pressed with the greatest clearness and vigour, 
 as well as subtlety ; and we find its distinctive 
 types more sharply defined, than anywhere else, 
 until we reach the Philosophy of the last two 
 centuries. 
 
 Another general feature in the Philosophy of 
 Greece is the singularly rapid development and 
 succession of its schools, produced by the active 
 movements of thought within them. One system 
 led on, swiftly and inevitably to another ; the 
 existence of the latter being due to the very com- 
 pleteness which characterised its predecessor. This 
 rapid succession of systems was not a symptom of 
 intellectual decay, but of vitality. The quick 
 absorption and assimilation of the elements which 
 nourish the intellectual life of a people is a sign
 
 THE BROODING EAST 39 
 
 of sustained national vigour. And so, in marked 
 contrast to the uniformity and stagnation which 
 characterized the brooding East, Greece presents 
 the spectacle of ceaseless activity, and incessant 
 change. 
 
 This was doubtless due to the manifoldness of 
 the life of the nation, as much as to anything 
 else ; and (to what has been already mentioned), 
 the intellectual reciprocity, or indebtedness of its 
 Philosophy to its Art, of its Art to its Politics, 
 and its Politics to its Religion. Out of the friction 
 of old ideas, and their incessant commingling, new 
 ones emerged. In contrast with this, in the East 
 where tradition for the most part ruled the national 
 mind, it at the same time repressed and fettered 
 it. There was no free play of thought, to break 
 up the routine of the past, and to interfere with 
 the monotony of precedent. If it was reverence 
 that kept the Semitic mind perennially loyal to 
 a few leading ideas, a certain intellectual timorous- 
 ness with languor, and love of ease, and other 
 causes, due to climate, race, and temperament- 
 kept the Eastern mind moving sedately, and at 
 times austerely, along the lines of immemorial 
 tradition. 
 
 There was no desire for change, no thirst for 
 progress, no demand for liberty, such as we find 
 in the West. Hence the uniformity which 
 characterizes the Mythology, the Art, the Govern- 
 ment of the East, as well as its Philosophy. We 
 find vastness, rigidity, and sameness. Where
 
 40 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 there is not repression, there is barbaric glitter, 
 and monotonous splendour. The type of mental 
 and moral character among all the Eastern peoples 
 is for the most part the same. It is like the 
 tropical vegetation, of more uniform feature than 
 that which has been developed in the temperate 
 zone. As some one was it Hegel? well re- 
 marked, the jungle is the physical type of the 
 intellectual and moral life of the East ; and it was 
 the want of intellect with its freedom and move- 
 ment, its endless bright developments that kept 
 the East so stationary in Philosophy and Religion, 
 as well as in Government and Art, and prevented 
 the rise of the Sciences. A cumbrous and elaborate 
 ritual overlaid the life of the people, with precepts 
 and practices that fettered it. 
 
 In contrast with this, it was perhaps due to the 
 inherent vigour of the primitive settlers on the 
 rocky peninsula of Hellas, and to the rapid 
 mingling of diverse races, as wave after wave 
 of emigration and of conquest swept westwards, 
 and turned southwards, from the primitive Aryan 
 home wherever it was that the world owes the 
 singular union of flexibility and strength, of force, 
 freedom and pliancy, characteristic of the Greek 
 mind. In Greece, as in the East, climatic causes 
 co-operated with racial tendency ; and the physical 
 features of the land with their variety, and com- 
 pact beauty aided the development of national 
 character. Greece was not the land in which 
 Nature could subdue man, or dominate over him.
 
 HELLENIC CHARACTERISTICS 41 
 
 It was pre-eminently the country in which man 
 would become the interpreter of Nature ; in which 
 also he would be able to manipulate her forms, 
 and be a deft and cunning workman in the 
 idealization of them. It was not a land in which 
 a doctrine of nirvana could possibly arise, or be 
 appreciated. The active and subtile intellect of 
 the people, and its aesthetic and athletic spirit 
 combined, prevented this. Thus, from the very 
 first, the philosophy and the mythology of Greece 
 differed from that of the East, and reflected the 
 free creative intelligence of the people. 
 
 Another feature which characterized the literature 
 and life of the Hellenic race, as well as its 
 Philosophy, was its love of directness, its going 
 straight to the mark, without intricacy obscurity 
 or twist. Abundant evidence of this is seen in the 
 evolution of its philosophical schools. Its early 
 infantile curiosity, and its subsequent youthful bold- 
 ness (often amounting to rashness), are evident ; 
 but intellectual thoroughness, and clear-eyed direct 
 intelligence, are dominant throughout. Many of 
 its early thinkers imagined that they had found 
 a single key by which they could unlock the 
 mystery of the universe at large ; but, in these 
 early schools, as well as in the later ones, we 
 find an effort to pierce by the sheer force of 
 thought, as far as thought could carry beneath 
 the symbols that obscured, and the metaphors 
 that entangled it. 
 
 Metaphoric conceptions ruled the East. They
 
 42 NATIONALITY IN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ruled the Semitic mind, and coloured the whole 
 religious literature of the Jews, where anthropo- 
 morphic ideas had the upper hand. In Greece, 
 on the contrary, from the very first, speculative 
 minds sought to reach the shrine of pure Being, 
 by the avenue of pure Thought. Vagueness, and 
 even mystery, were abhorrent to them. The blue 
 heaven above, and the bright sea around, suggested 
 clearness, as well as depth ; and depth without 
 clearness was not esteemed in Greece. Hence 
 vague suggestions were tracked, if possible, to 
 their root ; and were analysed, with a view to 
 the removal of the vagueness, by a process of 
 verification. The Greek did not naturally care 
 for, or believe in, vague impulses which he could 
 not name. Distrusting dim monitors within, the 
 Hellenic mind wished that they should all be 
 brought out of their lurking places into the light, 
 and that they should answer for themselves in the 
 court of logical appeal In this there was an 
 element of weakness, as well as of strength ; but 
 the historical fact to be noted is that in the whole 
 national life of Greece, we see a striving after clear 
 conviction; and this love of light, and perpetual 
 " coming to the light," may be said to have given 
 rise to the long succession of its schools of 
 Philosophy. 
 
 An equally significant illustration of the in- 
 fluence of Race and Nationality in determining 
 the characteristics of philosophical thought, is to 
 be seen in the modern German " stream of
 
 STREAMS OF TENDENCY 43 
 
 tendency," as compared with the French, the 
 Italian, and the Scandinavian ; and in the British 
 and American stream, as compared with the 
 Continental European. All of them, however, are 
 reserved for future treatment.
 
 Ill 
 
 OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL 
 OUTLOOK 
 
 THE problem of the present Outlook in Philosophy 
 may be dealt with in several different ways. It 
 might be prefaced by a historical sketch of former 
 tendencies in Philosophy, our anticipations of 
 the future being based upon our knowledge of 
 the past in which case the discussion might be 
 described as in another paper in this volume, 
 " Prospects, in the light of Retrospects " or, it 
 might be merely a review of existing tendencies at 
 work, amongst us and around us, the " outlooker " 
 noting what forces are for the time being in the 
 ascendant, and indicating what are dormant ; or, 
 it might be a combination of these two methods 
 of treatment, the entire survey bringing out 
 both our losses and our gains, and indicating some 
 desiderata in the Philosophy of the future. 
 
 In what follows I try to combine these methods, 
 so far as practicable. 
 
 Looking back then trying to forecast the 
 future not so much in the light of the present as of 
 the past, and remembering that " the thing that 
 
 44
 
 UNIFORMITY IMPOSSIBLE 45 
 
 hath been it is that which shall be " it does not 
 seem presumptuous to affirm. 
 
 First, that the attainment of uniformity in 
 philosophical opinion is a Utopian dream. Finality 
 in the speculative doctrines of the world is 
 absolutely impossible ; and, if there is to be no 
 finality, a millennium of uniformity would mean the 
 absolute ossification of belief, as well as the collapse 
 and ruin of Philosophy itself. Just as certainly as 
 that no political party can continue for ever in 
 power, that no nation can direct and control the 
 destinies of the world for ever, that no Religion can 
 monopolize the intellectual assent of the race, no 
 system of Philosophy can ever reign supreme and 
 final. This is, however, one of the commonplaces 
 of the literary and historic judgment of all com- 
 petent scholars. I therefore pass from it. 
 
 Second, and more particularly, we must expect 
 the continuance and development of two great 
 "streams of tendency" within the philosophical 
 world, one of them the real, the other the ideal 
 stream ; the former contented with (if not rejoicing 
 in) phenomenal fact and law ; the latter, discon- 
 tented with fact and law, endeavouring to transcend 
 them, and to reach the ideal somewhere, I 
 anticipate, in the Twentieth Century, the rise and 
 continuance of many new and antagonistic schools 
 of Philosophy ; but I think that they will be 
 separated from one another, in the main, by the old 
 line of cleavage, viz. that between the Realists and 
 the Idealists. I anticipate that their differences will
 
 46 OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 increase, and be rather more sharply accentuated 
 than diminished ; the increase, and accentuation 
 being due to fresh vigour of thought, and additional 
 clear-sightedness. Each of the two great schools 
 will see new reasons for emphasizing its special view 
 of the Universe, and for magnifying it in every 
 possible way. 
 
 Third, I anticipate, within these two intellectual 
 camps, the continuance in new forms of all the 
 main theories of the Universe, which have hitherto 
 dominated the thought of the world. One after 
 another they have seemed to be overthrown ; but 
 in no case, has their disappearance been due to the 
 unearthing of the root whence they have sprung ; 
 in other words, to a change in the constitution of 
 Human Nature itself. The evolution of that 
 nature being a continuous process, new varieties of 
 opinion and belief will continue to be evolved 
 alongside of its unity. Differentiation will work 
 side by side with integration in all time to come. 
 In the future treatment of the fundamental and 
 perennial problems of human interest, every one of 
 them will be re-stated afresh over and over again, 
 thought out anew from root to branch ; and, in 
 virtue of this, the Philosophy of the Twentieth 
 Century will be as different from that of the 
 Nineteenth, as ours has been different from 
 Eighteenth Century speculation. I maintain that 
 while nothing can hinder the continuance and re- 
 appearance both of Idealism and Realism, they will 
 come back to our successors in new phases ; and
 
 ECLECTICISM 47 
 
 that their return, and the characteristics they may 
 assume, will be determined by unconscious as well 
 as by conscious forces. 
 
 One thing which will conduce to this is the 
 amount of vigorous criticism which every one of the 
 great schools has hitherto received and must 
 
 o 
 
 continue to receive from its opponent. Dealt 
 with severely and justly, each must undergo a 
 radical change. It cannot re-appear in its previous 
 form, or aspect. While the essence of all remain, 
 their outward form will be different. Their errors 
 will be set aside, and their extravagances cleared 
 away. 
 
 Fourth, I anticipate in the future a much larger 
 tolerance for diversities of philosophical opinion, 
 than has hitherto existed ; and I think that those 
 who have adopted a special speculative creed as 
 their own which they may have either inherited, 
 or acquired, and who therefore remain loyal to it, 
 will see much more in other and opposing theories 
 than it has been customary for their predecessors 
 to see in them, and will therefore try to do them 
 greater justice. In other words, there will be 
 a further development of a desire to get at the 
 root of truth within all conflicting or antagonistic 
 systems. It will be "the aim of the wise" to 
 separate each truth from the extravagance with 
 which it has been previously, and temporarily, 
 associated ; while every new critic of the hour 
 will realize that his appraisal of the past is destined 
 to be in time superseded, if not entirely ignored.
 
 48 OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 This brings me to the mental attitude so 
 easily caricatured and misrepresented which I 
 have advocated ever since my student days, half 
 a century ago.* In the early fifties of 1800, in the 
 "Edinburgh Metaphysical and Ethical Society "- 
 one very similar to yours I used to try to vindicate 
 Victor Cousin from the opprobrium into which he 
 had fallen, notwithstanding that my much revered 
 teacher, Sir William Hamilton, had honoured him 
 as the advocate of a new and high Philosophy in 
 France, dedicating his own Discussions on Philo- 
 sophy to him. Cousin was explicitly an eclectic, 
 which Hamilton was not. I adopted the term, 
 introduced by the former, as descriptive of the 
 highest style of philosophizing, and I tried to 
 vindicate it, in many essays and discussions in 
 that Society. Now, let the word " Eclectic " be 
 disregarded, or disesteemed and I admit its 
 inadequacy, because it seems to see truth every- 
 where, and error nowhere nevertheless I maintain 
 that it describes a tendency which is fundamentally 
 noble, philosophically just, and salutary to the very 
 core ; while the system of intellectual activity to 
 which it gives rise is as progressive as it is 
 conservative. 
 
 Fifth, and as almost a corollary from the last 
 proposition, I think that the historical method of 
 examining and dealing with past opinion and theory 
 will continue to grow, and that it will develop a 
 
 * And here I may perhaps be forgiven for introducing a quasi-per- 
 sonal allusion.
 
 HISTORIES OF PHILOSOPHY 49 
 
 deeper understanding of the root-principle of every 
 one of them. As I have said elsewhere, the 
 philosophers of the future will understand better 
 than we do "the rock out of which we have been 
 hewn," and " the pit whence we have been dug." 
 The historians of the future will deal not only with 
 individual or national movements, but with those 
 great racial tendencies which underlie them both. 
 They will not write their books, as Sextus 
 Empiricus or Diogenes Laertius wrote theirs, 
 men to whom all opinions were equally good or 
 equally bad the variety of each being quoted as 
 proof of the untrustworthiness of all, and therefore 
 as a justification of O-KC^IS ; nor, will they write them 
 as the German historians of last century did 
 notably Brucker, Tiedemann, and Tennemann 
 making the dicta of a particular school the test 
 by which we should judge of the merit, or assign 
 the demerit of every other system ; nor even, as 
 Hegel and Comte did, bringing forward precon- 
 ceptions as to what the course of Philosophy must 
 be, and thus reading into earlier systems later 
 philosophical ideas ; but they will look upon the 
 multitudinous thought of the World as an organic 
 unity, evolving itself now in this system and now 
 in that, each containing a fragment of truth, but 
 not the whole of it ; and each, while seemingly 
 antagonistic to the other, not actually opposed, 
 but in its essence supplemental. 
 
 Sixth, I think that this historic method of exam- 
 ining and dealing with all systems and problems 
 
 D
 
 5 o OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 which is both a sequel to the doctrine, and an out- 
 come of the spirit of evolution already referred to a 
 method which has dominated the whole of the 
 latter half of the Nineteenth Century, is certain to 
 continue. Evolution though as old as the dawn 
 of Philosophy is the most vital and far-reaching of 
 our Nineteenth Century conceptions of the Universe, 
 and it has never been so articulately stated, or so 
 conclusively proved, as in our recent philosophical 
 and scientific literature. 
 
 It should be noted, however, that it is in the 
 main, a historic theory, or rather, a theory of 
 history. It traces the growth and progress, the 
 rise decline and fall, of everything that has been 
 or now is ; and it leads, naturally and inevitably, 
 to a new theory of Truth and Error. Here I 
 re-state, for the sake of greater clearness, what 
 has been already advanced. It is now seen with 
 noonday clearness, in the light of Evolution, by 
 all who possess the " inward eye," that no 
 "system" of opinion can possibly have either 
 a monopoly of truth or a monopoly of error. 
 None is wholly true, none is absolutely false ; 
 but all are approximations to reality, simply 
 because they have been evolved ; and because 
 each is, at its best, only the surface index of 
 ever working processes in the continuous thought 
 of the world. 
 
 Now this way of stating the case viz. that 
 error is merely extravagance, or the pushing of 
 a thing that is true to a point which is extreme ;
 
 TRUTH IN ERROR 51 
 
 and that Truth is only an approximation to that 
 which infinitely transcends, not only our formulae, 
 but our powers of apprehension may, to some 
 minds, seem to minimize what it really magnifies. 
 I reply that it only minimizes the value of our 
 individual work in the matter of system-building ; 
 which, when examined by others, may turn out 
 to be a process of erecting " castles in the air." 
 On the other hand, it magnifies the organic per- 
 sistent ubiquitous underlying thought of the 
 world. It overthrows the conceit that we have 
 by our " systems " attained to anything very lasting ; 
 and thus the ancient and most venerable terms, 
 " orthodoxy " and " heterodoxy " are not only 
 divested of their negative significance, they are 
 seen to have positively no philosophical meaning 
 at all. 
 
 But observe the distinctions between Truth and 
 Error are not obliterated, nor are the differences 
 between Right and Wrong ignored. Quite the 
 contrary ; but the localities in which they are to 
 be respectively found, the varying amounts in 
 which they respectively exist, and the extent to 
 which each is associated with its opposite, as 
 well as the means of their separation all these 
 are seen in a totally different light from that 
 under which they used to be discerned. 
 
 Of human thought I maintain that no system 
 could ever have emerged, and lived, were it errone- 
 ous at its root ; and also that in all of them, even 
 in the best and the highest, there are elements of
 
 52 OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 partiality, and therefore of decay ; while from the 
 worst there is something to be extracted that is 
 worthy of life. 
 
 To very many of our contemporary students and 
 workers in Philosophy it is the hope of the future 
 that, 
 
 Our little systems have their day, 
 They have their day and cease to be. 
 
 But this, so far from leading to agnosticism, 
 or to pessimism in any of its phases, leads (me 
 jndice] to a profounder gnosticism, or doctrine of 
 knowledge ; and to a nobler, because a more 
 earnest, purpose in life than was possible under 
 the old orthodoxies. And why ? I am not a 
 pantheist, when I say with St Augustine, as well 
 as with Erigena and Spinoza, that I see God 
 everywhere and in everything, that I discern a 
 divine unity within the ever evolving cosmic 
 processes ; and that I believe in what the poet 
 of the " Higher Pantheism " called 
 
 The one far-off divine event 
 
 To which the whole creation moves. 
 
 It is for this reason that I am hopeful about 
 the future of Philosophy. Let Science whether 
 it be agnostic or not march where it will, and 
 as it will annexing province after province to 
 its realm ; and, in our special realm, let us ex- 
 perience as many and as great reactions as that 
 which now exists in Germany, where metaphysics 
 seem to have been defeated for a time, out-thrust
 
 THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY 53 
 
 from its native home while physiology, and ex- 
 periential psychology have almost entirely taken 
 its place it can only be a temporary reaction. It 
 may have been perhaps as necessary for modern 
 Europe, as the Aristotelian recoil from the ultra- 
 idealism of Plato was natural and necessary. But, 
 in the nature of things, it can only last in the 
 Teutonic race for a very short space of time. And 
 I think that, when the idealistic tidal wave returns, 
 when metaphysical Philosophy resumes its natural 
 ascendancy, it will come back all the stronger 
 because of the temporary domination of the systems 
 which have ignored it. The continuance of meta- 
 physical Philosophy, and the perdurance of Theology, 
 are to me as certain, as the return of morning 
 after evening, or of summer after winter ; and they 
 will to the very end of time retain their ancient 
 rank, their place of imperial supremacy, in the 
 forefront of all the sections of human knowledge. 
 And why ? For this reason ; that the problems 
 with which they deal, and which even while " seeing 
 through a glass darkly " they solve "in part," are 
 problems of perennial interest alike to the intellect 
 and the heart of man, to which even the physicist 
 returns with unabated ardour, after his solutions 
 within the realm of phenomena are corroborated 
 as well as discovered. 
 
 Seventh, what I have advocated in previous 
 paragraphs has an important bearing on the pessi- 
 mism of the Nineteenth Century. Our modern 
 pessimism is not so much theoretical as practical.
 
 54 OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 Europe has at present no Schopenhauer or Von 
 Hartmann. But while neither pessimism nor 
 optimism are speculatively tenable as philosophical 
 theories, it is to be noted that pessimism of a 
 somewhat curious type almost invariably follows 
 or attends the agnostic attitude of mind. En- 
 thusiasm is lessened if it is not extinguished by 
 it. Cheerfulness, hopefulness, readiness to face evils 
 courageously, willingness to embark in, and to die 
 for, great causes ; all these diminish as the agnostic 
 spirit grows. Afterwards ennui sets in, such life- 
 weariness as occasionally tempts to suicide, as the 
 best exit from those " ills that flesh is heir to." 
 
 This practical pessimism has infected modern 
 Society, our Nineteenth Century Literature and 
 Politics, in very curious ways ; but it will not last. 
 I am of opinion that what is needed, along with 
 a more comprehensive and just estimate of the 
 past with a knowledge of the origin of its philo- 
 sophic, religious, and social systems is a moral 
 tonic, that will make our philosophical outlook a 
 more hopeful one. We need more rational 
 enthusiasm alike in our Social Life, our Politics, 
 our Art, and our Religion. We are now divided 
 into many parties, and must always be so ; but 
 while the wise builders of bridges to span the 
 chasms which separate us bridges of sympathy, 
 if not of intellectual agreement are always to be 
 honoured, the great virtue for each leader in my 
 opinion is at one and the same to hold to his own 
 position to magnify it, and to make it honourable
 
 CATHOLICITY V. PARTIZANSHIP 55 
 
 to the best of his ability and to recognize that 
 it is only one out of many equally tenable, and 
 equally valuable. And now, for an illustration. I 
 am a Scot, and I am proud of my country, its 
 characteristics, its history, its literature, and its 
 achievements generally ; but, I also know its 
 limitations and prejudices, its frequent dourness, 
 thrawness and provincialism ; and I can't be one of 
 those who 
 
 Take the rustic murmur of their burg 
 
 For the great wave that echoes round the world. 
 
 It must be admitted that the cosmopolitan 
 thinker, wide-minded and catholic-hearted who 
 sees good everywhere is at times apt to be remiss 
 in practical work. He is not so easily roused as 
 the partisan can be roused to toil for a special 
 cause. If we believe that a particular line of effort 
 is the only right, or the supremely right one, we 
 will work for it with ardour. Contrariwise, if we 
 think that all have a valid raison d'etre, we are 
 not so easily stirred up to defend our own. Never- 
 theless I think it is quite possible to combine the 
 widest theoretical catholicity of opinion with the 
 utmost practical ardour and enthusiasm in forward- 
 ing great causes. 
 
 Eighth, I have already indicated my belief that 
 the future of Philosophy is as certain as is the 
 survival of the principle of curiosity ; but it may 
 be useful to point out some of the signs of its 
 present influence, in quarters where it has not
 
 56 OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 always been felt in the same way, or at least to 
 the same extent. If it surrounds pervades and 
 interpenetrates every other department of know- 
 ledge, evidence of its latent presence ought to be 
 found in unexpected places ; and this is exactly what 
 we find in the Literature, the Art, and the Politics 
 of the Nineteenth Century. It is true that to make 
 room for the special sciences, which are more 
 immediately useful in supplying those who seek 
 the best professional outfit, Philosophy has been 
 of late thrust into the background ; and, even 
 within its own area, it is perhaps not so popular at 
 present as it used to be. 
 
 By the Ordinances of the late Scottish Uni- 
 versities Commission, the seven subjects once obli- 
 gatory for the degree of Master of Arts are no 
 longer necessary for it ; three out of the old seven 
 may be put aside, and any of the Sciences may 
 take their place. I was one of those who thought, 
 and advocated, that the old heptarchy of subjects 
 should remain the conditio sine qua non of our 
 M. A. degree ; and that all the Sciences, new and 
 old together, should be included within an enlarged 
 B.Sc. degree. But there is no use discussing 
 that now. Res finita est. qucestio cadit. Our suc- 
 cessors will see the Twentieth Century develop- 
 ments will shew them whether the new legislation 
 
 o 
 
 is an advantage over the old. But at present 
 candidates for the Scottish M.A. degree can dis- 
 pense with one of the two subjects of Latin or 
 Greek, and with either Logic or Moral Philosophy ;
 
 UNIVERSITY LEGISLATION 57 
 
 and, in consequence, Greek and Moral Philosophy 
 suffer heavily. They are now practically discour- 
 aged as subjects of study in our Universities. 
 
 Turn now to London. In that great University, 
 Philosophy has been reduced from its old pre- 
 eminence as an obligatory subject ; and it is, 
 through the Examination rules laid down by the 
 Senate, for its University degrees, made an alter- 
 native one.* Many tried to prevent this, but to 
 no effect ; and the result is that in the Colleges 
 which specially train for the examination such 
 as University College, London the number of 
 students in Philosophy has declined. The same 
 complaint is made in the Victoria University, 
 which has its Colleges at Manchester, Liverpool, 
 and Leeds. Here I am not bringing in a com- 
 plaint, along with my profound regret ; because I 
 know that the Senate of the London University 
 has been almost compelled to do what it has done. 
 By its very constitution and character it must have 
 primary regard to the urgent necessities of the 
 hour ; and the prodigious growth of the Sciences 
 which deal with Nature has led the Senate to 
 make these changes. 
 
 Speaking generally on the subject it is not only 
 the fascination which these Sciences now exert in 
 themselves, that explains the changes referred to. 
 It is still more the opportunity of utilizing them in 
 so many practical ways, because they can be made 
 
 * Nay, Logic and Psychology have been recently struck out from 
 the list of subjects optional for the B.Sc. degree.
 
 58 OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 to minister to wealth and comfort ; and can add so 
 much to the amenities, refinements, and luxuries of 
 life. No wonder that a knowledge of Natural 
 Philosophy (so called), mathematics and engineer- 
 ing is esteemed, since all of them can be applied to 
 gunnery, and to what is necessary for our Army 
 and Navy. No wonder that Geology, Zoology 
 Botany, and Geography are esteemed, since they 
 all can be of use in exploration, and colonization. 
 No wonder that Chemistry is in the ascendant 
 when it can be applied to a score of the practical 
 arts and industries ; and so on, and so on, and 
 so on. 
 
 But now, per contra, I ask you to note (i) that 
 this new programme both in England, Scotland, 
 our Colonies, and abroad is mainly due to the 
 notion (may it be a temporary one !) that the 
 chief end of Education is to secure an outfit for 
 professional success, to equip candidates with that 
 kind of knowledge which is needed to enable them 
 to go on "conquering and to conquer" in the race 
 for material prosperity. (2) These successes are 
 not the most important ones, for the race at large. 
 Our humanity has other, and more imperious, needs 
 to which these achievements minister but little. 
 Grant that the external sciences are the most 
 lucrative ones, because they promote individual 
 and national wealth more than others do, have 
 we not needs which transcend the "Wealth of 
 Nations" ? and is it not as true now as of old that 
 man " liveth not by bread alone?" It does not
 
 PHILOSOPHY IN SCIENCE 59 
 
 follow that the Sciences which add most to the 
 sum total of human pleasure are, in the long run, 
 the most useful ; and it is to counteract the gravi- 
 tation of human interest towards the material side 
 of life, the obviously utilitarian one, that Philosophy 
 is now more needed than it ever was before. 
 Note further (3) that the education given by 
 Science pure and simple Science all in all, un- 
 aided and uninspired by the older disciplines is 
 as a rule fragmentary and scrappy. It is apt to 
 be an ill-assorted miscellany of results, often full 
 of technicalities, which are sometimes puerile, the 
 trivial mixed up with the important. In addition 
 (4) the vast expansion of the Sciences has created 
 a fresh need for Philosophy, by opening up new 
 pathways along which it may travel. This could 
 be illustrated in much detail ; but I wish rather to 
 point out, in conclusion, how Philosophy the old 
 guide to the Sciences, and their faithful although 
 sometimes discredited servant has been silently 
 operating in the midst of all our modern Science, 
 Poetry, Art, History, Politics, and other Nineteenth 
 Century achievements. 
 
 First, all our scientific men of eminence admit 
 that they must become philosophers at last, in 
 other words, that their physics must end in Meta- 
 physics. Take Messrs Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, 
 Carpenter, Mivart, (I only mention dead men 
 whom I have known). They have all admitted 
 that their inventories of facts and laws will not 
 suffice, that there is a vast residuum behind, in
 
 60 OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 reference to which philosophical theories may be 
 formulated with no disrespect to science, and with 
 no possibility of science coming in to discredit 
 them. Nay several of these men as can be shewn 
 by the documentary evidence of their letters- 
 hungered for some solution of the ultimate problem 
 of the Universe beyond the region of phenomenal 
 fact and cosmic law. Second, come to the Poetry 
 of the Nineteenth Century. There never was a 
 time in which all the higher Poetry of the world 
 was so inter-penetrated with Philosophy. Glance 
 back in thought to Wordsworth and Coleridge in 
 its first decade, through Shelley (Byron even), 
 Tennyson, the two Brownings, to Clough and 
 Matthew Arnold, with scores of minor singers. 
 The deepest things which they have written have 
 had a root in Philosophy, and a philosophical 
 outcome. As I addressed my class in two opening- 
 lectures on " The philosophical undertones of 
 modern Poetry," I shall not repeat anything from 
 these lectures now. I only lay down the thesis 
 that the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century is more 
 profoundly inter-penetrated by philosophical ideas 
 than the Poetry of any earlier century in the 
 world's history has been ; and I also think that 
 the Poets have helped the (occasionally prostrate) 
 Metaphysicians, as to the problems of the Origin 
 of Knowledge, of Theism, of Immortality, and 
 of human Duty, in a very remarkable manner. 
 Third, as to Art, I maintain that the specialty 
 of the artistic products of the Nineteenth Century
 
 PHILOSOPHY IN ART 61 
 
 in so far as they are in advance on the work of 
 preceding eras is in the main due to the entrance 
 of philosophical ideas, and to the growth and 
 development of them within the realm of the 
 Beautiful. There may be defects in the work 
 of our modern English artists, but if we select 
 the noblest of them, who have dealt with the 
 higher symbolism of their subjects, e.g. Turner, 
 almost all the members of the pre-Raphaelite 
 brotherhood, Dante Rossetti, Millais, Burne- Jones, 
 also Frederick Walker, Albert Goodwin, and 
 instar omnium G. F. Watts, with others too 
 numerous to mention, it will be found that there 
 never was a time in which philosophical ideas 
 have influenced Art in the same unique and 
 wonderful manner. 
 
 Here I should add that while it is one of 
 the radical aims of Philosophy to teach us how 
 to rise above allegoric conceptions and to enter 
 into a sphere where metaphor neither impedes our 
 thought nor arrests its flight it is within that 
 wonderful sphere of symbolism that Art finds its 
 native home, and where the pictured representa- 
 tions of reality are our best and noblest guides. 
 Thus, while in the domain of Philosophy pure 
 and simple, our aim is to escape from meta- 
 phoric modes of thought, in the sphere of Art 
 symbolic representations are our best guides to 
 reality ; and in this great sphere of symbolic 
 representation, I unhesitatingly place George
 
 6a OUR PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK 
 
 Frederick Watts as the noblest teacher of the 
 Nineteenth Century. 
 
 Fourth, in History I maintain without fear of 
 contradiction that in the work of Carlyle, Grote, 
 Thirlwall, Froude, Freeman, Stanley, Milman, and 
 a score of others, we can trace the influence of 
 the higher Philosophy, and of a philosophical 
 training underlying all their work. Fifth, in 
 Politics it is the same. Was there ever an era, 
 however barren it may be in political progress 
 although I humbly think that it has been fruitful 
 directly and indirectly beyond all precedent 
 when the inter-penetrating spirit of Philosophy 
 has influenced and moulded Cabinets, as well as 
 individual Ministers, in the same way and to the 
 same extent?
 
 IV 
 
 POETRY AND SCIENCE, THEIR CON- 
 TRASTS AND AFFINITIES 
 
 ALL who are familiar with the philosophical discus- 
 sions of recent years know that there has been 
 acute controversy between the advocates of literary 
 and scientific culture ; and that some of the 
 champions on both sides have carried on the 
 debate as if there were a fundamental antagonism 
 between the two sides ; and as if the conflict could 
 only cease by the extinction of one of the com- 
 batants, and the sole supremacy of the other. It 
 would not be difficult to shew that, as in the case 
 of many minor quarrels, much of the controversy 
 has been due to a misunderstanding ; and that, 
 although the debate may have done good, in 
 bringing out the respective merits of each, the 
 difference has been much more apparent than 
 real. 
 
 It is only indirectly, however, that I now deal 
 with that question. It is rather of the two different 
 ways of interpreting Nature to which the scientific, 
 and the literary or poetic temperament respectively 
 tend that I mean to speak ; and, I do not enter 
 
 63
 
 64 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 into the controversy, as a partisan of either side. 
 I wish rather to vindicate both, and to shew how 
 the one is the natural complement, or sequel of 
 the other. 
 
 A preliminary glance, however, at the old battle 
 of the "rival cultures," may clear the way towards a 
 more adequate discussion of the subject. Whatever 
 used to be the case, in ancient academic haunts, 
 amongst a former race of teachers, half a century 
 ago, I am sure that now-a-days there is no dis- 
 paragement of Science, in the Universities of Great 
 Britain, or America, or the continent of Europe. 
 There is, on the contrary, quite as generous an 
 acknowledgment of the value of scientific culture, 
 and of the place of science in the curriculum of 
 a liberal education, by the humanists, as there is 
 a recognition of the value of letters, by the scientific 
 specialists. Nay, our modern scholarship is all 
 permeated by the scientific spirit. The Nineteenth 
 Century literary criticism is based upon scientific 
 methods of procedure. I think it is quite incorrect 
 to say as was said sometime ago by a very 
 distinguished scientific man that the " humanists 
 of the Nineteenth Century take their stand upon 
 classical study, as the sole avenue of culture, as 
 firmly as if we were still in the age of the Renais- 
 sance." I am not aware of any one in the most 
 conservative quarters, in the most mediaeval of 
 colleges, who does so ; and I question very much 
 if such a position is now maintained in the colleges 
 of the Roman Church.
 
 THE OVER-VALUATION OF SCIENCE 65 
 
 There is no fear of the under-valuation of 
 Science in our time. On the contrary, the risk 
 is all the other way ; and therefore while my 
 own attitude has always been, and will remain, a 
 catholic and cosmopolitan one inasmuch as one 
 of the two tendencies is invariably more domi- 
 nant than the other in every period, I do not 
 scruple to say that the over-valuation of science 
 may very easily become one of the intellectual 
 heresies of the future. 
 
 And by the term "heresy" I, of course, mean 
 nothing offensive ; but simply what the word itself 
 denotes, viz. a sectional or sectarian view of things. 
 Now, if one enters into this controversy with any 
 ardour, it is very difficult not to enter into it as 
 a partisan ; and, if one enters into it as a 
 partisan, he is almost sure to state the position 
 he wishes to refute somewhat unfairly. That is, 
 however, the bane of all controversy. Perhaps 
 the antidote may be found in a re-statement of 
 the problem from a fresh point of view. 
 
 One way of putting the question at issue 
 between the disputants is this. Is a knowledge 
 of any of the earlier forms of animal life on this 
 planet, say of the protozoa, more important to 
 mankind than a knowledge of the thoughts of 
 Plato and of Aristotle ; or, is a knowledge of the 
 laws of electricity more valuable to the race than 
 an initiation into the imaginative wealth of 
 Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Words- 
 worth ? To some that may seem an unfair way 
 
 E
 
 66 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 of stating the case ; but if it looks to them extreme, 
 I may restate it thus: "Is it more important for 
 man to know facts and laws, than to rise above 
 them into the realm of ideas?" 
 
 Now, the panegyrists of Science, who are 
 relatively the depreciators of Literature and Phil- 
 osophy, misconstrue the latter, when they do not 
 recognize anything in the universe that is verifiably 
 true except their own facts and laws. On that 
 view of things, literary and poetic culture is of 
 use mainly in so far as it is ornamental ; or as a 
 relief to the votary of knowledge, when he is tired 
 of the study of facts and laws. Perhaps the best 
 way of dealing with that view of the Universe is 
 to make our enquiry into the nature and methods 
 of scientific research more thorough, in other words, 
 to ascertain what it is that Science really does for 
 us ; so that we may be in a position to see if any- 
 thing else remains to be done for us, by another 
 agency, at the point where science leaves us, either 
 stranded or bewildered. 
 
 It is for this reason that I wish to discuss the 
 relations of Poetry to Science, and of Science to 
 Poetry, rather than to enter further into the claims 
 of scientific and literary culture ; because, if we 
 can vindicate for the two, i.e. for Poetry and Science, 
 a co-ordinate place and complementary function, 
 their respective merits, as contributing to universal 
 human culture, will be apparent. 
 
 Scientific knowledge is a knowledge of facts 
 
 o o 
 
 and laws. It is a knowledge of phenomena reduced
 
 THE SCIENTIFIC THEORY OF NATURE 67 
 
 to law, of causes related to their effects, and of 
 effects related to their causes. When anything 
 is known scientifically, it is known not as an isolated 
 fact or event, but in its relation to its antecedents 
 and its sequents. It is scientifically explained, when 
 that which gave rise to it, and that to which it 
 gave rise, is understood and explained. Science, 
 therefore, demands that all pre-suppositions, guesses, 
 and theories as to the causes of events must 
 be rigorously tested, first by inductive examination, 
 and next by subsequent experiment : and farther, 
 that all alleged facts must be scrutinized and 
 analyzed. One result of this scrutiny and analysis 
 will be that the points on which phenomena resemble 
 each other will be brought out, and that they 
 can then be arranged in departmental groups, or 
 classes. Their order, and their place in the system 
 of Nature, must be discerned and tested. In- 
 dividual phenomena can be explained by being 
 grouped together and reduced to law. Minor laws 
 can be taken up into major ones ; the final aim 
 of the scientific quest being the discovery of an 
 all-comprehending law, within which lesser ones 
 are embraced, and in which they finally disappear 
 from view. 
 
 Thus the scientific quest begins with individual 
 existences, and it does so by way of generalization, 
 advancing from a lower to a higher unity, precisely 
 as the area swept by it is extended. Each event 
 being, in the first instance, dealt with analytically, 
 by a process of scrutiny, and by the application
 
 68 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 of sundry tests so as to bring out its real meaning, 
 and to connect it with its antecedents and sequents 
 but this only prepares the way for a second 
 method of dealing with each isolated fact of 
 experience. 
 
 Every one of these isolated facts of experience 
 may be dealt with synthetically at the first ; that 
 is to say, each may yield us a point of departure, 
 from which we may pass at once through intuition 
 to that larger whole of which it is a part ; and 
 which it may either directly suggest, or indirectly 
 shadow forth, and may even at times reveal. In 
 other words, instead of being a dark point on 
 which the light of science must be turned to make 
 it intelligible, or to bring out its meaning it 
 may be a luminous point, which, by a flash of 
 suggestiveness, shews a meaning latent within it ; 
 connecting it, in its isolation and particularity, with 
 the vaster world of the unembodied. 
 
 Now, when any fact or event, any phenomenon 
 or occurrence, is regarded by us not in isolation, 
 as a link in the chain of things to be inspected 
 in detail catalogued, registered, and reduced to law 
 but as the passing embodiment of what transcends 
 itself, and as yielding as a point of departure toward 
 that larger unity (of which it is a fragment) it is 
 regarded no longer analytically, but synthetically ; 
 no longer scientifically, but poetically. The end 
 both of Poetry and of Science may be said to 
 be the attainment of unity, and the ultimate harmony 
 of the universe ; but whereas Science begins with
 
 METHODS OF INTERPRETING NATURE 69 
 
 detail, and works up to unity by generalization from 
 detail, Poetry rises to speak in a figure with 
 one sweep of wing, to the height whence the whole 
 variety of the Cosmos is seen embraced within 
 that "unity where no division is," after which 
 science laboriously toils. Poetic vision is intuitive, 
 and the unity it seeks is reached by " a fine sudden- 
 ness." It does not begin by analyzing and cata- 
 loguing things, taking inventories in detail, but it 
 carries us straight away, over all chasms, at a single 
 bound to unity. Furthermore, the unity to which 
 Science leads is the unity of law ; whereas the 
 unity to which Poetry conducts is the unity of 
 expression, or inward meaning. 
 
 Note, however, that in distinguishing scientific 
 from poetic insight, we distinguish two methods 
 of interrogating and interpreting Nature, which are 
 common to the whole race, and which have been 
 in operation from the very dawn of civilization. 
 It is not a distinction between methods, which 
 are the respective property of poets on the one 
 hand, and scientific specialists on the other. What 
 distinguishes the writer of poems from other men, 
 and what distinguishes the scientific discoverer from 
 the rude observer of Nature, is a most interesting 
 question. What is before us now is something 
 very different, viz., the distinction between that 
 poetic insight which is, or may be, common to 
 all men ; and the scientific insight which is open 
 to every one, although possessed in its supremacy 
 only by a few. It may easily be shewn that there
 
 70 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 are certain aspects of the Universe, phases of it, 
 which can be recognized adequately, or even 
 accurately, only by poetic vision ; and that there 
 are others, which can only be dealt with through 
 scientific investigation. 
 
 In illustration of this let us take any single 
 object, or group of objects, in Nature, e.g. the 
 starry heavens, a sunset, a flower, or a gem. 
 How does science deal with these things? In 
 answer we have the sciences of Astronomy, Meteor- 
 ology, Botany, and Mineralogy. But are the results 
 reached by these sciences exhaustive of the objects 
 with which they respectively deal ? Suppose that 
 you have become tolerably familiar with these 
 sciences, have they told you all about the objects 
 with which they are severally concerned ? 
 
 I think that almost every student of science, 
 in proportion to the thoroughness of his study, will 
 admit that there is a certain fragmentariness in 
 the department of knowledge with which he deals ; 
 and that, however satisfactory the results he may 
 reach in the way of discovery, it is unsatisfactory 
 to be confined to details, which he cannot connect 
 together, first in a unity which embraces them 
 along with other phenomena outside or beyond 
 them, and secondly, in a harmony which transcends 
 them all. 
 
 Now the point in which poetic vision has the 
 superiority over scientific insight is this. It con- 
 ducts us to a unity, which embraces the details of 
 the sciences within it. Take the four illustrations
 
 THE UNITY OF POETIC VISION 71 
 
 already mentioned. There is something common 
 to the starry heavens, the sunset, the flower, and 
 the gem. That common element within them all, 
 and pervading them, is the spirit of the beautiful 
 and the sublime. It is as real an aspect of Nature, 
 and as worthy of being known, as anything which 
 the four sciences of Astronomy, Meteorology, 
 Botany, and Mineralogy disclose. It manifests 
 itself in a vast variety of ways, but it is essentially 
 one underneath them all ; and it is a unity much 
 more easily discernible, and much more readily 
 grasped, than is the unity of Science. Each 
 separate object which awakens the feeling of the 
 Beautiful, opens as it were a door through which 
 we may pass to grasp this vast unity of Nature 
 The specialty of the disclosure which the separate 
 objects afford us is this, that it immediately carries 
 the contemplator far beyond himself, into the wide 
 and boundless realm of the infinitely beautiful. 
 
 It will be doubtless said by some, notwithstand- 
 ing of this as has already been said a score of 
 times that there can be no poetic interpretation 
 of Nature that is scientifically demonstrable. In 
 reply, the poet knows very well that he must carry 
 his own subjectivity along with him, into all his 
 interpretations of the external Universe. Less he 
 could not do, without ceasing to be a poet, or even 
 a man. He knows as one of the great fraternity 
 put it that an " auxiliar light" comes from the 
 mind, which "on the setting sun bestows new 
 splendour." He cannot help interpreting external
 
 72 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 Nature in the light of his own personality ; but 
 the poet, and all poetic minds, also know very well 
 that, in their most exalted moods of feeling, insight 
 is deeper than ecstasy ; and also that, in these 
 moods, one aspect of the universe is disclosed to 
 them which the logical intellect does not perceive 
 which cannot be discovered by the dry light of 
 Science, and with which Science cannot therefore 
 legitimately interfere. 
 
 It is true that this aspect of Nature is recog- 
 nizable, only in certain states of the percipient 
 mind ; and, therefore, the same object may appear 
 quite different to the individual at different times, 
 and still more so to persons of opposite tempera- 
 ment or idiosyncrasy. It is only in certain con- 
 ditions of the percipient subject that a discernment 
 of the true relation between Man and Nature is 
 possible ; and it is only under fixed conditions that 
 it is then realizable. It may be worth noting, 
 however, that the same thing is true of scientific 
 knowledge. That there is a relation of dependence 
 between the soul of man, and the objects which 
 call forth poetic feeling, and evoke poetic insight, 
 is as natural and necessary as is the relation be- 
 tween our intellectual faculties and the objects with 
 which they deal. 
 
 No one doubts that Nature appeals to us in 
 certain moods, in a totally different way from that 
 in which she becomes known when we investigate 
 her laws. She has done so from the dawn of 
 time ; and the story of the way in which this
 
 SCIENCE ANALYTIC, POETRY SYNTHETIC 73 
 
 appeal has been met is part of the literary history of 
 the world ; a most interesting chapter in the book 
 which records the evolution of humanity. Nay, 
 the record of the way in which Nature, in all her 
 aspects, has been regarded by Man throughout the 
 ages forms a large part of the history of human 
 civilization. We can trace it upwards and onwards 
 from the fear of the savage mind, crushed before 
 the might of Nature, to the gradual utilization of 
 the material world by the primitive colonist or 
 settler ; and we can see the latter slowly giving 
 place to the curiosity of the primitive investigator. 
 We find also that the primary idea of Nature, as 
 material substance distinct from Man, kept special 
 interest in it in the background ; but with the rise 
 of a deeper and truer Philosophy, which considered 
 Nature as a treasury of forces kindred to Man, 
 interest in Nature itself revived. In general it 
 may be said that, so long as nature was conceived 
 of as dead inanimate substance, it was regarded 
 prosaically, although to a certain extent scientific- 
 ally ; and, in so far as it was conceived of as living 
 force, it was regarded poetically. 
 
 This brings me back to the distinction between 
 the scientific and poetic tendency, as respectively 
 analytic and synthetic. The poet is not the analyst 
 of Nature, except in so far as he divines the secret 
 of certain of her more hidden aspects ; but he 
 apprehends her unity, as the oneness of the mani- 
 fold suggested to him by intuition. He does this, 
 by the exercise of no special gift which is his alone,
 
 74 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 but by the intense action of a power, which is 
 common to him and to the whole race. The 
 writer of poems the poetic artist is endowed 
 with keener, quicker, and finer perceptions than 
 other men, with greater sensibility of soul, and a 
 more delicate responsiveness to the ever changing 
 moods of Nature ; but so it is also in the poetic 
 moods of many who never write poems, but only 
 feel them and discern their truth. In our most 
 receptive assimilative and poetic moods, our per- 
 ceptions are keener, quicker, and finer than they 
 usually are. It is then that we are most respon- 
 sive to the direct touch of Nature. 
 
 But the scientific quest is never inconsistent 
 with poetic insight or aspiration. On the contrary, 
 it invariably aids the poet, by giving him new 
 points of departure. It does not lessen the glory 
 of the heavens to his eye, if he knows something 
 of Astronomy. It does not diminish his sense of 
 the mystic meaning of a flower, if he has learned 
 a little of Botany ; or his appreciation of a gem, 
 if he knows the laws of crystallization. Doubtless, 
 in the course of the scientific investigation, poetic 
 insight must be kept in the background. It cannot 
 be present when scientific analyses are being carried 
 on ; but this is merely due to the intellectual 
 necessity for some "division of labour," and be- 
 cause concentration on one phase or aspect of 
 Nature is always necessary to its successful pursuit. 
 At any and every point in the scientific process, 
 and during every pause in the analysis, poetic
 
 SCIENCE EXPRESSED IN POETRY 75 
 
 vision may and must come in, both to verify and 
 to interpret the results of Science. 
 
 I know that there are some scientific men, who 
 have the most vivid sense of the limits, as well as 
 of the range of their own sphere of knowledge, and 
 whose appreciation of poetry has been deepened by 
 the very consciousness of these limits. There are 
 others, however, like the late Mr Lewes, who wrote : 
 " How insignificant is the existence of a thousand 
 Ciceros in comparison with a single law of Nature ! " 
 
 No extension of the territories of Science can 
 ever push Poetry aside. The investigation of 
 phenomena, and the discovery of new laws, 
 invariably opens up fresh pathways for poetic 
 labour. " Out of the eater comes forth meat, and 
 from the destroyer sweetness." Science may 
 occasionally disenchant old poetic theories, and 
 change the character of our interpretation of 
 Nature ; but it can never supersede poetic work, 
 because the tendency of modern culture is not 
 towards uniformity, but rather towards an ever 
 increasing complexity. 
 
 Besides, a time comes, after the most brilliant 
 scientific discoveries are made, when their results 
 are best expressed in Poetry. It is well known that 
 poetry has often popularized Science, but poetry 
 has a far higher office than this. It is needed to 
 interpret the last results of science, because when we 
 have got all our facts and laws together, we need 
 an explanation of them different from that which 
 science gives us. I must try to unfold this further.
 
 76 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 The phenomena of Nature are not expression- 
 less. They have a language visible, audible, 
 sensible which their mere reduction to law does 
 not exhaust. And the deepest meaning both of 
 the phenomena and their laws is reached, not by 
 the analysis of understanding, but by the synthesis 
 of intuition. In other words, all phenomenal facts 
 are the signs, or symbols, of a reality which under- 
 lies them ; and it is through poetic insight, or 
 intuition, that we get a glimpse of the things which 
 they signify. It is somewhat remarkable that many 
 of the old Greek realists of Ionia and elsewhere, 
 who struck out new physical theories of the 
 Universe, wrote down their ideas through the 
 medium of poetry. So did Lucretius ; and the 
 physical theory of Pythagoras, Empedocles, and 
 many others, was expressed and embodied in a 
 poetic form. 
 
 It may even be said that every scientific dis- 
 covery becomes, in course of time, fit material for 
 poetic treatment. The theory of gravitation, the 
 atomic theory, the glacial theory, the theory of 
 evolution (in any of its forms) after they have been 
 elaborated by the understanding, and demonstrated 
 by a process of verification, after they have taken 
 their place in the great structure of scientific thought, 
 become just as any important national event, or any 
 great historical occurrence fit subjects for the poet 
 to deal with ; and he deals with them, not as a 
 recorder or chronicler, but as an interpreter. It is 
 thus that the creations of the poet have more
 
 NATURE'S LANGUAGE 
 
 77 
 
 individuality than those of the scientific investigator; 
 and are, in consequence, more durable in the form 
 in which they first arose. They are not superseded, 
 as theories of Nature are superseded, by being taken 
 up into the advancing current of the world's 
 scientific thought. The most brilliant discoveries 
 of Science are not only transcended, but they 
 disappear in the new ones which succeed, and re- 
 embody them ; but the great poems of the world 
 do not thus disappear. By this I do not mean that 
 scientific discoveries are forgotten, or that their dis- 
 coverers pass into oblivion ; but that the particular 
 frames of theory, in which scientific discoveries have 
 been for a time embodied, disappear inevitably. It 
 may be said that they are meant to disappear, when 
 others more complete take their place. 
 
 To put the case otherwise, scientific thought is 
 not individual, but general. Were it individual, or 
 personal, it would not be scientific. It would be 
 but the hypothesis of an individual mind ; and all 
 the individuality that enters into a scientific theory, 
 when it is first advanced, disappears and must 
 disappear so soon as the theory is taken up into 
 the permanent building of the science of the world. 
 There is nothing, for example, of the individuality 
 of Sir Isaac Newton in the theory of Gravitation 
 or of that of Charles Darwin in the theory of 
 Evolution. But one of the conditions of immortality 
 in any work of poetic genius is that it must be full 
 of the individuality of its author. It is the in- 
 dividuality of the Iliad, of the Divine Comedy, of
 
 78 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 Hamlet, of Paradise Lost, of Faust, of the lyrics of 
 Burns and Wordsworth, that is at once the source 
 of their charm, and the guarantee of their endurance. 
 It is thus that the prosaic facts with which Science 
 deals analytically become poetic, when looked at 
 not as they are in themselves, but as they are in 
 relation to that larger unity, which they suggest or 
 adumbrate. And while we get no exact knowledge 
 from the poetic interpretation of Nature, we never- 
 theless get a deeper kind of knowledge, because 
 it is more penetrative and suggestive, than anything 
 disclosed to us by the dry light of Science. This 
 may be put in a simple way by the half of an 
 illustration. 
 
 Suppose you are standing near the Falls of 
 Niagara on the Canadian shore, just at the edge 
 of the great Horse-shoe Fall, and looking right into 
 the heart of the mighty cauldron. There is perhaps 
 no spot in the world not excepting the grandest of 
 Alpine peaks or passes where Nature speaks more 
 significantly, both to the scientific and to the poetic 
 imagination. The geologist has much to learn from 
 Niagara, as to the way in which that great trough 
 through which the St Lawrence river descends to 
 lake Ontario has been cut out in the course of the 
 ages. Now, suppose that you could calculate, as 
 Sir Charles Lyell tried to do, the precise number of 
 millions of gallons of water precipitated over the fall 
 per minute, or the precise rate at which the fall is 
 annually receding, you would be adding something 
 to your store of scientific knowledge ; but, when you
 
 NIAGARA FALLS 79 
 
 had ascertained all the laws of matter and of motion, 
 which are so grandly illustrated at Niagara, how far 
 would you have got in the real interpretation of 
 Nature ? Suppose your inventory of all the natural 
 forces and phenomena at work to be complete, and 
 that you had reduced the whole within the domain 
 of Science, you would be as yet only at the threshold 
 of the interpretation of Nature ; and the poet, or 
 even your own aesthetic insight, could carry you 
 much further in one direction, even without the 
 science. 
 
 Suppose yourself standing where the whole 
 volume of water from the Rapids above comes 
 plunging forward ; and those great unbroken ridges 
 of green water hasten and bound forward, till they 
 strike the underlying rocks, and are tossed into 
 sheets of dazzling spray. You see the broad 
 volume of the river at the crest of the precipice 
 where the column of solid water is estimated to be 
 over thirty feet in thickness, and where it is over 
 two thousand feet in breadth. The green of the 
 upper current shades into a rich amber colour at the 
 base, produced by the rock behind, till it breaks 
 away in a single sheet of snow, and goes down into 
 the unsunned abyss ; whence rise the most delicate 
 wreaths of spray, that are whirled by the wind into 
 forms of aery loveliness, and tossed a thousand feet 
 into the sky, through which as a thin gauze veil 
 the sunlight streams. What gives its specialty to 
 Niagara is, I think, the peculiar transparency both 
 of the water, and of those wreaths of spray that
 
 8o POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 float up from the great cauldron, as natural incense 
 skywards. And what it awakens in a sympathetic 
 beholder is not a feeling of the beauty, or even the 
 sublimity of Nature, but of its glory. No other 
 word is adequate to express it. And if you add all 
 the suggestions of multitudinous force and resistless 
 energy, of continuity and patience, of serenity and 
 repose allied to strength, and the marvellous music 
 of the Fall the harmony of all the different notes 
 that ascend for ever from that natural orchestra, 
 who will venture to say that those suggestions, 
 given forth by Nature at such a place, are to be 
 set down as the mere idealizations of the mind that 
 contemplates them, and not rather as disclosures of 
 what lies within the physical framework, and behind 
 the barrier of her laws. 
 
 The illustration might be made more effective 
 for the present purpose by combining it with those 
 revelations of Nature one occasionally meets with 
 amid the high Alps of Europe, but one is as good 
 as a hundred. And not even on Monte Rosa or the 
 Matterhorn at daybreak, when the saffron and rosy 
 lights of sunrise touched the snowfields with 
 inexpressible loveliness, have I felt the apocalypse of 
 Nature so rich as at the stupendous fall of Niagara. 
 You cannot get away from it ; you are magnetized 
 and spell-bound by it. 
 
 And now I wish to ask whether the disclosure of 
 the heart of Nature, occasionally made to us in the 
 presence of such objects as the European Alps or 
 Niagara, is not as far-reaching as the knowledge
 
 THE REAL AND THE IDEAL 81 
 
 which Science yields us. I do not ask which of the 
 two interpretations is the higher, although I have my 
 own belief upon the subject ; but there is no use in 
 arguing whether the scientific interpretation or the 
 poetic vision of Nature is the deeper of the two, 
 because each appeals more strongly to the mind 
 that is constitutionally most in sympathy with it. 
 
 It is enough if they are seen to be co-ordinate. 
 The knowledge of Nature which we get from 
 Science is precise, definite, and clear ; but it limits 
 us by its precision, its definiteness, and its clearness. 
 It fixes us among details. It detains, and some- 
 times hampers us, by a sense of arrestment. Poetic 
 vision, on the contrary, gives us hints and sugges- 
 tions of infinity. Opening up tracks which it does 
 not pursue, but in which it leaves us to range at 
 will, it invariably gives freedom, life, and move- 
 ment. 
 
 Thus we may say in general that Science deals 
 with the real, and tends to make its students 
 realistic to the core ; while Poetry rises to the ideal, 
 and tends to raise its disciples more and more into 
 the idealistic sphere. It lifts us above the actual, 
 out of the region of mere facts events and laws, 
 which is on the whole a prosaic region ; but it does 
 not carry us, as in a balloon, into cloudland. We 
 do not take with it an aerial voyage into the mist, 
 when we forsake the comparatively level road of 
 scientific law. We pass, by poetic imagination, 
 into a higher world of knowledge ; and we find that 
 
 when we have entered into this ideal sphere we are 
 
 F
 
 82 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 nearer to reality, to the very core of existence, to 
 the " last clear elements of things," than when we 
 are fumbling amongst phenomena, or trudging along 
 the lines of mere mechanical sequence. 
 
 Then, I must remark that the poetic or ideal 
 interpretation of Nature, and the Universe which 
 is the complement and supplement to its scientific 
 interpretation comes out quite as much in the 
 construction of the great ideal Philosophies, as in 
 the great Poems of the world. It is seen quite 
 as much in the philosophy of Plato and Plotinus, 
 of Erigena, of Descartes, of Spinoza, Kant, and 
 Hegel, as it appears in the sEneid, The Canter- 
 bury Tales, in King Lear, in the Intimations of 
 Immortality, or in In Memoriam. 
 
 We may perhaps get some further light on 
 this subject, when we combine what has been 
 already stated with the larger idea that all the 
 knowledge we acquire by Science comes primarily 
 from without although, to convert the reports 
 that reach us from without into knowledge proper, 
 the mind must exert its own a priori power of 
 arranging, comparing, grouping, classifying 
 whereas the source or spring of the knowledge 
 we attain by poetic intuition lies within the soul 
 itself. The more knowledge we get from without, 
 the more is the mind of the knower dominated by 
 it, I might even say subdued by it. But poetic 
 intuition, which rises out of the depths of the soul 
 and passes outwards, interpreting the scroll of 
 Nature, does not dominate over us, as Science
 
 BALANCE BETWEEN POETRY AND SCIENCE 83 
 
 does. It rather liberates us, and shows us that 
 mind if not superior to matter is at any rate 
 co-ordinate with it. 
 
 Poetry is thus continually restoring the balance 
 between Man and Nature, which a one-sided 
 Science is incessantly disturbing. Furthermore, 
 the poetic glance, which pierces to the root of 
 things, and is interpretative of that vast Reality 
 which underlies all the shews of sense, rises from 
 the actual to the ideal. Ever aspiring though not 
 restless, its very existence and uprise within us is 
 a sign that the actual is, and must be, unsatisfying ; 
 and so, it takes a constant although a calm and 
 steady flight towards the ideal, at once above and 
 within the actual. I think that Poetry may be 
 regarded thus, in its noblest and deepest aspect, 
 as the flight of the human soul beyond the realm 
 of fact and law ; not a lawless flight for one of 
 our own poets has told us that "nothing is that 
 errs from law " but as an expression of human 
 effort to get beyond, and to rise above, the 
 dominion of mere facts or events, in their law-ruled 
 manifestations and phases. Its outcome is one 
 evidence and perhaps the highest expression of 
 the craving of the human soul for liberty, for 
 emancipation from the fetters of custom, from the 
 tyranny of tradition, from the weight of precedent, 
 from the slavery of use and wont : in other words, 
 it testifies to the perpetual need of fresh air, and 
 for those aerial voyages of the imagination, which, 
 starting from the real, rise to the ideal.
 
 84 POETRY AND SCIENCE 
 
 If, therefore, in reference to the emancipation 
 of the human intellect, modern Science can say, 
 "With a great price obtained I this freedom "- 
 the price of ages of misrepresentation, miscon- 
 struction, obloquy, and also of struggle with re- 
 pression from many quarters Poetry may reply 
 to her younger sister in the words, " But I was 
 free-born " : I was never in bondage to any of the 
 facts or laws, which it is your function to in- 
 vestigate. 
 
 It is one of the happiest signs of our time 
 which is an era of extreme diffusion rather than 
 concentration of culture, when knowledge is 
 " running to and fro," and influencing unexpected 
 quarters that the old estrangements, intellectual 
 moral and social, which our forefathers felt so keenly 
 while labouring in different spheres of effort, are 
 giving place to a more generous recognition of 
 the worth of every branch of human culture, to 
 a more genuine appreciation of the results obtained 
 in each one of them, and of the merit of each 
 worker who has contributed the smallest share to 
 the result.
 
 V 
 THE UNSEEN ROOT OF ETHICS 
 
 AN ingenious set of writers maintain that Ethics 
 is a wholly mundane science, that its basis lies in 
 the simple facts of individual and social experience, 
 that it requires no more and can attain to nothing 
 higher, that outward authoritative law is not only 
 unnecessary but is deceptive and pernicious, and 
 that, in the mere impulses of our collective humanity, 
 intellectual, emotional, and voluntary -- each oi 
 these controlling the action of the rest we find 
 the true and the only root of duty. I wish to 
 deal with this doctrine of dynamic force, accumu- 
 lated in the individual, stored up there as the 
 result of heredity, asserting itself in various ways, 
 demanding realization, and pressing outwards from 
 within. This glorification of impulse is a complete 
 reversal of what has been the dominant note in 
 the higher ethical thought of the world, although 
 it is an old and familiar theory. Its advocates 
 try to prove that the notions of law and duty, 
 of absolute Imperatives, of external rules and 
 commandments emanating from a moral source or 
 centre, must all give place to the action and
 
 86 THE UNSEEN ROOT OF ETHICS 
 
 reaction of those impulses, which alternately rise 
 and fall within human nature ; and that, if our 
 Ethics are to be scientific, every idea of obligation 
 must be discarded, and all metaphysical or theo- 
 logical law put aside as unverifiable, and quite 
 useless in practice. 
 
 The question has often been discussed can 
 the laws of morality survive the complete decay 
 of religious belief? It was argued with much 
 acuteness, and from several points of view, in one 
 of the modern intellectual "symposia," carried on 
 in the columns of The Nineteenth Century twenty- 
 four years ago, by Sir James Stephen, Lord 
 Selborne, Dr Martineau, Mr Frederick Harrison, 
 the Duke of Argyle, Professor Clifford and others. 
 The controversy was interesting, but I do not 
 purpose to return to it now. I prefer to deal 
 with the ethics of a brilliant Frenchman recently 
 deceased, M. Guyau, who held that the ideas both 
 of external and internal law must be entirely laid 
 aside by us, that all the ancient sanctions of 
 morality are incorrect, and that the subjective 
 forces of character, intellectual emotional and 
 voluntary, are our only rule, the sole guide of 
 life. Morality he taught would be more secure, 
 and would continue to rule mankind not only when 
 religion was a fossil, but when all ideas of law, 
 order and sanction, the "imperatives" of duty, 
 were extinct. Nay, the overthrow of the very 
 notion of obligation he considered an indispensable 
 preliminary to the morals of the future. The
 
 THE MORAL DYNAMIC 87 
 
 structures reared by our predecessors on these 
 great questions had all to be levelled with the 
 dust ; and our ancient ethical houses having been 
 demolished, a new one was to be reared on the 
 facts of experience and on these alone. 
 
 In his introduction M. Guyau criticizes the 
 different attempts made in six separate ways, to 
 justify obligation from the physical point of view. 
 He then discusses the motive force of morality 
 from a scientific point of view ; and maintains that 
 as intensity of life is the chief force at work in 
 the world, the highest intensity demands the 
 greatest expansion. He finds that the root of 
 obligation lies in the sense of inward power or 
 capacity. This is the true moral dynamic, the 
 real spring of conduct a purely earthborn impulse. 
 But it is an impulse that tends away from the in- 
 dividual toward others, and is therefore not selfish. 
 No obligation calls it forth. It is not prescribed 
 by law. It simply flows forth from the individual 
 toward others. Absolute duty is an illusion, all 
 "categorical imperatives" deceive us. 
 
 Furthermore, there is no aim or purpose dis- 
 cernible in Nature, only the everlasting flux of 
 Heraclitus. Hence there is no immortality for 
 man. No life can survive, because all life is in- 
 dividuation for a time, which prepares the way for 
 new individuation, and further change. Since there 
 is no absolute rule of right, the laws of conduct 
 may be quite different in other worlds from what 
 they are here. A different kind of energy may
 
 88 THE UNSEEN ROOT OF ETHICS 
 
 be demanded on a different planet It is in the 
 particular contingent things we have to do in 
 this world, and in their relation to what surrounds 
 us, that the morality of our action lies ; and not in 
 any abstract or formal obligation to act. 
 
 Having set aside the universal imperatives 
 of Zeno and Kant, Guyau discards with equal 
 emphasis every moral law based on or derived 
 from theological ideas, and all obligations which 
 are supposed to spring from an inward sense of 
 duty. It is a mere superstition, quite as bad as 
 idol worship, to reverence any duty arising from 
 within. Putting all these aside, the intellectual 
 and ethical room being cleared of lumber, Guyau 
 proceeds to fill it with new contents. Here it may 
 be allowed he is more successful, although the facts 
 he adduces are not new, and are all consistent 
 with the truth of the theories he discards. He 
 starts with the fact that each individual has to 
 pursue ends determined by his organization, and 
 his ancestry, all of which tend to unity. The aim 
 of the individual is "to maintain and enlarge his 
 life," life in its most intense and manifold forms. 
 That is the ultimate law of every living thing. 
 
 Now this, like so many other supposed novelties, 
 is not new. It can scarcely be distinguished from 
 the great Aristotelic law of unimpeded energy ; 
 although, the "enlarged hygiene" of modern 
 science may have helped humanity to extend the 
 range of its activities. Starting from this, the 
 moral end for man, according to Guyau, is mere
 
 INADEQUATE ETHICAL THEORIES 89 
 
 activity of every possible kind. All kinds are 
 good, if they leave room for others. There is 
 in each one of us a vast store of undeveloped 
 individual capacity, of conscious life and uncon- 
 scious power, which should have some outlet or 
 manifestation. It should pass away from self to 
 others. Hence selfishness cannot be the true 
 basis of morals. The individual cannot remain 
 an isolated unit ; his nature must tend toward 
 that of others, and this secures enlargement of life 
 and its multiplication. Guyau traces it in its 
 threefold forms of fecundity of mind, fecundity of 
 emotion, and fecundity of will. 
 
 But what is the corollary of this? If impulse 
 is the root of Ethics and the highest morality is 
 the fullest manifestation of every phase of intellect 
 emotion and will, the only restraint coming from 
 the action and reaction of these surging and 
 warring forces -- nothing can be validly con- 
 demned that has ever emerged on the field of 
 history. Every force requires the presence of 
 its opposite, and universal war being the law of 
 the world, the most gigantic crimes might be 
 justified. Guyau saw this, and not only were the 
 acts of the Caesars and of Napoleon justified to him 
 by their results ; but, from the fact that the forces 
 were there, the inner impulses had their justification 
 in their very outcome. " To upset the surface of 
 the world," as Guyau put it, "with the object of 
 impressing their mark upon it," would be quite 
 justifiable to the men of mighty will ; and it would
 
 9 o THE UNSEEN ROOT OF ETHICS 
 
 be useless to tell them that they had ignored the 
 parallel forces of reason and feeling, because they 
 might reply, "We have them not," "They are not 
 ours " ; and all that the moralist of the Guyau type 
 could say in reply would be this, " You are a maimed 
 individual, not so richly rounded into harmony as 
 others are, because you have not been social." 
 
 This is the rock on which M. Guyau's theory 
 surfers shipwreck. His maxim is "to have the 
 power to act is to be obliged to act." " I can, there- 
 fore I must." Could Nero then be blamed, or any 
 other incarnate fiend who has ever possessed the 
 power ? If, " to feel within you the greatest that 
 you are capable of doing " be " really the con- 
 sciousness of what it is your duty to do," it is 
 inevitable that the still small voice of duty will 
 be silenced by the loud clamour of passion and 
 of crime. It is true, and was nobly said by Guyau, 
 that life can maintain itself only on the condition 
 of diffusing itself, but what is to teach the in- 
 dividual this altruism ? and the necessary restraint 
 upon himself which it implies ? Is it to come only 
 from the inflow and the outflow of impulse ? Is 
 the magnet to be found within the personality of 
 others ? or, is the dynamic power to emanate from 
 a source that is above as well as beyond, and yet 
 within the individual ? 
 
 And now I reach "the Unseen Root of Ethics." 
 It seems to me that those moralists are right who 
 tell us that, underlying the ethical sphere is that of 
 Religion ; Religion, not conventionally understood,
 
 THE UNIVERSAL WILL 91 
 
 but in the sense in which a great poet realized it, 
 when he spoke of Duty as the 
 
 Stern daughter of the voice of God. 
 
 I agree with those who say that Ethics must 
 survive, that the eternal laws of conduct will remain 
 unassailable, even although Religion be for a time 
 discarded ; or at least those forms in which it has 
 occasionally clothed itself. But I not only find in 
 Religion the goal of Ethics and its crown, but also 
 and we must both think and speak by the help 
 of metaphor its root. 
 
 That root is for the most part wholly unseen. 
 Its presence is unconscious to the individual. The 
 root does not come into visible display, while the 
 stem and the branches are to be seen growing on 
 the tree of human life ; but it is always present, 
 universal and aboriginal ; else the root, stem, and 
 branches could neither exist nor flourish. It is 
 the existence of the Universal Will, that is " in us 
 yet not of us," at one and the same time our 
 highest self in its highest manifestation and exercise, 
 and the supreme authoritative Lawgiver within us 
 that is the root of Ethics. Obviously the notions 
 we entertain as to the nature of the Universe in 
 which we live must have a definite bearing on our 
 theory of conduct, and on the rules of life which 
 we adopt. If we believe that this world is ruled 
 by two adverse powers of light and darkness, or 
 that it is intrinsically a realm of evil, our conduct 
 is certain to be different from what it will be if we
 
 92 THE UNSEEN ROOT OF ETHICS 
 
 believe it to be pervaded by, and to be under the 
 direction of a single beneficent Power. 
 
 It is therefore evident that morality is influenced 
 by religious belief, while the practices of the race 
 have invariably suffered from its deterioration or 
 decline. That is a historical fact which cannot be 
 gainsaid. On the other hand, the sense of duty, 
 the conviction that we are under law, is inherent in 
 our constitution, indigenous to it, and imperative in 
 its utterances, although not unvarying in its verdicts. 
 I believe that we find the explanation of the fact 
 that human nature is " under authority," only in 
 the existence of an extra-human, extra-mundane 
 Presence, which, as the Hebrews put it, " besets 
 us before and behind, and lays its hand upon us." 
 
 Let us suppose that the adult morality of the 
 world has arisen from obscure sources, that it 
 has grown out of the rudimentary guesses of our 
 ancestors, we are surely bound to take the latest 
 and the highest not the earliest and the crudest 
 as our leading guide ; while we cannot place all of 
 them on the same level of importance. Some 
 one has said that morals are " anonymous in their 
 origin " ; another, that they are autochthonous ; 
 a third, that there are "no azoic" (i.e. lifeless) 
 "rocks in the sphere of ethics." The anonymity 
 may be conceded, if the source whence the relatively 
 mature products of to-day have come, be a real 
 and living fountain-head ; and if it be admitted 
 that we have some light as to its characteristics. 
 But, if we are entirely ignorant as to our whence
 
 THE APOCALYPSE OF GOD 93 
 
 and whither, the rules of action which happen 
 to sway us at any particular period, being provisional 
 and transient ones, can have very little authority. 
 
 I am of opinion that the laws of conduct are 
 indigenous to Human Nature, only because that 
 nature is a mirror of the Divine ; or to use more 
 ancient and accustomed words because man exists 
 " in the image of God." But the discernment 
 of this underlying element in our moral conscious- 
 ness, which unites the finite with the Infinite, and 
 connects the individual with the All, is not always 
 possible. It is a rare apocalypse. The speculative 
 warrant of our highest truths comes to us only 
 when we are on the mountain-tops of evidence ; 
 but, then and there it is that we are able to tran- 
 scend the boundaries of Time and Space, to 
 get beyond phenomena, and to " see into the life 
 of things." The Divine within the human is the 
 unseen root of Ethics, the " suppressed premiss " 
 of all our higher life, and without it we drift on 
 the vague ocean of moral probability, without 
 rudder chart or compass. Thus it seems to me 
 that the first thing which comes into the ethical 
 sphere from one above it, and which having 
 entered in, becomes its root is the belief in an 
 infinite moral Source which is divine ; and the 
 second is an ethical corollary of the first, viz. 
 the lasting issues of our conduct here ; in other 
 words, the immortality of the individual. When 
 these twin convictions are absent, both the root 
 and the superstructure of morality are changed.
 
 VI 
 
 THE CORRELATION OF THE MORAL 
 FORCES 
 
 IN discussing the question of the correlation of 
 the moral forces, I start from what may be assumed 
 as a demonstrated doctrine, viz., the convertibility 
 of the physical ones. The interchangeability of 
 these forces is one of the conclusions of modern 
 science, equal in importance to the doctrine of 
 Evolution to which it is closely kindred and 
 equal in evidence to the law of Gravitation. 
 
 The first question I put is this : Is it legitimate 
 to infer, from the above scientific axiom, the con- 
 vertibility of all force ? and, from the unity of 
 the material and the mental forces, their ultimate 
 identity ? 
 
 In answer, I think it is not : for the obvious 
 reason that the chasm between the physical and 
 the vital has not yet been bridged by Science ; 
 and although Speculative Philosophy has tried 
 from the time of the Eleatics to throw a plank 
 across it, in its doctrine of unity-minus-difference, 
 neither Parmenides nor Plotinus, neither Erigena
 
 REALMS OF FORCE 95 
 
 nor Spinoza nor Hegel (to take representative 
 names from successive schools and periods), has 
 proved to the satisfaction of the philosophical world 
 that monism of this type is the last word in 
 Metaphysics. I therefore set aside the question 
 as to whether the physical, the vital, and the 
 conscious forces can be unified. Embraced within 
 a single category of thought, and labelled by the 
 common name of " Force,' they can, of course, 
 be easily talked of as one ; but there certainly 
 remains a fundamental trinity within that unity, 
 and it is enough for my present purpose to say 
 that the question both as a scientific and as a 
 ontological one is still sub judice. 
 
 Let us, then, provisionally assume without 
 going into either the metaphysics or the physics of 
 the controversy that there are three realms of 
 force, which have not yet been reduced to unity 
 by the rigour of speculative reason, or by the ex- 
 periential and inductive proofs of science : (i) the 
 sphere of the physical forces, which are all inter- 
 related, and convertible inter se ; (2) the realm of 
 the vital force or forces ; and (3) the sphere of self- 
 conscious and volitional force, in which intellectual 
 elements blend with moral ones. Let us suppose 
 that there is no discovered track, which is also a 
 transit-path, between these several realms or 
 spheres ; but only the bridge of a common name. 
 What may be suggested as highly probable is 
 this : that as, in the first of the three spheres, the 
 doctrine of interchangeability is now almost as
 
 96 CORRELATION OF MORAL FORCES 
 
 clearly demonstrated as is the law of natural 
 selection, it may be concluded, by analogy, that it 
 is the same in the two other realms ; and, there- 
 fore, that all life is radically and organically one, 
 and that all self-conscious energy mental, moral, 
 and volitional is, at its root, the same. 
 
 Adequately to discuss the first of these corol- 
 laries, one would require to be familiar with data, 
 on which only experts have a right to speak. The 
 question of the germ-theory of life, and of disease, 
 must be left to specialists in biology and physics. 
 The problem now raised is much narrower. It 
 refers to the sphere of consciousness alone, or, 
 perhaps, it should rather be said, to the field 
 of Human Nature alone. Within that sphere, 
 there are both conscious and sub-conscious states ; 
 and, in the field of consciousness, there may 
 be a further limitation of the problem, viz., to 
 the moral area of experience. Within this sub- 
 section, we may examine the springs of conduct 
 seriatim, and their outcome in character : that we 
 may see whether they are originally one howso- 
 ever different their developed phases may be, and 
 whether we may conclude that they are all con- 
 vertible inter se. 
 
 In discussing it, it is scarcely necessary to say 
 that the old notion of " faculties" as separate powers 
 of human nature, is given up by every modern 
 psychologist. It was a convenient way of naming 
 and differentiating certain aspects of energy in con- 
 sciousness, to speak of them as faculties; but the
 
 INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL POWERS 97 
 
 idea of our being endowed with separate and in- 
 dependent powers of sense, memory, imagination, 
 reason, feeling, and will is no longer tenable. 
 
 It is more congenial work, however, to try to 
 raise the down-trodden reputation of a discarded 
 theory and to shew the truth from which it sprang 
 than, in a combative mood, to expose the error 
 to which it gave rise ; and this old doctrine of the 
 faculties was only a pictorial, and somewhat 
 picturesque, way of stating an undoubted truth in 
 reference to those phases of activity, which differ 
 so greatly in their outcome, although their origin 
 may be the same. Whether the intellectual and 
 the moral powers are one at their root, and have 
 grown out of something wholly unlike their present 
 state, is a question we need not raise. It might 
 rather enhance the wonder of their origin, than 
 detract from their present greatness, if we had 
 valid evidence that there was but one "rock 
 whence they were hewn," and one "pit out of 
 which they were dug " ; since, in their present 
 multitudinousness and variety, they are the phases 
 of a single ego, which is the residuum at the basis 
 of all energy in man. This, however, would not 
 prove their interchangeability. The determination 
 of the latter question is one both for Psychology 
 and for Metaphysic : and perhaps its solution will 
 be easier, after we have settled the minor question 
 of the interchangeability of the moral forces, and 
 the unity of the realm to which these forces 
 belong.
 
 9 8 CORRELATION OF MORAL FORCES 
 
 It is not necessary, with a view to its solution, 
 that we have a list of the several virtues, drawn 
 out on perfectly adequate psychological lines. We 
 may take any list the Platonic, the Aristotelian, 
 the Stoic, the Zoroastrian, the Buddhist, the 
 Christian or a perfectly miscellaneous one, such 
 as the following Courage, Temperance, Candour, 
 Liberality, Friendship, Magnanimity, Honour, Jus- 
 tice, Courtesy, Tenderness, Chivalry, Humility, 
 Grace. It would be quite possible to go on 
 dividing and sub-dividing, or mingling and inter- 
 changing the virtues, till we had instead of those 
 mentioned ten times their number ; and yet each 
 would seem different from the rest, owing to the 
 circumstances in which it has to be exercised, or 
 the objects which respectively call it forth. Thus 
 diverse in character and outcome, they may never- 
 theless be all one in origin, the varying phases of 
 a single virtue in its separate modes of manifesta- 
 tion ; just as the chemical and physical forces- 
 heat, light, electricity, etc. are the separate modes 
 of a single protean power. 
 
 In helping us to answer the question now raised, 
 the evolution of the moral sense, within historical 
 experience, is an all-important element. It has 
 been affirmed that all the virtues which have 
 arisen are the result of the efforts of man to in- 
 crease and multiply his own resources, and the 
 resources and possibilities of his race ; self-main- 
 tenance, and race-maintenance in the wildest and 
 richest sense of the terms having been the motive
 
 EVERY VIRTUE EXHAUSTS ITSELF 99 
 
 forces at work in the evolution of his powers, and 
 therefore in the gradual deferentiation of his 
 faculties. If this be a warrantable position to 
 take up, it will abolish the controversy between 
 the egoists and the altruists, by vindicating each ; 
 and by shewing that both tendencies the centri- 
 petal and the centrifugal were at work from the 
 first, under many disguises and aliases. 
 
 It may be noted that the want of any explicit 
 link of connection between the developed products, 
 or the wide chasm which may seem to separate 
 them now, is no evidence against a common 
 parentage. Suppose that one particular virtue has 
 been in active exercise for a time or that the 
 generic virtue of self-maintenance and race-main- 
 tenance has been working in one particular channel 
 it is inevitable that it must intermit its energy 
 for a period. Every virtue exhausts itself, by its 
 very activity and strength. In fact, it is never quite 
 the same, during any two successive moments of 
 experience ; and when it reasserts itself, after 
 temporary rest, it does so with the alliance of 
 other elements, which it has received both by in- 
 heritance and by contagion. It therefore appears, 
 of necessity, in a different guise from that which it 
 formerly assumed. Not only is the same virtue 
 supposing the virtues to be separate and independent 
 changed in character at each new period in which 
 it is exercised, so that e.g. Courage, Temperance, 
 and Courtesy differ in a boy, in a young man, in 
 one in middle life, and in an old man ; but when
 
 ioo CORRELATION OF MORAL FORCES 
 
 the virtues reappear in the field of consciousness, 
 they come back blent with many elements that 
 were not there before. They are inevitably altered 
 " for better for worse, for richer for poorer." The 
 distant inheritances of character which reach us 
 from paternal and maternal sources shew them- 
 selves, now in this peculiarity of action or de- 
 meanour, and again in that ; but it is always the 
 same moral ego that is developing, and differen- 
 tiating itself, in these successive experiences. 
 
 As a new element in the case we must not 
 overlook the sudden, and curiously strong, reactions 
 that occur in moral experience. How are we to 
 explain these ? The rapid development of a 
 virtue, which seems the opposite of all that had 
 gone before it, in the character which exemplifies 
 the change ; e.g. a selfish nature becoming 
 generous, or a cynic hopeful, or a sot com- 
 paratively temperate. It is not that the old 
 tendency has wrought itself out, and satiety 
 followed, determining reaction the other way ; it 
 is rather that a reaction in experience, and a return 
 to a truer and healthier view of conduct, prove that 
 the underlying force in character is one and the 
 same. 
 
 In this connection it should be noted that 
 ethical lessons are very seldom taught directly. 
 A certain result is produced, by passing through 
 an ordeal which has been keen or arrowy say a 
 great disaster, or an experience of wrong. Its 
 effect may at first be unperceived, because it is
 
 DESTRUCTIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE AGENCIES 101 
 
 occult and subterranean, working inward ; but the 
 original moral force may reappear afterwards as 
 a new virtue of a totally different kind as distinct 
 as light is from heat, or as both are from electricity. 
 
 It is too obvious to require illustration that, 
 given a moral agent, with a certain character and 
 subject to certain conditions, a particular class 
 of virtues will be evolved ; and that, given the 
 same agent, with the same character and different 
 conditions, a different set of virtues will be evolved. 
 If this be admitted as a matter of fact, the corollary 
 is that the motive force, which in the main regulates 
 conduct, and differentiates the virtues, comes from 
 within ; and that, this dynamic source or seat of 
 the virtues being one, the virtues themselves may 
 be traced back on the last analysis to a common 
 root. 
 
 Another point to be noticed is that destructive 
 agencies are at work in the moral world, which 
 are correlated with the productive or constructive 
 ones, to further the general weal. This suggests, 
 remotely if not nearly, the unity of the virtues. 
 Every one knows how elaborate are the con- 
 trivances in the realm of Nature to inflict pain, 
 injury, ruin, and death, among the organisms 
 underneath man. But this arrangement, by which 
 
 Nature, red in tooth and claw, 
 
 destroys its weaker physical specimens, is paralleled 
 in the equally elaborate plan by which the weaker 
 members of the human race are crushed aside,
 
 io2 CORRELATION OF MORAL FORCES 
 
 after much suffering, defeat, neglect, and loss. It 
 is part of a destructive process, operative in the 
 cosmos, and which has probably always existed 
 in it. Alongside of this, however, there is a 
 constructive process at work a strictly conserva- 
 tive force, sometimes evolved out of the other 
 by reaction. This new force enters the arena, 
 " not to destroy, but to fulfil " ; but, whilst it does 
 so, its mode of working seems an evidence of the 
 unity of all the moral forces, of their interchange- 
 ability, and almost of their ubiquity. 
 
 The doctrine of the unity of the virtues is an 
 old one in the literature of Philosophy. Its germs 
 are to be found in the Vedas, and in Buddhism. 
 It became explicit in the Zend-Avesta. Zoroaster 
 unified the good and the evil principles, in two 
 great areas, or diametrically-opposed spheres of 
 action. Socrates to pass over earlier Greek 
 writers held that all virtue was one, and had 
 its root in knowledge ; while the Cynics, and the 
 Stoics, more emphatically, announced the same 
 theory. In Stoicism the doctrine exploded in a 
 series of paradoxes, such as that if a man possessed 
 a single virtue he possessed all the virtues. Virtue 
 to the Stoics was an indivisible, homogeneous, 
 inelastic, organic whole. Either you had it all, 
 or you had it not at all. There was no state 
 half-way between a virtue and a vice, and no 
 middle place between no virtue and all the virtues. 
 Rudimentary, developing, and evolving virtue was 
 not understood by the Stoics ; and, in consequence,
 
 ETHICS OF STOICISM 103 
 
 there were no " degrees of comparison " in their 
 view of moral excellence. Hence the arbitrary 
 division of mankind into two classes, as sharply 
 marked as in the ethics of Zoroaster ; and hence 
 the further paradox that the good do nothing evil, 
 and the bad do nothing good ; that all good actions 
 are equally good, all evil ones equally evil no 
 distinction between faults and crimes being recog- 
 nized. In short, there was no scale in Stoicism, 
 either of virtue or of vice. But, with this for- 
 gotten scale recognized, the truth out of which the 
 Stoic paradoxes sprang must not be forgotten ; 
 and, if adequately understood, this ancient doctrine 
 of the unity of the virtues, and their convertibility, 
 may be one of the most powerful incentives to 
 their pursuit in the modern world. If one may 
 legitimately believe that the moral excellence, after 
 which he strives in vain, is nevertheless an integral 
 element in the nature he inherits, and therefore 
 a latent possibility of his life only requiring the 
 removal of existing hindrance^ and the presence of 
 some magnet, to draw them forth there is a large 
 amount of good cheer in the prospect. The 
 possibility of dormant virtues springing into 
 activity, or of dull ones being quickened by 
 transference, adds a new interest to the moral 
 life, and its aspiration after unrealized ideals. 
 
 The evidence which experience gives of the 
 indestructibility of the moral forces tends towards 
 the same result. No morally good act ever dies. 
 It perpetuates itself, in other forms, as well as
 
 104 CORRELATION OF MORAL FORCES 
 
 after its own likeness. As Browning represents 
 Abt Vogler saying : 
 
 There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live as 
 
 before ; 
 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good, shall be good ; with, for evil, so much good 
 
 more. 
 
 The correlation of the moral forces may thus 
 be seen, in personal experience ; but the same 
 conclusion may be reached from a study of the 
 way in which they operate in society at large. If 
 moral life in the individual be fundamentally and 
 organically one, it is so a fortiori in society ; where 
 many units combine to forward the general weal, 
 by co-operation and inter-communication. All the 
 social forces are solidaires. The energy which 
 enthusiasts possess, in collectively working out a 
 great cause, is just the sum of the energy of the 
 individuals who compose the group ; but whilst 
 they combine to effect a common end, they all 
 differ inter se. The moral force at work in the 
 organization is composite ; but it works to a single 
 end. The energy which each unit brings, into 
 what may be called the commonwealth of the 
 forces, while it is different from that which every 
 other brings, is at the same time convertible into 
 it ; and the special form it assumes is often a 
 matter of apparent chance or accident. That 
 which, in a particular profession, becomes a force 
 tending to the strength of that profession would 
 if its author had entered on a different calling
 
 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE 105 
 
 have differentiated itself accordingly, and gone to 
 increase the sum - total of energy, in labour of 
 another kind. 
 
 If it seems difficult to carry out this principle 
 in reference to the race at large, it may be noted 
 that between the individual and the race there 
 lies the nation ; and that the solidarity and con- 
 vertibility of national forces may be obvious when 
 those of the race are less patent to the eye.
 
 VII 
 
 CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: 
 FRANCE AND THE TRANSVAAL 
 
 THE ethical thesis which I put before you is this, 
 that if we are individually responsible for our 
 conduct, there must also be a corporate responsi- 
 bility for men and nations ; that there is a national 
 as well as an individual conscience. In other words, 
 if the units in the body corporate are accountable 
 for what they do, and what they are, the aggregates 
 of which they form the parts that is to say, Society 
 and the Nation are no less responsible for what 
 they do and become, by the joint action of their 
 component members. This proposition may be 
 considered by some to be too trivial for statement, 
 and too elementary for proof ; nevertheless it is 
 constantly ignored, even by prominent representa- 
 tives of public opinion. 
 
 All stable Governments have taken good care 
 that individuals shall be held responsible for their 
 actions. If they contravene the unseen laws of 
 conduct, the State does not interfere, although 
 their contravention of these laws always finds 
 
 106
 
 THE ATOMISTIC VIEW OF SOCIETY 107 
 
 them out ; but, if they break the laws which are 
 the safeguard of social order and security, they are 
 at once dealt with as offenders. Many think, how- 
 ever, that it is only the units in a nation who are 
 responsible ; and that the State, or social organism, 
 is merely a collection of units. In opposition to 
 this atomistic view of society, my aim is to shew 
 that responsibility belongs to nations in their 
 corporate capacity, to organizations as well as to 
 units ; and to indicate some of the results which 
 follow from ignoring it. 
 
 It is easy to see that to the vast majority within 
 each nation corporate responsibility, as a fact of 
 conscious experience, is impossible. Individuals 
 are necessarily absorbed with the details of their 
 special work, in the midst of which they often 
 hardly recognize their accountability as units. 
 But those who are elected to lead and to guide 
 the masses, those chosen by suffrage to represent 
 them, must if they are worthy of such choice 
 recognize the existence of a social and national, 
 as well as of an individual conscience. They must 
 understand that their temporary position in office 
 does not lessen their responsibility ; but adds to, 
 and enhances, it indefinitely. Thus, to take in- 
 stances ; those who are Town or County Coun- 
 cillors, Members of Parliament, the Clergy, 
 Schoolmasters, University Officials, Directors of 
 Companies, Managers of Trusts, Judges, Cabinet 
 Ministers, are each and all because of their 
 election to these varied posts invested with new
 
 io8 CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 responsibilities, which are the unalienable and 
 permanent duties of office. Very much as a 
 parent is face to face with new obligations, so 
 soon as he becomes the head of a household for 
 which he has to live and labour, and the honour 
 of which he has to advance ; when a Nation 
 has passed through a period of adolescence and 
 reached that of manhood, new duties arise, which 
 are the higher obligations of maturer years, in 
 other words, corporate responsibilities. 
 
 This is obvious enough on the surface, but the 
 idea in connection with it on which special emphasis 
 should be thrown is that, when this particular stage 
 is reached in the history of a Nation, or of any 
 organized association of units within it any club, 
 or profession, or guild moral obligation is in- 
 creased. A second and a new kind of responsi- 
 bility is added. Now, it is a curious although an 
 obvious fact, in the history of the world, that this 
 corporate responsibility is often totally disregarded. 
 Many when chosen for office seem to think that 
 their election gives them additional freedom of 
 action, almost irresponsible action. They regard 
 their new position as a sort of protective shield, 
 under which they may act independently, cut off 
 from the scrutiny of other eyes than their own ; 
 and so, gigantic wrongs have been committed, by 
 members of corporations and clubs, to which the 
 light of day has not penetrated at once. Managers 
 of Trust Companies, Bank Directors, sometimes 
 even Nations themselves through their Courts
 
 THE "AFFAIRE DREYFUS" 109 
 
 or Cabinets have inflicted terrible wrongs on 
 individuals which have remained hidden for a 
 time. 
 
 If a case occurs in which it is impossible to 
 get justice done in the Law Courts of a country 
 more especially at a Court-martial or another in 
 which the Outlanders of a Republic are practically 
 ostracized, and crushed under a tyranny that is 
 both unjust and cruel, what is to be done ? In 
 answer, it may be affirmed that if the corporate 
 conscience of a nation is dead, that nation deserves 
 first of all the grave remonstrance of public opinion 
 within it ; next the rebuke of other nations ; and, 
 if it will not listen to the remonstrance and rebuke, 
 it then deserves repudiation. Doubtless, the evi- 
 dence must be ample, if not overwhelming, before 
 such condemnation takes place ; but if all the 
 countries of the World stand aghast at the want 
 of justice, the collapse of a sense of corporate 
 responsibility in a land which used to boast of 
 its ancient spotless honour, what conclusion can 
 be drawn but that there is some extraordinary 
 moral decay at work ; and the effect of such 
 decay, on the lives of many individuals within 
 it, must be stupendous. For a supreme judicial 
 Court to allow an innocent man to suffer years 
 of infamy and misery to screen the conduct of 
 others high in rank is a procedure fraught with 
 the utmost peril to the land in which it occurs ; 
 while it shews that, for the time being, there is 
 a disease within the national heart.
 
 no CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 You see to what I refer in these sentences.* In 
 our time there has been no object-lesson on the 
 subject of corporate responsibility at all comparable 
 to that which France has afforded in the recent 
 " Affaire Dreyfus." But the condemnation of that 
 innocent Jew has not only touched the heart of the 
 whole civilized world, but it has brought those who 
 condemned him to a low level amongst contem- 
 porary nations. Prejudice, race-hatred, and jealousy 
 have crushed aside almost stifled the instincts of 
 justice, and have led army-generals to condemn a 
 just man, very much as happened at the commence- 
 ment of the Christian era. The sense of righteous- 
 ness that righteousness which exalteth a people- 
 becomes almost extinct within the military caste of 
 one of the great nations of the world ; when it is 
 openly alleged that it is better for a blameless 
 individual to suffer, than for those in the army 
 who did the wrong to be proved to be guilty, and 
 be condemned. That the real culprits, the traitors 
 and betrayers of the nation, should be shielded for 
 the supposed benefit of the class to which they 
 belong is an absolute reversal of the primary canons 
 of morality, by those who were placed in office to 
 maintain them. 
 
 And this is the point of chiefest interest to 
 the whole world outside France, as well as to 
 those that grand minority of noble-minded 
 and righteous men within its border who have 
 fought so valiantly for truth and justice. It has 
 
 * This address was delivered in the autumn of 1898.
 
 REPUBLICAN TYRANNY in 
 
 afforded a lesson, and it may yet afford a more 
 lasting one, on the principles of righteous conduct. 
 The French nation has suffered temporary degrada- 
 tion in the eyes of the world by the perversion 
 of justice, but this may perhaps result. From the 
 noble defences made by two of the ablest of modern 
 lawyers, the courage of one or two of the army- 
 generals themselves, and the zeal of one great 
 novelist, the country to which they belong may 
 be awakened to a new sense of its responsibilities, 
 and may recover its former honoured place amongst 
 the nations by the force of moral reaction. 
 
 Now, take another case, which gives us a second 
 contemporary object-lesson. If the majority within 
 a Republic is, for the time being, colour-blind 
 by prejudice as to the merits, not of a single 
 individual within its borders, but of another race 
 which forms the majority of its population ; if that 
 Republic tyrannizes over those who have come into 
 it from other lands, and subjects them to disabilities, 
 insults, grievances, and injustice, the country 
 whence the larger number of these settlers came, 
 which has also large bordering territories of its 
 own territories threatened by the lawlessness 
 and mal-practices which prevail may justly inter- 
 pose on the ground of the paramount rights of 
 mankind, and the corporate responsibility of the 
 nations composing it, and may insist on the redress 
 of these wrongs. Here, as in the former case of 
 France, you see at once that the reference is to 
 South Africa and the Transvaal. Well, we find
 
 H2 CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 it said, and said plausibly, by many advocates of 
 an ultra-radical independence amongst the nations, 
 that no country has a right to interfere with any 
 other in the management of its affairs ; and that as 
 an individual is free to act as he pleases, a nation 
 may do as it likes with its own. But, however 
 plausible, that is only true if they both do justly ; 
 and, if a nation does unjustly, there are but two 
 alternatives open to it. It may be left outside 
 the pale of civilization ; or, if it desires to be 
 recognized by others in the great confederacy of 
 nations, it must be compelled to put in practice 
 the universal world-wide virtue of Justice. 
 
 A country recognized as independent of its 
 neighbours may be allowed to take the first 
 alternative, if it prefers isolation. If it elects to 
 defy the general consent of the nations, and declines 
 to adopt a policy of even-handed justice within 
 its borders, it may do so ; but only so long as 
 it does not inflict injury on the honest members 
 of another race, encouraged by its own Govern- 
 ment to live within it. If it tries to grow richer by 
 unjust action towards those who have helped it to 
 become rich if it tramples upon them, treats them 
 as aliens, and inflicts all manner of disabilities upon 
 them a time comes when active intervention 
 is necessary ; and it is necessary, not only for the 
 oppressed Outlander and the redress of grievances 
 which have become intolerable, but for the mainten- 
 ance of the corporate responsibility of the world, and 
 for the honour of mankind at large.
 
 A NATIONAL CONSCIENCE 113 
 
 The precise method of interference is another 
 matter, but when the resources of diplomacy are 
 spent those of civilization are not exhausted. On 
 this latter subject we need not enter. It is enough 
 if we see, in the light and by the aid of these 
 contemporary facts, that every Nation of the World 
 has, or ought to have, a national conscience ; and 
 that in its corporate capacity it is not less but 
 more responsible than the individual is. It comes 
 to this, that a Nation which does not respect and 
 honour Law, exalting it above all selfish aggrandize- 
 ment, is in a state of moral decay, whatever its 
 successes or achievements in other directions may 
 be ; and that if it persists in the practices of in- 
 justice and tyranny, a point is reached when 
 interference with it becomes necessary for the 
 sake of the world at large, as well as of the weak 
 and the oppressed within itself. Furthermore, that 
 as the units in each nation are bound to respect 
 and obey the laws of the realm, if the majority 
 of any people in a temporary fit of frenzy ignore 
 justice and defy the law the minority, who are 
 loyal to the principles of morality, are those who 
 truly represent the nation, and even constitute it. 
 
 ii
 
 VIII 
 PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 A THEORY of Morals has the closest possible relation 
 to the conduct of Life, and the discovery of a 
 speculative ground of action, or a theoretic ideal 
 of duty, has no relevancy or meaning apart from 
 its realization by the Individual and by Society. 
 If our aim, in the Philosophy of Ethics, be the 
 discovery of a true theory of practice, our main 
 endeavour after we have found it should be the 
 practice of the theory, because the possession of 
 what Mr Mill happily called "a moral nautical 
 almanac " is of no use to any one, unless he can 
 actually steer the vessel of his life according to 
 the directions given in the almanac. 
 
 It need hardly be said that to act wisely in this 
 world action must be the result of insight, and that 
 insight must be wide, varied, and thorough ; but 
 there are various kinds of insight, and that which 
 leads to inaction, or sits apart, "holding no form of 
 creed, but contemplating all," may entail a greater 
 loss than gain to the individual and to the world. 
 
 During the earlier years of life the practical side 
 of experience is not usually esteemed so highly as
 
 THE UNITY OF THE VIRTUES 115 
 
 the theoretical. This is natural and inevitable ; 
 but when these earlier years are passed, or are 
 passing, when a career has to be chosen and pur- 
 sued, more especially when one is at the "parting 
 of the ways," where cross-roads meet, and it 
 depends on the track he takes what the future 
 of his life is to become the practical side begins 
 to get its due. Again, when the intellectual 
 defects of all the systems of belief are realized, and 
 the vast number of lacuna or unsolved problems 
 is taken into account problems which remain to 
 baffle us after our analytic investigations are closed, 
 and our further syntheses are reached, we are 
 perhaps better able to estimate at their true value 
 the conclusions we may come to in the verifiable 
 sphere of conduct. It is a region over which our 
 speculative theories must sweep, but with which 
 they need never practically interfere ; it is one 
 upon which mists occasionally settle, but which 
 they invariably leave to the clear sunshine and the 
 light of day. 
 
 In giving a sample of some of the points which 
 would be discussed in a full course of practical 
 Ethics, a single prefatory remark may be made 
 in reference to them as a whole viz. this, that 
 every phrase of practical virtue has the closest 
 point of contact with every other. Man being a 
 moral unity, they may all be interpreted, from 
 different points of view, as the varying aspects 
 of one and the same radical virtue, which under- 
 goes constant transformation and redintegration.
 
 u6 PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 In arranging these practical virtues, I follow no 
 systematic order ; but, if we may roughly divide 
 them, first into duties towards self, or duties con- 
 nected with the estimate of self and the regulation 
 of the personal character, and secondly into duties 
 towards others or connected with the estimate of 
 others, then the first five will belong to the former 
 class, and the remaining three to the latter. 
 
 Thejirst in the list is that great and radical 
 virtue of having a root in ones self, to which in 
 various ways almost every moralist refers. Now, 
 at the outset it is most important that we see the 
 intellectual ground whence this moral virtue springs. 
 It is the conviction that the individual is something 
 more than a mere link in the chain of Nature, that 
 in virtue of his personality and personal identity 
 each one of us is a centre, or focus, at which the 
 scattered rays of moral relationship to others meet. 
 If, at our birth, we are not mere waves rising out 
 of the sea of being, and at our decease sinking 
 back into the ocean of forgetfulness if it is not 
 true that we are only "such stuff as dreams are 
 made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep," 
 if we have natures above Nature, as well as within 
 it and if our alter ego is capable of being acted 
 upon by the Infinite from within, so that our 
 highest self in its most exalted exercise is the 
 action of the Divine within us, if this be a fact, 
 or series of facts, in the conscious life of the human 
 race, it must impart a new sense of personal worth 
 or value to the individual. It will develop a
 
 SELF-SUFFICIENCE 117 
 
 feeling of independence to the blows of fate, of 
 superiority to the chance accidents of the hour, a 
 sense (for we must speak figuratively) of rooted- 
 ness and groundedness in what is at once durable 
 and infinite. 
 
 The practical outcome of this is a certain self- 
 sufficience, which is totally different from every 
 phase of self-sufficingness, and which, when true 
 and genuine, does not lead to pride in any of its 
 phases, but only to self-reliance. The stupendous 
 fact which gives rise to this moral self-reliance is 
 one which humbles the individual, as much as it 
 exalts him ; and it does so in the very act of 
 exalting him. The fact is this : that the humanity 
 of each member of our race is, at one and the 
 same time, within Nature and above it, and that, 
 although indissolubly involved in the sequences 
 of the physical world, we are, as one of our poets 
 puts it : 
 
 A lasting link in Nature's chain, 
 From highest heaven sent down. 
 
 Now, to tell a young person that self-sufficience 
 is a virtue, and that the cultivation of it is a 
 duty, may seem like opening up a very superfluous 
 pathway towards conceit, if not opinionativeness. 
 Rightly understood, however, it is the very reverse ; 
 because the practical side of the truth just men- 
 tioned is not self-satisfaction, but self-command ; 
 not self-elation, but self-control ; not self-gratifica- 
 tion, but self-superintendence. 
 
 The virtue I speak of arises out of a discernment
 
 u8 PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 of the true nature of man, as a being with faculties 
 and affinities which link him with the Infinite, and 
 within whom the Infinite may work. The recogni- 
 tion of that fact if it be a fact develops a second 
 consciousness, which both elevates and humbles ; 
 and which leads, at one and the same time, to 
 self-development and self-control. This virtue may 
 be connected with the nobler part of the teach- 
 ing of the Greek sages, from Socrates to the 
 Stoics, and even the Epicureans. The " living 
 according to Nature," and yet above Nature, the 
 "following right Reason," the "pursuit of inward 
 harmony," all take their rise in the recognition of 
 what the moral self is ; and of how it is open, on 
 the one hand to the world in which we live, and 
 on the other to the Infinite whence we have come, 
 and whence we may all be inspired. So much for 
 the first of the practical virtues. 
 
 What I set down as the second in the list may 
 seem far removed from the first, but it is in reality 
 very closely akin to it. It is that of openness to 
 all influence that is elevating, invigorating, and 
 healthful. This, from another point of view, is 
 the virtue of candour, dispassionateness, or single- 
 eyedness. It is equivalent to the directness of 
 soul, that is free from prejudice, twist, or bias. 
 It implies a readiness to receive impressions which 
 lift our consciousness up to higher levels. It in- 
 cludes a willingness to be taught, and a docile 
 attitude under the guidance of what is loftier 
 than ourselves. It is a virtue which has many
 
 OPENNESS TO INFLUENCE 119 
 
 aspects or phases, which may perhaps be more 
 apparent if we contrast it with its opposite vice, 
 viz. the assumption that one is wiser than other 
 people, and does not need instruction from with- 
 out ; or that, if not sufficiently wise, it will not 
 do to let others imagine that one is not so, and 
 that they have anything very important to impart 
 in the way of influence or teaching. This latter 
 is the vice of inordinate self-esteem, and it is 
 curious how inveterate it occasionally is, how it 
 clings to some people who are otherwise ex- 
 cellent, and seems to grow stronger as they grow 
 older. 
 
 Sometimes, in proportion to the amount of 
 intellectual power possessed, and the force of 
 character which works on others, there is a want 
 of openness to their peculiar views, and even an 
 arrogant air that is ready to impose favourite views 
 with the strength and tenacity of the partisan. 
 Some persons always have their shibboleth, whether 
 of orthodoxy i.e. of what alone it is right to believe 
 or of good manners i.e. of what it is the correct 
 social form to do ; or it may be a political shibboleth 
 of what alone can lead a nation to prosperity, or 
 of what is certainly leading it to destruction and 
 they test everything by their shibboleth, so that 
 they never grow any wiser, but worship their fetish 
 till they die. Some of them, moreover, have a 
 very unlovely habit of obtruding their shibboleth 
 on other people. They assume the hard style of 
 the Roman infallibilist, or the doctrinaire style of
 
 120 PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 the old-world parish dominie, or the arrogant one 
 of the modern " emancipated person," and thrust 
 their ideas upon other people. They sometimes 
 even try to put others down by self-assertion, pre- 
 ferring to brush them aside rather than be them- 
 selves examples of noble thought and generous 
 feeling. 
 
 One cure for this very common tendency 
 which sometimes destroys a character, taking all 
 loveliness out of it, and which also does much 
 social mischief is just the cultivation of that open- 
 ness of soul, or candour towards new ideas and 
 new influences, with the Socratic conviction all 
 dominant that what we chiefly know is our own 
 ignorance, and our need of further knowledge. 
 Here, as elsewhere, true wisdom lies midway 
 between a perpetual openness to all impressions, 
 and a consequent pliability of spirit which can 
 be twisted in any direction, and the self-assertion, 
 rigidity, and conceit, that will not admit the need 
 of any modification of belief, or any new practical 
 influence from without. 
 
 The third virtue is that of an earnest piirpose in 
 life, the sense of having a serious function to fulfil 
 and a duty to discharge in this world ; in other 
 words, the conviction that we are here not merely 
 for the purposes of enjoyment, not born for pleasure 
 only or for excitement, but for the accomplishment 
 of great ends, which are up-bound with our exist- 
 ence as intellectual and moral agents, whatever 
 our sphere of labour or pursuit may be. It will
 
 THE GLORY OF FRUITFUL WORK 121 
 
 be seen that this item in practical ethics has a 
 close relation to the theory of morals ; and that, 
 if it is explicitly borne witness to by our practical 
 instincts, it modifies if it does not contradict 
 the one-sided theory of utilitarian happiness so 
 much in vogue. 
 
 The nobility and glory of fruitful work have 
 been taught us by many strong voices lately silent, 
 notably by Carlyle. We may also recall a sentence 
 in Aurora Leigh ; 
 
 Work, work, work, 
 
 'Tis better than what you work to get. 
 
 The same poet said, in a noble sonnet 
 
 What are we sent to earth for ? Say to toil, 
 Nor seek to leave the tending of thy vines 
 For all the heat o' the day till it declines, 
 And death's mild curfew shall from work assoil. 
 God did anoint thee with His odorous oil 
 To wrestle, not to reign. 
 
 The precise point to be realized in this con- 
 nection, is the extraordinary expansion which it 
 gives to human character, and the consequent 
 enlargement of all the aims of life, when we realize 
 that, in virtue of our own personality and its 
 relation to the Infinite we are here to add a 
 little to that great structure of noble human work 
 which is being definitely accomplished within the 
 lives of other people, work which will survive 
 when the workers have passed away and are 
 forgotten ; in other words, that we live to 
 transmit influence (the influence of life on life),
 
 122 PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 to be architects of character, by however slow 
 a process and in however slight a degree. To go 
 through life with that aim paramount, not so much 
 ambitious of professional success, or outstripping 
 others in the social race, as of taking a noiseless 
 and unostentatious part in the building up of 
 character, in the perpetuation of pure and elevating 
 influence, that is one of the noblest of human aims, 
 and one of the grandest of possible achievements, 
 It is a moral result that is open to all of us ; 
 and its realization, even in a slight and partial 
 manner, has a wonderful effect, in the majority 
 of cases, in tranquillizing human life, as well as 
 making it fruitful. It subdues that restlessness 
 which is the chief enemy of joy, as well as of 
 attainment. So much for the third virtue in our 
 list. 
 
 The fourth virtue, which is in closest harmony 
 with the third, though some would think it far 
 removed, is one which Aristotle would have 
 called an intellectual rather than a moral excel- 
 lence. It is the effort to attain to some kind of 
 unity or harmony in our personal life. By this 
 is not meant an effort to reach ideal completeness, 
 but such a practical harmony that, amid the diverse 
 aims and interests which may be properly ours, 
 we do not feel the sense of discord arising within 
 us. The intellectual root on which this virtue 
 reposes is the conviction that all our activities, 
 whether directed towards the True, the Beautiful, 
 or the Good, should meet at a focus and there be
 
 HARMONY IN LIFE'S AIMS 123 
 
 harmonized. This is much less frequently attained 
 than many imagine. It is a real achievement, 
 for example, when one, whose life is devoted to 
 the pursuit of knowledge, finds that its pursuit 
 blends quite harmoniously with all his social duties, 
 without any hitch or jar, and unites his profes- 
 sional toil in a natural manner with the humbler 
 and commoner work which fills up the interspaces 
 of life. 
 
 Perhaps there is no better safeguard than that 
 which this virtue affords in preventing men from 
 indulging in any one thing, or in any kind of 
 effort, to excess. If a particular pursuit cannot 
 be harmonized with other ends, which a rational 
 being is called upon to accomplish, he or she may 
 be sure that it ought to be restrained or discon- 
 tinued. They may take it for granted that it is 
 alien to that unity which is the one end both of 
 individual and of social life. 
 
 Another result of the endeavour to reach unity 
 and harmony, both amongst one's convictions and 
 aims, is this ; that it checks partisanship of every 
 kind. Almost every one who enters on a practical 
 pursuit with any ardour, enters it of necessity as 
 a partisan. He therefore over-magnifies it, and 
 sometimes comes to look on his particular line 
 of effort as the noblest in the world. It is a 
 natural illusion, and it often does undoubted good, 
 by giving energy and enthusiasm in work ; but 
 it leads to corresponding evils, e.g. the evils of 
 coterieism, or sectarian views of life, to class-
 
 124 PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 prejudices and the feelings of caste. It thus 
 happens that the most earnest advocates of special 
 lines of labour usually fail to see the good that 
 is being achieved by thousands beyond their own 
 department. The habit of striving after unity and 
 harmony in all things (the virtue now under con- 
 sideration) is more likely than any other to 
 counteract, if not to checkmate it, and it is a 
 virtue which should be specially cultivated before 
 professional life is begun ; because the discern- 
 ment, at that stage, of the organic unity to which 
 all genuine human labour tends or may tend 
 should check the spirit of partisanship, and lessen 
 the force of professional bias in after-life. 
 
 We now reach a virtue which seems to need 
 special emphasis laid upon it in the nineteenth 
 century. It is that of reverence, and of a reverential 
 habit of mind. By this is not meant the practice 
 of any act of religious observance. Such acts 
 belong to another province than the ethical. What 
 is now referred to is the characteristic of " high 
 seriousness," to which Matthew Arnold referred 
 as a distinctive feature in all the greatest literary 
 work, as well as an integral element in all noble 
 character. Its speciality will perhaps best be seen 
 when we contrast it with its opposite, which is not 
 merely a frivolous or surface way of looking at 
 life's problems, and dealing with its interests ; but 
 also that arrogant attitude towards Institutions 
 
 o 
 
 and great national Inheritances, as well as towards 
 individuals, which has borne much bitter fruit in
 
 REVERENCE 125 
 
 our time. The reverence now spoken of was 
 one of the old Hebraic virtues which Arnold so 
 happily signalized, and it is a virtue inseparable 
 from every character that is really great. 
 
 It is useless to assume the role of a censor, 
 or complainant, towards the age in which one 
 lives. The present has doubtless manifold and 
 characteristic virtues, which posterity will be better 
 able to appreciate than we are. But while an 
 "increasing purpose" is running through it, and 
 evolving results in individual and national char- 
 acter which we cannot as yet adequately compute, 
 our Zeitgeist may perhaps have some other less 
 admirable tendencies pervading it, and the want 
 of Reverence may be one of these. How is it, 
 for example, that some have so little regard for 
 that which they have politically inherited, that 
 they would not hesitate to cut down the ladder by 
 which they have ascended to the position they now 
 occupy, that they would destroy Institutions which 
 are the fruit of millions of experiments, and of 
 the conjoint working of the twin spirits of Law 
 and Liberty, 
 
 Broadening slowly down 
 From precedent to precedent, 
 
 in the blind hope that somehow a better recon- 
 struction will follow in the wake of their anarchic 
 levellings ? There is certainly too little reverence 
 amongst us, both for the great national Legacies, 
 and the great Characters of the past ; very much
 
 126 PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 as its best systems and its noblest treatises are 
 forgotten by those who have an omnivorous appetite 
 for sensational newspapers. They are passed over 
 in the rush of ephemeral interests, or ignored amid 
 the trivial competitions of the hour. As a great 
 poet put it, 
 
 The world is too much with us, late or soon 
 Gathering and spending we lay waste our powers. 
 
 In addition to this, the fundamental error in 
 sectarian socialism, viz. that every man is as good 
 as every other man, and that all have therefore 
 an equal right to everything, which is as untrue in 
 ethics, sociology, and politics, as it is contradicted 
 by all historic experience, seems to be lessening 
 the reverence of our age, both for the great Men 
 of the past and for the Institutions of our ancestors. 
 It sometimes looks as if those who are the heirs 
 of all the ages of struggle for constitutional liberty 
 were to be subjected to a worse tyranny of the 
 demos than Athens or Sparta ever knew. Con- 
 temporary politics are referred to only to emphasize 
 a moral lesson which is independent of party ; and 
 it is one of the saddest reflections to a spectator, 
 who watches the strife of parties from outside, that 
 amid all the achievements of the century and our 
 progress in a thousand things, the development 
 and discipline of character in the great virtue of 
 reverence are so apt to be left out. We find it 
 in the home the school the college, in scientific 
 circles and at political gatherings, amongst the
 
 GENEROSITY AND CHIVALRY 127 
 
 young and the old, the rich and the poor, in the 
 Church and in the State. The old habit of rever- 
 ence (of unselfish delight in what is above us, 
 unenvious admiration for what is greater than 
 ourselves, the willingness to defer to the teachings 
 of experience, and to be led by the wisdom of age) 
 is either far less common than it used to be, or 
 it is assuming very strange and unfamiliar phases. 
 In this assertion no complaint is made that "the 
 times are very evil," or that they are wholly 
 "out of joint," but it may surely be set down as 
 a virtue, the practice of which is much needed in 
 our time, and, indeed, in every age, that the 
 profoundest reverence should be cherished towards 
 the wisdom of the past, and towards that which 
 has made the present what it is. Everything 
 else is surely worse than even " botanizing on a 
 mother's grave." It is irreverence towards that 
 mother herself, the truest, noblest, and most 
 beneficent alma 'mater in the world. 
 
 From the preceding five virtues which are more 
 specially individual I pass to others which are 
 social. Amongst them, as number six in the list, 
 may be set down the habit of generous construction 
 or a chivalrous estimate of other people. This was a 
 conspicuous virtue in the Zoroastrian ethic. It has 
 no less prominent a place in the Christian. It is 
 surely a clear practical duty never to put an evil or 
 sinister construction upon the deed of another 
 person, until we have it proved to demonstration 
 that the act was evil or sinister ; and even then, it
 
 iz8 PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 should rather be accompanied by sympathetic 
 sorrow for the offender, than by strong dislike or 
 personal aversion. The practice of this may be 
 partly a matter of temperament, because some 
 persons look instinctively on the dark side of human 
 nature, and suspect evil until good is proved ; while 
 others look on the bright side, and believe in the 
 good until evil is proved. But the latter virtue 
 may be cultivated, and very closely allied to it if 
 it be not a phase of it is the habit of appreciating 
 what others are doing and achieving, while we are 
 not doing and achieving the same things, and can 
 never expect to do so. 
 
 This virtue is radically akin to that which was 
 placed second in the former list, viz., that of open- 
 ness or candour of soul ; and this will illustrate 
 the unity of the virtues. There are some persons, 
 however, so painfully self-engrossed, " in narrowest 
 working shut," that they cannot see or can with 
 the utmost difficulty see that the good which is 
 being achieved by others is quite as important to 
 the world as anything which they themselves are 
 doing. This applies to all the professions and 
 pursuits of mankind, and in each profession to 
 almost all the workers in it. It is curious that it 
 should be so inveterate a tendency in otherwise 
 noble natures. It is a vice which grows by that 
 on which it feeds ; but it is one which may be 
 largely counterworked and subdued. For example, 
 take one of the great and admirable qualities in our 
 public-school system, and in the college-life which
 
 FRIENDSHIP 129 
 
 follows it, viz. that it gives scope for the generous 
 recognition of the merits of others, while all are 
 striving to excel and if possible to out-distance 
 others in competitive work. To recognize, with 
 no grudge or shadow of dislike, the somewhat 
 
 o o 
 
 humbling fact that we have been eclipsed by others, 
 is what may be called a school or college virtue, of 
 the first magnitude, and of the purest water. 
 Whatever may be thought to the contrary, it is not 
 an extinct virtue in our modern life, and it is quite 
 possible that it may assume even finer phases as 
 time goes on. Few things are more helpful to 
 human progress than the ungrudged recognition of 
 the merit and work of other people a cordial and 
 genial delight in their achievements ; while those 
 who rejoice in them feel that the world is so much 
 the richer by what they themselves could never 
 possibly have done. In this connection we may 
 recall the words of Aprile to Paracelsus in 
 Browning's drama, 
 
 let our God's praise 
 Go bravely through the world at last, 
 What care through me or thee. 
 
 Closely allied to the foregoing virtue comes that 
 of friendship in its highest and purest forms, 
 friendship developed into the habit of universal 
 friendliness, and the constant effort to he.lp other 
 people. Many recognize this after a fashion, as it 
 is one of the strongest social bonds ; but the love of 
 personal ease makes them shrink from the active 
 
 offices of friendship, which demand constant sacrifice 
 
 i
 
 13 o PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 and self-surrender if thereby others can be helped. 
 Nay, some friendship is at its roots thoroughly 
 selfish. There are those who wish to keep their 
 friends to themselves. They are jealous lest they 
 will lose something, if their friends get into a still 
 closer relationship with other people. But a noble 
 nature must acquiesce without a shadow of com- 
 plaint in such a result as this. If his earliest, 
 chiefest strongest friend becomes another's newer, 
 chiefer, stronger friend, what of that ? It is 
 presumably a gain to them ; and to promote, 
 develop, and multiply all the deep relationships of 
 life is the very essence of noble, heroic, and unselfish 
 friendship. There is such a thing as this in the 
 world. There are those who live for the sake of 
 others continuously, regarding it as a far higher 
 thing to serve than to be served ; glad, if oppor- 
 tunity occurs, not merely of lifting the burdens 
 which others bear, and of carrying them a little way 
 vicariously, but also of helping those whom they do 
 not know to clearer thoughts, truer feelings, and 
 more fruitful action ; and there is perhaps no nobler 
 virtue in the whole category of human achievement 
 than this habit of incessant service, when one feels 
 that "it is more blessed to give than to receive," 
 and reckons it a privilege to be able to brighten the 
 lives of other people. 
 
 In connection with this virtue another may be 
 noted, which grows up under its shadow, so to 
 speak, and flourishes alongside of it. It is that of 
 indifference as to how one is treated by others in the
 
 CHIVALRY 131 
 
 course of this devotion to their interests indiffer- 
 ence to dislike, or even misrepresentation. The 
 superiority which this virtue gives to one who 
 practises it is marvellous. It creates an inner 
 serenity of spirit. If one has large practical aims 
 and ideals, if he is bent on adding something to the 
 stock of human good that is in the world, what has 
 he to do with taking umbrage or offence at the 
 actions of other people ? He has no time to think 
 of these things, and is degraded by dwelling upon 
 them. 
 
 There are other virtues besides these to be dealt 
 with in Practical Ethics, but the foregoing are a 
 sample of the rest ; and a concluding remark 
 which has a certain reference to the whole of them 
 is specially relevant to student-life. It is this. 
 Let the spirit of Chivalry be the animating spirit of 
 the modern student, as much as it was of the 
 mediaeval soldier ; and its later phases may be 
 much finer than its earlier ones were. Never do an 
 ungenerous or unkind thing to any of your fellows, 
 by word, or by pen, or by deed ; though others 
 may think it clever of you to do so. Let your 
 primary aim be to find out the good that is in others 
 around you, to put yourselves into lines of sympathy 
 with them, and to serve them by eliciting that good 
 still further ; for, until you do so, you cannot know 
 how rich and wonderful a thing this human nature 
 of ours is, which in its broken lineaments can 
 mirror a Nature higher than itself, and in a finite 
 way even reflect the Infinite.
 
 IX 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN THE 
 UNIVERSITIES OF SCOTLAND* 
 
 THE inauguration of a Society for the discussion 
 of philosophical questions by the students of this 
 University has a peculiar interest to those whose 
 life-work it is to teach Philosophy at St Andrews. 
 There have been, and still are, Societies of the 
 same kind at Edinburgh and Glasgow ; and there 
 once was although I am not sure that there still is 
 a similar one at Aberdeen. There have also 
 been several in former years in St Andrews itself ; 
 and so whether we may be more accurately 
 described as meeting to inaugurate a new Society, 
 or to re-animate an old one we are certainly 
 met to complete a quadrilateral of philosophically- 
 minded student-groups, within the Universities of 
 Scotland. 
 
 Ever since I became a Professor at St Andrews 
 I urged the formation of such a Society here, and I 
 
 * This address was delivered at the inauguration of the second of 
 three University Student Societies for the study of Philosophy at St 
 Andrews, founded since 1876. 
 
 132
 
 STUDENT SOCIETIES 133 
 
 long ago suggested that it should be called the 
 " Ferrier Society," in honour of the most dis- 
 tinguished philosopher who has ever taught at St 
 Andrews, or who is likely to teach here for genera- 
 tions to come ; but the more general title is 
 probably a better one, and it is certainly more 
 comprehensive. Our earlier Society did not care 
 for the Ferrier title, and I did not afterwards 
 propose its adoption to your predecessors. 
 
 When asked to deliver an opening address to 
 your newly constituted Society, I thought of dis- 
 cussing one of the problems of the hour and there 
 are many such of surpassing interest but, as you 
 are not to meet very often, and as part of your 
 winter programme is to hear Lectures from 
 contemporary writers and teachers in Philosophy,* 
 it seemed better that your inaugural address should 
 have a more general character. I have therefore 
 thought that it might interest those who are to 
 become members to know something of the earlier 
 Societies of a similar kind, which have, from time 
 to time, been started in Scotland, and done good 
 work in their day. I think that the Student 
 Societies, formed for the discussion of literary 
 philosophical and theological problems, and general 
 intellectual converse, have done a great deal to 
 develop academic life, and to compensate for the 
 want of that camaraderie, or social fellowship, which 
 is more directly promoted by residence in those 
 
 * Professor Royce, of Harvard University, Boston, was the next 
 lecturer to the Society.
 
 i 3 4 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 Colleges which are grouped together within the 
 Universities of England. 
 
 In our own University in pre- Reformation times 
 the custom of public speaking and oral disputation 
 by students both in the classes, and before the 
 University authorities was general ; and after the 
 Reformation it was enjoined by statute that such 
 discussions should take place, always in the presence, 
 and under the guidance, of the Masters or Regents. 
 At that time the summer recess was only one of 
 three months, from July to September ; and during 
 the recess the students met once a week, to engage 
 as a rule in theological discussions. Some interest- 
 ing information on this point will be found in 
 M'Crie's Life of Principal Melville, which casts 
 curious light on the style of discussion practised 
 previously. We read, e.g. "that the disputants 
 were exhorted to avoid the altercation usually 
 practised in the schools, and not to bite and devour 
 one another like dogs." 
 
 The Parliamentary Commission of 1579 drew 
 up a plan of study for our University of St Andrews ; 
 which was chiefly the work of Andrew Melville, at 
 that time Principal of the University of Glasgow. 
 It was ordained that all students should attend 
 the class of Rhetoric which was then first added 
 to the course of philosophical study and " spend 
 part of every day in composition ; and, during the 
 last half year, should declaim or pronounce an 
 oration, once every month in Latin and Greek 
 alternately." It was further ordained that students
 
 ST ANDREWS 135 
 
 of Theology " shall engage in public disputations 
 every week, in declamations once a month ; and 
 that at three periods during the course, a solemn 
 examination shall take place, at which every learned 
 man shall be free to dispute." These ordinances of 
 the Parliamentary Commission of 1579 were not 
 suffered to remain a dead letter, but were stringently 
 enforced, owing in large measure to the administra- 
 tive rigour of the same Andrew Melville, who was 
 transferred from Glasgow to the Principalship of St 
 Mary's College, St Andrews. It was also largely 
 due to the action of the first Principal of the 
 University of Edinburgh, Robert Rollock and by 
 the academic work of these two men that the 
 foundations of a new order of things were laid, both 
 at St Andrews and in Edinburgh. 
 
 The immediate result at St Andrews was not 
 so much the development of a taste for classical 
 knowledge, as a general activity and energy of mind 
 which shewed itself in many ways ; and to the 
 honour of St Andrews be it said your young student- 
 predecessors did more than the statutes enjoined. 
 Not content with conforming to the rules for public 
 debate within the College walls, they formed them- 
 selves into a voluntary Association for the dis- 
 cussion of literary and philosophical questions, 
 which I take it was the real parent of all the 
 subsequent Student-Societies in Scotland. 
 
 Another important thing about this earliest 
 Students' Society was this. It was peripatetic. 
 The members met, we are told, in the fields, and
 
 136 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 carried on discussions in the open air ; out at 
 Magus Moor (let us suppose) or on the links 
 toward Eden Mouth, or by the cliffs toward the 
 Rock-and-Spindle. A MSS. volume of exer- 
 cises prepared by members of this Society was 
 discovered some time ago, by the late Principal Lee 
 of the University of Edinburgh. They are both in 
 Latin, and in Greek ; and, amongst the contributors, 
 is to be found the name of Milton's tutor, Mr 
 Thomas Young. 
 
 The custom of debating in the presence of the 
 Professors, or of defending philosophical theses in 
 public, gradually fell into abeyance. The seven- 
 teenth century in Scotland was academically very 
 dull. The wave of intellectual activity, which 
 Melville and Rollock had started, spent itself; and 
 there was no attempt to enforce the ordinances 
 which existed. The old custom of public disputa- 
 tion came, like many other good things, to be 
 "honoured more in the breach than the obser- 
 vance." Probably it had done its work, and it 
 was time that it should be superseded. In the 
 next century the eighteenth Student- Societies, 
 meeting in private for the discussion of philosophical 
 and other questions, and quite unfettered in their 
 action, took the place of all other teaching agencies, 
 excepting that of the Professoriate. 
 
 It must be admitted, I think, that while St 
 Andrews has the credit of forming what we may 
 call the first peripatetic students' society of the six- 
 teenth century, the University of Edinburgh has
 
 EDINBURGH 137 
 
 the honour of organizing those of the eighteenth 
 century. But it should be noted that it was for 
 the promotion of Science that these societies were 
 originally started. In the year 1720 one was 
 formed at Edinburgh for the study of what was 
 dignified by that most misleading and unhappy term 
 " Natural Philosophy." It is true that the term 
 may be so far justified from the fact that the 
 students of Nature, in the eighteenth century, 
 who investigated the laws of matter, motion, and 
 force sought for much more than mere facts. 
 They doubtless went in search of principles, and 
 to that extent were philosophically-minded. All 
 the same it was a misnomer a real abuse of 
 words to speak of their researches as a branch 
 of " Philosophy." 
 
 This earliest society in Edinburgh, however, 
 collected an excellent library, which was afterwards 
 made over to the University of the metropolis. 
 In 1734 a Medical Society was started in Edin- 
 burgh, which obtained a royal charter in 1779, 
 and subsequently grew to great proportions, being 
 a most valuable auxiliary to the extra-mural medical 
 school. A number of smaller societies or clubs 
 followed its institution. One was originated by 
 Principal Robertson, another in 1754, called the 
 Select Society an unfortunate name was started 
 by the painter, Allan Ramsay, son of the poet of 
 the same name. This Society met weekly on 
 Friday evenings in the Advocate's Library, for 
 literary and philosophical discussion ; and its de-
 
 138 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 bates were occasionally very able, sometimes 
 brilliant. Dugald Stewart, in his Account of the 
 Life and Writings of Dr William Robertson, 
 says (p. 15) that in it were heard "debates which 
 have not often been heard in modern assemblies 
 debates where the dignity of the speakers was 
 not lowered by the intrigues of policy, or the 
 intemperance of faction ; and where the most 
 splendid talents that have ever adorned the country 
 were roused to their best exertions, by the liberal 
 and ennobling discussions of Literature and Philo- 
 sophy." Even if we deduct something from this 
 panegyric, due to the perfervidum ingenium of 
 the writer, it must have been a remarkable and 
 " select" Society, in the best sense of the term, 
 which numbered in its ranks such men as Sir 
 Gilbert Elliot, Mr Wedderburn (afterwards Lord 
 Loughborough), Mr Andrew Pringle (afterwards 
 Lord Alemoor), Lords Monboddo, Kames, Hailes, 
 and Elibank, Charles Townsend, Sir John 
 Dairy mple, Dr Robertson, David Hume, Adam 
 Smith, and Ferguson the poet. Dr Carlyle of 
 Inveresk speaks of Lords Monboddo and Elibank 
 as the members " who had the peculiar talent of 
 supporting their tenets by an inexhaustible fund 
 of humour and argument." In 1759 there were 
 13^ members in this Society. 
 
 Passing from Edinburgh to Aberdeen we find 
 a very remarkable Society formed at the Northern 
 University in January 1758 one which fairly 
 earned the title of philosophical, and which has
 
 ABERDEEN i 39 
 
 a special interest to us, from the fact that many 
 of the treatises of the psychologists and meta- 
 physicians of the north arose out of its work : the 
 subjects on which these philosophers wrote having 
 been first discussed by them at their Society 
 meetings, and afterwards expanded into formal 
 treatises. Thomas Reid, and Alexander Gerard, 
 were two of the most important of its members ; 
 and Reid was its first secretary. It was formed 
 for the reading of philosophical papers, and the 
 discussion of speculative problems. The following 
 is an extract from the rules of the Society. " The 
 subjects of the discourses and questions shall be 
 philosophical ; all dramatical, historical, and philo- 
 logical discussions being conceived to be foreign 
 to the designs of the Society. And philosophical 
 matters are understood to comprehend every 
 principle of Science, which may be deduced by 
 just and lawful induction from the phenomena of 
 the human mind, or of the material world ; 
 all observations or experiments that may furnish 
 materials for such inductions ; the examination of 
 false schemes of Philosophy, and false methods of 
 philosophizing ; the subserviency of Philosophy to 
 the Arts, the principles they borrow from it, and 
 the means of carrying them to their perfection." 
 
 This Aberdeen Society met once a fortnight 
 in the afternoon or evening, at one of the taverns 
 of the town ; and the arrangements which the 
 northern philosophers made for bodily along with 
 mental refreshment are not a little curious. " There
 
 i 4 o PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 was an entertainment," we read, "the expense 
 of which was not to exceed eighteenpence a head. 
 The whole expense might be about ten shillings ; 
 of which one half was for a bottle of port, or punch, 
 or porter, and the other half for eatables. Each 
 meeting lasted for three hours ; but free conversation 
 was allowed for half an hour before, and half an 
 hour after the president took the chair. This 
 Society lasted from January 1758 to February 
 
 1773- 
 
 During its first year Reid discussed " the 
 
 Philosophy of the Mind in general, and particularly 
 the perceptions we have by sight." In 1760 he 
 gave "an analysis of the Senses, and a discussion 
 on Touch," and in 1762 his valedictory address 
 as president was on " Euclid's definitions and 
 axioms." Gerard wrote and read papers on 
 "Genius," on the "Association of Ideas," on the 
 " Fine Arts," on " Poetical Imagination," on the 
 " Difference between Common Sense and Reason," 
 and on the " Universality and Immutability of 
 Moral Sentiment." As the Society went on the 
 range of the subjects taken up widened, and we 
 find that notwithstanding the restrictions of the 
 constitutions philological questions, bearing on 
 Language and its origin, were discussed. The 
 problems of Natural Theology, the methods of classi- 
 fying objects, and such things as the influence of 
 climate on human affairs, the prolongation of life, 
 the retardation of old age, the foundation of taste 
 in music, and even the local question of the union
 
 ABERDEEN 141 
 
 of King's and Marischal Colleges, were dealt with ; 
 but by far the larger number of problems debated 
 were psychological, and metaphysical. 
 
 Discussion turned not infrequently to the agnos- 
 tic Philosophy, which had been lately introduced 
 by David Hume ; and one of the most interesting 
 things connected with this Society is a letter 
 which Thomas Reid wrote to Hume, in March 
 1763, in which he said, "your friendly adversaries, 
 Drs Campbell and Gerard, as well as Dr Gregory, 
 return their compliments to you respectfully. A little 
 philosophical Society here, of which we all three 
 are members, is much indebted to you for its 
 entertainment. Your company would (although 
 we are all good Christians) be more acceptable 
 than that of Athanasius ; and since we cannot 
 have you upon the bench, you are brought oftener 
 than any other man to the bar ; accused and 
 defended with great zeal, but without bitterness. 
 If you write no more on Morals, Politics, or 
 Metaphysics, I am afraid we shall be at a loss 
 for subjects." 
 
 While the Aberdeen Philosophical Society was 
 pursuing its unostentatious course within the 
 University, another was formed at Edinburgh, 
 which was destined to fulfil a more brilliant, if a 
 more miscellaneous function amongst the kindred 
 Societies of Scotland. This was " the Speculative 
 Society," founded in 1764, by six undergraduates. 
 It met once a week on the Tuesday evenings. 
 An essay was read and criticized at each meeting,
 
 124 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 and a debate followed, but the subjects were 
 historical and political as well as literary. The 
 name Speculative was given to it, not from the 
 subjects discussed, but from the freedom of debate 
 allowed to each member. The rules of the Society 
 were admirably drawn up ; one of the most im- 
 portant being that after an ordinary member's 
 attendance ceased, and he had read a certain number 
 of essays, and opened a certain number of debates, 
 he was eligible as an extraordinary member, and 
 could attend all meetings when convenient to him 
 without any new duty being imposed. This rule 
 has been followed in many other Societies ; and 
 it is excellent,* because it brings into the occasional 
 work of the Society experienced writers and practised 
 debaters who have left College, but who need not 
 on that account sever their connection with it. 
 
 A characteristic feature of the Speculative 
 Society, during the first four sessions of its existence 
 was that what they called an Inquiry rather than 
 a formal debate took place, at each alternate 
 meeting. Another rule, early adopted, was to 
 the following effect. "If any member has met 
 with anything new or curious in the course of 
 his reading, he may give an account thereof to 
 the Society." But this, as you can easily see, 
 was liable to abuse ; and it was afterwards 
 repealed. 
 
 Many distinguished " men of the time " belonged 
 
 * Especially in large centres of population, such as Edinburgh 
 and Glasgow.
 
 EDINBURGH 143 
 
 to this Speculative Society of Edinburgh. It 
 became the fashion for all lawyers, aspiring to 
 eminence, to join it. Amongst the philosophers 
 who were members, Dugald Stewart was perhaps 
 the most eminent. In 1773 he read to it an " Essay 
 on Dreaming" ; and, in an interesting note to 
 his Philosophy of the Human Mind, he says "The 
 speculations concerning the human mind which I 
 have ventured to present to the public all took 
 their rise from the subject to which this note refers. 
 The observations in the text were written at the 
 age of eighteen, and formed part of the first 
 philosophical essay which I recollect to have 
 attempted. The same essay contained the sub- 
 stance of what I have introduced in Chapter III. 
 concerning the belief accompanying conception, and 
 the remarks stated in the third section of Chapter V. 
 on the extent of the power which the mind has over 
 the train of its thoughts. When I was afterwards 
 led professionally, at the distance of many years, 
 to resume the same studies, this short MS. was 
 almost the only memorial which I had preserved 
 of these favourite pursuits of my early youth ; and 
 from the views which it recalled to me insensibly 
 arose the analysis I have since undertaken on 
 our intellectual faculties in general." 
 
 Literature and Science, as well as History and 
 Politics, were more frequently discussed in this 
 Speculative Society than strictly philosophical 
 questions ; and I need say no more of its future 
 than that it included in its ranks philosophers,
 
 144 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 such as Sir James Mackintosh, Thomas Brown, 
 and Sir William Hamilton ; brilliant literary men, 
 such as Sir Walter Scott and Wilson (Christopher 
 North) ; and lawyers and politicians like Brougham, 
 Francis Horner, Lord Justice Boyle, Jeffrey, and 
 Palmerston. The Speculative was not at first 
 exclusively, or even mainly, a "Students' Society" ; 
 and the high entrance fees latterly exacted limited 
 it for the most part to those who had left the 
 University, and were engaged in professional life. 
 I may add that the essays read to it became the 
 property of the Society ; and being written on 
 paper of a uniform size they were bound up at 
 the end of each session. The same subject was 
 not allowed to be re-discussed for several years. 
 Religious questions, and those of party politics, 
 were excluded. A valuable library, chiefly of 
 works on history and political economy, and con- 
 sisting of over 1300 volumes, belongs to the 
 Society. It still exists, although it has no formal 
 relation to the University, and its members need 
 never have been students. Nevertheless the in- 
 fluence of this Society over many distinguished 
 Edinburgh men who have been its members, 
 has been great, and has often been gratefully 
 acknowledged by them. Sir Walter Scott, Sir 
 James Mackintosh, Francis Horner, Lord Jeffrey, 
 and Lord Cockburn have all written of it. I 
 may add that an elaborate history of the Society 
 was published in 1845. 
 
 Time would fail me to give an account of all
 
 SOCIETIES IN EDINBURGH 145 
 
 the other Edinburgh societies. I shall only name 
 them. The Juridical was founded 1773, the Theo- 
 logical in 1776, the Royal Physical in 1782, the 
 Dialectic in 1787, the Literary Society (of which 
 Sir Walter Scott was a member) in 1789-90, the 
 Chemical Society in 1800, the Academical the 
 Didactic and a new Select Society all in 1 8 1 1 , 
 the Scots Law Society in 1815, the Diagnostic in 
 1816, afterwards the Forensic, the Classical, and 
 the Physico - Mathematical, and the Philomathic. 
 The only reason for mentioning these Societies in 
 the present connection is that strictly philosophical 
 questions were occasionally discussed in most of 
 them ; and, while each had its distinctive nuance, 
 each and all helped to quicken the intellectual life 
 of the students in our metropolitan University. 
 
 But a strictly philosophical Society was founded 
 in Edinburgh about the year 1830, one that 
 deserved the name of Speculative, much more than 
 its august predecessor and contemporary. I wish 
 much that the history of that society could be 
 written. It contained within it at different times 
 Professor Ferrier, Professor Campbell Fraser, and 
 Principal Cairns. I am told that it did a remarkable 
 amount of work, although it did not survive for 
 many years ; but it gave rise, by a sort of lineal 
 succession, to the " Metaphysical and Ethical 
 Society," which was inaugurated in the New College 
 Edinburgh (the college of the Free Church). 
 
 That Society was the most vigorous of all the 
 
 Edinburgh University ones during my student 
 
 K
 
 146 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 days. It numbered amongst its members the 
 philosophically-minded men who had been stimu- 
 lated by the teaching of Sir William Hamilton, 
 such as John Veitch, afterwards Professor at St 
 Andrews and Glasgow, John Downes afterwards 
 editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Alexander 
 (afterwards Sheriff) Nicholson, and Professors 
 Bruce, M'Gregor, Murray, etc., etc. The diploma 
 of honorary membership in that Society was valued 
 many times more than the existing Master of Arts 
 degree. I may mention that the degree of M.A., 
 which was conferred after no examination whatso- 
 ever, or after what was the mere mockery of an 
 examination, had in these days sunk so low that 
 few students could be induced to take it. None of 
 those whom I have mentioned did so. It was 
 the same in all the Universities of Scotland ; and 
 it was the disgraceful state into which this degree 
 had fallen that was one of the things which most 
 loudly called for academical reform by the Univer- 
 sities Commission of 1858. 
 
 I remember a student, a very excellent one of 
 this University, telling me his experience in going 
 into the retiring room of my class to be examined 
 by Professor Ferrier for his degree in Philosophy, 
 when something like the following occurred. Mr 
 Ferrier. "Well, sir, you want to pass for your 
 degree in Philosophy." "Yes, sir." "Then, sir, 
 can you explain to me Adam Smith's theory of 
 Moral Sentiment ? " Thereupon the student tried, 
 in two broken sentences, to unfold the theory of
 
 THE METAPHYSICAL AND ETHICAL 147 
 
 Sympathy. He was interrupted, before he got 
 to the end of his statement, by "Very good, 
 
 Mr , very good ; can you now tell me anything 
 
 about my own theory of Knowing and Being ? " 
 Whereupon the youth, now greatly relieved, stam- 
 mered forth a few sentences in explanation of what 
 he had heard in the class-room. They were not 
 finished, when the urbane and delightful Professor 
 
 interposed with "Very good, Mr , I see you 
 
 know all about it. That will do. I put you down 
 as passed in Philosophy ! " 
 
 Now these were the times of complete academic 
 disregard for Examinations, which Scotland and 
 the British Parliament winked at for many a day. 
 But the University Commission of 1858, laying 
 down definite graduation rules, raised our Scottish 
 M.A. degree (and others) to a position of honour 
 and importance, which they not only now possess, 
 but which they have transcended. 
 
 In that period of decadence in the academical 
 life of Scotland, however, the " Metaphysical and 
 Ethical Society " did a work which was quite 
 unique. Its diploma of Honorary Membership 
 was only conferred on those who, after serving 
 the Society as Secretary or Vice-President, and 
 finally as President, had written for it six essays, 
 and opened as many debates ; and who had been 
 associated with it first as an ordinary, and after- 
 wards as an extraordinary member for six years 
 So far as I remember it was only granted to eight 
 members in the twenty years of the Society's
 
 148 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 existence. It may very well be valued more 
 than an ordinary M.A. degree. In the year 
 1871 this Society was merged in "the Philo- 
 sophical Society " of the University of Edinburgh. 
 
 More recently a Philosophical Society was 
 established in Glasgow, but I believe that nearly 
 twenty years previously there was an Aristotelian 
 Society within that University. This was suc- 
 ceeded by the " Wittenagemote Society." These 
 were for the discussion of strictly philosophical 
 problems. They did not live long, but they 
 were the precursors of the subsequent Philosophical 
 Society of Glasgow. 
 
 I need not endeavour to trace the story of the 
 various students' societies formed at St Andrews 
 since the union of the Colleges in 1747, because 
 the aim of none of them, excepting those formed 
 within quite recent years, was to develop the study 
 of Philosophy ; although they did excellent work 
 in different directions. I would throw out a 
 suggestion, however, to any student desirous of 
 filling up an as yet unoccupied niche in the literary 
 and academic history of Scotland ; viz. this, to 
 attempt to write the History of all its University 
 Societies. It would be a most useful literary 
 monument ; and, if well done, would be a delight- 
 ful book for every future student to possess. 
 
 There is another Society to which I may refer 
 in a paragraph, viz. the " New Speculative Society 
 of Scotland " which was formed in the year 1870, 
 by a. number of men connected with the Univer-
 
 "THE NEW SPECULATIVE" 149 
 
 sities and outside of them, for the discussion of 
 philosophical questions. It was founded in Edin- 
 burgh, and a lengthened debate took place as to 
 the name it should be known by. Professor Nichol 
 of Glasgow was one of those who took a chief part 
 along with me in its organization, and the first 
 regular meeting of the Society was held in his 
 house, when Professor Edward Caird read the 
 opening paper. There were in all some eighty 
 members enrolled ; but, as it was difficult for those 
 of us who lived at a distance to attend the monthly 
 meetings regularly in the metropolis, I proposed 
 that the Society should divide itself into three 
 subsections an Edinburgh branch, a Glasgow 
 branch, and a St Andrews one. This was carried 
 out ; and while the meetings in Glasgow were 
 few (owing partly to the competing interests of 
 an " Adam Smith Society " for the study of political 
 economy) the Edinburgh branch did good work, 
 but the St Andrews one did by far the most. 
 I may mention that while we had in our ranks 
 the late Principal Tulloch and Professor Baynes, 
 many of the papers first read to this Society 
 were afterwards published in such magazines as 
 The Nineteenth Century, the Contemporary, and 
 the Fortnightly Reviews. The Society has how- 
 ever ceased to exist. It was not a students' 
 society, and my only justification in alluding to 
 it now is the kindredness of its aims to those 
 which you have at heart, and the importance of 
 some of the papers read to it. I may add that,
 
 150 PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES IN SCOTLAND 
 
 as at Aberdeen, with Dr Reid and his friends, 
 we found it helpful to conjoin a social element, 
 with the intellectual. We met in the afternoons. 
 We first had the paper read, and discussed ; and 
 we dined afterwards. 
 
 I repeat that some student ought yet to write 
 the whole " History of the University Students' 
 Societies of Scotland." It will be a most welcome 
 addition to the literature of a not-unimportant part 
 of our great national inheritances.
 
 X 
 
 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 THIS subject has a philosophical root ; but the stem 
 and the branches which grow from that root are 
 social, political, artistic, and religious, as well as 
 philosophical. 
 
 I shall indicate a few of the causes which 
 determine public opinion, and one or two of the 
 effects which result or issue from it. The influences 
 which create it are very complex, and unexpected 
 consequences result from its inevitable pressure 
 upon the individual units which compose each 
 nation. But if we find out what it is that regulates 
 the Formation of Opinion what consolidates and 
 diffuses it we get to know the origin and outcome 
 of social forces which are at times obscure, and 
 very often illusive. 
 
 When we examine the systems of philosophical 
 and religious belief which prevail in other lands, 
 we see the same influences at work in the formation 
 of Opinion as those which produce our own. We 
 trace the stream of individual and national Evolu- 
 tion, at once forming and differentiating the beliefs 
 of the world.
 
 1 5 * THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 In discussing this subject it is wise to begin 
 by a study of contemporary thought. It is of 
 primary importance to ascertain and accurately 
 appraise the forces now in operation which sway 
 ourselves and others, to this side or to that, in 
 the formation of belief. That is a simple question 
 of fact ; but to answer it with accuracy, we must 
 make a careful inductive study of contemporary 
 forces and influences. 
 
 The next thing to be ascertained is not what 
 is now regulating, or has hitherto regulated, public 
 opinion ; but what ought to determine it. In other 
 words, what it is wise to accept in matters of belief, 
 and what it is prudent to reject ; or, what we should 
 follow, and what we should oppose. 
 
 In giving a short inventory of the forces and 
 influences which seem to be in the greatest activity 
 at present, there is first of all the inheritance 
 we have received from our ancestors and the 
 education which has followed consciously or un- 
 consciously from that inheritance, and confirmed 
 it. There is the early influence of our parents, 
 our homes, our teachers, our youthful associates 
 and friends. These forces were once very strong 
 ones ; and they continued to mould us in many 
 ways, long after we forgot all about them and their 
 way of influencing us, and perhaps could not even 
 remember their existence. To the very end of 
 the last chapter of our lives, we all remain to a 
 large extent the victims of the past, as it is 
 expressed in the aphorism that "blood is thicker
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY PRESS 153 
 
 than water " ; and so we are led unconsciously to 
 follow opinions, which we have not ourselves 
 formed, but have inherited in a subterranean sort 
 of way ; and which are ours, while we are ignorant 
 of their origin or their rationality. That is a very 
 powerful element in the formation of opinion, all 
 the more potent perhaps, because it works unseen 
 and unknown. Up to one-half of what each of us 
 either believes or becomes, in the mysterious 
 voyage of life and its innumerable conflicts, we 
 are at the mercy of external influences operating 
 upon us ; and, while the other half of our beliefs 
 and actions is due to what we have formed or 
 created for ourselves, the former profoundly in- 
 fluences the latter. 
 
 Leaving these inherited tendencies we come to 
 those living, contemporary forces which sway and 
 determine the adult opinion of the world. 
 
 And there is, first of all, the influence of the 
 contemporary Press. Under this head a prefatory 
 statement may be made easily understood by 
 those who are in sympathy with a comprehensive 
 survey of the social problems of the world that 
 no lover of wisdom should ever become the partisan 
 advocate of a special political party. In the great 
 arena of debate, including within it the work of 
 the Press which has become so influential an 
 element in the formation of opinion there are 
 many honourable and just organs in Great Britain, 
 enlisted on the side which happens to be to many 
 of us politically abhorrent, viz. the policy which
 
 154 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 would allow us to return to the old Heptarchy of 
 England. Those who think that policy not only 
 foolish but Utopian, may, nevertheless, have the 
 highest admiration for many who advocate it, and 
 for the organs of opinion which represent it. They 
 are, perhaps, quite as necessary for the country as 
 are those of the opposite party. 
 
 But the point to be emphasized is this. The 
 state of public opinion throughout every country 
 is largely due to the way in which the con- 
 temporary Press deals with the problems of the 
 hour. We have, first of all, the reports given, 
 in the newspapers, of speeches delivered by party 
 leaders whether in Parliament, or outside of it. 
 No one can deny that a great political speech has 
 a formative effect on the opinion of the day. The 
 recognized leader of a party is always listened to, 
 and every important speech which he delivers is 
 not only reproduced, and read ; it is at times 
 slavishly deferred to. However biased it may be 
 however inaccurate or vague, or inept its state- 
 ments or conclusion it is, at any rate, read and 
 pondered. Those who sympathize with it make 
 allowance for the defects of its advocate, while they 
 become ecstatic over his successes. A speech by 
 a leader of opinion, by a departmental Chief, or 
 by one who is an expert in any official sphere is 
 invariably waited for ; and, when it comes, it is 
 received sympathetically by the party in power. 
 It is only put aside if it is found to be really 
 inadequate or inopportune. It may be safely
 
 SPEECHES BY PUBLIC MEN 155 
 
 affirmed that the utterances of individual men or 
 of responsible members of Parliament now mould 
 the nation, and determine the trend of political 
 opinion within it, more thoroughly than they ever 
 did before. 
 
 Consider next the way in which the Press deals 
 with the speeches of our public men. It is some- 
 times extremely difficult to know what has been 
 actually said by the leader of a party, if one 
 chances to take up a paper which is the organ of 
 the opposite political side ; because it would seem 
 to commend itself to some journalists, as a wise bit 
 of strategy, to give a partial or jaundiced report 
 of the words and the procedure of their opponents. 
 Thus, the initial difficulty is to know what a public 
 man has actually said on any public matter. In 
 this connection the statement of a dead philosopher 
 may be remembered, "there are more false facts 
 than false theories abroad in this world." 
 
 It is curious that so many people adopt their 
 opinions from what is set before them in their 
 favourite newspaper. They cannot make up their 
 own minds on any question until they have read 
 a "leading article" upon it; and their conviction, 
 thus formed by what they read, may be changed 
 by the next article they peruse ; just as others are 
 influenced by the last person they have met, and 
 chanced to talk to. Again, different newspapers 
 report the same speech by a representative public 
 man in a totally different way. It is tantamount to 
 an intentional misleading of others if a newspaper
 
 156 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 records only a part, and not the whole, of a state- 
 ment made by an opponent on an important public 
 question. Perhaps they have not room to report 
 the whole ; but as almost every great speech on 
 a great subject, has necessarily many sides, and 
 as they chronicle only one of them the result 
 which follows is that public opinion is misled. 
 It is inadequately formed, because it is based on 
 a part, and not on the whole of the facts of the 
 case. And so it comes to this, that apart from all 
 commentary different reports of the same address 
 lead to very different kinds of belief. And when 
 we come to the critical commentary of the Press, 
 the bias of opponents on the one hand, and 
 the excessive zeal of perfervid admirers on the 
 other, results in the formation of opinions almost 
 diametrically opposite. 
 
 Next, take into account the intentional misrepre- 
 sentation which exists hostile criticism avowedly 
 carried on for party polemical purposes. In this 
 no charge is made which would not be admitted 
 by the writers referred to ; for, they say, it must 
 be done. It is legitimate party warfare. I consider 
 this much more than doubtful ; but the ethics of 
 the subject are not now before us. I am merely 
 collecting the facts of the case, trying to compute 
 or reckon up the forces that are in operation around 
 us : and it is one of the most notorious facts that, 
 in our contemporary Press, there is a great deal of 
 disparagement of real excellence, and frequent 
 praise of emptiness and vacuity. There are floods
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 157 
 
 of senseless oratory, issuing day by day and week 
 by week, from the Press. If our Parliamentarians 
 are sometimes inane, our scribes are often fatuous. 
 There are articles written by political rivals, at 
 times by disappointed aspirants to offices which 
 are filled by those whom the writers satirize ; nay, 
 it is well known that, in some countries, biased 
 articles have been written in the Press by paid 
 political agents. 
 
 We need not follow Carlyle and characterize 
 the masses of mankind as "mostly fools." He 
 wrote that sentence or spoke it good man and 
 great as he was when suffering from a very bad 
 attack of dyspepsia ; but it may be endorsed as 
 regards a great many reviewers of our time. Their 
 ignorance and self-sufficiency, their occasional utter 
 irrelevance, their presuming to estimate the worth 
 of a volume which it has taken many years, perhaps 
 a lifetime, to elaborate and which they have never 
 read in a few scrappy sentences is appalling. If 
 the readers of our modern Press only knew how, 
 and by whom, many of the articles which they read 
 are written, they would pay very little regard to 
 them. Matters were perhaps worse in the earlier 
 days of literary reviewing in England. I know 
 what used to be said by the " Edinburgh " and 
 the " Quarterly " long ago, in reference to the best 
 authors of the time ; and what was also written 
 in scores of lesser magazines and papers. But, 
 in this connection, I may venture to state what a 
 venerable late editor of a Quarterly Review told
 
 158 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 me as to his own experience in managing it. He 
 said that one of his chief writers spoke thus (in 
 reference to the work he had to do for smaller 
 magazines) : " How can you expect me to read 
 the books which are sent me to review? I 
 have very small payment for my work, and I am 
 compelled to produce a critical estimate of an 
 important volume within twenty-four hours of its 
 publication, so as to be if possible first in the 
 field of the reviewers. / can not do it. I simply 
 read the table of contents, glance at a page or 
 two here and there, and then for better, for 
 worse cut up the book." 
 
 Can we wonder, while the editors of papers and 
 magazines cater for the hour in that fashion as so 
 many of them do that the result is misleading, if 
 not injurious ? They do not care for calm and 
 judicial estimates if only they can get an early and 
 sparkling notice, and if as a result their paper 
 sells. They candidly admit that they have no time 
 for a serious careful and dispassionate treatment, 
 either of books or problems. They must write 
 quickly, up to date, and according to order. 
 
 Well, what is the result of all this multitudinous 
 criticism on public opinion ? That is the question 
 now before us. We have to consider the effect 
 of those million articles, written day by day, hour 
 by hour, minute by minute, in haste and with a 
 bias or prejudice in them on the mind of the 
 country at large. And here we may note that 
 the most highly educated people come under
 
 AN HONOURABLE PRESS 159 
 
 their influence as well as the multitude. In fact, 
 no one can escape from the intellectual contagion 
 which is thus diffused, because it is in the very 
 air we breathe. The malady often becomes 
 epidemic, and the result is that the judgment of 
 the nation is contaminated at its fountain-head. 
 Its opinions, feelings, and sympathies are warped, 
 twisted round about in an extraordinary manner ; 
 and so the public mind becomes the almost un- 
 conscious victim of illusions manifold. 
 
 In proportion as I honour the noble army of 
 workers in a just and honourable Press, I despise 
 the hirelings and the partisans, the servile men 
 who scribble in it ; and I wish that they had re- 
 mained "hewers of wood and drawers of water," 
 in less ambitious fields. 
 
 Note, then, the influence which the Press 
 exerts, "for better, for worse." Many persons are, 
 as already said, almost at the mercy of the news- 
 papers. The Press has well been named " The 
 Fourth Estate " ; and it has certainly influenced 
 the work of all who labour in the other "estates." 
 It determines the feelings and beliefs of many, who 
 are unaware of the power at work in and around 
 them. And what is the result of this ? It is 
 that the opinions of mankind are influenced or 
 sometimes formed by the most trivial things. 
 They are shaped by forces which injure and 
 degrade as well as by those which uplift and 
 strengthen, i.e. by destructive as well as by con- 
 structive agencies.
 
 160 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 But, leaving the Press, I come to the in- 
 fluence of Society on the formation of public 
 opinion. Plato once said that Society was the 
 great Sophist ; and there is much truth in the 
 aphorism. Consider the ignorant and prejudiced 
 chit-chat of the day, the long-drawn-out inanities 
 of the gossip - mongers, and the interminable 
 drivel of talkers who bore their fellow-creatures 
 with crudities and common-places. What is the 
 outcome of this on the formation of opinion ? 
 However melancholy it may be, the fact remains 
 that trivial society - talk, conversational chatter, 
 determines many of the opinions now current in 
 the world. It influences the feelings, if not the 
 convictions, of the hour. We have probably all 
 known persons who have changed their opinions, 
 just as they change their garments, because of the 
 prevailing fashion. They have abandoned one set 
 of opinions, and taken up another, because it was 
 customary to do so ! I may here put a very 
 elementary question? What is fashion? It is 
 that which happens to surround and which tries to 
 mould us. But I ask, what is its intrinsic value and 
 its permanent destiny? It has nothing of either. 
 Its use is always temporary, and it is necessarily 
 superseded by the next turn of the wheel of fortune. 
 There is no such thing as fixity, or abidingness, 
 due to the influence of Reason, or high I marina- 
 
 o o 
 
 tion, or purified Emotion, in anything that is the 
 mere " fashion of the hour." 
 
 Another thing, which operates banefully in the
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIETY 161 
 
 formation of opinion by Society, is the wide if 
 not universal adoption by it of such maxims as, 
 "nothing succeeds like success," or "the end 
 justifies the means," or "might is right," or 
 "heaven helps those who help themselves." These 
 maxims have been adopted and have become 
 aphoristic current coin, because, like all proverbs, 
 they have sprung from a root of truth, and are a 
 wise embodiment of that truth. Observe, however, 
 the effect on the formation of public opinion, if 
 they are pushed to an extreme. If, " nothing 
 succeeds like success," and if "the end justifies 
 the means," and if " might makes right," then the 
 vices of great potentates like Napoleon I., or 
 Queen Catharine II. of Russia, not to speak of 
 contemporaries are all to be ignored or condoned, 
 simply because these potentates succeeded. Well, 
 there have been many actors on the wide field of 
 history who have thought so : and many of their 
 eulogists have followed them in taking that most 
 pernicious maxim in the list, viz. " might is right," 
 as the very motto of their existence ; but if that 
 is to be the final word addressed to the jarring 
 disputants of this world, we may say farewell at 
 once to all noble progress, nay, to every high 
 ideal. In the formation of public opinion under 
 the influence of such maxims idealism perishes, and 
 realism alone survives. 
 
 Another point which may be noted here is the 
 influence of clubs and coteries, in at once socially 
 
 uniting and socially isolating their members ; and 
 
 L
 
 162 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 therefore, in breaking up society, as much as they 
 bind it together. There is no doubt that the 
 influence of the many hundred clubs which exist 
 in every large city and the tens of thousands of 
 them which exist in every land, has been beneficial 
 to the world, in the development of good fellowship, 
 camaraderie, and many of the virtues of associated 
 life and action. But, is it not the case that they 
 have sometimes developed partisanship, and isolated 
 their members from other people ? Although they 
 may have been evolved naturally and inexorably, 
 out of the diversities of social life, it is important 
 to note that in the formation of public opinion 
 there is a bias at work in each of them. Neverthe- 
 less, as in the case of rival philosophies, each may 
 counteract the successes of the other ; while they 
 all tend to differentiate public opinion. 
 
 Then, take into account the effect of the bias 
 inherent in each of the professions. They all tell on 
 Society in numerous ways. The soldier, the lawyer, 
 the clergyman, the physician, and the merchant, 
 each has his ownfach, or specialty ; which inevitably 
 becomes by slow degrees, and as life goes on, his 
 fetish. Thus class sympathies develop and struggle 
 together. Within each of these professions there 
 is rivalry, strife, and jealousy. For illustration, 
 take only the clerical. See how at Church Con- 
 gresses, at Roman Catholic gatherings, at the 
 annual Congregational Unions, at Unitarian meet- 
 ings, at Synods and Assemblies of Presbyterians, 
 at Baptists' gatherings, etc., etc., each sect that
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY 163 
 
 is to say, every part into which the Church Catholic 
 is cut, each with its own note of doctrine or of 
 practice seems to think it would be a great achieve- 
 ment if its particular brotherhood could conquer 
 or absorb the rest, could extinguish opposition 
 and bring in a millennium of decorous uniformity, 
 in other words, if it could reduce the world to a 
 single ecclesiastical level. I do not discuss the 
 wisdom of the doughty champions on any of the 
 sides, or in their multitudinous campaigns. I only 
 try to point out the effect of what they do in the 
 formation of public opinion. However extreme 
 they may be, the partisan results which they pro- 
 mote are facts, with which the student of con- 
 temporary history must reckon ; while their 
 increasing number and their seeming persistence 
 may yet become even more potent factors in the 
 evolution of the opinion of the world. 
 
 And now before indicating what may perhaps 
 best guide or direct the formation of opinion in the 
 future, note another and a very different " sign 
 of the times " ; one which, in the later years of the 
 nineteenth century, is profoundly interesting to all 
 who believe in the function of Philosophy and in 
 its future. 
 
 It is this. All the chief leaders of opinion in 
 the world and this is especially true of Great 
 Britain are increasingly influenced consciously or 
 unconsciously by the spirit of philosophy. They 
 all discuss the questions of the hour with an eye 
 directed to their philosophical root, or their ante-
 
 164 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 cedents. I need not particularize individuals ; but 
 I may say that, never in the past history of Great 
 Britain, were the guides of opinion more influenced 
 by philosophical ideas, and therefore, so remote 
 from prejudice. The only thing which a lover 
 of Philosophy desires is that the leaders in each 
 party should recognize more fully than they often 
 do, the value of the work which has been done, 
 or which is being done, by their opponents. Their 
 courtesies to one another in social life however 
 much they differ in policy are well known ; and 
 this is one of the distinguishing features in the 
 life of the great statesmen of England. It is true 
 that some of the more partisan leaders seem at 
 times to think that chivalrous recognition of the 
 merits of opponents made at a public meeting, 
 or in an open manner would be an act of dis- 
 loyalty to their own side ; and many a minor 
 party leader has rejoiced in a printed statement 
 which has damaged his opponents without making 
 enquiry as to its relevancy or its justice. But 
 I think that Great Britain compares very favour- 
 ably in this respect with the line taken and the 
 policy pursued in France, Germany, and Russia ; 
 although, perhaps, in the practice of this political 
 chivalry, " we have not all as yet attained, neither 
 are we already perfect." 
 
 But now, turn from the causes which hinder the 
 formation of Opinion on honourable lines, to the 
 things which may tend toward its development, 
 under happier auspices in future years.
 
 KNOWLEDGE OF HUMAN NATURE 165 
 
 (i) Perhaps the chief ameliorating influence will 
 come from a profounder knowledge of human 
 nature itself. The old Socratic maxim, "know 
 thyself," lies at the very root of all human progress, 
 personal, social, or political. We must know our- 
 selves before we can know anything else adequately. 
 And in this connection all wide historical study, 
 study which deals with the rise, decline, and fall 
 of opinion, and the resurrection of belief the wide 
 world over, is one of the most important. In 
 pondering the immemorial debates of the world, 
 we should study ancient controversies in the light 
 of those problems which are before us now. We 
 re-animate the discussions of the past by giving 
 them a place in relation to the problems of the 
 hour. I take the Socratic motto, "know thyself," 
 as the basis of everything else worth knowing. 
 Our late poet and philosopher, Matthew Arnold, 
 put it thus in his Empedocles on Etna ; 
 
 Once read thine own breast right, 
 And thou hast done with fears ; 
 Man gets no other light. 
 Search he a thousand years. 
 
 That may be philosophically an extreme way of 
 stating it, although it is poetically very grand ; 
 but I maintain that unless we do know ourselves, 
 getting initiation into the true lines of thought, 
 and the ultimate springs of human action, we 
 are incompetent to form a just opinion on any 
 contemporary problem.
 
 166 THE FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 The next thing that deserves not only mention 
 but emphasis is this, the supreme practical value 
 for every one who is to take part in the formation 
 of public opinion of Candour, or openness of spirit ; 
 in other words, the capacity and willingness to re- 
 ceive influence in what a great poet called "a 
 wise passiveness "- from opposite points of view. 
 If all our statesmen and all our critics would put 
 in practice a minimum of this virtue as well as a 
 maximum of the power of satirical invective which 
 some of them love so much, and in which they are 
 occasionally rare adepts the temporary judgments, 
 passed on men and problems, would be much saner, 
 in other words, more just. 
 
 There are two great forces working in the 
 world, that of attraction and that of repulsion ; in 
 other words, the powers of sympathy, and of anti- 
 pathy ; of appreciation and of antagonism. We 
 find a parallel to this in the movements of the 
 planetary bodies. But in our little world, and in 
 the circle of our mundane interests there is a set of 
 forces ever at work sending us all apart, dividing 
 us into circles, cliques, and coteries ; and there are 
 other forces drawing us magnetically together to 
 the same centres of interest, sympathy, and pursuit. 
 A due appreciation of these centrifugal and centri- 
 petal forces of nature, forces which operate in the 
 intellectual, the moral, and the political world, and 
 a knowledge of their tendencies and their uses, will 
 certainly contribute towards a wiser formation of 
 public opinion.
 
 LAWS OF EVIDENCE 167 
 
 Finally, a better acquaintance with the laws of 
 evidence, and the power of impartially weighing 
 evidence will help towards the same result. Pre- 
 cipitency of judgment, before these laws are under- 
 stood, and before all the facts which bear upon the 
 problem are dispassionately weighed, is the source 
 of innumerable errors. We all live amidst illusions 
 manifold, and we often mistake a mirage for the 
 solid land. But if there is one thing more than 
 another which aids the wise formation of individual 
 belief, and therefore the healthful construction of 
 public opinion, it is this capacity of dealing with 
 evidence coming to us from all quarters, and also 
 the power of combining the shreds of evidence in 
 a higher unity of thought ; in other words, a com- 
 prehensive and constructive synthesis rather than a 
 fragmentary and disintegrating analysis.
 
 XI 
 
 DESIDERATA IN MODERN 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 IN every age we need a new statement of philo- 
 sophical Credibilia from a fresh point of view. It 
 is absolutely certain, from the analogy of the past, 
 as well as from the nature of the case, that we 
 require this now. No age or generation can be 
 satisfied with the conclusions of the past. Taught 
 by them it may always be, and that immeasurably ; 
 but satisfied with them it cannot be. Therefore it 
 is that fresh Philosophies must arise, that the old 
 must give place to the new ; although, as a matter 
 of necessity, the new will very often be just the 
 old recast, or transformed. 
 
 In its efforts to interpret existence around it, 
 the human consciousness blossoms at certain 
 periods, in the labours and systems of pre-emi- 
 nently gifted men ; men of large faculty, con- 
 structive spirit, and deep penetrative sagacity. 
 Such times of blossoming are followed, as in 
 the physical sphere, by periods of repose ; when 
 the attitude of the mind of the race becomes, 
 
 168
 
 CLASSIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES 169 
 
 by reaction, one of passive contemplation and 
 recipiency, rather than of creative effort and 
 attempt at system-making. This period of in- 
 tellectual lull or repose is usually succeeded by 
 a time of new and active insight ; one in which 
 tradition and precedent become wearisome, and a 
 fresh creation is demanded. 
 
 A primary philosophical desideratum of our time 
 is a new Classification of the Sciences. Since 
 Philosophy sits behind the sciences, and deals with 
 questions which underlie them, it is one of its special 
 functions to classify the sciences ; and we now need 
 a readjustment of all the provinces of knowledge 
 from the point of view to which modern Philosophy 
 conducts us. If we attempt to readjust the terri- 
 torial boundaries of knowledge from a scientific 
 point of view that is to say, from the station on 
 which any of the individual sciences places us 
 the likelihood is that it will be done in a one-sided 
 manner. We must go beyond the separate and 
 special sciences to reach the guiding principle which 
 will explain, and enable us to arrange the whole of 
 them. Of course the agnostic, who ignores the 
 realm of metaphysic, will classify the phenomena of 
 the Universe in a very different way from that in 
 which the idealist classifies them. Plato's arrange- 
 ment was unlike that of Aristotle ; Bacon's 
 classification was different from that of Leibnitz ; 
 Comte's adjustment unlike that of Cousin ; and 
 Kant's and Schelling's quite different form that of 
 Spencer. The most important thing to note how-
 
 iyo DESIDERATA IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ever in my judgment is this. All the best classifica- 
 tions of the sciences have come, not from the 
 discoverers in Science, or from our scientific 
 authorities, but from the great philosophers of the 
 world. 
 
 I give you a roughly drawn chart to begin with, 
 and you will see how large the questions are which 
 it opens up. Suppose we make our fundamental 
 contrast the phenomena of Mind and the pheno- 
 mena of Matter. Starting from the ideal or 
 metaphysical point of view, we must exclude from 
 the circle of the Sciences, and reserve for the 
 sphere of Philosophy, all enquiries as to the 
 ultimate essence of mind and of matter, and 
 as to the meaning of the one underlying substrate 
 of the Universe. We therefore exclude Theology. 
 Theology is not a science, except indirectly. 
 There is a science of Religion, that is to say of 
 the phenomena of the human mind in their rela- 
 tion to the Divine ; but we cannot, by any possi- 
 bility, have a science of the divine Mind. 
 
 Keeping then, first, to the phenomena of Mind, 
 and secondly to the phenomena of Matter, we may 
 classify as follows : 
 
 (A) Sciences dealing less or more with the 
 phenomena of Mind (l) Psychology, (2) Logic, 
 (3) Ethics, (4) ./Esthetics, (5) Sociology, (6) Juris- 
 prudence, (7) Political Economy, (8) Comparative 
 Philology, (9) Comparative Religion, (10) History. 
 
 Many of these might be divided into subsections, 
 and some of them such as the science of Language
 
 A SUGGESTED SCHEME 171 
 
 (Comparative Philology) and that of History lie 
 intermediate between the two spheres indicated ; 
 because they are not exactly sciences of mind, nor 
 certainly are they material sciences. In the same 
 way the first group in the second section, i.e. the 
 Mathematical sciences, partake of an intermediate 
 character, and form a link of connection between 
 the mental and the material spheres. But to pass 
 at once to the second section. 
 
 (B) There is (i) the Mathematical sciences, with 
 their many sub-divisions, dealing with the relations 
 of number and space, the quantitative relations 
 of things ; (2) experimental Physics, dealing with 
 the laws of matter and motion, with its numerous 
 sub-sections Statics, Dynamics, the phenomena 
 of Heat, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, etc. ; (3) 
 Chemistry ; (4) Biology, with its subsections Botany 
 and Zoology ; (5) Anatomy ; (6) Physiology, the 
 margin line between it and Zoology being a 
 peculiar one ; (7) Geology ; (8) Astronomy. 
 
 Some of the sciences named may seem to over- 
 lap each other, and some to retreat into others ; 
 while, from a philosophical point of view, all the 
 problems of all the sciences meet at a common 
 focus. Our modern knowledge is becoming so 
 intricately sub-divided, modern culture increasingly 
 complex, that we are very seldom able to ascend to 
 an intellectual observatory, and there map out the 
 separate constellations shining in the firmament of 
 knowledge. It seems to me, however, that while a 
 new classification and sub-division of the sciences is
 
 i 7 2 DESIDERATA IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 one of the desiderata of the immediate future of 
 British Philosophy, it can only be effectively carried 
 out by one who occupies a position outside the 
 sciences themselves. A knowledge of the sciences 
 in detail is necessary before the classification can be 
 adequately done, and a scientific specialist may be 
 the best person to do it ; but, whoever does it, it is 
 by Philosophy alone that it can be accomplished ; 
 because it is not a scientific question at all. It 
 is strictly a philosophical problem, a recasting of 
 the way in which we interpret the inner and 
 final element of knowledge which transcends the 
 sciences. In every age there is a fresh necessity 
 for this.* 
 
 II. Next, we must re-interpret the ultimate 
 principle of Existence. We must continually recast 
 our doctrine of Substance, Essence, and Cause. 
 No past theoretical explanation be it Eleatic, 
 Heraclitic, Platonic, Aristotelian, or any other, can 
 exhaust the possible ways in which Substance, 
 Essence and Cause may reveal themselves. Hence 
 all the varying metaphysical theories, which, one 
 after another, have come to the front in the course 
 of the ages. 
 
 The most perfect statement of the ideal theory, 
 which the world received in ancient times was that 
 of Plato ; but Plato's idealism did not satisfy the 
 ages. It exhausted itself, and was naturally and 
 necessarily superseded by the experientialism of 
 
 * In my Essays on Philosophy, Old and New, I have dealt with this problem 
 in a somewhat different manner.
 
 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BEAUTIFUL 173 
 
 Aristotle, and when it reappeared in the Neo- 
 Platonic School at Alexandria it assumed new 
 phases. It survived in the theology of St Augustine, 
 and was seen again at Florence under Ficinus, sub- 
 sequently assuming all the hundred kaleidoscopic 
 phases of modern idealism, but changed in each of 
 the schools both by the additions it received and 
 the subtraction it experienced. 
 
 III. Another desideratum is the recasting or 
 fresh appraisal of the Philosophy of the Beautiful. 
 It is remarkable that, with all our advances 
 in recent years in British Art, with our noble 
 growth of modern Poetry, our magnificent Music, 
 and our great English school of water-colour land- 
 scape backed by the direct and indirect artistic 
 teaching of Mr Ruskin on the subject our Philo- 
 sophy of Beauty should be just where it was in 
 the last generation, nay, almost in the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
 Now the ultimate essence of the Beautiful 
 must be re-analyzed by us. The question of what 
 Beauty is in itself must be discussed, and the 
 relation in which all individually beautiful things 
 stand to be ultimately and absolutely Beautiful, 
 must be cleared up. There is a beauty in poetry, 
 in music, in art, in human life, as well as in external 
 nature. The central feature of a great landscape 
 picture by Turner, the main characteristic of a 
 sonata of Beethoven or Brahms, and the prevailing 
 feature of any one of the great poems of the world, 
 from Homer to Tennyson, may seem to be very
 
 174 DESIDERATA IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 different ; and, of course, the manifestations of 
 the Beautiful vary indefinitely in all its provinces 
 and subsections, but the thing itself is the same 
 in all. It seems to me that this has to be exhibited 
 afresh, and to be drawn out conclusively in detail. 
 It is one of the most interesting fields for the 
 speculative philosopher to traverse, hile his deter 
 mination of the ultimate canons of the Beautiful 
 will be found to help him in his speculative enquiries 
 within other allied provinces.* 
 
 IV. A fourth desideratum is the working out 
 of the co-relation of the three provinces of the 
 True, the Beautiful, and the Good. This classifica- 
 tion is one which we inherit from Plato, but Victor 
 Cousin shewed a wonderful intuitive sagacity in 
 reference to it ; and in his lectures published 
 under the title of " The True, the Beautiful, 
 and the Good," he has done much to bring out 
 the salient points in the great harmony he insisted 
 on. I do not propose to follow him now. I only 
 wish, in trying to point out the correlation of the 
 three provinces, to shew how the mere ontologist 
 is baffled before the mystery of things, w T hen he 
 perceives the arcana that surround him, and finds 
 that he cannot proceed towards the shrine of the 
 Universe by the avenue of pure thought alone. 
 When his logic breaks down, and even his intel- 
 lectual intuition of the infinite is pale and spectral, 
 it is then that the poet comes to his aid, with his 
 
 * I have discussed this question, at some length, in my Philosophy 
 of the Beautiful (vol. II.), "University Extension Manuals."
 
 THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 175 
 
 vivid glance into the mystic meaning of the cosmos, 
 and his interpretation of its higher harmonies. Not 
 only so. Not only is the metaphysician helped 
 by the poet, but the theologian is helped by both of 
 them, in his interpretation of the ultimate principle 
 of the Universe ; while the metaphysician, or the 
 poet, who sets the theologian aside, has an equally 
 partial and imperfect view of the Universe as a 
 whole. When the metaphysician becomes a poet 
 and a theologian, when the theologian looks with 
 the eye of the poet and the metaphysician, and 
 when the poet looks through both a speculative 
 and a religious lens, then the view which each takes 
 of the Universe at large meets at a common focus, 
 which is a luminous one. 
 
 V. The fifth desideratum which I shall mention 
 has been more thoroughly understood than any 
 of the previous ones, and much has been already 
 done in the way of supplying it. It is the treat- 
 ment of all philosophical problems historically, so 
 as to bring out the relation between the systems 
 that have been constructed by the individual reason 
 and the general mind of the race or that universal 
 reason of which they are, after all, only the most 
 vivid illustrations. The study of the great problems 
 historically shews us the causes that have led to 
 their origin. It explains their rise and their fall. 
 It exhibits their evolution out of previous systems, 
 and their occasional progress by antagonism and 
 reaction. It gives a key to their vitality, their 
 reappearance after decay, their resurrection from
 
 176 DESIDERATA IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the dead ; and it also shews why, in reappearing, 
 they assume new phases. The law of the here- 
 ditary transmission of qualities applies to systems 
 of opinion, as well as to characters and physiog- 
 nomies ; and this historical method of study shews 
 us further that the origin of every great speculative 
 system is to be traced back not merely to intellectual 
 causes, but to many others working alongside of 
 the reasoning power of their founders. 
 
 Our mental attitude towards a doctrine which is 
 an evolution out of the distant past, and therefore 
 only a passing phase of the universal constructive 
 reason of the race, is very different from what it 
 would be towards a doctrine which was the creation 
 perhaps the crotchet of an individual mind. 
 One result of this way of looking at systems of 
 philosophy ought to be the development of a larger 
 tolerance, tolerance for opinions with which one 
 may have little personal knowledge, and perhaps 
 less appreciation. We learn that the opinions 
 which are not ours may nevertheless belong to 
 what I have just called the universal reason of 
 the human race ; that gigantic errors may be only 
 simple truths abused ; and therefore that the most 
 extravagant of them are not to be spurned by 
 us, but rather to be so studied, that posterity may 
 extract wisdom out of their erratic or eccentric 
 phases. 
 
 The last point in the present discussion although 
 it is by no means the last desideratum in contem- 
 porary Philosophy is the determination of the social
 
 PHILOSOPHY AND LIFE 177 
 
 bearings of the greater problems ; their bearing, 
 that is to say, both on individual character and 
 national life. In this we have a sort of minor 
 test of the worth of all the great systems. A 
 Philosophy which has no relation to life, but stands 
 apart from it, like a set of mathematical formulae, 
 is almost self-condemned ; and here you may note 
 that the Philosophy which tells most powerfully 
 on human life is one in which reason and emotion 
 unite, in which poetic intuition and rational insight 
 go hand in hand. One reason why metaphysical 
 speculations are so little esteemed by the masses 
 is that they are so often elaborated in solitude, by 
 recluse students who never think of their bearing on 
 life and practice ; but Philosophy lies much closer to 
 practice, than the sciences do. 
 
 I am the more anxious to lay stress on this 
 because of the common delusion that the higher 
 Philosophy, from its being called speculative and 
 it obtains that title merely because its students look 
 as from a watch-tower over the firmament of know- 
 ledge, and traverse its areas from centre to circum- 
 ference by the telescope of thought is necessarily 
 unpractical. It is a crude popular fallacy that 
 the speculative and the practical are opposed. The 
 very highest Philosophy, which concerns itself with 
 the Infinite and Absolute, is necessarily practical ; 
 because we only know the Infinite through the finite, 
 at the same time that we know it as transcending 
 the finite ; while it is in the depths of the human 
 consciousness and in the very arcana of that 
 
 M
 
 178 DESIDERATA IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY 
 
 consciousness that we have the fullest disclosure 
 of the Infinite. The Infinite is there manifested 
 not extensively, but intensively ; that is to say 
 it is revealed in the depths of personality, and 
 this makes a true Philosophy of the Infinite the 
 most practical of all the sections of human know- 
 ledge, connecting it directly with Religion. 
 
 Further, there are the higher ethical questions 
 which concern individual duty, and the relation of 
 unit to unit in the social organism ; these have to 
 be wrought out afresh in the philosophy of the 
 future. Our Ethics must be allied to our Sociology 
 as well as to our Religion. The relation in which 
 the individual stands to his fellows not as a mere 
 branch or leaf of the tree of social existence and 
 therefore detachable from it as a fragment but 
 as a part of that larger whole, which is at the 
 same time his own higher self "writ large" on 
 the field of humanity ; so that any injury done 
 to others is at the same time a wrong done to self, 
 a hurt and impoverishment of one's own person- 
 ality ; all this has I believe to be yet developed 
 much more fully. 
 
 These desiderata as to what may be needed in 
 the immediate future are thrown out as sugges- 
 tions, which may be of some use to contemporary 
 students of Philosophy, who are now drawn towards 
 it by the same magnetic spell which has led their 
 predecessors in the same direction. One does not 
 need to assume the role of the prophet in affirm- 
 ing that Philosophy will continue to fascinate the
 
 DESIDERATA 179 
 
 generations of the future, that " the coming race " 
 will not find a substitute for it in agnosticism ; 
 but that it will remain the friendly ally both of the 
 highest Science and the deepest Religion, and that 
 these will continue, as Tennyson expresses it in 
 reference to " the True, the Beautiful, and the 
 Good," 
 
 three sisters 
 
 That doat upon each other, friends to man, 
 Living together under the same roof, 
 And never can be sundered without tears.
 
 XII 
 THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM* 
 
 THE necessity of Criticism is almost too obvious to 
 be stated. 
 
 Imagine a political party in office uncriticized, a 
 Ministry without an Opposition, a flood of litera- 
 ture sweeping the country without any review of 
 its merits or demerits ; imagine a state of Society 
 in which there were no rules of conduct, or canons 
 of taste or principles of evidence, and no adequate 
 criticism of these ; suppose a single all-dominant 
 Church, without a rival sect, either to oppose it or 
 to do it justice ; in such circumstances this fair 
 world of ours would be uninhabitable. It would 
 either collapse, or drift into the lethargy that pre- 
 cedes decay. 
 
 Those differences which exist in human Nature, 
 underlying its unity, necessitate the existence of 
 opposite parties in the State ; and the one which 
 
 * This subject was discussed by me, from a different point cf 
 view, in two articles in TJic Nineteenth Century, respectively entitled 
 " Criticism as Trade," and " Criticism as Theft." I have intended to 
 follow these by a third, entitled " Criticism as Murder," but it is 
 meanwhile postponed. I discussed the same subject to a certain 
 extent in a late periodical, The Scots Magazine, 
 
 180
 
 ITS FUNCTION 181 
 
 happens to be temporarily in power could not be 
 trusted to do its best work and to do it thoroughly 
 were it not criticized and opposed. These two, 
 the criticism and the opposition, bring out the best 
 that it is doing, and is capable of; much more than 
 appreciative praise could ever bring it out. If the 
 worst thing that could happen to a youth is to be 
 reared in a home where he is pampered, and nearly 
 the worst that could befall an author is to be 
 greeted with premature applause, the chief evil 
 that could overtake any political party is to be left 
 to itself, deprived of the steadying influence of 
 criticism, and the guidance of an Opposition. 
 
 But all criticism is not alike beneficial. When 
 it is destructive, it is usually sterile of result. On 
 the other hand, a constructive estimate as a rule 
 initiates new results. The former may be ex- 
 tremely brilliant, but it does not create, and it is 
 seldom even ameliorative. Like the surgeon's 
 knife, it is an instrument to be used to remove 
 what is obnoxious, and possibly perilous to life, 
 and growth ; but it never gives rise to fresh de- 
 velopments. True criticism does not enter, either 
 into Literature or Politics, Philosophy and Art or 
 Life, to destroy. It is meant to subserve the higher 
 function of fulfilment ; guarding what is excellent 
 in the Republic of Letters, and in the Body 
 Politic, and rejecting only what is alien to the 
 True, the Beautiful, and the Good. 
 
 I think it may safely be said that, in whatsoever 
 sphere they work, all just men welcome honest
 
 i8z THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 
 
 criticism, even in proportion to its severity, if it 
 be justly administered. They may wince under 
 it for the moment ; but they feel no chagrin, 
 and they soon recover from any annoyance it 
 caused. Most of them are able, in the long run, 
 to thank their critics for the work they did, and 
 the excellent stimulus it gave them. There is 
 scarcely a limit to the service which just criticism 
 performs towards the well-being of us all, of in- 
 dividuals and communities alike ; and the keener, 
 and more dexterously incisive it is, the greater the 
 service done, if only it be just. Criticism is of no 
 use, unless it be trenchant ; and if its arrows are 
 not barbed, the wounds they cause are salutary, 
 and soon healed. Per contra, perhaps, the weakest 
 of all literary or political writers is the man who 
 is always complimentary, and is therefore sure 
 to be commonplace to the core. 
 
 But, while reiterated and effusive praise is more 
 than weak it is offensive to every honest mind 
 and heart the savage criticism of a coterie, or a 
 self-constituted clique, is a most injurious and re- 
 pellent element both in Literature and Politics. 
 If the suppressio veri and the suggestio falsi do 
 immeasurable harm in the literary field, the imputa- 
 tion of base motives in the political arena, is a 
 still greater degradation to those who resort to 
 such procedure. It is not "the noble army" of 
 writers and speakers, however, who thus trans- 
 gress. They may occasionally say severely bitter 
 (and perhaps unjust) things of their contemporaries ;
 
 POLITICAL CRITICISM 183 
 
 but it is the lesser scribes, and the lower critics 
 the mercenaries of their profession who are 
 blameworthy, and who should me judice be put 
 into a pillory of exposure, since they are undoubted 
 literary criminals. 
 
 Every reader of the daily papers knows that 
 there is a style of political criticism which de- 
 moralizes party conflicts, killing out the old 
 chivalry, and even poisoning the well-springs of 
 national life. I do not raise the question whether, 
 in this respect, we are worse than our predecessors ; 
 nor do I mean that, in an ideal state of matters, 
 the keenness of party controversy should cease. It 
 would be no political elysium were those who sit 
 in opposition to the Ministry of the day, whose 
 function it is to watch every measure introduced, 
 and be the severest censors of its weak points 
 to give us rose-water speeches, instead of robust 
 incisive criticism, where even the sting of satire 
 has its use. The Opposition must be vigilant, 
 fearless, nay it must be lynx-eyed in reference to 
 trifles, fastidious even in its criticism of the party 
 in power, resourceful in its tactics, and not afraid 
 of being for a time in the minority. But why 
 should it be unscrupulous in its charges, tumultuous 
 in its passion, and irritable like a boy in unjust 
 invective ? 
 
 It should never be so ; and I therefore ask 
 again, Why should partizanship sink to such a 
 level that not only the leader-writer in the pro- 
 vinces who praises the speeches of his chief
 
 i8 4 THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 
 
 mainly because they are his but the metropolitan 
 critic as well, who often offends as much as his 
 provincial brother, start with the presupposition 
 that no good thing can come out of the precincts 
 of the rival camp ? The presupposition with which 
 all partizans begin whether the organizers or the 
 critics, the leaders or their lieutenants is that the 
 policy of the Ministry must be a bad policy ; that 
 no proposals tending in the right direction can 
 emanate from it ; or that, if they do, their merits 
 must be overlooked, their excellences obscured, and 
 the measures themselves opposed. Not only so, 
 but we are sometimes told that the motives, as 
 well as the policy, of the Ministry are altogether 
 bad, and that it is better for the country that there 
 should be no legislation at all, than good legislation 
 initiated by the party in power ; because the credit 
 of carrying one good measure will give popularity 
 and strength to an Administration that is unworthy 
 of the confidence of the country. 
 
 There are even some extremists who do not 
 scruple to say that no legislation can be good for 
 the country unless it originates with the most 
 advanced section of their special party. Its good- 
 ness consists, not so much in what it is, as in the 
 quarter whence it comes. They forget at least 
 for the time they forget that every legislative 
 measure has, and must have, its weak side ; that 
 the one they would have devised, had they been 
 in power, would have been justly open to the 
 criticism that it was incomplete ; and that, if the
 
 THE MINISTRY AND ITS OPPOSITION 185 
 
 passing of remedial measures (relatively wise and 
 good) is to be postponed until the Opposition 
 happens to be again in power, constructive legisla- 
 tion might be set aside for ever. Since no party 
 can ever have a monopoly of wisdom, if the Ministry 
 of the day is thwarted in the passing of its measures 
 by factious partizanship, reprisals are sure to follow 
 when the swing of the political pendulum sends 
 those in power into the shade of Opposition. 
 
 What one complains of is that no sooner does 
 a Cabinet agree upon a policy, or its leader issue 
 a manifesto, or make a speech disclosing a legisla- 
 tive programme, than the chiefs of the Opposition, 
 as well as their satellites, find their function if not 
 the very justification of their existence in pulling 
 it to pieces, and if possible scarifying its authors ; 
 being not only suspicious of their wisdom, but 
 doubtful of their motives. No one can object to 
 the keenest critical estimate of a rival party, and 
 its programme. That is the very life of the 
 political struggle ; but no less excellent, and equally 
 necessary in the long run, is an appreciation of 
 the good that is being done by the Opposition. 
 Why should that be an extinct virtue ? We need 
 not expect absohite dispassionateness ; but, is it 
 Utopian to urge, and to hope for, the practice of 
 the old virtues of fairness and political chivalry ? 
 In the heat of party warfare men are not swayed 
 by reason. They are led on, as in civil war, by 
 the impulse of passion : and there is a good deal 
 to justify the fear that we are in one of those heated
 
 i86 THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 
 
 political periods of which the most notable in 
 modern times was that which preceded the French 
 Revolution when fanaticism, and the blind worship 
 of a fetish, for a time overpower the calmer judg- 
 ments of reason. On the other hand, there are 
 signs which warrant the hope that a fairer spirit 
 may emerge out of this chaos, and that many are 
 growing tired of partizanship. 
 
 It is by its conduct while in Opposition, that the 
 highest virtues of a party are seen ; and its future 
 victory will be assured, if its recognition of what 
 is good in the measures of those in power is as 
 explicit, as its criticism of the defects of their 
 measures is incisive and keen. Might not the. 
 masses in our country to whom so much power 
 is now entrusted be educated to see that, as two 
 great Parties are necessary for the well-being of 
 every Nation, neither can possess a monopoly of 
 wisdom ; and that therefore neither of them ought 
 to have a very long-continued lease of power ? In 
 the retrospect of every period it is seen that political 
 wisdom has been pretty equally divided between the 
 contending parties, and it is for this reason that 
 power should pass alternately from side to side. 
 
 At any rate, we may ask, is it necessary for 
 the present political struggle for success in the 
 work of dethroning Ministries, and bringing others 
 into temporary power that motives, as well as 
 policy, should be constantly challenged ? that 
 measures should be caricatured, rather than ap- 
 praised ? and that so soon as a party is deprived
 
 CRITICAL REVIEWS 187 
 
 of a seat or two, the opposition should try to 
 prove that the tide has turned again in its favour? 
 It would surely strengthen the State, and make 
 the people happier while it would raise the tone 
 of social life in the country if a loftier courtesy 
 were introduced into political strife, and if some- 
 thing of the ancient chivalry towards opponents 
 mingled with, and even animated, the fray. 
 
 Coming to a few details. The world's debt to 
 its nobler Critical Reviews is a very great one. 
 The Magazines have been the channels through 
 which many of our literary masterpieces have first 
 seen the light. But there are now-a-days far too 
 many Magazines and Reviews in circulation. Their 
 name is legion, and their character occasionally 
 nondescript. There are more than six hundred 
 in Great Britain, and more than eight hundred 
 I am told in America ; I cannot tell how many on 
 the Continent of Europe, or in our Colonies. Of 
 course, in this as in other things, the demand has 
 caused, and regulated the supply. The vast 
 increase, and development of our primary and 
 secondary Education, the thousands of schools 
 where in last century there were tens, the myriads 
 of newspapers where there used to be hundreds, the 
 increase of cheap books and free libraries, and the 
 consequently easy perusal of light literature by the 
 half-educated masses, has led many to begin to 
 write, who, a quarter of a century ago, would never 
 have put pen to paper ; and so, we have far too 
 many authors and authoresses. Our modern educa-
 
 i88 THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 
 
 tion the much glorified product of the nineteenth 
 century has been such that almost every one can 
 now produce a novel, every man can make a speech 
 or keep a journal, and every woman write poetry. 
 As a necessary consequence there is an entire 
 regiment of miscellaneous scribes ready to criticize 
 the authors and the speech-makers. Early in life 
 these writers are trained up to a certain level, on 
 which they can come forth as penmen, and they find 
 a ready market for their wares. There are so many 
 magazines waiting for the services of those who can 
 turn out "views and reviews" rapidly on demand, 
 especially if they can write up to the standard of 
 cleverness in vogue, that there are scores of com 
 petitors waiting for employment ; far more candi- 
 dates than there are offices to fill. 
 
 In this connection I think I may also say that 
 there are too many publishers now-a-days, each of 
 the newcomers ready to issue " the book of the 
 hour"- i.e. the book that will bring in the largest 
 return in the way of profit, apart from merit or 
 enduring fame. 
 
 You may remember that, in one of the best of 
 his later poems, Tennyson said : 
 
 But seldom comes the Poet here 
 And the Critic 's rarer still. 
 
 As a humble member of the literary brotherhood, I 
 entirely concur in that verdict. And may I add 
 Wordsworth's opinion given in 1824? In that year 
 he wrote, " Some will say ' Did you ever know a
 
 THE POET AND THE CRITIC 189 
 
 poet who would agree with his critic, when he was 
 finding fault ? ' I will ask, ' Did you ever know a 
 critic who suspected it to be possible that he himself 
 might be in the wrong ? " I think that the true, 
 high-toned, sympathetic critic is rarer than the 
 creative poet, for this reason ; that accurate analytic 
 power is not so common a possession as is that of 
 facile production. Nevertheless, I put both of these 
 powers and tendencies to avoid a psychological 
 quarrel on an equal level of merit and value 
 to the human race. 
 
 Trying to reach the underlying philosophy of 
 the subject, perhaps it comes very much to this. 
 There are two great social forces working- in the 
 
 o o 
 
 world, viz. that of attraction and that of repulsion ; 
 in other words, sympathy and antipathy, a forward 
 movement and a backward impulse, or a progressive 
 and a regressive tendency. We find a parallel to 
 this which rules the world of humanity in the 
 motions of the planetary bodies. In solar physics, 
 attraction and repulsion combine to produce the 
 harmony of the spheres. But, in our little world, 
 and in the circle of our mundane interests, there 
 are forces continually at work which drive us 
 apart ; dividing us up into those circles, sets, 
 cliques, and coteries, to which we respectively be- 
 long. There are other forces which draw us 
 magnetically together, tending to a common centre 
 of sympathy and pursuit. These centrifugal and 
 centripetal tendencies which operate with invari- 
 able constancy in the physical sphere have their
 
 i 9 o THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 
 
 analogues in the world of humanity ; and the 
 parallel is a very close one. 
 
 Before leaving this part of the subject, I retrace 
 my steps, to speak in praise of a noble Press 
 and I think that in our country it has done great 
 things as an educator of the masses. None but 
 fools can bring a " railing accusation " against the 
 Press as a whole ; and those who do so, make 
 daily use of what they despise. The services it 
 has rendered in the diffusion of knowledge, in the 
 development of faculty, nay in the education of 
 character, have been vast. Without our Press 
 our country might at this hour have been half 
 barbaric. It has been a powerful means, and will 
 be an increasingly powerful one, of diffusing culture 
 and sending out new knowledge to the very ends 
 of the earth. All the more need, however, that 
 the masses should be trained carefully to weigh its 
 tendencies, and accurately to test its influence. 
 What those who have been hitherto helped by it 
 need to know is how to use it wisely, to sift the 
 materials it brings together in a miscellaneous 
 manner ; in other words, to distinguish what is 
 substantial and enduring from the tinsel of mere 
 appearance. If the masses only knew what to 
 read and what to ignore, what to value and what 
 to put aside, everything would for them be changed. 
 
 I come back to the critic's true function, or 
 mission, his special province and work in the 
 world. If we go to the root of things, it may be 
 said to be (i) to try to get at, and to shew the
 
 THE CRITIC'S FUNCTION 191 
 
 ultimate raison d*tre of all that is, assigning it its 
 proper place in the scale of existence. (2) Since 
 everything in the world is related to every other 
 thing, and it is impossible to isolate anything 
 successfully, to weigh each of them impartially, 
 testing its intrinsic value. (3) Since all things 
 are "double one against another," to perceive, and 
 to bring out the fact that we cannot understand 
 anything without an appreciation of its opposite. 
 (4) To shew that the value of what is being done 
 by any individual thinker, or practical worker, or 
 social reformer, is to be measured not only by the 
 extent to which he happens to mould contemporary 
 opinion, but also by the way in which he rises 
 above the verdict of the hour, and anticipates the 
 future ; creating history by laying hold of the in- 
 trinsic reality of things, apprehending their principia, 
 if not their ultimata. Now, it may be thought, 
 and said, that these things are hard to reach, and 
 still harder to retain. Be it so. That does not 
 make them inapplicable, or untrue x"^ 7 T Ka ^- 
 The true critic does not live on the surface of 
 things, or rest contented with a glance at the 
 externals of a problem, a character, or a policy ; 
 and he invariably begins (as I have tried to shew), 
 not with clever satire or dispraise, but with appre- 
 ciation. Were he to start with the idea that his 
 chief function was that of the anatomist or surgeon, 
 to dissect and remove, rather than to heal and 
 to build up he would fail ab initio. But alas ! the 
 destructive spirit is almost invariably abroad work-
 
 i 9 2 THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 
 
 ing havoc, so soon as the constructive one appears ; 
 and so, almost every new scheme or policy, if it be 
 original and great, is disesteemed at first. Many 
 of the very best books ever written have as Hume 
 tells us was the fate of his great Treatise fallen 
 "still-born from the press," and have had a very 
 slow resurrection from that early death. In addi- 
 tion to this history shews us that no great work 
 of Art has ever been adequately appreciated on 
 its first appearance, and that nearly every great 
 poem has been launched upon the world, without 
 the sympathy of the average reader and critic. 
 
 The reason is obvious. A writer, starting from 
 the level of the commonplace following con- 
 ventional rules, and adopting the standards he 
 finds current around him must of necessity fail 
 to appreciate what is original if it be novel. On 
 the other hand, the former canons of opinion and 
 rules of art are displaced, if not set aside, by the 
 original mind that has anything fresh to announce. 
 Here, as in other cases, it is found that the new 
 wine of genius bursts the old bottles of tradition. 
 
 Nevertheless the verdict of time is always just. 
 As Tennyson wrote 
 
 What is true in time will tell. 
 
 And it is not curious that it should be disesteemed at 
 first, and forgotten for a time. That is the destiny 
 of everything that is to live ; and so we see many 
 works, advertised by booksellers for a time amongst 
 their " remainder lots," become the cherished
 
 ART CRITICISM 193 
 
 possessions of the future. " Magna est veritas et 
 prevalebit" although for the moment it might seem 
 to be truer to say, "Magna est mendacitas et 
 triumphavit" But no. Human nature is sound 
 at the core, and the verdict of the general mind 
 of the race is ultimately on the side of genuine 
 merit of every kind. 
 
 In a previous paper I referred to the reviewers 
 of books who never read them. But this is not 
 confined to literary criticism ; and I give other 
 similar instances. One of the distinguished R.A.'s 
 of our time told me of an art - critic who had 
 agreed to review the pictures in a particular 
 Academy. He had to go suddenly to Paris, 
 and could not possibly see the Exhibition ; but, 
 he had to produce a review of it. So he asked 
 a friend to send him a catalogue, and to write on 
 it such phrases as " this is a daub," " that a success," 
 "this an improvement," this other "lacks atmos- 
 phere," the fifth "has no colour," the sixth is 
 "sketchy "and "a failure," and so on and so on. 
 The art-critic, receiving his marked catalogue, at 
 once wrote his review for pay ! 
 
 Another case. A critic of painting scribe of 
 the scribes ventured to compose an article, made 
 up of his jottings when visiting the private studios 
 of the leading artists who were expected to con 
 tribute pictures praising this and condemning that 
 but, when the Exhibition opened, not one half 
 of the pictures thus glibly criticized were hung on 
 the walls ! Similarly, or worse, a musical critic 
 
 N
 
 i 9 4 THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 
 
 undertook to write an article on an advertised 
 concert. After reading through the programme, 
 he composed a hypothetical notice. When the 
 concert took place, the programme was altered, 
 but the notice of what had been originally 
 advertised, although never performed, was pub- 
 lished in full by the newspaper in question. 
 
 Note another thing. So soon as a great man 
 dies, the eagles of criticism swoop down upon 
 him. Trivial details of his life are chronicled ; 
 and the biographical pilot-balloonists anticipate the 
 rightful biographer. The mere newsmonger, who 
 sets in order telegraphic notes and telephonic scraps 
 of information, and who supplies it at the earliest 
 possible moment, is honoured and rewarded. If 
 the supreme ambition of editor or publisher is to 
 be first in the field, the inevitable result must be 
 imperfect work, inaccurate detail, scrappy products, 
 desultory fragments, and a great deal of miscel- 
 laneous and most foolish gossip. 
 
 And then there is that terrible creature, the 
 professional interviewer, who comes with pencil 
 and notebook, and holding a sort of literary kodak 
 in your face, asks your opinion of many things, to 
 reproduce them after his own or her own fashion 
 in the newspapers. They are amongst the greatest 
 of modern nuisances. It is said that Napoleon was 
 once plagued by an interviewer ; and getting rid 
 of him, some one asked, " How did you manage it ? " 
 " Oh ! " said the emperor, " I shot him." 
 
 I said before that there were far too many books,
 
 THE BOOK OF THE HOUR 195 
 
 and reviews of books, in our time ; too many trades- 
 men in knowledge, the purveyors of indigestible 
 literary food. It was an old saying, which has 
 come down to us from the time of the exile in 
 Babylon, " Of the making of books there is no end ; " 
 nor observe is there an end to their unmaking, 
 their rapid disappearance ; because the one thing 
 involves the other. The trivial " book of the hour " 
 must of course disappear. It cannot live, and it is 
 well that it should die. But take the case of a 
 really good book. No sooner is it written and 
 circulated than it encounters hostile as well as 
 appreciative criticism. If it is a joy to some, it 
 is envied by others. It stirs up the ambition of 
 aspirant authors and rival publishers, to eclipse 
 it, to outdo its success by a similar venture. Every 
 new " Series " of Books is imitated by a rival one, 
 almost as soon as it is started. Not content with 
 seeing a bit of good work done, by one author, 
 editor, and publisher, leaving it alone, and en- 
 deavouring to make a fresh departure along a 
 different track the competing author, editor, and 
 publisher, devoid of all originality or imagination, 
 merely try to eclipse the success previously made, 
 along its own line. How foolish of them ! Are 
 there no new possibilities in human nature ? No 
 fresh pathways both for original and for critical 
 work ? 
 
 But, as already said, I am sceptical of the 
 wisdom of increasing the number of new magazines, 
 even when they are issued by our best publishing
 
 196 THE ETHICS OF CRITICISM 
 
 houses. Of course when old ones die out, and 
 are in the nature of things superannuated, others 
 must take their place, and they will doubtless be 
 evolved on lines of their own. But perhaps we 
 would have a richer Literature, with more origin- 
 ality and greater depth, if we had fewer of these 
 dissipating periodicals. 
 
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