THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESENTED BY PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL a BY THE SAME AUTHOR. LECTURES AND PAPERS ON THE HISTORY OF THE REFORMA- TION IN ENGLAND AND ON THE CONTINENT. Demy Sz>o, i6s. SCIENCE AND THE FAITH: Essays in Apologetic Subjects. Crown Svo, 6s. "Very able and interesting essays by one of the ablest of our clergymen. . . . Seems to us full of ability and candour, and of largeness of speculative grasp." — Tke Spectator. "His grasp on the history of philosophy shows that the fine old Oxford tradition of * Science ' is still understood and main- tained." — The Satiirday Review. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Lt° ES SAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL BY THE LATE AUBREY L. MOORE, M.A. HONORARY CANON OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THB LORD BISHOP OF OXFORD TUTOR OF ST, MARY MAGDALEN AND KEBLE COLLEGES MEMOIRS OF THE AUTHOR LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Lt?. 1890 J^AtJ..J\i {The rights 0/ translation and 0/ reproduction are reserved) BTIIOI PREFACE, The welcome accorded to " Science and the Fatth "" makes it unnecessary to apologize for the publica- tion of a companion volume. If any such apology were needed, it would be found in the fact that Aubrey Moore had in his lifetime contemplated such a sequel, and had set aside about half of the papers contained in this volume for that purpose. It is more necessary to say a word in explanation of the choice of the other papers and of their arrangement. They may seem at first miscel- laneous, and but slightly connected ; for they represent Aubrey Moore's work as a reviewer, as a lecturer (papers VII. and VIII. being notes of lectures given in his course upon the Ethics of Aristotle), and as a preacher (the two last having been composed as University Sermons). The arrangement passes from Natural Science through Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy to more definite Theology. But any who look beneath the surface will find a striking unity underlying all. There is b PREFACE. in all a clear belief in the power of Reason and in the reality and authority of Revelation. There is a hearty acceptance of Science, and yet a clear insist- ence upon its necessary limitations. On p. 147 will be found the author's own statement of the chief problem of the day : " The great metaphy- sical problem of the day is personality, implying self-consciousness and freedom ; " and I believe that this volume will prove a real contribution in defence of those two points, Personality — the Per- sonality of God and of man — and Freedom. One of the strongest statements of Personality will be found in the Sermon on Theology and Law ; the most fearless claim for the Reason in the sermon on " The Pride of Intellect." This will be an adequate excuse for including sermons in such a volume as this. These sermons were, moreover, preached on special occasions, and are philoso- phical rather than hortatory in tone and treatment. My warmest thanks are due to the Editor of the Guardian for permission to republish the reviews which have appeared in his paper ; to the Presi- dent of the Aristotelian Society for leave to print No. IX. ; and to many friends who have helped me in the choice of papers and the revision of proofs, especially to the Rev. J. R. Illingworth, Rev. W. J. H. Campion, and the Rev. T. B. Strong. My task has been made easy and pleasant by the kind help of the Rev. D. Moore, PREFACE. vii of Holy Trinity, Paddington, and of her who has tended the memory of Aubrey Moore with the same assiduous affection with which she tended him in his lifetime. W. LOCK. ( CONTENTS PAGB Memoir: (i) Rev. E. S. Talbot, D.D. ... ... xi (2) G. J. Romanes, Esq., M.A., LL.D., F.R.S. xxvii (3) Rev. W. Lock, M.A. ... ... xxxi I. Weismann's Essays upon Heredity, etc. ... i Note. — On some Theological Bearings of the Doctrine of Heredity ... ... 22 II. Darwinism ... ... ... ... ... 30 III. Mental Evolution in Man ... ... 41 Note. — Evolution and the Fall ... ... 60 IV. Creation and Creatianism ... ... 67 V. Types of Ethical Theory ... ... ... 83 VI. Prolegomena to Ethics ... ... ... 108 VII. Some Questions about the Will ... ... 134 "VIII. A Summary of Aristotle's Ethics as com- pared with Modern Ethical Theories ... 145 IX. Some Curious Parallels between Greek and Chinese Thought ... ... ... 162 Note.— On the Relation of Taoism to Con- fucianism... ... ... ... ... 197 > Essays upon Heredity, etc. By Professor August Weismann. Edited by Edward B. Poulton, M.A., F.R.S., etc., Tutor of Keble College, Oxford, Dr. Schonland, Ph. D., and A. E. Shipley, M.A. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ' ^ B 2 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. As far back as 1884, Mr. A. E. Shipley began a translation of the two essays which stand first in the present collection, and he has now co-operated with Mr. E. B. Poulton and Dr. Schonland in preparing the volume before us. Professor Weis- mann has himself looked over the proof-sheets, which is a sufficient guarantee for the accuracy of the work as a whole, while the assays in their English dress admit of the high commendation that, if it were not for the necessary insertion in brackets of a German technical term here and there, there would be nothing to remind us that the essays are a translation at all. The essays themselves are eight in number, and are arranged in chronological order, the first being written in 1881, the last in 1888. We are thus able to trace the development of the theory in Professor Weismann's own thoughts, and see how he was led from point to point, till he reached the central position, that in what he calls "the continuity of Germ-plasm " is to be found the true explanation of heredity. And this involves the non-transmission of acquired characters, and the overthrow of the Lamarckian and Neo-Lamarckian theory. It is only the outside of Professor Weismann's work that we can hope to touch in the present review. And even then we can do little more than state results. For the evidence lies in the myste- rious processes of embryological development, a WE IS MANN'S ESS A YS UPON HEREDITY. 3 discussion of which would be as much out of place as it would be beyond our power to attempt. There are two centres round which Professor Weismann's investigations turn — a speculation as to the origin of iiatiiral deathy and a new theory of heredity^ and the two are closely connected to- gether, and result in a complete and coherent biological theory. I. The first essay raises the question of the reason of the great variation in the duration of life among plants and animals. Can this variation be brought under any law } It is assumed, to start with, that duration of life depends upon adaptation to ex- ternal conditions, and is governed by the needs of the species rather than of the individual. When, then, the individual becomes useless to the species, whether that stage is reached after a longer or a shorter period, we should expect him to have reached the natural term of his life. And we are confirmed in this expectation by finding that, as a rule, life does not greatly outlast the period of reproduction, except in those species which tend their young. In spite of the fact that there is very little accurate information available as to the dura- tion of life in different species, Professor Weismann is able to produce some remarkable statistics in favour of this view, the most striking perhaps being drawn from the "exceptions" which "prove the rule." But this discussion of the duration of life 4 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. leads on to the extremely interesting question of the meaning and nature of death. Science has in past days discussed the origin of life, and for the present has put the question aside as an insoluble problem. On this matter, then, Professor Weis- mann has nothing to say beyond recording his belief that "spontaneous generation, in spite of all vain efforts to demonstrate it, remains a logical necessity." But on the phenomenon of death he has much to tell us. And his conclusions are as striking as they are suggestive. It sounds at first like a paradox to say that "it is only from the point of view of utility that we can understand the necessity of death," or to talk about death as " a beneficial occurrence," an " adap- tation," which has arisen by the operation of natural selection, because a life of unlimited duration would be "a luxury without a purpose." Still more startling is it to be told that, though the higher organisms " contain within themselves the germs of death," there are inferior organisms which are "endowed with the potentiality of never-ending life." But it is only the language which is para- doxical. When the amoeba increases by division, neither half is younger or older than the other. The process may go on for centuries ; thousands of amoebae may be destroyed, yet the amoebae who survive are as old as, for they are identical with, the first amoeba. The same is true of the WEISM ANN'S ESSAYS UPON HEREDITY. 5 low unicellular algae, and the more highly organized unicellular infusoria. They can be killed, but they do not die naturally. In this sense they are immortal. And, as Professor Weismann puts it, " Each individual of any such unicellular species living on the earth to-day is far older than man- kind, and is almost as old as life itself." Assuming, then, that the higher forms are evolved from the lower, when did natural death appear, and how could it have been — for this is Weismann's contention — a gain to the species, brought about by natural selection ? The answer is that when we pass from the unicellular to the multicellular organisms we are at first as far as ever from death. Multicellular organisms, like unicellular, are capable of being killed, but so long as the cells are homogeneous, there is no death. For the dissolution of the cell- colony is not death, since the separated cells still live. But when among the multicellular organisms we reach those in which a division of labour has taken place among the cells — that is to say, when we pass from homoplastides to heteroplastides — a new fact appears. The previously identical cells have become dissimilar, some being perishable, the somatic cells, the others, the reproductive cells, retaining the potential immortality, which belonged alike to unicellular organisms and to the cells of the homoplastid colony : — 6 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. " The mortality of the somatic cells," says Professor Weismann, "arose with the first dififerentiation of the originally homogeneous cells of the polyplastids into the dissimilar cells of the heteroplastids. And this is the first beginning of natural death." At first, while the immortal reproductive cells far outnumbered the perishable somatic cells, the death of the latter would be hardly noticeable. The organism, as a whole, would seem to survive, though a part of it perished. But when, in the individual, the perishable somatic cells came to outnumber the reproductive cells, death would emerge into prominence. For that which lived would be relatively small and unimportant com- pared with that which died. And when, more- over, the potentially immortal germ cells, owing to the death of the somatic cells, lacked the conditions under which they might build up a new body, they would also die, and so the natiLval death of the somatic cells would become incidentally the cause of death in the germ cells. For instance, if a plant or insect dies before all the reproductive cells have matured, these remaining cells are killed by the death of the soma. And thus the mortal secures an accidental triumph over that which in its own nature was potentially immortal. If we ask — Why did the mortal thus triumph over the immortal ? the answer is that it must have been for the good of the species. But this at once suggests the further question, — IVEISMANN'S ESSA YS UPON HEREDITY. 7 If natural selection, operating on the material of minute quantitative variations in the cells, not only produced a quantitative distinction between mortal and immortal, but put a premium on death, why should not immortality some day reappear? If immortality is lost because it proved under certain conditions "a useless luxury," under other con- ditions it might reappear. Professor Weismann answers — The line between mortal and immortal is less sharp than we might suppose. For the immor- tal cells, which do not die, can be killed ; and the mortal cells do recover the power of indefinite, if not infinite, reproduction, where long life is neces- sary for the good of the species. The duration of life is seen to be controlled by the good of the species, and long life, where it is so needed, is secured by an increase of the number of cell- generations in the sojna. If we further ask — Why, then, may not this increase continue till the line between reproductive and somatic, immortal and mortal disappears ? the answer is, that there is no reason, except that we cannot imagine conditions under which such an extension would be for the good of the species. A Tithonus, endowed with immortality but not exempted from the wear and tear of life, is as useless to the species as he is burdensome to him- self. The sojna being in its nature vulnerable, would, if immortal, become of less and less use to 8 £SSAyS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. the species, and the life potentially immortal would actually be limited by natural selection. Nature does not feed " useless mouths." The higher organisms, then, contain the germ of death, not because death is a primary necessity for living things, nor because in them a distinction between reproductive and somatic cells exists, but because in the somatic cells the power of indefinite multi- plication ceased to be of use, and so was lost. In short, the death of the individual was for the good of the species. Such is Weismann's theory of the origin of death. And it is interesting to find that, more than twenty years ago, Dr. A. R. Wallace had hit upon a similar explanation. In a note written some time between 1865 and 1870, but published for the first time as a footnote in the present volume, he says that while an organism, which increases by fission, would survive in spite of the destruction of its individual separated parts, those organisms which give off very small portions to form new organisms would be at a great disad- vantage as compared with these smaller organisms in the struggle for existence, and would soon cease to exist : — "This state of things," he says, "would be in any case for the advantage of the race, and would therefore, by natural selection, soon become established as the regular course of things, and thus we have the origin of old age, decay, and death; for it is evident that when one or more individuals WEISM ANN'S ESSAYS UPON HEREDITY. 9 have provided a sufficient number of successors, they them- selves, as consumers of nourishment in a constantly increas- ing degree, are an injury to those successors. Natural selection, therefore, weeds them out, and in many cases favours such races as die almost immediately after they have left successors." Here we have Weismann's theory of the origin of death, not indeed worked out as it is in his Essays on the " Duration of Life " and " Life and Death," but thrown out as a suggestion, which seems to have lain dormant and been forgotten even by the author till the essays of Professor Weismann were submitted to him in proof. 2. The other point in Professor Weismann's philosophy is his theory of heredity, which follows as a consequence from his theory of the origin of death and the separation of somatic and reproduc- tive cells in the heteroplastids. It is clear that in those organisms which increase by simple division the likeness which exists between the divided parts is simply the likeness of identity. The offspring is " a chip of the old block " in a literal sense, except that the question of age does not come in, each part being as old, or as young, as that of which it is a part. There is, as yet, no question of heredity. After the separation, any of the separated parts might by direct action of environment be modified, and so become different from the others, but when they in turn increased by fission their divided parts would, to start with, 10 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. be exactly alike, the likeness being still the likeness of identity. Even when the stage is reached in which two unicellular organisms conjugate and coalesce in one, whatever be the immediate advan- tage of such conjugation, there would presumably be the funding of the characters possessed by each, but so long as reproduction takes place by fission the whole of the parent passes into the offspring, or rather the parent and offspring (if such terms may be improperly applied to the parts of the division) are of one piece. When, however, we reach those organisms in which two different sorts of cells are produced, and when sexual reproduction makes its appearance, in place of reproduction by fission, the offspring is no longer identical with either parent, but shares the nature of both, being distinct from either. If we still speak of the child as " a chip of the old block," we are more or less conscious that we are speaking metaphorically. Yet the fact of heredity, whether in plants or brutes or men, is too obvious to escape notice, and is taken as a matter of course long before any attempt is made to explain it. Nor does the real difficulty of the problem present itself to us till we ask, How can a microscopic cell contain in the germ not only the whole body in all its parts, but the special characters of parents or more remote ancestors ? It is well known that the fact of heredity plays WE ISM ANN'S ESSAYS UPON HEREDITY. ii an important part in Lamarck's theory of descent ; indeed Lamarck would have explained the struc- ture of organisms mainly through the inheritance by one generation of qualities or characters acquired by previous generations. The long neck of the giraffe was due to constant stretching after the leaves of trees, the web between the toes of a water-bird's foot to the extension of the toes in an attempt to oppose as large a surface as possible to the water in swimming. In both cases the charac- teristics of the species were supposed to be acquired by minute additions from generation to generation. According to the theory of natural selection the same facts would be differently explained ; but Darwin did not altogether abandon Lamarckianism, or see that all the facts could be accounted for by natural selection, and that therefore the inheritance of acquired characters was an unnecessary hypo- thesis. Instead of this, he addressed himself to the question how the use or disuse of an organ in one generation could be transmitted to the next. The answer was the cumbrous theory oi pan- genesis, which Darwin himself recognized as only a provisional hypothesis. It was supposed that exces- sively small particles known as " gemmules " are constantly given off from the cells of the body and collected in the reproductive cells, so that any change in the organism during its life is as it were " registered for transmission " to the offspring. 12 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND FHILOSOPHICAL. Apart from the other difficulties of this theory, it has been practically proved by Galton's experi- ments that the "gemmules" do not exist, and, moreover, the tendency of recent science has been almost entirely in the direction of emphasizing the importance of the Darwinian principle of natural selection, and excluding what remains of Lamarck- ianism in the doctrine of evolution. Professor Weismann's theory of heredity is the latest development of this tendency, (i.) It explains heredity by the continuity of the germ-plasm ; (ii.) it denies the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characters ; and (iii.) it recognizes in natural selection the sole factor in the evolution of species, at least among the metaphyta and metazoa. The continuity of the germ-plasm. — We have seen that the problem of heredity does not really present itself in those plants and animals which increase by fission or division. For here the parts are at the time of the division alike because identical, and retain their likeness except when acted upon by the environment But when sexual reproduction appears, the offspring is no longer identical with either parent, but combines in varying proportions the characteristics of both, though we can trace it back to a microscopic cell. This microscopic cell must contain all that grows from it — not like a Chinese puzzle box-within-box (emboziement), nor as containing preformed gemmules (J>angenesis), WEISMANN'S ESSA YS UPON- HEREDITY. 13 but as the vehicle of the united germ-plasms of the parent plants or animals. At a certain staje in the evolution of organisms, as we have already noticed, a distinction arises between reproductive and somatic cells — the latter being perishable ; the former, in the sense explained, potentially immortal. The higher organisms, then, contain — speaking from the purely physical point of view — a mortal and an immortal part, what belongs to the individual and what the individual merely has the use of There is no primogeniture in nature, but the inheritance is strictly entailed. The individual becomes the vehicle to the next genera- tion of a portion of that ''immortal" germ-plasm out of which he himself was built up. Parent and child are thus made of the same "stuff." Their somatic cells grow out of the same germ-plasm, and the likeness in the result is due to the identity of the source. Thus heredity is ti'aced back to groivth. If we compare the germ-plasm to the creeping rhizome of a fern, the successive genera- tions would be represented by the fronds as they are successively thrown up along the line of the rhizome. Coming from the same rhizome we expect them to be alike, except so far as they are individually modified from without. But the individual modifications are individual simply, and the next frond has an identical starting-point with the last, and is unaffected by anything which for 14 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. good or evil has affected the others from outside. This illustration of a creeping rhizome, however, is a very imperfect one. It would fairly represent the facts if the plant or animal were the offspring of one parent only. But when sexual reproduction appears, the germ-plasm, out of which the individual plant or animal is built up, is the union of the germ-plasms of four grand-parents, and so on. The complexity of the germ-plasm increases in geometrical ratio, so that in the tenth generation a single germ contains 1024 different germ-plasms, with their inherent hereditary tendencies. But though the germ-plasm in each generation increases in complexity, it does not increase in mass. For it is constantly being used, as it increases, for the building up of successive individuals, though there is always a part of the germ-plasm which is not used up in the construction of the body of the offspring, but is reserved unchanged for the next generation. The somatic cells belong to the individual, are modified in the life of the individual both by the direct action of environment and by use and disuse, but they also die with the individual ; while the germ cells belong to the race, and can only be affected very slightly, if at all, through the somatic cells. As a corollary from this we get — The non-transmission of acquired characters. — This, of course, does not mean that a new charac- WE ISM ANN'S ESSjfYS UPON HEREDITY. 15 ter which appears in one of the parents nftay not reappear in the child, but that nothing can arise in any organism unless the predisposition is already present, and it is the predisposition which is trans- mitted, not the character : — "Only those characters can be called 'acquired' which owe their origin to external influences, and the term * acquired ' must be denied to those which depend upon the mysterious relationship between the different hereditary tendencies which meet in the fertilized ovum. These latter are not ' acquired,' but inherited, although the ancestors did not possess them as such, but only as it were the elements of which they are composed." With regard to changes produced in the indi- vidual by external influences, these, according to Professor Weismann, cannot be transmitted to the germs, and therefore cannot be hereditary. No one expects a cat whose tail has been cut off to become the parent of tailless kittens, though there are always old wives' fables to that effect ; nor do we expect a man who has lost an arm in battle to have a family of one-armed children. Even the tyranny of fashion seems powerless to affect the germ-plasm. The deformed foot of the Chinese mother is not transmitted to her children, nor have centuries of Western civilization had the slightest influence on the waist of the British baby. Professor Weismann has an elaborate examination of the various cases of supposed transmission of mutila- tions, including the case of epilepsy artificially i6 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. induced in guinea-pigs and transmitted to their offspring. He also discusses at some length the botanical arguments in favour of the transmission of acquired characters. Besides this he has recorded his own experiments on white mice, seven females and five males, whose tails were ruthlessly cut off. In five generations of artificially mutilated parents 901 young were produced, and there was not a single example either of a rudimentary tail or even of one abnormally short. The question of the transmission of special talents is a more difificult one, simply because it is less easy to distinguish between what is innate and what is really acquired : — " The children of accomplished pianists (as Professor Weismann says) do not inherit the art of playing on the piano ; they have to learn it in the same laborious manner as that by which their parents acquired it ; they do not inherit anything except that which their parents also possessed when children — viz., manual dexterity and a good ear." All predispositions can no doubt be improved in the course of a lifetime, but the question is whether the improvement can be added to, and handed on with, the predisposition to the next generation. On this point Professor Weismann is quite clear : — " In my opinion," he says, " there is absolutely no trust- worthy proof that talents have been improved by their exer- cise through the course of a long series of generations. The Bach family shows that musical talent, and the Bernoulli WEISMAN^'S ESSAYS UPON HEREDIIY. 17 family that mathematical power, can be transmitted from generation to generation, but this teaches us nothing as to the origin of such talents. In both families the high-water mark of talent lies, not at the end of the series of genera- tions, as it should do if the results of practice are trans- mitted, but in the middle. Again, talents frequently appear in some single member of a family which has not been previously distinguished. Gauss was not the son of a mathematician ; Handel's father was a surgeon, of whose musical powers nothing is known ; Titian was the son and also the nephew of a lawyer, while he and his brother, Francesco Vecellio, were the first painters in a family which produced a succession of seven other artists with diminishing talents." We may sum up Professor Weismann's theory of heredity in his own words : — " I believe that heredity depends upon the fact that a small portion of the effective substance of the germ, the germ- plasm, remains unchanged during the development of the ovum into an organism, and that this part of the germ- plasm serves as a foundation from which the germ-cells of the new organism are produced. There is, therefore, con- tinuity of the germ-plasm from one generation to another. . . . Hence it follows that the transmission of acquired characters is an impossibility, for if the germ-plasm is not formed anew in each individual, but is derived from that which preceded it, its structure, and above all its molecular constitution, cannot depend upon the individual in which it happens to occur, but such an individual only forms, as it were, the nutritive soil at the expense of which the germ- plasm grows, while the latter possessed its characteristic structure from the beginning — viz., before the commence- ment of growth. " But the tendencies of heredity, of which the germ-plasm is the bearer, depend upon this very molecular structure, C 1 8 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. and hence only those characters can be transmitted through successive generations which have been previously inherited viz., those characters which were potentially contained in the structure of the germ-plasm. It also follows that those other characters which have been acquired by the influence of special external conditions, during the lifetime of the parent, cannot be transmitted at all." It is obviously impossible to attempt anything like a criticism of Weismann's theory. Its evidence lies almost exclusively in the domain of embryology, and must be judged by professed embryologists. A part of this evidence, to which we have not even alluded hitherto, is Professor Weismann's theory as to the nature and meaning of the polar bodies given off by the unfertilized ovum in both plants and animals ; a theory which, if it be generally accepted, will not only be a valuable support to Professor Weismann's main position, as explaining the differences as well as the likenesses which exist between the offspring of the same parents, but will rank among the more important discoveries of modern embryological science. But in reading these essays we cannot help feel- ing, what was indeed a priori probable in a theory which was diametrically opposed to Lamarckianism, that too hard a line is drawn between the repro- ductive and the somatic cells. To most people it would seem that, however slight it may be, or however slowly it may take effect, there must be a reaction of the individual life on that of which it is WEISMANN'S ESS A YS UPON HEREDITY. 19 the vehicle. Professor Weismann, indeed, admits this, but with obvious reluctance. He says — " I am far from asserting that the germ-plasm — which, as I hold, is transmitted as the basis of heredity from one generation to another — is absolutely unchangeable or totally uninfluenced by forces residing in the organism within which it is transformed into germ cells. I am also compelled to admit that it is conceivable that organisms may exert a modifying influence upon their germ cells, and even that such a process is to a certain extent inevitable. The nutri- tion and growth of the individual must exercise some influence on the germ cells ; but in the first place this influence must be extremely slight, and in the second place it cannot act in the manner in which it is usually assumed that it takes place." But if, as he admits elsewhere, a changed climate may somehow affect the germ, and if increased nourishment not only increases the luxuriance of a plant, but "in some distinct way alters the plant," it may also be true, as is commonly believed, that the acquired habit of intemperance may react upon the germ-plasm of which the drunkard is only the steward, and he may transmit an alcoholized nature to his children ; and the roue may not only be destroying his individual life, but weakening and vitiating that which he hands down to pos- terity. It may be a slower process than we had imagined, but it is hard to believe that it does not take place. Looking at Professor Weismann's theory as a 20 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. whole, there are two points which seem to be of special importance. I. The first is that Weismann's theory makes a definite advance in attempting to account for variability. Hitherto evolution has been com- pelled to postulate variability, and has neither set limits to the possible variations nor accounted for their origin. Given a practically infinite number of " accidental " variations, evolution sets to work to show why, under the law of natural selection, supplemented by the supposed inheritance of acquired characters, certain forms rather than others survived. But Weismann's theory attempts to explain the existence of variation, and to show that the variations, though innumerable and prac- tically infinite, are neither really infinite nor acci- dental, but from first to last are subject to law. In the lower asexual organisms variation is brought about by external influences acting on the indi- vidual, these individual characters, though acquired, being as yet transmissible, because reproduction takes place by simple fission. But when the dis- tinction between reproductive and somatic cells arises, the direct action of environment ceases, or rather it affects the individual, not the species. /Sexual reproduction now appears as a new method ^of multiplying variations. For sexual reproduc- tion, by combining the variations already in exist- ence, increases them in geometrical ratio, and thus WEISM ANN'S ESSAYS UPON HEREDITY. 21 secures "hereditary individual characters to form the material upon which natural selection may work." 2. The second point to notice is that Weismann's theory, if it is true, involves the triumph of the Darwinian principle of natural selection, and will therefore have to run the gauntlet with the modern champions of Lamarckianism, including Herbert Spencer. For Herbert Spencer is committed to the view that what is a posteriori in the race is a priori in the individual ; in other words, that acquired characters are transmitted. According to Weismann no such transmission is possible or necessary. It is not possible if we are to accept the theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm ; and it is not necessary if we can explain the facts without it. His contention is that we can ; that the Lamarckianism which survived in Darwinism was a dens ex machind, which we can now dispense with. The progressive increase of variability has no meaning except as the progressive preparation of material for natural selection to work upon. The same law holds throughout. The conjugation of unicellular organisms, the distinction and the stereotyping of the distinction between somatic and reproductive cells, the introduction of natural death, the beginning of sexual reproduction, are all explained by reference to the same end. And when Darwin tells us that no flower is invariably 22 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. self-fertilized, and when Sir John Lubbock assures us that " nature sets her face against self-fertiliza- tion " we can see why it is so. For cross-fertiliza- tion has a similar advantage over self-fertilization, that sexual reproduction has over reproduction by fission. It multiplies the materials on which natural selection can operate. And to multiply the possible variations in plant or animal is to multiply the chances of survival in the struggle for existence. Whatever modifications Professor Weismann's theory may receive, it will, at all events, have stated a new problem, a problem of the deepest scientific interest, and pointed the way to its solution. If we may not call it a new departure, it is at least a new development in the theory of evolution. NOTE. A doctrine of Heredity which involves the non- transmission of acquired characters, if it ever be proved or generally accepted, can hardly fail to have a bearing upon questions of morals and society and even theology itself. No doubt those who see in evolution a ready weapon for use against the belief in creation will catch at Professor Weismann's theory as a new argument against the doctrine of original sin. For the present it is WEISMANN'S ESS A YS UPON HEREDITY. 23 enough to say that there is an obvious and triumphant answer from the point of view of CathoHc theology, which, however, may be reserved till the difficulty is raised. But the belief in Heredity has already influenced our judgment of responsibility and our theories of punishment. It is a common argument on temperance platforms that the drunken father or mother is transmitting to the offspring the " craving for drink," which in themselves is an "acquired" character. If we accept Weismann's theory, this is no longer true, or at least it is no longer a true way of putting the facts. For nothing that the parent can do or abstain from doing, in the way of use or disuse, can influence the offspring, which must inherit the joint inheritance of both its parents. Then there is the great question of education. Is it true, as Weismann's theory requires, that the children of highly educated parents profit nothing by that education, but have an identical starting-point with their parents? It may be true, but if so we shall have to recast many of our common views. It would seem, for instance, that if the new view of Heredity be accepted in place of the old, and if, so far as the species is concerned, it matters little what the parent does, but matters a great deal what the father is to start with, that the legislator 24 £SSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. would be bound to copy nature more closely, and sacrifice the good of the individual to the good of the species. This is 'the inevitable, and some- times the avowed, tendency of natural science, as distinguished from morals and religion. For morals and religion set an increasingly high value on the individual personal life, while the movement of what we call " nature " seems to be towards the good of the whole at the cost of the parts. This explains the fact of the strange alliance of the modern science of nature with pantheism, and the reappearance in Professor Weismann's theory of what we are familiar with in Spinoza. The individual life, we are told, is nothing but the mortal vehicle of the immortal germ-plasm. " Life," says Professor Weismann, "is continuous, and not periodically interrupted ; ever since its first appearance upon the earth in the lowest organisms it has continued without break ; the forms in which it is manifested have alone undergone change." Sq Spinoza speaks of the individual as " a mode of the universal substance," and individual lives as waves in the sea, "shapes which perpetually die away and have no being." Here pantheism and materialism are at one. For it makes no difference whether it is an eternal "matter" of which the individual is the transient shape, or an eternal " spirit " of which for a little while he is the organ. We do not by this mean to imply that natural WEISMANN'S ESSAYS UPON HEREDITY. 25 science in general, and Weismann's theory in particular, are opposed to morals and religion, but that they confessedly fail when they attempt to cover the whole of human life. We may say of them as Bacon says of final causes — " not that these causes are not true and worthy to be inquired, being kept in their proper place," but that their excursion into a region not their own "hath bred a vastness and solitude in that tract." The moment we apply to morals and religion the principles which seem to dominate "nature," we produce "a vastness and solitude" in the higher life of man. " Love one another " cannot easily be stated in terms of the struggle for existence, nor can " the infinite value of the individual soul " and the doctrine of personal immortality be fitted in with a theory in which "somatogenic" characters are of relatively little account. This contrast between the natural and the moral is just as marked when we have to face the question of responsibility and formulate a theory of punish- ment. Heredity is sometimes appealed to as excusing a man from responsibility, or at least as mitigating his guilt. In a well-known story in Aristotle's " Ethics " a man who kicked his father out of doors excused himself on the ground that his father had done the same to his grandfather, and added, pointing to his son — " When I am old he will do the same for me. It runs in the family." 25 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. The facts are explainable either on Weismann's view of Heredity, or that of Lamarck, though our judgment as to the guilt is different. According to Weismann's theory the capacity for kicking a father out of doors would have been transmitted from some abnormally ungrateful protozoon, to whom that capacity must have been of use. And though no doubt the man should have checked and not exulted in the development of the capacity, nothing that he could have done would have prevented his handing it on to his son. On the Lamarckian theory, each generation would, by use or disuse, have increased the inherent capacity for the exercise. And the effort of the individual to repress it or keep it within strict limits, would have also done something towards getting rid of a hurtful tendency. A part of the fascination which Lamarckianism has for some people is probably due to the fact that by this doctrine of use and disuse, and the transmission of acquired characters, it makes the individual really responsible, if only in part, for his children as well as for himself, and leaves room for the possibility of the extermi- nation of vicious qualities in the species by influences brought to bear upon the individual. But on Weismann's theory it is different. As- suming that an inherited tendency to kick one's father out of doors is, at the present stage of development, no longer for the good of the species, WEISMANN'S ESSAYS UPON HEREDITY. 27 what method and theory of punishment are we to adopt? Clearly the only reasonable course is elimination. A recent writer on "Marriage and Heredity" tells us that the Chinese put to death "by the slow process" not only the man convicted of treason, but his son and grandson, on the ground that presumably potential traitors must be got rid of This is very much what Mr. Cotter Morison's recommendation of a scientific homoculture comes to. We must "suppress" those human beings which show signs of moral or physical taint, and gradually improve the breed. But there are two difficulties which suggest them- selves with regard to this method. First, it has been tried, and the one thing that we are all agreed upon is, not that it failed, for where it was thoroughly carried out it was most effective, but that the attempt itself was wrong. We refer to that form of artificial selection known as religious persecution. The vast majority in the countries where this form of selection was practised were agreed as to the right type to be preserved ; and the elimination of what cattle-breeders would call the " curs and screws," or, as they were called in the language of the day, heretics, was carried on with the cheerful co-operation of Church and State. At the Reformation there was, in England and some other countries, some slight change of view as to the type of character to be preserved, but the method 28 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. and means of selection continued much the same for at least a century and a half And our experience of religious persecution has done little to prejudice us in favour of a scientific " suppression." Even if science were as infallible in its judgment of the best type as the Church has sometimes claimed to be, the methods which would have to be adopted would jar strangely with our nineteenth-century ideas of toleration and freedom. The other difficulty may, perhaps, be due to prejudice. But it is not easy in a moment to recast traditional ideas of justice and adopt a theory of punishment in which suffering would be meted out to those who are the unfortunate, but helpless, vehicles of that over the possession and transmission of which they have no control. We do not shrink from punishing the fathers for the children, but it is only a primitive society which recognizes it as just that if the fathers have eaten sour grapes the children's teeth should be set on edge. If with all the modern opportunities of education a child grows up in ignorance, the School Board rightly punishes the parent. But the more rigorously we apply Weismann's theory of Heredity the farther back we are driven in our search for a punishable subject. We are driven back step by step to the primitive variations among the protozoa, where ordinary methods of punishment are not available. The fact that these WEISMAI^N'S ESS A YS UPON HEREDITY. 29 protozoa are "immortal," and that the existing individuals are part and parcel of those which have been the ultimate source of mischief, would no doubt enable us to punish them without detri- ment to our sense of justice. And if corrective measures could be applied to the protozoa^ we might in some millions of years produce through new seons of evolution a more perfect race than ourselves. It would be a great satisfaction to have contributed to this result, but we still want a modus Vivendi for the present, and an intelligible scientific theory of punishment. £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. II. DARWINISM.! Those who have read the " Life and Letters of Charles Darwin " will turn with keen interest to the present volume. The relations between Wallace and Darwin, as shown in these letters, did honour to both. Either might have fairly claimed to be the real discoverer of natural selection, yet there was an entire absence of anything like rivalry between them, an ungrudging appreciation of each other's work, and, above all, a willingness to treat their individual claims as subordinate to the truth which both were helping to bring out. Writing to Wallace in i860, the year of the publication of the " Origin of Species," Darwin says — " I admire the generous manner in which you speak of my book. Most persons would in your position have felt some envy or jealousy. How nobly free you seem to be of this common failing of mankind ! You would, if you had my leisure, have done the work just as well, perhaps better, than I have done it." In the present volume Mr. Wallace writes more » Darwinism. By Alfred R. Wallace, LL.D., F.L.S., etc. Macmillan & Co. DARWINISM. 31 as if he were Darwin's disciple, than as, what he really is, the independent discoverer of the theory. " I claim for my book," he says, " the position of being the advocate of pure Darwinism." And by *' pure Darwinism " we are to understand the pre- eminently Darwinian doctrine, that natural selec- tion is the predominant though not the only factor in the variation of species. Mr. Wallace, thus, at once puts himself on the side of Darwin and Weismann, as against Lamarck and Herbert Spencer, though this does not imply either the unqualified acceptance of Weismann's theory, or the abandonment of the old opposition to Darwin on the subject of man. The greater part of the book is devoted to the verification and defence of Darwin's main position, not merely that descent with modification is the order of nature throughout the organic world — for this is universally admitted — but that, among the factors in evolution, natural selection is overwhelmingly important. Those who wish for a clear statement of the evidence for natural selection, and the way in which it acts, as well as of the fundamental fact on which natural selection depends, the struggle for existence, will find what they want in Mr. Wallace's book, together with a statement in Chaps. VIII. — XL of some of the most recent results of the investio^ation in the colouration of plants and animals, and the various forms of protective or predatory mimicry. 32 JISSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. We wish, however, to call special attention to the proof in Chap. VI. that all specific characters are either useful or correlated with useful characters. The bearing of this upon the question of teleology is obvious. At a certain phase in the development of the evolution doctrine, we heard a good deal of the uncouth word " dysteleology," which meant that so far from everything in nature being designed for good, there were many things like rudimentary organs, which were not only useless but positively hurtful to the organism. At this point, however. Professor Huxley had to step in and check the enthusiasm of the anti-teleologists. It was well to have a crushing argument against theologians and those who believed in design, but the appeal to dysteleology was fatal to evolution itself : — " For either these rudiments," Professor Huxley said, "are of no use to the animals, in which case . . . they ought to have disappeared ; or they are of some use to the animal, in which case they are no use as arguments against teleology." Quite lately Mr. Romanes has argued, from the large number of useless specific characters, that natural selection can have had nothing to do with them. But Mr. Wallace points out the distinction between " useless characters " and " useless specific characters," and maintains that — at least with regard to the latter — it is only our ignorance which justifies us in calling them "useless." Much that DARWINISM. in Darwin's time was supposed to be useless is now accounted for and shown to have a meaning, to be either directly useful or correlated with that which is useful : — " Almost every detail," says Mr. Wallace, speaking specially of plants, " is found to have a purpose and a use. The shape, the size, and the colour of the petals, even the streak's and spots with which they are adorned, the position in which they stand, the movements of the stamens and pistils at various times, especially at the period of and just after fertilization, have been proved to be strictly adaptive in so many cases that botanists now believe that all the external characters of flowers are, or have been, of use to the species." The main interest, however, of Mr. Wallace's volume gathers round the last two chapters, the former of which contains an elaborate criticism of some modern theories of evolution opposed to Darwinism, and a clear statement of the recent speculations of Professor Weismann, while the last chapter deals with the question at issue between himself and Darwin. Of views opposed to Darwinism four typical theories are discussed, all of them tending, in different ways, to minimize the action of natural selection, while three out of the four stand or fall with the possibility of inheriting acquired characters. The first and most important of these is the view of Herbert Spencer, which, though it runs through his works, has lately received special attention, because an article written by him for a popular review on the " Factors of Organic Evolution " was D 34 ^^-^-^KS" SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. triumphantly claimed by the Duke of Argyll as " a great confession " of the failure of Darwinism. But Mr. Wallace points out — (i.) that the in- herited effect of use and disuse of parts is admitted by Darwin in the " Origin of Species ;" and (ii.) that, in the present state of knowledge, it is more than doubtful whether both Darwin and Spencer were not wrong in recognizing it at all. The instances adduced can all be explained on the counter- assumption of there being no inheriting of acquired qualities, if we take into account the effects of the withdrawal of the action of natural selection. Where the struggle is going on every useful organ is kept up to its highest limit of size and efficiency ; but when the plant or animal is artificially protected from the struggle for existence there is a natural " regression to mediocrity," as Mr. Galton has called it, which would explain, for instance, the reduced size of the wings of many birds in oceanic islands, as well as the diminished size of the muscles used in closing the jaws in the case of pet dogs fed for generations on soft food. According to Herbert Spencer, this is due to the effect of disuse independently of natural selection ; according to Wallace and Darwin, and a fortiori Weismann, it is due to the fact that an organ, abnormally in- creased under certain circumstances by natural selection, tends to revert to mediocrity when those circumstances are changed. DARWINISM. 35 Mr. Wallace criticizes carefully, and as we think successfully, not only the view of Herbert Spencer, but that which has been lately defended by the American school of evolutionists, and the view of Dr. Karl Sempen ; but he is himself clearly inclined to accept the theory of Weismann, which would cut away the ground from all these theories. According to Weismann's theory, the question of heredity is reduced to one of growth. It is only where propagation is asexual that individual characters are handed on. Elsewhere the individual is only the vehicle for a minute portion of the very same germ-plasm, from which the parent was developed, all that is inherited being handed on, while all that is acquired dies with the individual. The individual, however, is a complex result, inheriting as he does the united germ-plasms of both parents, each of which in turn unites the germ-plasms of two grandparents. Diversity of sex becomes then of primary importance as the cause of variation, and the advantage of cross fertilization is obvious. Such a theory, if proved, would be absolutely fatal to the Neo-Lamarckians, and would triumphantly prove that natural selection is the supreme factor in the origin of species. Mr. Wallace, though he does not speak of Weismann's theory as ** proved," is evidently willing to accept it as a good working hypothesis ; and, in any case, he is ready to maintain, as against the Neo- 36 ^^^-^KS- SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Lamarckians, that ''whatever other causes have been at work, natural selection is supreme to an extent which even Darwin himself hesitated to claim for it." This supremacy of natural selection throughout the animal and vegetable world is, nevertheless, according to Mr. Wallace, limited when we come to man. It is here that we reach the point of difference between Wallace and Darwin. Yet the difference is far less than is generally supposed. For the idea that man is in any sense a "special creation" is as clearly rejected by Wallace as by Darwin : — "To any one," he says, "who considers the structure of man's body, even in the most superficial manner, it must be evident that it is the body of an animal, differing greatly, it is true, from the bodies of all other animals, but agreeing with them in all essential features. The bony structure of man classes him as a vertebrate ; the mode of suckling his young classes him as a mammal ; his blood, his muscles, and his nerves, the structure of his heart, with its veins and arteries, his lungs, and his whole respiratory and circulatory systems, all closely correspond to those of other mammals, and are often almost identical with them. He possesses the same number of limbs terminating in the same number of digits as belong fundamentally to the mammalian classes. His senses are identical with theirs, and his organs of sense are the same in number and occupy the same relative position. Every detail of structure which is common to the mammalia as a class is found also in man, while he only differs from them in such ways and degrees as the various species or groups of mammals differ from each other. If, then, we have good reason to believe that every existing DARWINISM. group of mammalia has descended from some common ancestral form — as we saw to be so completely demonstrated in the case of the horse tribe — and that each family, each order, and even the whole class must similarly have descended from some much more ancient and more generalized type, it would be in the highest degree improbable — so improbable as to be almost inconceivable — that^ man, agreeing with them so closely in every detail of his structure, should have had some quite distinct mode of origin." " As we seek in vain, in our physical structure and the course of its develop- ment, for any indication of an origin independent of the rest of the animal world, we are compelled to reject the idea of ' special creation ' for man, as being entirely unsupported by facts as well as in the highest degree improbable." Facts, however, tend to show that, while man has general points of affinity with the orang-utan of Borneo and Sumatra, the chimpanzee and gorilla of West Africa, and the long-armed apes of south- eastern Asia, he has peculiarities which separate him from all four, and suggest that he must have diverged from the common stock before the existing types of anthropoid apes diverged from one another. But Mr. Wallace will not hold, with Darwin, that man as a moral and intellectual being has become what he is in the same way and by the action of the same general laws which account for his physical structure. Here, we are told, natural selection alone fails to account for the facts : — " Because man's physical structure has been developed from an animal form by natural selection, it does not 38 jSSSAYS scientific AND PHILOSOPHICAL. necessarily follow that his mental nature, even though developed pari passu with it, has been developed by the same causes only." Certainly not ; but the burden of proof rests with those who deny it. And it would seem as if they were at least bound to show us how that other "influence, law, or agency" works, which in man, and man only, is supposed to supersede, or assist, natural selection. Instead of this Mr. Wallace emphasizes the difficulty of explaining the mathematical, the musical, and the artistic faculties, by natural selection, and then leaps to the conclusion that they must have had some origin " wholly distinct " from that which accounts for the animal characteristics. What, then, is this "wholly distinct origin".? Mr. Wallace apparently holds the view of "a spiritual nature superadded to the animal nature of man," and, of course, with this deus ex machind he can account for everything, though he tells us little or nothing of the law by which this spiritual nature acts. But this idea of " superaddition " is full of difficulties. It destroys the unity of man. Instead of the " reasonable soul and flesh " being " one man " we have a highly organized animal with a " superadded spiritual nature." And then, if we are to believe that a creature of the stock of the anthropoids became a man by the superaddition of a spiritual nature, is not a similar superaddition DARWINISM. 39 necessary in the case of each individual man, unless indeed Mr. Wallace is prepared to face the alternative that the spiritual nature, once given, is transmitted with the " germ-plasma " from parent to child? A few pages later on we are told that the progressive manifestations of life in the vegetable, the animal, and man, which Mr. Wallace distinguishes as unconscious, conscious, and intellectual, are only different "degrees of spiritual influx," and therefore do not break the continuity of the whole. But if, as Mr. Wallace holds, this spiritual nature, in all the degrees below man, works uniformly by natural selection, there is a strong probability that the law of its work will be the same in its highest operation, while if it works by some other law, we should expect to be able to trace the beginnings of this law in the world of vegetable and animal life. Mr. Wallace's anthropology is only less puzzling than his metaphysics. The several stages in the continuous process are said to be marked by the transition from inorganic to organic, from vege- table to animal, and from brute to man. With regard to the second of these, if Mr. Wallace had emphasized the contrast between vegetable and animal, in the strictly scientific region, we should not have dared to criticize him. But when he distinguishes them as unconscious and conscious life, we are tempted to ask — Are the protophyta 40 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. less "conscious of their own existence" than the protozoa? Have we any right to assert either that the brute has an " ego'^' or that the plant has no sensation? The line which separates living from not living is at present as clear as that which separates man from brute, but when Mr. Wallace talks of "sensation" and the "ego'' of conscious and unconscious life, he passes into the region of metaphysics, where he is as little competent to lead as we are willing to follow. ( 41 ) III. MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN.^ This is an essay, almost a first essay, in com- parative psychology — that is to say, it is an attempt to apply to the mental and moral nature of man the method which has been so fruitful of results when applied to physiology and morphology. It is not an attempt to merge psychology in physiology, but to compare the psychological facts of which man is immediately conscious with facts supposed to be similar in other living things. The first difficulty here is one with which Mr. Romanes does not directly concern himself, though for Auguste Comte it seemed to make all psycho- logy impossible — the difficulty, namely, of collect- ing the facts which are to be dealt with. " It requires art and pains," says John Locke, " to set the mind at a distance from itself, and make it its own object." Comte says in effect, the thing is impossible. No " art and pains " can help us. For, ex hypothesis the observer and the observed are * Mental Evolution in Man. By George J. Romanes, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. 42 jEssays scientific and philosophical. identical, and the observer is only in the judicial attitude necessary for observation when nothing is going on — i.e. when there are no facts to observe. Hume had said almost the same : — " Should I attempt to experiment on my own mind, 'tis evident this reflection and premeditation would so disturb the operation of any natural principles as must render it impossible to form any just conclusion from the pheno- menon." Hence Comte's conclusion is, psychology is no science, but a branch of physiology. But this view Herbert Spencer will have none of Between the physiological order and the psychological there is a barrier which at present is absolute : — "Physiology (we are told) cannot properly appropriate subjective data, or data wholly inaccessible to external obser- vation." It "ceases to be physiology when it imports into its interpretations a psychical factor, a faculty which no physical research whatever can disclose or identify, or get the remotest glimpse of . . . Psychology under its subjective aspect is a totally unique science, independent of, and anti- thetically opposed to, all other sciences whatever." In fact, a purely physiological psychology is as impossible as a subjective account of somnambulism. It is only psychology so far as it is false to its physiological method. All this, we take it for granted, Mr. Romanes would allow. Psychological facts must be primarily and directly known in the consciousness of the individual, even if, with Mr. Sully, we allow that MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 43 all introspection is retrospection. But how then about the comparative method ? Nobody knows any mind but his own, and not much of that. For as he tries to look back to the earlier stages the words of memory become inarticulate and its characters illegible. And how does he know that other men have minds, or that they are at all like his own? And what about the familiar process of " tossing about psychological babies," as Dr. Martineau calls it, " and wringing from them amhigtias voces as to how they feel " .'' The psycho- logy of other people's children only looks more legible than the recollection of one's own childhood, because we think we read there what we really read into it. We are not here raising a difficulty which Mr. Romanes is not fully aware of. His answer would be, that other people's minds are to us neither subjects, like our own is, nor objects, like that which we can study physiologically, but ejects. The word is borrowed from Professor Clifford, and is used to mean an inference from acts or movements observed, which acts or move- ments, in our own experience, have been associated with certain psychological facts, and are therefore assumed to be a guarantee for the presence in others of similar facts. In the case of our fellow- men this assumption is undoubtedly made, and if it is not always justified, it is frequently confirmed 44 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. by what our fellow-men tell us by means of a language which we have come to understand. But the farther we get back in the history either of the individual or the race, the larger the assumptions which we have to make, and the smaller the help that language can give us. It is no use catechizing a child as to its psychical condition, though we may watch its acts and the growth of its language, and assume that these reflect the growth of its " mind." When, however, in our loyalty to the comparative method, we attempt to extend our inquiry to non- human animals, whose conversational powers are more limited than those of a child, we find our- selves making larger drafts on our original as- sumptions. Before, we were only guilty of " auto- morphism," interpreting other people's acts by ourselves ; now we are guilty of the far graver crime of " anthropomorphism " — i.e. interpreting in terms of man the acts and movements of creatures which are not human. Mr. Samuel Butler extends the same method to plants : — " In its own sphere," he says, "a plant is just as intelligent as an animal, and keeps a sharp look-out upon its own interests, however indifferent it may seem to be to ours." We are not anxious to maintain the opposite in either case, but it is well to remind ourselves that it is an assumption, and that the assumption becomes greater, and the conclusions less scientific, as we move away from the individual consciousness MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN 45 and argue about the movements of animal or vegetable life. So much for the difficulties in limine^ which are not indeed formally discussed by Mr. Romanes, but of which, of course, he is fully conscious. He starts by telling us that he assumes the general truth of evolution, and its applicability to the whole animal kingdom, both with respect to physical and psychical development, with the one (provisional) exception of the human mind, and he argues for the a priori probability of the con- clusion that this will prove to be no exception after all. We are not quite sure whom Mr. Romanes imagines himself to be opposing. He constantly speaks as if the cause of comparative psychology must stand or fall with him, and he were heroically defending it against a strong body of opponents. Who are they } Not evolutionists generally, for whatever they may think of Mr. Romanes' attempt, they are prejudiced in favour of his main conten- tion ; not anti-evolutionists, for if so the volume is an elaborate ignoratio elenchi^ since an anti-evo- lutionist would not admit the assumptions with which the inquiry starts. Mr. Romanes wishes to prove that human and animal psychology differ not in kind but in degree. Here every one is against Mr. Romanes, including himself, unless he is prepared to say that evolution has abolished 46 jESSAYS scientific AND PHILOSOPHICAL. species, instead of showing how species came to be. If a cat and a dog are different in kind, so are a man and a monkey, whatever view we may take of the genetic relations of the pairs. But this is not what Mr. Romanes means by different in kind. In a footnote to page 3, he says that difference of kind means difference of origin, and accuses Professor Sayce of "confusion" for saying that "^differences of degree become in time differences of kind." We seem to remember a greater than Professor Sayce teaching us that the categories of quantity and quahty disappear in " measure." And if this sounds to Mr. Romanes a trifle meta- physical, we might remind him that whenever science has shown that differences of kind, con- sidered genetically, are differences of degree, no one dreams of supposing that they are any the less differences of kind. The question of origin has nothing to do with it. Only apparently Mr. Romanes is fighting against some one who explains the difference in kind between human and brute psychology by a difference of origin. If this is the view of Mr. Wallace, or Mr. Mivart, or Pro- fessor Quatrefages, we must leave them to defend it. And if Mr. Romanes is defending the unity of origin for man and brute, he need not be afraid of theological opposition. Christianity knows of only one origin for all things, however widely they differ in kind. If of man it is said that God MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 47 "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul," it is also said of the beasts and fishes, " When Thou lettest Thy breath go forth they shall be made; and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth." On the a priori question, then, Christianity has no particular view. The creation of the soul by God is neither more nor less true than the creation of the body by Him, and therefore, if science can by a patient application of its own methods tell us something here too of the modus creandi, we may hope that Christians have learned enough from the past to be ready to meet the attempt with some- thing more than glum disapproval. Even those who look upon the attempt with most suspicion may comfort themselves with the wise remark of the learned Gamaliel, " If this work be of men it will come to naught ; but if it be of God ye cannot overthrow it." When, however, we approach Mr. Romanes' volume, with every readiness to avail ourselves of any new light which experience, scientifically organized, can give us, we find ourselves at once in opposition, not indeed because we object to the application of the comparative method to psycho- logy, for, difficult as this is, it is the only way in which the subject can be scientifically dealt with, but because we find Mr. Romanes assuming, as if it were generally accepted, the empirical psycholog>^ 48 £SSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. of Locke, curiously supplemented and confused by terms borrowed from the Kantian School. At present Mr. Romanes is only concerned with the intellectual difference between man and brute, the question of morals and religion being postponed for future treatment. But he might just as well assume that Hedonism is accepted by all moralists as that Locke's psychology is accepted by all psychologists. No doubt any investigator is at liberty to assume any psychology he pleases as the basis of his in- quiry, and it was natural that a psychology, which can claim to be almost typically English, and was constructed under the influences of physical science, should suggest itself as most likely to tally well with the results of similar investigations in the animal world. But the astonishing thing is that Mr. Romanes should suppose that he is carrying all psychologists with him, and that it is indifferent whether the intellectual difference commonly held to exist between man and brute be stated in the language of Locke or Aristotle. This is what he says : — " I now pass on to consider the only distinction which in my opinion can be properly drawn between human and brute psychology. This is the great distinction which furnishes a full psychological explanation of all the many and immense differences that unquestionably do obtain between the mind of the highest ape and the mind of the lowest savage. It is, moreover, the distinction which is now universally recog- MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 49 nized by psychologists of every school, from the Romanist to the agnostic in religion, and from the idealist to the materialist in philosophy. "The distinction has been clearly enunciated by many writers, from Aristotle downwards, but I may best render it in the words of Locke." Then we have a long quotation from the " Essay," which draws the line between man and brute at the power of abstracting — " the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain to." In the next chapter we have ideas classified as follows : — "The word 'Idea' I will use in the sense defined in my previous work — namely, as a generic term to signify indiffer- ently any product of imagination, from the mere memory of a sensuous impression up to the result of the most abstruse generalization. " By * Simple Idea,' ' Particular Idea,' or ' Concrete Idea,' I understand the mere memory of a particular sensuous perception. " By ' Compound Idea,' ' Complex Idea,' or ' Mixed Idea,' I understand the combination of simple, particular, or con- crete ideas into that kind of composite idea which is possible without the aid of language. " Lastly, by ' General Idea,' 'Abstract Idea,' ' Concept,' or ' Notion,' I understand that kind of composite idea which is rendered possible only by the aid of language, or by the process of naming abstractions as abstractions." Directly after, the stages in " ideation " are named as follows. The simple or particular ideas are E 50 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. called percepts ; the general or abstract ideas are called concepts ; but there is no co-ordinate name for the middle class. Here Mr. Romanes is in the difficulty which Professor Clifford was in when he boldly borrowed the word 'eject' as a tertium quid between subject and object. Mr. Romanes follows his lead, and invents the term Recept : — " In addition to the terms ' Percept ' and ' Concept,' I coin the word Recept. This is a term which seems exactly to meet the requirements of the case. For as perception means a taking wholly., and conception a taking together , reception means a taking again. Consequently, a recept is that which is taken again, or a re-cognition of things previously cog- nized. ^^ Of this classification Mr. Romanes, in his sum- mary, says — " It is a classification over which no dispute is likely to arise, seeing that it merely sets in some kind of systematic order a body of observable facts with regard to which writers of every school are nowadays in substantial agree- ment." Now, a scientific man, as long as he keeps to the firm ground of experience, is worthy of all honour. No one doubts the truth of experience. But when he offers us a rationale of experience which makes all experience impossible, and from the logical results of which he is only saved by his strong common sense, we may be allowed to express our dissent. Mr. Romanes can only make all psycho- logists agree with him by adopting what Locke calls "the short cut to infallibility," and saying MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 51 that those who do not agree with him are not psychologists. He ahnost does go as far as this in reference to another matter, which he says ''is admitted by all my opponents who understand the psychology of the subject." Certainly no meta- physician would agree with him, for, as every one who has read Green's " Introduction to Hume " knows, that which for Mr. Romanes is the founda- tion of knowledge, the simple idea, or " perception," or sensation, which is common to man and beast, is the very negation of knowability, and many nothings will not make a something. While if the individual sensation is consciously representative, it is already knowledge, and can as little be shown to exist anywhere except in man as " concepts " can. Curiously enough, almost simultaneously with Mr. Romanes' volume, there have appeared two repudiations of the psychology of " ideation " from different points of view. Father Rickaby repudiates it in the interests of modern scholastic realism, and Mr. Case from the point of view of healthy physical realism. We do not, however, propose to join issue with Mr. Romanes on his avowed nominalism or his unavowed sensationalism, either of which, to our perverse metaphysical view, is destructive of know- ledge altogether, still less to criticize Locke and Hume through him. We propose rather to show how Mr. Romanes builds upon this foundation. 52 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Of course we do not deny that the child, who from the first is potentially rational, as the brute is not, passes through stages of mere sensitive and irrational life and, as it were, lives the life of the brute in miniature, just as its body in the embryonic state sums up the evolutionary series. This is excellently stated in Aristotle, who, while he con- tends that Man is distinguished from brutes by his rational and his moral nature, both of which, like speech, are peculiar to him, yet admits that as the brute has «^wvr;, but not Xoyoc, so there are traces '/xv»? — " footsteps " is Locke's word — of both intellectual and moral qualities in the lower animals. And he adds these remarkable words : — "This is most clearly seen if we look at the case of children. For in them we find the traces, and as it were the germs, of what afterwards shall be ; indeed, if I may say so, there is no difference between the mind of the child and the mind of the brute at this period, so that we are not sur- prised to find that they have some things which are the same with, some things which resemble, and some things •which are analogous to, what is found in the brute." Nature, he says, makes its transitions little by little, and the continuity of the process conceals the border line — rrj avve\ua XavOavei to jueOopiov avrojv. It is this border line which Mr. Romanes has ^et himself to discover, and he apparently sets much store by the doctrine of Recepts. These recepts are something between particular and general ideas. They are the " blended " pictures MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 53 of Mr. Galton ; the " generic " images of Professor Huxley, who however does not clearly distinguish between them and the " concepts ; " they are "sensations with a fringe," as Professor James calls them, on which Professor Maguire, of Dublin, re- marks, "A sensation with a fringe is more mis- leading than a sensation on a bicycle." They are not yet truly universal, but are on their way to become so. For, following Locke again, Mr. Romanes tells us that the mind is as yet passive, whereas in " conceptual thought " it is active. But a blurred picture is as much particular as a picture with a sharp outline ; if it is really '' generic " in the sense of being representative, it is already "general." It becomes a mere rpi-roq avOpomog, doubling the difficulty it was to help to solve. It is Mill's old fallacy of arguing from particulars to particulars. So far as they are particular we cannot argue from them, and so far as we argue from them they are not particular, but typical, and therefore universal. The "recept" of a triangle is like Locke's abstract idea of a triangle, which — "Must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equila- teral, equicrural, nor scalenon ; but all and none of these at once. In effect it is something imperfect that cannot exist ; an idea wherein some parts of several different and incon- sistent ideas are put together." Yet the whole object of the present volume, we are told, is to discover whether there is a difference 54 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. of kind or only a difference of degree between a recept and a concept. With a view to this discovery, then, we have five chapters which are full of anecdotes bearing on the " language " of animals and men. For as the term " ideation " is made to cover what is not human, as well as what is human, in the process of thought, and all that leads up to it, so language is made to cover not only speech, but all the noises and gestures which in children precede speech and in brutes take the place of speech. There is much that is extremely interesting in these chapters, and much which any one may verify and add to by appealing to his own ex- perience. Every one has had some experience of the cleverness of animals and of the quaintly original efforts of children to express themselves. That brutes understand one another and communi- cate with one another no attentive observer of their habits can doubt. In fact, they have a language, and can even learn to use ours. What, then, is the difference } Here Mr. Romanes, how- ever little we like his terminology, keeps clearly to his point. Brutes have percepts and recepts ; their language never rises above that which, in the human animal, belongs to the receptual or pre- conceptual phase. A human being talks like a parrot at a certain stage, but a parrot never talks like a human being who has grown up to his MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 55 manhood. So in language we must not draw the line, if any one does, at sign-making language, but only that kind of sign-making which we understand by speech. And " till the age of self-consciousness dawns " the child has not properly speech, but merely the power of expressing "receptual judg- ments." Its self-consciousness, before it is capable of "conceptual ideation," is "rudimentary or nascent." Of the gradual attainment of self-con- sciousness Mr. Romanes says — " I say 'gradual' because the process is throughout of the nature of a growth. Nevertheless, there is some reason to think that when this growth has attained a certain point, it makes, so to speak, a sudden leap of progress which may be taken to bear the same relation to the development of the mind as the act of birth does to that of the body. In neither case is the development anything like completed. Midway between the slowly evolving phases 171 utero and the slowly evolving phases of after-growth, there is in the case of the human body a great and sudden change at the moment when it first becomes separated from that of its parent. And so there is some reason to believe it is in the case of the human mind. Midway between the gradual evolution of receptual ideation and the no less gradual evolution of con- ceptual, there appears to be a critical moment when the soul first becomes detached from the nutrient body of its parent perceptions, and wakes up in the new world of a consciously individual existence." Time and space forbid our attempting to follow Mr. Romanes in his interesting appeal to philology on the phylogenic question as he has appealed to language on the ontogenic. And there is the less 56 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. reason for doing so because the question which in phylogeny is parallel to the ontogenic question of the dawn of self-consciousness Mr. Romanes wisely refuses to decide. It is interesting to see how man in his embryonic life gathers up the sharply defined types of infra-human existence, but no one dreams of basing zoology on embryology. Similarly, to argue from the origin of self-con- sciousness in the individual, about which we know so little, to the transition from the man-like ape to the ape-like man, must be, as Mr. Romanes says, "of a wholly speculative or unverifiable character." "As well," he says, "might the historian spend his time in suggesting hypothetical histories of events known to have occurred in a prehistoric age." And he therefore contents him- self with criticizing three "alternative — and equally hypothetical" — accounts of the process, the view of certain German philologists, the view suggested by Mr. Darwin, and a modification of this thrown out as a suggestion by Mr. Romanes himself What, then, has Mr. Romanes really done in the volume before us ? If we take his own account, he has triumphantly proved that the difference between man and brute is one of degree and not of kind. If this means that he has triumphed over somebody who believed that the soul came from God and the body from somewhere else, we con- gratulate him on his victory over a revived Mani- MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 57 cheanism. If difference in kind means, what Mr. Romanes wants to make it mean, difference of origin, there is no such thing as difference of kind either for idealist or realist, for Pantheist, Materi- alist, or Christian, and Mr. Romanes has only given the coup de grace to a moribund Deism. In doing this, however, in spite of his unfortunate terminology and impossible metaphysic, he has been led by experience back to Aristotle, whither all biological studies ultimately tend. We have already quoted one passage on the continuity of evolution. We proceed to quote another on " the genesis of conceptual ideation : " — "All animals have," says Aristotle, "a certain natural power of discrimination which we call sense ; but in some animals which are capable of sensation there is also the power of retaining the sensation, while in others this power is wanting. Those animals, then, which either wholly or in part are with- out this power, can have no knowledge beyond mere sensa- tion ; while those which have this power may retain the sensation when it is no longer present. There are many animals of this kind, and they are further distinguished by the fact that in some of them out of this power of retaining sensations comes reason, in others it does not. From sense, then, comes memory, and from repeated memories experience (for many memories make an experience) ; and from ex- perience or from every universal which abides in the mind — the unity, that is, which is distinct from the many, and is yet one and the same in them all — comes the beginning of art or science, according as it belongs to the practical or specula- tive region." This is, of course, a well-known passage, but it 58 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. is worth comparing with Mr. Romanes' view : aiaOvimg, sensation, which is common, though in different degrees, to all animals, is what Mr. Romanes means by percepts ; eiwirEipia, experience, the result of many particular "percepts" retained by memory, corresponds to his "receptual idea- tion." But it is in man only that we get the true apxri, in Mr. Romanes' language the "con- ceptual ideation." The child subsumes in its intellectual life the processes of the lower animals ; but it rises above them, and till it rises above them it is only potentially human. Let us hear Mr. Romanes : — "The whole distinction between man and brute resides in the presence or absence of conceptual thought, which in man is but the expression of the presence or absence of self- consciousness." "The distinction between a recept and a concept is really the only distinction about which there can be no dispute." " A receptual judgment is always separated from a conceptual inference or true judgment by the immense distinction that it is not itself an object of knowledge." It is all the difference between "truth perceived and truth perceived as true," and this difference is reflected in language : — " The line must be drawn, not at language or sign-making, but at that particular kind of sign-making which we under- stand by speech." " So that a man vieans^ it matters not by what system of signs he expresses his meaning ; the dis- tinction between him and the brute consists in his being able to inemt a proposition^ " This is the ' Rubicon of mind ' which separates the brute from the man." MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 59 Aristotle, and those who follow him, say — Man is different in kind from the brute because man has reason, which brutes have not ; speech, which brutes have not ; morality, which brutes have not. Mr. Romanes has not yet dealt with the question of morality, but on the other two points he endorses the old distinction. The ideas are, indeed, more precisely limited, which is a gain : and they are expressed in terms borrowed from empiricism, which is a loss. He has told us a great deal about the psychical processes of brutes which Aristotle did not know. But the main distinction is as clear as ever. Ideation covers everything from sensation to thought. Language covers all sorts of noises and sign-making, as well as the language of man. But only conceptual ideation, which is peculiar to man, has a right to the name of reason, and only the expression of it in language has a right to be called speech. Homo alaliis, if he ever existed, was an impostor, or a contradiction in terms. For " speech created reason : before its advent mankind was reasonless " — i.e. it was not mankind at all. Yet Mr. Romanes claims to have proved that man and brute only differ in degree and not in kind. Certainly he cannot complain if he is mis- understood and misjudged. A more misleading expression it is difficult to imagine, and even when the sense in which " different in kind " is used has been explained, the old and natural use 6o ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. of the term will be constantly reappearing. The reason of a child is never the same in kind as that of the brute, for from the very first it is potentially that which the brute's never can be. " The greatest of all distinctions in biology," Mr. Romanes says, " when it first arises, is seen to lie in its potentiality rather than in its origin^ Granted ; but it is none the less a difference of kind. The distinction between the adult and the rudimentary intelligence of man is a difference of degree ; but between that of the brute and the baby it is a difference of kind. Mr. Romanes thinks little apparently of " the mere fact that it is the former phase (of self-conscious- ness) alone which occurs in the brute, while in the man, after having rtm a parallel course of develop- ment^ this phase passes into the other ; " but it is just this "mere fact," the power, viz., of passing into the other which makes it fro7n the first human and not merely animal. And Mr. Romanes has done good service in showing us what man is by his minute comparison of him with what he is not. NOTE ON EVOLUTION AND THE FALL.^ There is one difficulty in connection with evolu- tion which, for obvious reasons, is not dealt with ^ Extracted from Oxford House Papers, No. XXI., Evolution and Christianity, by A. L. M., 1889. Rivington. EVOLUTION AND THE FALL. 6i by natural science, but which is constantly felt by religious people, whether scientific or unscientific. All this beautiful theory of evolution, of progres- sive development from inorganic to organic, from brute to man, and its continuation in the history of man from primitive times to the present day, is confronted by the doctrine of the Fall. While science seems to teach a continuous evolution, Christianity is committed to a theory of degrada- tion. For if the Fall is not a myth or an allegory, it certainly means that the first man was what his descendants are not, and that, in spite of all that we know and much more that we imagine about human progress, the first man, who, if evolu- tion is true, had but just emerged from the brute into the self-consciousness of man, was a higher creature than an Aristotle or a Raphael or a Darwin. It is clear that everything here turns upon what we mean by " a higher creature." What had Adam which his descendants have not? What did he and they lose by the Fall ? Certainly Adam's descendants have much which he had not. No one, for instance, supposes that the first man was supernaturally gifted with scientific knowledge, or that he was a born metaphysician, or a mathe- matician, or an artist, or a musician. All these things are the result of a gradual growth, and only the merest possibility of them could have existed 62 £SSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. ill the first man. The same is obviously true of what we call " civiHzation." Whether or no the first man was " arboreal in his habits " — a fact on which we have no evidence — we are told that he was " naked," and we hear nothing as yet of even shelter or fire. In what, then, did his greatness consist ? Chris- tian theology answers that the first man was not only, as every man is, a free, self-conscious per- sonality, capable, as the brutes are not, of knowing and loving God, but a being who, by the grace of God, was living in happy communion with God. The difference between him and the non-moral animals was that, while both alike obeyed God's Will, he did it consciously, knowing what he did, and rejoicing in the knowledge. And his nature, like theirs, was at harmony with itself. But when Adam set up his own will against God's Will, he separated himself from that Divine communion, and lost the grace which alone had kept his nature true to itself in holiness and righteousness. By that withdrawal of God's grace, man finds himself not only separated from God, but at strife with himself — his free-will not, indeed, destroyed (for man is never on a level with the non-moral world), but weakened, the image of God in him defaced, the vision of God obscured, human nature unable to restore itself to the communion which it had lost and for which it longed. EVOLUTION AND THE FALL. 63 The change which took place at the_Fall_was a cliaiige^n~tHe~moral regidrTpbut it could not be without its effect elsewhere. Even the knowledge of nature becomes confused, without the governing truth of the relation of man to God. The evolution, which should have been the harmonious develop- ment of the whole man, is checked and impeded in one part, and that the highest part, of his nature. And therefore, in spite of all the physical and intellectual advance which man has made, he is always and everywhere the worse for the Fall. However great his development has been, it is still a retarded development, a development slower than it need have been, less regular and less sure than God meant it to be. A simple illustration may help us here. A child who is obedient and teachable and willing to learn, who trusts his father or his teacher, may be in actual knowledge as inferior as he is in size and strength to the full-grown man, though the man may be wayward and wilful and self-assertive. And yet, for all that, the child is in a higher moral condition, and capable of a fuller and truer intellectual development ; for he is in a right relation to truth, while wilfulness and self-assertion are antagonistic to truth and impede knowledge. So man before the Fall was in a right relation to God, though he knew nothing of modern science and modern civilization. When that relation was 64 JSSSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. changed, physical and intellectual development still went on, but the progress of mankind in that knowledge of God, which alone can give a unity to our growing knowledge of nature and of man, was arrested. And it needed that He Who once had raised up man to bear His likeness should Himself provide for his recovery, and raise up a people who should be " a sacred school for the knowledge of God," and prepare the world for the revelation of the Son. We are not concerned with the question of the evidence of the Fall, but with the question how the Christian belief in a moral change for the worse, happening at a definite time, and yet affecting the whole human race, is consistent with what science has to tell us about evolution. We are here on ground where natural science can help us little. Moral facts cannot be put under the microscope. And even if the Fall has left its mark on human nature in the disorder and loss of harmony of its parts, science cannot trace this back to the Fall, for it cannot compare man, as he is, with man as he came forth from his Creator's Hand. But the history alike of moral science and of religions bears testimony to the existence of a struggle, an antagonism, a disorder in human nature, and to the belief that this disorder is not natural to man, and could not have been meant by God. And a real science of man must some day face the fact. ^ EVOLUTION AND THE FALL. 65 which is now persistently put on one side, that in this matter man is a great exception in the order of nature. While every other living thing is striving \ for its own good, man alone is found choosing what I he knows to be for his hurt. No theory of evolu- | tign is-complete, then, which ignores the fact of sin-i — VOL- man. Men have tried again and again to ex- plain it, and they have only succeeded in explain- ing it away. Sin cannot be explained, for it is irrationaP^the one irrational, lawless, meaningless thing in the whole universe. And the wilfulness which in the Fall separated man from his true good — that is, God — is reproduced in every sin, and is everywhere a disturbing cause in the reign of law, a check to progress and a barrier to know- ledge. Side by side, then, with all that science tells us of the evolution of man at the first from lower forms of life, and all that history tells us of the progress of man since, in civilization and know- ledge, we see the fact of sin casting its shadow upon human history and holding man back from his full development. This is- the fact which lies at the basis of all religions, and which moral systems universally recognize, though they can neither explain nor remove it. And science has taught us that we must be true to facts. It is because he is true to facts, that a Christian evolu- tionist refuses to acquiesce in the easy optimism of F 66 jESSAYS scientific AND PHILOSOPHICAL. those who see but one side of human development, and ignore the fact of sin ; it is because he sees in sin the great obstacle to the true development of man, that he claims on the side of progress the Gospel of One Who came "to save His people from their sins." C 67 ) IV. CREATION AND CREATIANISM. I HAVE called this paper " Creation and Crea- tianism," because, so far as I could see, these were_^ the two points on which Christians cannot affordj to be hazy and indistinct. Of course, no words can be used which do not carry with them associations other than those which the words imply, and there- fore, at the risk of platitudinizing, I have put down certain propositions which none of us will refuse to accept, and which certainly no terms I use are intended to contradict. I. The first is the truth which, in a one-sided way. Pantheism has seized, a principle which is especially important now in the face of the practical Deism of some scientific writers. God's Creative activity is present everywhere. There can be no division of labour between God and Nature, or God and Law. For " if He thunder by law, the thunder is still His voice." The plant which is produced from seed by the natural laws of growth is His creation. The brute which is born of the natural process of generation is His creation. The plant 68 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC A JVD PHILOSOPHICAL. or animal, which by successive variations and adaptations becomes anew species, is His creation.^ It follows that terms like " interference " have no meaning. God cannot interfere with Himself. 2. The second principle is that which the equally one-sided system of Deism has seized, and which is the safeguard of Theism against Pantheism, however disguised. God is not nature^ arid nature is not God. Any system therefore which logically carries with it the identity of God and Nature, or obscures the line which separates them, contradicts this principle and is destructive of true Theism. Now, Creation in its theological sense implies the recognition of both these principles conditioning one another, and hence it has been said, " Belief in creation is a necessary outwork of any true theism whatever ; deny creation, and you deny God." ^ But if Creation includes God's omnipresence in the world of nature, and His separation from Nature, it has more meanings than one, and these have to be defined. Now, the theological distinction is between primary and secondary, or original and derivative creation, or immediate and mediate, or supernatural and natural. God creates in the first > Cf. W. S. Lilly, Cont. Rev., 1883, p. 119. "The budding of a rose and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ are equally the effect of the One Motive Force which is the cause of all phenomena." ^ Liddon, Some Elements of Religion, pp. 59, 60. Cf. Mivart, Genesis of Species, p. 244. " No one can at. the same time accept the Christian religion, and deny the dogma of creation." CREATION AND CREATIANISM. 69 sense when the creative act turns that which is not into that which is. He creates in the second sense {mediajite naturdy as the Schoolman says) in all those processes to which properly the name of evolution or development is given. Such a distinction is recognized by Haeckel, as creation of matter and creation of form.^ Of the first, Creation in its narrow sense, science knows nothing; the second properly falls under the cognizance of science.^ In order to bring this question to a point, I will for the sake of argument assume, what I do not believe, that, given a certain irpuyrr] vXtj, the pro- cess known as evolution will cover everything. Haeckel, of course, believes this, for he moves in the region of matter, and spirit for him means matter subtilized. The religious instinct, like the gregarious instinct, is the result of organization. Now, with those evolutionists who, like Haeckel and Darwin, start from the' material side, the defenders of Creation have no real quarrel. Indeed, though science can know nothing of it, a primary creation of matter is even probable. For we must ' History of Creation, vol. i. pp. 8, 9. ' *' It is plain that physical science and * evolution ' can have nothing whatever to do with absolute or primary creation." Mivart, Genesis of Species, p. 261. See too his quotation from Baden Powell's Essay. Cf. also some useful quotations in Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, pp. 360, 361, and Tyndall, Use and Limits of Imagination in Science, p. 49. "Evolution does not solve — it does not profess to solve — the ultimate mystery of this universe, t leaves, in fact, that mystery untouched." 70 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. choose between this (supposing we believe in a spiritual world at all) and a Pantheism which rarely appeals to scientific minds. One theory- evolution certainly militates against, and that is the eternity of matter. For the ideal of materialistic evolution is to trace all the variety of material forms back to a unity, and this primal unity, whether it be an amorphous cell of protoplasm with infinite potentialities, or a fiery cloud in which the genius of Shakespeare and Raphael were latent,^ could hardly have existed from eternity as a barren unity and then at a point in time begun to differentiate. The ordinary scientific evolu- tionist, whatever his objection to the Mosaic account of Creation, has no quarrel with the belief in a primary or original creation, except that it is "not proven," that it has no analogies in the material world with which we are familiar. Yet even the mystery which surrounds such an original creation has its parallel in that creative process which science traces. One is more com- mon, the other less common, but that is all. For the thoughts " of God are incorporated in creation at one time directly, at another indirectly, both which modes of incarnation of Divine ideas are to us equally incomprehensible.^ Only as St. Gregory ^ Tyndall, Use and Limits of Imagination in Science, p. 47, Tyndall, of course, speaks of this as "an absurdity too monstrous to be entertained by any sane mind." 2 Heer ap. Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, p. 373. CREATION AND CREATIANISM. 71 says, " Quotidiana Dei miracula assiduitate viles- cunt." We think we understand them because they happen so often. The instinctive tendency of rational beings is to express the unknown in terms of the known, the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, and, therefore, though materialists have nothing to say to a primary Creation, those who approach the matter from the idealistic side have grappled with the question. And what have they done for us ? not expressed Creation in language intelligible to reason, for Creation (that is, primary as opposed ^_^^^^^ to derivative creation) refuses to be rationalized^ but they have reduced primary creation to deri- vative creation. In other words, they have reduced all creation to that secondary and derivative creation which is familiar to us as evolution. Those who are more anxious to be orthodox than lucid talk about the Divine Idea passing into reality ; those who are more anxious to be lucid than to be Christian talk of the world as a " pro- cessio," or proceeding forth from God. This, then, IS my first difficulty. Am I to believe that the phrase, " In the beginning God created," is equiva- lent to the phrase, " The world is an eternal going out from God " t And if not, what has evolution done, and how has it helped us in making Creation intelligible? We have been told that, thanks to evolution, "now we understand Creation." But lu^ 72 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. evolution, — and evolution I fully and gladly accept, not as a theory, but as a scientific fact, which in one region of Biology I have had some opportunity of appreciating, — evolution has done nothing to explain Creation. It has won from the unknown law of primary creation much which it has trans- ferred to the more familiar law of evolution. We do not now seek by artificial or natural systems of classification to discover the original creations of God. Probably all known varieties came from one. At all events, the sharp line which separates kind from kind is gone, that which separates animal from vegetable is gone, the line which separates organic from inorganic exists still, but how long it will exist who knows, and what does it matter ? ^ But if primary creation is thus limited to a point, whatever that point may be, the line between crea- tion and evolution is still as fixed as ever. We are no nearer knowing, or expressing in terms of reason, the truth that " in the beginning God created." Creation, it is said, is an idea never found apart from Christianity. An eternal chaos, an un- ^ See W. S. Lilly's Article on the religious future of the world, Cont. Rev., January and February, 1883, p. 213. "And what do you say to spontaneous generation? I would say, first that I hardly see how it touches the Theistic or the Catholic position. As a matter of fact, Catholics generally believed it until the other day. St. Thomas Aquinas and Suarez seem to have taken it for granted." So did Bacon. See his Hist. Naturalis., vol. iii. It is only the odium scientificum which has tried to make it a theological question at all. CREATION AND CREATIANISM, -73 knowable matter, an afioptpog vXrj on which form is imposed, all these theories we are familiar with apart from the Bible : ^ but not creation. I turn to Duns Scotus, who is often spoken of as tke Theologian of evolutionists, and I find a clear and distinct formulation in scholastic language of the Bible view of original creation. No doubt he was writing at a time when the Church of the West was peculiarly sensitive to the danger of Pantheism in any form. Scotist and Thomist fought side by side against the pantheistic Averroes, and while they differed on a subject of far less importance than is generally supposed, they were at one in defending the Christian doctrine of Creation as " the bulwark of true Theism." For some time I was puzzled by a passage quoted from Duns Scotus by Dr. Liddon, which seemed to conflict not only with the creed of Creation as the passage from not being into being, but with numerous passages in Scotus' own writings. The passage is this : " Invenio Eam (Divinam Naturam) neque creatam esse, neque creantem. Quid creabit, dum Ipsa omnia in omnibus fuerit, et in nullo nisi Ipsa apparebit." Clearly if such language was orthodox in the thirteenth century, it would be dangerous to speak of it as pantheistic now, though Dr. Liddon ^ See Luthardt, Fundamental Truths, p. 79. "The notion of Creation, properly so called, is nowhere found in the ancient world apart from revelation and Scripture." 74 ^^^^KS- SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. rejects it, and compares it with " some modern theories which deny the dogma of creative activity in God." ^ But at last I discovered that the words quoted came not from the orthodox Duns Scotus, but from the heterodox and pantheistic John Scotus Erigena, who lived four centuries before. John Scotus, like a true pantheist, explains how the world goes forth from God, and rightly denies, on his principles, that there is such a thing as " creatio " at all. Such an exception proves the rule. The idea of Creation is inseparable from our Christianity. It cannot be made intelligible as evolution, for evolution, in the only sense in which it seems con- sistent with Christianity, presupposes it. In one sentence, All evolution is creation^ but all creation is not evolution. Christianity is therefore in its essence dualisticy and open to the objections com- monly brought against a dualistic theory. We may wish that it was not, that it would consent to be rationalized. We may deal gently with those who in their desire for a Monism accept pantheism or even materialism because it is more " philosophical," but the fact of creation, which is unphilosophical in the sense that it cannot be expressed in language that we know, and as that creative activity of God which we call evolution can, that fact stands for us at the very entrance of Christianity. " In the ' Liddon, University Sermons, First Series, p. 241. CREATION AND CREATIANISM. 75 beginning God created the heaven and the earth." " Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear " (Heb. xi. 3). We gain nothing by keeping this truth, if it is a truth, as a "skeleton in the cup- board," and complaisantly thanking the evolutionist for explaining nothing.^ II. From Creation I go on to Creatianism. Whether God called into being some one reality which was to be by His Will the germ of all things, or whether, as St. Augustine suggests,^ He created at first many germs which should develop accord- ing to their own laws, i.e. according to His good pleasure and in His own way, does not affect the fact of Creation. From that primary Creation to the Creation of Man everything may have been, and probably was, the result of that creative activity which we call evolution. At present there are gaps in the process. The problem of archebiosis or archegony is not solved, and the balance of scientific opinion is against it, so that the inorganic * Similarly in St. Athan., De Incarn., ii., God is shown to be KTtffT^js not Tcx^iTrjs : "'Eo'Tat Se, €t ovrws ex^*> 'f^''"' o-vto^js 6 0e6y rexvirris /xSvou Koi oh ktktt^s els rh ehai, el t^v uTro/cetyUeVrji' v\r]v (pyd^eraiy rrjs 5e v\r]s ovk tffriv avrhs aXrios. Cf. the Shepherd of Hennas, ii. i, Tlpurov irduTuv Tri(TTev(Tov, bn th iariv 6 Qihs, 6 to vcivTa KTiaas Ktd Karaprlcras, Kai troiiicras 6/c tov fi^ 6vT05 els rh ehai. ^ De Genesi, ad It'i. v. 5 ; Ben. Ed., iii. 186 ; and see cap. xxii. ; cf. Mivart, Genesis of Species, pp. 264, 265. 76 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. does not yet shade off into the organic. Similarly, some evolutionists, like A. Wallace,^ believe that there is another gap between man regarded as a material organization, and the highest of the brute creation. But whether these gaps are bridged over, as they probably will be, or not, the theologian qud theologian has nothing to do with the matter. Whether God's creative power proceeds by steps or " levels of creation," instead of by an inclined plane within the limits specified by the terms "original creation" and " creatianism," is a matter, not for theology, but for science to determine. Those of us who are interested in the progress of science look forward eagerly to the time when the "breaks " on which some people base their theology will disappear, because at present these " breaks " in the chain are so many gaps in our knowledge of a process which we believe can be rationalized, i.e. made intelligible to reason. But as at the one end of the chain the fact of Creation meets us and baffles us, defying any attempts to rationalize it, for it does not really make creation intelligible to say that it is mutatio a non esse ad esse? so at the other end of the chain the existence of man as a being in whom God dwells, whose "soul," as we call it, has communion with God, whose nature has been in the Incarnation taken ^ Natural Selection, pp. 332, et seq. ^ Duns Scotus, vol. v. p. 461, tc. CREATION AND CREATIANISM. 77 into God, refuses, as Creation does, to be ex- plained as we explain evolution. Of course, Creatianism is open to all the diffi- culties of Creation and more. It is crude, unphilo- sophical, scholastic, old-fashioned, antiquated. For every reason we want to get rid of it, and for that very reason we ought to scrutinize the more narrowly any attempt to do so. An overwhelming balance of Christian authority is in favour of it. If St. Augustine to the last refuses to decide between Traducianism and Creatianism, he at least shrinks from appealing to Traducianism, which would have been a powerful weapon to use against Pelagius.^ Tertullian, as everybody knows, was a traducianist, and Professor Ray Lankester, in a little popular treatise on " Evolution," thinks that he has quieted any possible scruples on the subject by quoting a traducianist sentence from Tertullian. But at least Duns Scotus may be expected to be a tradu- cianist, with his wonderful theory, as it is commonly understood, of a great evolution in which man, the perfect being, is the last term — a being capable of union with God. Now, as a matter of fact. Duns Scotus is entirely at one with his great rival St. Thomas on the subject of Creatianism. Not only is the creation of the first man an act of primary creation {i.e. a creative act which cannot be expressed in terms of evolution), but there is a ^ See Dr. Liddon's Some Elements of Religion, p. 100. 78 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. similar act in the case of every individual soul. He therefore rejects the suggestion of St. Augus- tine, that if the first soul was created by a primary act, all others may have originated from it, sicut candela de candeld} In mediaeval days the question, of course, arose as to the interpretation of Aristotle's " De Anima." Not that there was any suspicion of traducianism in Aristotle. The controversy between the School- men and the Arabians was not whether Aristotle was a traducianist (and if Aristotle had been a traducianist, he must have been a materialist, because of his belief in the pre-existence, if not the eternity, of matter), but whether he was a theist or a pantheist ; whether the vovq^ which was eternal and imperishable and came in OvpaOev, was a creation or an emanation. Avicenna and Averroes held the latter ; St. Thomas and Duns Scotus held the former view. In spite of the authority of St. Thomas and Duns Scotus, the higher criticism of our day has decided in favour of the Arabians, and the fact, which Scotus admits, that Aristotle had no idea of an original creation of matter by God, tells strongly for the pantheistic view. Now, traducianism is a modus creandi which we can understand, which can be expressed in the familiar language of generation ; and creatianism is a modus creandi which refuses to be rationalized. ^ See St. Aug., Ep., 157 ; Duns Scotus, vol. iii. pp. 79, 80. CREATION AND CREATIANISM. 79 The opposition is here in the case of the individual exactly what we have already noted in the creation of the world. Traducianism is creation which is intelligible, which can be expressed in terms of reason, which can be paralleled by every-day familiar processes however mysterious. Creatianism is creation which is unintelligible, which is known only as the negation of traducianism. If th ere-is no such_lhing-as creatianism, if all creation can be expressed in terms of traducianism, no doubt the opposition ceases. It ceases because one of the .opposing^terms is destroyed. But the two opposites cannot approximate to or shade off the one into the other. Those who can express creation as evolution can of course express creatianism as traducianism. But are we prepared to do this? If not, it is no use speaking "with bated breath and whispering humbleness " of that which Catholic antiquity, as well as modern Roman Catholic evolu- tionists, like Mivart, call creatianism. There are many who suppose that creatianism implies a scholastic view of the soul as a " thing " put into the body,^ and they would propose to ^ Thus Hegel commits himself to the statement (Logic, § 34) that the pre-Kantian metaphysic viewed the soul as a "thing" which is "an immediate existence, such as is evident to the senses" or a " processless ens." But this is perfectly untrue of scholastic metaphysics in which the soul, though an "ens" which has been created "de non ente," was in its essence an activity, though not in the same sense as God, who is "actus purus." In scholastic 8o ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. explain what is called the " infusio animae " as the establishing of a new relation between the creature and the creator. This theory is discussed in Duns Scotus, who points out the new difficulties which rise out of the phrase, *'nova relatio," especially the possibility of " mutatio " in both the related terms, of which God is one. But even this phrase, a " new relation," implies all that creatianism im- plies, so far as that it is something which evolution cannot explain, which makes man different, not in degree, but in kind, from all the lower creation. What is this but saying that when we talk of " creatio equi " and " creatio hominis " the word " created " has a different meaning ? In one case God creates by a process which science can follow ; in the other, science is baffled. Haeckel's em- bryological researches have in no way affected the problem, for whether we talk of a " soul " or a " nova relatio," it cannot be put under the micro- scope ;^ and if we believe in a "soul" or a ''nova relatio," we believe in a break in the process of terminology, if the same name is given to the Creator and the created, it is not used univocally, but " eminenter " of God. For the "new relation" doctrine see Baden Powell, Unity of Worlds, Essay ii. § ii. p. 247. "The difference is not in physical nature, but in investing that nature with a new and higher appli- cation. The continuity with the material world remains the same, but a nezv relation is developed in it, and it claims kindred with ethereal matter and with celestial light." ^ " Physical science as such has nothing to do with the soul of man, which is hyperphysical " (Mivart, loc. cif., p. 285). CREATION AND CREATIANISM. 8i evolution infinitely greater than that which separates organic from inorganic. The existence of a " nova relatio " is creatianism, for it implies that man is a new and distinct order of being, and this implies a creative act which cannot be reduced to evolu- tion. And here, again, while all traducianism is a form of creation, there is such a thing as creatianism which cannot be expressed in terms of tradu- cianism. I have tried to keep carefully to the terms of my paper, " Creation and Creatianism," but, at the same time, I cannot but feel that our judgment in this . matter determines other questions. St. Athanasius, in his treatise " De Incarnatione," keeps closely together creation and re-creation, ^ Kva^Kx\ yap iifxag Xiyovrag TTSpl ri^g tig r\fxag e7ri(j>avdag tov ^(OTrjpog, XijEiv Kol TTspl Trig tCjv avOpMTTwv apxng (ch. iv.), because false views about creation, or indistinct language about creation, logically issues in false or hazy views about the Incarnation. If we can explain creation in terms of evolution, I cannot see why we cannot so explain the Incarnation* The materials for such a process are already to our hand. We have only got to read an Alex- andrian, instead of a Palestinian, meaning into the doctrine of the AOrOS in St. John's Gospel. We have more than one Neo-Platonic catch-word in the Epistle to the Hebrews. John Scotus Erigena has worked it all out for us. The nothing out of G 82 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. which the Church believes the world to have been created is God's own incomprehensible essence.^ In creation God passes through the primordiales causae into the world of invisible and visible creatures. Our life is God's life. We are in the image of God. r The Incarnation differs from creation only in degree. ^he "processio" of God into the world has its correlated " reversio " when He returns unto Him- self. It is much more intelligible than Hegel, quite as philosophical and much more ingenious, because Scotus Erigena contrived to use theological terms, and could claim a good deal of authority from the writings of orthodox theologians. Now, however, we are told that "this religious dogma" of the Incarnation "is only another way of saying that the antithesis of subjective and objective is given to us as already overcome, and that on us lies the obligation of participating in this redemption by laying aside our immediate subjectivity, putting off the old Adam, and learning to know God as our true and essential self" ^ The pantheistic con- ception is as certain as in Erigena, but we have not gained much in clearness of expression. The Atonement, according to this last theory, ceases to mean man's reconciliation with God, for the Incarnation is simply the revelation that there is really no enmity to be reconciled. ***** * De Divis. Nat., iii. 9. ' Hegel's Logic, 194. ( 83 ) TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY.^ A GROWING interest in moral philosophy is one of the signs of the times, and those who are content with a superficial explanation of new phenomena might plausibly argue that it is due to the fact that the age of supernaturalism has passed away. A people, it may be said, which has outgrown metaphysics and theology is driven to seek aid from the natural and the human. And this is a thoroughly satisfactory explanation, so long as we shut our eyes to the facts of the case. But the moment we fairly face them we find that those who try to write on ethics, as a science inde- pendent of metaphysics and theology, invariably fail to stir up anything but a languid enthusiasm ; while those who really are influencing thought and life are more and more fearlessly connecting their ethics with the belief in God. We refrain from mentioning representatives of the former class, but ' Types of Ethical Theory, by James Martineau, D.D., LL.D. Oxford : Clarendon Press. 84 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND FHILOSOPHICAL. among the latter we find the great names of Professor T. H. Green and Dr. Martineau. Of course, we do not mean to assert that, with these writers, their ethical system is a mere de- pendaitce of their theology, or that their theology is that of the Catholic Church. It is their great- ness that they have vindicated for moral science its rightful basis in human life, even when that life is lived apart from the revelation of Jesus Christ ; and have nevertheless seen that its full explanation and justification lies in that which is superhuman. It is their weakness, if we may say so, that their implied theology, the doctrine of an eternal Con- sciousness in the one case, and of a God Who is personal and moral, and yet an undifferentiated Unit in the other, involves intellectual difficulties greater far than those which beset the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet, for all this, the present genera- tion will owe it to Professor Green and Dr. Marti- neau that moral philosophy has been raised to a position, in which it awaits its transformation, and, at the same time, its true development, in the light of the Incarnation. In the main controversies of morals, then, Christianity claims and welcomes the work of such men. John Stuart Mill, no doubt, by a noble inconsistency did much to undermine the founda- tions on which his own theory rested. But it still remained for men like Professor Green and Dr. TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 85 Martineau to examine the sources from which Mill had unconsciously borrowed ; to dissociate the Utilitarianism of Mill from that of Bentham ; and to rescue ethics from its bondage to physical law. There is a special attractiveness in this part of Dr. Martineau's work, because, as he tells us in his most interesting Preface, he himself only slowly won his freedom. It was not the influence of any great thinker, but "a fusillade of questions from a class of sharpshooters " which roused him from his dogmatic slumber. Till then, he tells us — "Steeped in the 'empirical' and 'necessarian' mode of thought, I served out successive terms of willing captivity to Locke and Hartley, to Collins, Edwards, and Priestley, to Bentham and James Mill ; and though at times I was driven to disaffection by the dogmatism and acrid humours of the last two of these philosophers, my allegiance was restored and brightened by literary and personal relations with the younger Mill." But a new intellectual birth was at hand, and its beginnings were seen in a growing dissatisfaction with Mill's metaphysics : — " I seemed to discover a hitherto unnoticed factor in all the products which I had taken as explained ; to recognize, after resolving all knowledge into relations, the presence of an invisible condition of relation itself. ... I had to con- cede to the self conscious mind itself, both as knowing and as willing, an autonomous function distinct from each and all the phenomena known and changes willed — a self-identity as unlike as possible to any growing aggregate of miscellane- ous and dissimilar experiences." 86 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. And this metaphysical protest was due to " the irresistible pleading of the moral consciousness ; " the secret misgivings which he had felt at either " discarding or perverting the terms which con- stitute the vocabulary of character — * responsibility,' ' guilt/ * merit,' * duty,' " resulting at last in the surrender of determinism, and a revision of the doctrine of causation. At this point Dr. Martineau turned once more to the Greek philosophers, and, under the guidance of a great Aristotelian, Professor Trendelenburg, saw Aristotle in a new light. This experience, he tells us, was essentially — "The gift of fresh conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-consciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls behind ; and, once gained, was more or less available throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of Kant and even Hegel. It was impossible to resist or distrust this gradual widening of apprehension ; it was as much a fact as the sight of Alps I had never visited before." From this new and truer metaphysic the transition to theology was natural. The particular averments of the moral consciousness, which are the postulates of an ethical treatise — " Form the organic connection between ethics and religion, and define the relations between the human and the divine ; and so far as they can be lifted out of immediate know- ledge and submitted to mediate tests of certainty, it can only be by carrying them into the court of metaphysics, to be tried among the questions of transcendent ontology." TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 87 Thus as morals led on from physics to meta- physics, so metaphysics made the transition from morals to theology. Comte's so-called law of the three stages was exactly reversed. Such a preface gives rise to great expectations, and they are not disappointed, except, perhaps, that one might have hoped for a fuller discussion of some of the underlying metaphysical questions. Of course, as a writer on ethical theory, Dr. Marti- neau might refuse to be led away into metaphysical speculation. But then a very considerable part of the first volume is devoted to the discussion of metaphysical subjects, the positive bearing of which on the ethical conclusions is not very obvious. There is here a very marked contrast between Professor Green and Dr. Martineau. Professor Green approaches ethical questions as a meta- physician : Dr. Martineau approaches metaphysical questions as a moralist. Those who have the courage to read through the " Prolegomena to Ethics" feel all through that it is the work of a real metaphysician, and yet that, however far from ethics the discussion of " the spiritual principle in knowledge and in nature " may at first seem to be, it all ultimately bears upon the ethical result. Dr. Martineau's interest is primarily with morals and only with metaphysics as the speculative basis for morals, — at least that is the idea which his two volumes leave upon our minds, 88 ^-5-^^^^ SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. We believe this to be the explanation of a difficulty which meets us at the very outset. After more than one honest attempt to accept the schema of systems which Dr. Martineau maps out, we are obliged to return to our first impression, that it is neither obviously appropriate as a classification of ethical theories, nor, indeed, anything more than an artificial grouping of some exceedingly interest- ing essays round the central statement of the author's own beliefs. The classification begins with a broad distinction familiar to all students of the history of philosophy. The Greek schools " were all essentially unpsycho- logical and objective." "Objective" they certainly were, but " unpsychological" is an unfortunate word to choose as an equivalent. It, of course, does not mean that they did not pay attention to psychology — since we are told that " Plato did not fail to go back into the recesses of the human mind for the springs of private and public life, and the separating lines of right and wrong ; " and, again, ''The Greeks look for their whole moral world within, among the phenomena of conscious and self-conscious nature : " it can only m.ean that they worked from the outward to the inward ; in fact, that their attitude was, as M. Noire puts it, " naively objective." These objective systems. Dr. Martineau goes on, are either vutaphysical or physical according as reason or sense is supposed TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 89 to be the organ of our knowledge of the real. And in both cases the moral theory comes to be a deduction from a prior theory of the universe : — "The genius of the Greeks," he says, "was essentially objective ; . . . nor could they readily deal with anything as an inner fact, till they had had their look at it as an hypostatized reality beyond their own centre. Hence, their systems are all either metaphysical or physical in their basis ; and their ethical element is in no case intelligible, till it is studied as a sequel to this earlier portion of the scheme." Here, in spite of our objection to the term "un- psychological," we recognize a division which is intelligible and exhaustive. But a difficulty arises when we ask. Who are to represent physical ethics among the Greeks ? Not the Hylicists, nor any pre-Socratic philosopher ; not Socrates, who refused to theorize about nature ; not his great descendants Plato and Aristotle ; not the Sophists nor the Cyrenaics nor the Epicureans, though as pheno- menalists they had much in common with modern champions of physical ethics. Can Dr. Martineau mean the Stoics ? It is possible. We turn anxiously to find out the chosen representative, and we find — Auguste Comte ! — " Of this doctrine," says Dr. Martineau, " we are fortunate enough to have a thorough-going recent representative in M. Comte ; and an English interpreter, perhaps of less original genius, but of far more balanced judgment, in J, S. Mill." 90 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Yet this English interpreter appears far away, in a different branch of the division, among " psycho- logical " moralists, presumably because he admitted, what Comte denied, the possibility of an intro- spective psychology. And this is typical of the way in which Dr. Martineau illustrates his schema. Without actually giving us a cross-division, he constantly makes us feel that the distinguished parts in the division are not co-ordinate, that in fact the classification is not natural but artificial. This is very marked when we come to the subdivision of metaphysical theories into transcendental and immanental. According to the one view, the eternal ground of all things is greater than those things of which it is the ground ; according to the other, it is convertible with them. Here, again, we have an excellent distinction ; and no one can for a moment hesitate as to the representatives of these views in Greek thought. If Plato clearly represents the one, Aristotle as clearly represents the other. Dr. Martineau then gives us a full and minute examination of Plato's system, and we turn, full of hope (for Dr. Martineau is far more of an Aristotelian than a Platonist) to see what he will say about Aristotle, and we find ourselves face to face with Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza, the first two being introduced only to explain the " immanental " doctrine of the third. TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 91 Surely nothing can justify the substitution of these names for that of Aristotle. Dr. Martineau ex- plains that in the two contemporaries, Plato and Aristotle, " the divergence of tendency which we desire to notice is too near its commencement to be very striking and conspicuous." But it is a received logical principle that a point of difference is best examined in two cases which most closely resemble one another in everything else ; and as for the divergence being " too near its commence- ment" we would suggest that in that mediaeval period, which Dr. Martineau, like many other writers, dismisses in a few lines, the divergence can be clearly traced, and all the more clearly because Plato and Aristotle had, by a little ingenuity, been reduced to a common denominator in the doctrinal system of the Schools. On the other hand, the contrast between Plato on the one hand, and Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza on the other, is rendered almost impossible by the fact that, in the day of these later theorists, thought had passed through the discipline of Christianity and the lawlessness of a reaction from it. This change in the conditions of ethical and metaphysical problems Dr. Martineau is fully aware of and states most strongly. "The whole complexion of thought and language on ethical subjects," we are told, "alters on crossing the line from heathendom to Christendom." " Nature, 92 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. which was a principal before, sank into the acci- dental and the neutral — the mere scene on which the great drama of real being was performed and flung its lights and shades." Self-knowledge, the sense of sin, the desire for reconciliation with a personal God — these, if not entirely new factors in the ethical problem, assumed a prominence which they had never had before. Hence " psychological ethics is altogether pecidiar to Christendom^ Yet, if Spinoza is to be chosen to balance Plato, we must remember that those who prepared the problem for him were, in the one case, a pupil of the Jesuits, in the other, an Oratorian Father. And the change which had passed over meta- physics was as great as that which had passed over morals. Christian philosophy had, for a moment, restored something of the old unquestioning faith in reason as the organ of truth. But the separation of reason and faith, in the later scholastic age, had prepared for the scepticism of the Renaissance. Descartes and his successors had, therefore, to face a metaphysical problem which for Aristotle would have been unintelligible : while the answer ultimately given by Spinoza, though undoubtedly an "immanental" theory, savours more of Plato than of Aristotle. Dr. Martineau says, " The doc- trine of immanency excludes theism, while that of transcendency leaves it still possible." True, so long as we are contrasting Plato and Spinoza TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 93 But when we trace the parallel development of Plato's doctrine and Aristotle's in the mediaeval period, we find that it is Platonism which is always running off into a mystical pantheism, and Aristo- telianism which, in spite of its inherent weakness on the side of personality, leaves it possible for the Aristotelian to hold the Catholic faith. The truth is that the "transcendency" of the Platonic doctrine is more imaginary than real, and largely due to an uncritical acceptance, by people gene- rally, of Aristotle's criticism of the doctrine of ideas. We have said thus much in criticism of Dr. Martineau's schematism of ethical theories, because it seems to us the most artificial and unsatisfactory part of a really valuable work. We are bound to say that the artificiality is much less marked in the second volume, which deals with "psycho- logical " theories, and distinguishes them by the uncouth words " idiopsychological " and " hetero- psychological." Surely in these days of paternal government, there ought to be a law to limit the ovofiaroTroiiTiv ora^rjvfta? £V€fC£v. The first volume is occupied with a discussion of the three typical forms of " unpsychological " ethics — Transcendental Metaphysics, represented by Plato ; Immanental Metaphysics, by Spinoza ; and Physics, by Comte. These studies, though they go far beyond what is needed for the author's purpose, are exceedingly interesting. That on 94 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Plato includes a detailed examination of the theory of Ideas, and its culmination in the Idea of the Good. The great question to determine is " whether inherent movement or causal activity is attributed to them." On the one side we have the criticism of Aristotle, on the other numerous pas- sages in which Plato certainly treats them as causes. Dr. Martineau seems to accept Aristotle's criticism in the case of the Ideas generally, but to make an exception in favour of the 'iS'a raya^oO, as " a cause which brings them to phenomenal birth." But surely far too much is allowed to Aristotle's criticism. Mr. Jowett, who certainly has a right to speak on such a matter, says plainly that "the stereotyped form which Aristotle has given the Ideas is not found in Plato ;"-^ and Lotze, in a most valuable chapter in his Logic, points out, not only that the transcendency doctrine ascribed to Plato (and with it the Aristotelian criticism) falls to the ground, but that the "immanental" view of Aristotle is as powerless to explain the possibility of knowledge. The truth, we believe, is that Plato's doctrine included the elements of a contradiction, of which he only gradually became conscious. The "dead hand" of Eleaticism was upon him, and Aristotle, seeing this, made him consistent with himself by denying causality to the Ideas ; whereas Plato, inconsistently perhaps, * Introduction to Parmenides, p. 124. TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 95 yet nevertheless held to the belief that, though eternal, they were causes of movement. If Dr. Martineau allows this to be true of the 'iSea ra'^a' Oov, why not of the u^t) ? And if Aristotle may talk of a irpCoTov kivovv ov kivov/isvov, and explain or disguise the paradox by the phrase Kivd ujg Ipuj/itvov, why should not Plato do the same? The account of Plato's ideal State, its strength and its weakness, is admirably worked out, but when our author goes out of his way to compare it with the Catholic Church, his statement needs a good deal of qualification. After quoting Hegel's contrast between " the relentless subjugation of the individual" in the Platonic State and the infinite value of each individual soul in the teaching of Christianity, Dr. Martineau turns round upon the Catholic Church, and says its real failure was due to its not having recognized the doctrine of "justifi- cation by faith." Here, apparently, the Catholic Church means the mediaeval Papacy, which cer- tainly, like all over-centralized governments, tended to ignore subjective conditions in its anxiety to secure external conformity. Yet the antinomi- anism which shaped itself in the sixteenth-century solifidianism, is both on its moral and metaphysical side farther removed from Christianity than was the mediaeval idea of unity. There is a good deal of special pleading in the attempt to make Plato a theist ; and it comes 96 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. rather oddly after the statement that Plato and Aristotle were " both realists and both pantheists." One has heard a good deal before now about " the Platonical Trinity," and we incline to think there is at least as much to be said for this interpre- tation as for the theistic one. At any rate, if Plato is a theist, he is fully aware of the inherent difficul- ties of theism. It was not without reason that, some hundred years ago, a Bishop of the English Church, arguing with the Unitarians of his day, gave the advice, " If any one thinks that Uni- tarianism is simpler than Christianity, let him read Parmenides." Dr. Martineau is, however, far too honest to ignore passages which conflict with his theory, and his final conclusion comes to this. If we apply the test of self -consciousness, we may no doubt call Plato a theist ; if we apply the test of will, "we might be obliged to confess that the God of Plato is impersonal'^ Comparing his theo- logy with his ethics, we seem to get an ethics of responsibility resting on a metaphysic of necessity. And Dr. Martineau would like to square the meta- physic with the ethics rather than the ethics with the metaphysic. But neither is possible without explaining away Plato's utterances. And even the mythical passages, as Dr. Martineau truly says, "often express the doctrines most sacred to his faith, though least effectually grounded in his philosophy." It is not the only instance in which TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 97 we see moral truth, with a "noble inconsistency," refusing to conform to a speculative theory : — " Plato, in his ' divine wrath ' at the tyrant flung into Tar- tarus ; Malebranche, self-extinguished in the Absolute Holi- ness ; Spinoza, lifted from the thraldom of passion into the freedom of Infinite Love ; Comte, on his knees before the image of a Perfect Humanity, are touching witnesses to the undying fires of moral faith and aspiration.'" Our space will not permit a close examination of the three studies on Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza, or of the full and sympathetic account given of Comte. But we cannot help noticing, in passing, a most suggestive section on the rejection of final causes, so long as mechanism dominated science, and the reappearance of teleology under the influence of evolution. We may also be allowed to regret a very superficial passage, where Dr. Martineau, after a rapid survey of Greek thought, says of "the intermediate period of Catholic cul- ture " that it is needless to prove that it was "mainly concerned in investigating the relations between God and man." If this means that natural science was in abeyance, it is only partially true ; and in any case the whole subject of Dr. Mar- tineau's two volumes falls under the general title of " the relations between God and man." He might have got at least as much from a study of Thomas of Aquin, as from the scepticism of Descartes, or the pantheism of Spinoza, or the positivism of Comte. H 98 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. The first half of Dr. Martineau's second volume is devoted to the exposition of his own theory, " idiopsychological " ethics as distinguished from the three typical " heteropsychological " forms, the Hedonist ethics of Utilitarianism, the " Dianoetic " ethics of Cud worth and Clarke, and the "Esthetic" ethics of Hutcheson. These are introduced in a very characteristic passage. " Idiopsychological " ethics leaves us with an order of thinking and a group of convictions distinct from any that can be got from the natural sciences, " And philosophers do not like to be encumbered in their survey of the world with bundles of first truths as numerous as the elements of a lady's luggage : they cannot move freely till their outfit will all go into a Gladstone bag. So they try to find some one of their packages of thought capacious or elastic enough to hold all that cannot be proved super- fluous ; and as, in any case, room enough must be left for the senses, which are solid affairs, it is usually the moral sentiments that are apt to get squeezed, and to come out at the end hardly recognizable." Hence right is dissolved in the pleasant or the true or the beautiful. The criticism of these in the latter half of the volume, especially the review of utilitarianism and the ethics of evolution, is admirable. Nor does it detract from its value that the criticism of utili- tarianism by Dr. Martineau has much in common with Professor Green's. If it is less searching, it is more popular, and the points are made more TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 99- sharply and clearly. The mere heading- of the section, "From 'Each for Himself to 'Each for Air — No Road," speaks volumes. The criticism has often been made before, but seldom with such precision and incisiveness. Mill's attempt to find a qualitative difference in pleasures is only an attempt to throw a bridge over an impassable chasm. The Hedonist, who substitutes others for himself, becomes moral by turning his rational preferences upside down, or "by the practical paradox of attaining pleasure by aiming at something else," " Hedonistic advance " to any higher love being not less impossible than "hori- zontal movement uphill." Though there have no doubt been moralizing divines " who recommended the cultivation of disinterested and devout affec- tions as a good investment," we may find the cause of it in the low spiritual level of their age, and the effect in the " notorious inefficacy " of their teaching. We arrive, then, at the conclusion that, notwithstanding the provision in our nature for the partial conversion of interested into dis- interested feeling, we cannot identify the greatest happiness of self with the greatest happiness of all, nor get duty out of prudence, nor virtue from self-love. The main issue is not really changed when evolution supplements Hedonism, and the indi- vidual, society, and the world are treated no longer ICO jEssavs scientific and philosophical. as constants but as variables. " The difficulty is apparently lessened by dilution," but in reality we only take refuge from "the strong light" of indi- vidual experience, " in the earlier twilight, where nobody can tell exactly what goes on." Hence — 'The extreme fondness which evolutionists show for tossing about psychological babies, and wringing from them ajnbigiias voces about how they feel, is natural, in proportion as their doctrine is hard to prove." " By spinning out your process indefinitely, you gain time enough for anything to take place, but too much for anything to be seen ; in the very act of creating the evidence, you hide it all away ; and the real result is, that you may make the story what you please, and no one can put it to the test." ..." Nothing can be more chimerical than prehistorical psychology." The truth is that — " Evolutionary ethics have no psychology of their own ; but merely pick up what best suits them of the old materials, and fit it in with the ^urtXy physiological story they have to tell." If there is a gap between " Each for Himself" and " Each for All," there is even a greater gap between Hedonism and evolution. If evolution is true, we have no right to treat the increment, whatever it may be, as illusion, but as emergence from illusion. You cannot explain it by what it has been, and "strip bare the moral type of thought till you have the naked natural animal, and say, There ; that is the real live truth when you have got the clothes off." Dr. Martineau TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. loi draws an excellent illustration from the evolution of the eye out of a mass of jelly which becomes responsive to light. The question is not. What did the eye come from ? but, Does it really see ? Has it life-relations with reality? Similarly the real question at issue about conscience is not, Did it come ultimately from something which is non-moral ? but, Is it a moral faculty correspond- ing to a moral environment? If we are to accept evolution, we must believe that everything is what it may become, not what it has been. To prove that, at a certain stage of development, the embryo of a man is indistinguishable, even to the practised embryologist, from that of a dog, carries us no way at all towards proving the identity of creatures which in their perfect form are so different. It is here that Dr. Martineau seems to us to go beyond Professor Green. He is more fearless in his attitude towards evolution. Professor Green throughout shrinks from admitting the possibility of the evolution of the moral from the non-moral. Dr. Martineau is content to fix attention on the reality of the development, and to emphasize the fact that "each increment contributed by fresh differentiation constitutes a discovery, and connects us by one added link of truth with the real scene of our existence." We can indeed " undress the moral intuition," and lay aside fold after fold of its disguise till we discover nothing at last but 102 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. naked pleasure and utility, but " no foresight, with largest command of psychologic clothes, would enable us to invert the experiment, and dress up these nudities into the august form of duty." The whole chapter is well worth study, and is certainly the best in the critical part of Dr. Mar- tineau's book, at any rate "for the present neces- sity." For the supposed destruction of the validity of conscience by the discovery of its origin is that which troubles men, and Dr. Martineau is not afraid to claim that discovery, if it be a discovery, as a new proof of the validity of conscience. " It introduces," he says in his preface, " no disturbing problem ; it supplies new chapters of natural history, but changes not a word in the eternal law of right." Such a view of conscience, as fearless as it is true, instead of excluding, presupposes historical development and growth, and leaves opponents like Mr. Leslie Stephens valiantly slaying the dead or beating the air. We have reserved to the last Dr. Martineau's own view, which has already shown itself in his criticisms, but is explicitly stated under the head of " idiopsychological " ethics. Standing midway between the " unpsychological " ethics of Vol. I., and the " heteropsychological " ethics of the Hedonist, Dianoetic, and Esthetic moralists, it simply asks. What has the moral sentiment to say of its own experience ? TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 103 To those who have neither time nor inclination to read through two octavo volumes, and who nevertheless wish to be acquainted with the great facts of moral science, we confidently commend the first one hundred and twenty pages of Vol. II., which should be read in close connection with the author's intellectual history sketched in his preface. It is a full and fearless statement of the facts, by one who is fully conscious of the arguments com- monly urged against them. Dr. Martineau does not shrink from an argument because it is an old one. He knows that an argument is never worn out till it is answered. He appeals to the judg- ments of the adult moral consciousness, as he appeals to language, "the great confessional of the human heart." What, then, are the objects of those moral judgments which we all pass ? Persons^ not things ; thoughts and feelings, not mere conduct. Here he can claim on his side Mr. Spencer and Mr. Leslie Stephen, Professor Green and Mr. Bradley, as well as the Christian ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. But he is at issue with the current opinion of moralists when he argues, most truly as we believe, that "criticism, like charity, begins at home," that a moral judgment is primarily a self-judgment, and does not begin with "a prior critique upon our fellow-men." A further analysis of the moral judgment brings out the distinction between mere 104 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Spontaneity and volition. In the voluntary there must be a comparison and a power of choice in the presence of simultaneous possibilities. " Moral judgment, then, credits the Ego with a selecting power between two possibilities, and stands or falls with this." It is impossible to treat the determinist problem as neutral, as Mr. Sidgwick would do. "Either free-will is a fact, or moral judgment a delusion." Moral judgment, then — " Postulates moral freedom ; and by this we mean, not the absence of foreign constraint, but the presence of a personal power of preference in relation to the inner suggestions and springs of action that present their claims." Turning now to the mode in which the moral judgment acts, we find that it is exercised upon incompatible impulses which it distinguishes as higher and lower— 2.^. by their moral worth. Con- science is "the critical perception we have of the relative authority of our several principles of action." This at once explains the variation in the contents of the moral judgment, on which sophists in all ages base their denial of morality. " Among the sinful crowd it is intelligible enough how ' many that are first shall be last, and the last first,' " since the life of widest visible aberration from a Divine standard of perfection is not neces- sarily the most wicked. The publicans and harlots may in the sight of God take precedence of those whose wilful choice of the lower is covered by " the TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 105 smooth surface of a decent life." The fact, too, that every moral judgment is a judgment of moral worth enables us clearly to draw the line between the judgments of conscience and of prudence. The moral judgment is insight, prudence is foresight : conscience is given, prudence is found. This brings us to the most valuable part of Dr. Martineau's constructive work, where we must leave him, without following him into the detailed classification of the springs of action. Conscience speaks with authority. This truth has shown itself in our very conception of duty. For — "Without objective conditions, the idea oi duty involves a contradiction, and its phraseology passes into an unmeaning figure of speech. Nothing can be binding to us that is not higher than we ; and to speak of one part of self imposing obligation on another part — of one impulse or affection play- ing, as it were, the god to another — is to trifle with the real significance of the sentiments that speak within us. Con- science does not frame the law, it simply reveals the law that holds us ; and to make everything of the disclosure and nothing of the thiiig disclosed is to affirm and to deny the revelation in the same breath." But— " The predicate ' higher than I ' takes me yet a step beyond ; for what am I ? A person, higher than whom no ' thing'' assuredly, no mere phe7to?ne?ion, can be ; but only another Person, greater and higher and of deeper insight. . . . If it be true that over a free and living person nothing short of a free and living person can have higher authority, then is it certain that a ' subjective ' conscience is impossible. lo6 £SSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. The faculty is more than part and parcel of myself ; it is the communion of God's life and guiding love entering and abiding with an apprehensive capacity in myself." "The real, eternal objective will of God seems to me to construe very faithfully the sense of ajithority attaching to our moral nature : they are in us, but not ^us ; not ours, but God's." We have now found the key to Dr. Martineau's classification of ethical theories. It is really a dichotomous division based on the recognition or non-recognition of the truth of personality and the fundamental doctrine of obligation. In the ancient world " the notion of personality was held very indistinctly and with great fluctuation," while, with the exception of Bishop Butler and some writers of the Scottish school, " it is difficult to find any class of recent moralists who have declined to betray their science to the physiologist on the one hand, or the ontologist on the other." Whether personality and freedom are merged in metaphysic, immanental or transcendental, or in physiology, as with Comte and Spencer, or are lost in the false psychology of the hedonist or rational or sesthetic schools, makes little difference. They are only subdivisions of the negative arm of the dichotomy. But those who, like Dr. Martineau, allow the moral consciousness to speak for itself, must make the transition, as he does, from morals to meta- physics and theology, — must ask. What metaphysic will furnish an adequate basis arid justification for TYPES OF ETHICAL THEORY. 107 the indispensable postulates of ethical doctrine f If morality demands freedom and an objective moral law, we have passed out of psychology into meta- physics and we must go farther. If the law is moral — can appeal to me as a moral being — it must be the appeal of a personality to my person- ality. Therefore, says Dr. Martineau, morality implies theism. And here he leaves us to face the difficulties of the Parmenides and the criticism of Herbert Spencer, that a Personal Infinite is a contradiction in terms. We are compelled, then, to make a further step, and ask. Is theism any longer a tenable metaphysic ? Must it not declare itself Christian on pain of lapsing into pantheism ? If so, the doctrine of the Trinity becomes the true and only safeguard of that theism which is the postulate of the moral consciousness. This final chapter on the metaphysic of morals Dr. Martineau has not written, but he has given us a noble introduction to it. io8 ^^^^KS" SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. VI. PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS.^ The publication of a work on moral philosophy by Professor Green will be welcomed by many besides those who have been brought directly within the sphere of his influence. People generally knew little of him. When his unexpected and almost sudden death in March, 1882, called forth the noble testimonies to his life and work of those who knew him well, many were astonished to find how great a man he was who had been taken away from among us. Students of philo- sophy had, of course, read his two or three review articles, and above all his introduction to Hume. Oxford men were familiar with his earnest, thoughtful face, and they knew that he was " a philosopher," and that the article in the North British on the " Philosophy of Aristotle," must be read by any one who hoped for high honours in " the schools." But it was a comparatively small number of men who really appreciated him, and the publication of the "Prolegomena to Ethics," after ^ Prolegomena to Ethics. By T. H. Green, M.A., LL. D. PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 109 his death, seems specially appropriate in the case of one who lived so little for himself and so entirely for the great truths with which he dealt. The greater part of the book, as the editor, Mr. A. C. Bradley, tells us, had been used in professorial lectures, Mr. Green having been appointed Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1877 ; and about a quarter of the whole appeared in Mind in the first half of the year in which Mr. Green died. Mr. Bradley is responsible for the arrangement into books and chapters, the manuscript having been written in paragraphs, and we also owe to the editor a most excellent table of contents which serves as a full and true analysis of the book itself. The short preface of the editor ends with a sentence worth quoting, as showing how Professor Green affected those who had the privilege of being much with him and being able to appreciate him. After acknow- ledging his debt to Mrs. Green, Professor Caird, and Mr. R. L. Nettleship, Mr. Bradley concludes: — " But it would seem to me, and to those who have helped me, out of place to express any gratitude for work given to a book which, more than any writing of Mr, Green's yet published, may enable the public outside Oxford to under- stand not only the philosophical enthusiasm which his teach- ing inspired ; but the reverence and love which are felt for him by all who knew him well." If the theology of the Catholic Church had less in common than it has with the metaphysics of Pro- fessor Green, English Churchmen would still owe no ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. to him a heavy debt of gratitude for the unswerv- ing protest of his life and teaching against sophistry and unreaHty. No doubt there were some who could wrench words and phrases from their context in " Green's philosophy," and use them as mere catch-words in argument. There will always be found some who will take the fine gold of the philosopher and make it a " medium of exchange ; " but, as a rule, to have read philosophy with " Green of Balliol " was to have imbibed, at least in some degree, his earnestness in dealing with the great problems of life — to have caught something of his enthusiasm in the search for truth, and his strong faith in the reality of goodness and unselfish work for others. It is diffi-cult to overrate the value of such an influence in an age of disintegration and selfishness, and amongst young men who, as Plato says, are inclined to use philosophy "as puppies use their teeth," in tearing one another to pieces. The "Prolegomena to Ethics," as arranged by Mr. Bradley, is divided into four books, the first two dealing with the scientific basis of ethics, the last two with ethics proper, and the editor, with great considerateness for readers who may be " unaccus- tomed to metaphysical and psychological discus- sions," suggests that much of the author's ethical views may be gathered from the third and fourth books alone. This is no doubt true, but we cannot but express our belief that the '' Prolegomena to PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. ill Ethics " will owe its place in English philosophy to the earlier rather than to the later books. It is a serious thing to begin with metaphysics when we have almost talked ourselves into the belief that anything which we cannot "touch and taste and handle " is unreal, or at best a field for intel- lectual gymnastics. And this Mr. Green felt. It was only the necessity of the case which compelled him to do as he has done. It may seem strange indeed to some that after nineteen centuries of Christianity, and at a time when the Christian morality is accepted by all civilized nations, it should be necessary to write " Prolegomena to Ethics '* at all. The science of ethics implies a metaphysic of ethics undoubtedly, but is not that metaphysic of ethics supplied by Christian theology on which from the first Christian ethics has been based } Such a question can only come from one who ignores or has reason to doubt what certain people now take for granted — viz., that dogmatic theology has had its day, and the Church remains only as a fossilized shell in which a living germ is still hidden. Some, indeed, go further, and deny the existence even of the germ ; but then they believe in a kind of moral archebiosis which in the physical world they are slow to accept. Thus, the Intro- duction to the " Prolegomena to Ethics " speaks of people who are " wearied of the formulas of a stereotyped theology, but still demand free in- H2 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. dulgence for the appetite which that theology- supplied with a regulation-diet" (p. i). Mr. Herbert Spencer, in the '' Data of Ethics," goes further. He is quite willing to believe that dog- matic theology is a thing of the past, but he has a profound mistrust of metaphysics. We are, therefore, told in his Preface that — "The establishment of rules of right conduct on a scientific" {i.e. positive) " basis is a pressing need. Now that moral injunctions are losing the authority given by their supposed sacred 'origin, the secularization of morals is becoming imperative." Supposing, now, for the sake of argument, that dogmatic theology has something still to say in the present as it has had in the past, we find that ethics becomes the battle-ground of the three great tendencies of the human mind — the positive, the metaphysical, and the theological. Mr. Spencer is prepared to give us a natural science of morals, and nothing could be more acceptable to the present age than this, if it does not demand too great a sacrifice of common sense. Mr. Green, on the other hand, is anxious to find " some indepen- dent justification " for ethics " in the shape of a philosophy which does not profess to be a branch either of dogmatic theology or of natural science " (p. 2). And there are still some, and we venture to think an increasing number, who are reactionary- enough to hold that there is no basis for the Christian PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 113 virtues except the Christian verities. Still we should be quite wrong in supposing that the controversy between science, philosophy, and theology in this matter could be represented as a triangular duel, or a " belbim omnium inter omnesT For metaphysics and theology fight side by side against any attempt to make ethics a part of natural science. It is only when metaphysics adopts,, as it sometimes does, a sublimated Christianity in which the Christ of the Gospels and the Epistles is lost sight of in the Christian Idea, that theology is compelled to re- assert the historical character of the Catholic faith. The " Prolegomena to Ethics " is mainly directed to the establishment of morality on the basis of self- consciousness. Such a view necessitates a criticism of those theories which involve a physical theory of conscience and of will, whether in the form given to it by Mr. J. S. Mill, or in the ethics of evolution as formulated by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Against both of these it is necessary to show the reality of the spiritual principle in nature and in man, and the true relation of man to nature. This is the subject of Book I., which is headed " Metaphysics of Knowledge." It is clearly impossible without unfairness to summarize a closely reasoned discus- sion, which includes much valuable criticism. For a summary can do little more than state in a bald, dogmatic form the conclusions ultimately arrived at, indicating roughly and in outline the method I 114 -ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. by which such conclusions are established. Still, for understanding the theory of ethics developed in Books III. and IV., it is necessary to do this. At the end of the Introduction two questions are suggested for consideration, of which the second depends upon a negative answer being given to the first : — " Can the knowledge of nature be itself a part or product of nature in that sense of nature in which it is said to be an object of knowledge ? " This is the question of Book I. If the answer be in the negative the further question is suggested — namely, whether that principle in knowledge which is not natural has not another expression in the consciousness of a moral ideal. Thus the Second Book leads us on from the critique of the speculative to that of the practical reason. It would be difficult to find in the English lan- guage so clear a statement of great metaphysical principles as we have in Book I. on the metaphysic of knowledge. Metaphysicians, from Heracleitus to Hegel, have a tendency to adopt a defiant atti- tude towards ordinary people. There is nothing of this in Professor Green. Even when he is dealing with the most abstruse subjects he wishes to be understood ; and the wish to be understood carries him on far towards the attainment of his object. Whether it is that English people are too matter-of-fact to be metaphysical, or that they PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 115 have been hopelessly miseducated by traditional systems of philosophy, the fact remains that what is almost a truism to a metaphysician is a paradox to " the plain, honest man." To be told that all reality consists in relations, and relations are im- possible except for an intelligence capable of relating, sounds strange to people whose common view of the real is that it is something which is independent of consciousness, that is, " unrelated." Ever since the days of Locke a mysterious "entity," called matter, is supposed to exist as a source of reality, though it is unknown and unknowable. Even Kant did not succeed in laying the ghost which hampered the English philosophy, and which the good Bishop of Cloyne in vain sought to exorcise. For this unknown something, which for Bishop Berkeley was the haunt of materialism, reappears in the Kantian " thing-in-itself," while for the English "philosophers of relativity," it remains as " a skeleton in the cupboard." Hegel dared to say that it was a ghost which any man of sound common sense could afford to laugh at, since the intelligible is the real and the real is the intelligible, and we can do better without the ghost than with it, because, as Mr. Green tells us in a different context, "nothing can be known by reference to the unknown." But if the real is the related, and relation implies a relating consciousness, we cannot explain con- ii6 jEssavs scientific and philosophical. sciousness by that nature which presupposes it. Discarding, then, the materialistic solution, can we accept the Kantian dictum that the " understand- ing makes nature " ? Popular thinking opposes the external order of nature to our thinking, and the antithesis has been emphasized by Locke as if the order of nature were one thing and real, while our thinking is another and unreal. But nature as a system or unity is so for a conscious intelligence, and yet we do not make that unity for ourselves. It seems, then, that we have the conception of an order of nature on the one side and that order itself on the other. Either, then, we must suppose "some unaccountable pre- established harmony," through which there comes to be such an order corresponding to our concep- tion of it, or we must recognize the fact that " our conception of an order of nature and the relations which form that order have a common spiritual source" (p. 35). At any rate, we cannot reduce one to the other : — " Intelligence, experience, knowledge, are no more a result of nature than nature of them. If it is true that there would be no intelligence without nature it is equally true that there would be no nature without intelligence" (pp. '^'j, 38). Nature, then, in its reality implies a principle which is spiritual, or at least not natural (p. 56). What, then, is our relation to this principle ? We are conscious of an order in nature, and this PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 117 consciousness cannot be a part of the process of nature. Popular psychology has, indeed, familiarized us with the term " phenomena of con- sciousness." Knowledge may be of phenomena, but phenomena are related in time to other phe- nomena, the consciousness is not. Few better instances of Mr. Green's psychological analysis can be found than the sections (58-64) which he devotes to the theory of perception adopted by Mr. Mill and Mr. Lewes, and the result of his analysis is the conclusion that — " A sensation excited by an external irritant is not a per- ception of the irritant or (by itself) of anything at all ; every object we perceive is a congeries of related facts, of which the simplest component, no less than the composite whole, requires in order to its presentation the action of a principle of consciousness, not itself subject to conditions of time, upon successive appearances, such action as may hold the appear- ances together, without fusion, in an apprehended fact " (p. 70). But our consciousness seems to admit of growth. How is this to be explained ? Probably what seems to be a growth of consciousness is really a process by which the animal organism becomes " a vehicle of the eternal consciousness : " — "We must hold that there is a consciousness for which the relations of fact which form the object of our gradually attained knowledge already and eternally exist ; and that the growing knowledge of the individual is a progress towards this consciousness." The system of related facts which we call the ii8 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. objective world implies a mind or consciousness for which it now exists, and as that eternal con- sciousness reproduces itself in us the world tends to become for us also a system of related facts, though there can never be for us that *' wholeness " which there must be for " the mind which renders the world one." It has always seemed to us that Bishop Berkeley, the best misunderstood of Eng- lish philosophers, had a glimmering of this truth. He never escaped from the terminology of Locke nor overcame the confusion between sensation and thought ; yet he seems to have seen that the popular theory of ideas admitted of being turned against its materialistic defenders. If a thing's esse is its percipi, then, since the human mind " exists not always," things must be either " no- where when we perceive them not," or they must be " ideas in the mind of God." Hume, of course, sneers at the good Bishop's " lessons in scepticism," yet in turning the prevailing philosophy of "ideas " into an argument for the existence of God he already foreshadowed the truth that reality implies an eternal consciousness, and nature the existence of a mind without which nature would not be. The consciousness which in knowledge asserts its freedom by distinguishing itself from impres- sions is seen in morality distinguishing itself from mere wants and animal impulses to satisfy them. For the animal system of man is organic not only PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 119 to impressions but to wants. And a want is no more identifiable with a motive than an impression is identifiable with a thought. In a motive no less than in knowledge, there is something non-natural, not as though a motive were made up of animal instinct plus self-consciousness ; for it is one and indivisible, resulting from "the determination of an animal nature by a self-conscious subject other than it" (p. 95). Any one who is familiar with a certain long and hopelessly confused footnote in Mill's ** Utilitarian- ism," on motives and intentions, will appreciate the admirable clearness of Mr. Green's discussion (sees. 103 and seqq?) and his criticism of the mis- leading phrase, " the strongest motive." With the clearer view of what motive means, the freedom of the will, which is necessarily implied in morality, becomes intelligible. We are not shut up to either of the one-sided heresies of "determinism " or "in- determinateness." Freedom in motive is not free- dom from motive. It is not " some unaccountable power of unmotived willing," nor is an act deter- mined by character one that a man cannot help doing. " It has no must, in the physical sense, about it. The ' can't help it ' has no application to it." To say, then, that a man's action is the joint result of his character and his circumstances is only true and compatible with human freedom, if we recognize the existence of "a self-dis- 120 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. tinguishing and self-seeking subject, as making both character and circumstances what they are " (p. III). A free will, however, is not necessarily a good will, any more than a strong character is a good character, though it may be true that the weak man cannot be a good man. Hence a fuller dis- cussion of the nature of will in its relation to desire and reason is necessary in order to establish the distinction between the good and the bad will which is the basis of ethics. To will is to identify one's self with one of those tendencies towards different objects, which, till that identification, are external to the man. An act of will is thus never 'tnere desire. I*i willing a man seeks to realize himself in that which he wills. Any act of will is the expression of the man as he at the time is, but the character of the man and the distinction between the good and the bad will depends upon the nature of that object in which self-realization is sought. This brings us at once to ethics proper and the criticism of the Utilitarian theory. Not that Pro- fessor Green ever allows himself to be driven by reaction from Hedonism into a one-sidedly ascetic view. " Self-satisfaction is the form of every object willed" (p. i6i), and "in all self-satisfaction, if attained, there is pleasure" (p. 165). This is the truth that underlies the false notion that pleasure PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 121 is always the object of desire. Mr. Green is never happier than when he is disentangling the con- fusions of Utilitarian psychology. One has heard much of the way in which Sir William Hamilton wielded the metaphysical scythe. We venture to think that there are passages in the " Prolegomena to Ethics " which will bear comparison with any of Sir William Hamilton's criticisms. If the style is less trenchant, it is only because Mr. Green has no interest in merely proving an opponent wrong. He is anxious to discover in the confusion that which made a false theory seem true. " A lie which is all a lie" has no echo in the human spirit. If, therefore, a false theory is commonly received or is capable of plausible presentation, it is owing to some truth which it has seized and misinterpreted. Nothing could be better than the way in which Mr. Green unravels the confusion of pleasure and the good in his criticism of Utilitarianism. The criticism is indeed as old as Aristotle ; just as the confusion is inherent in Cyrenianism ; and none knew this better than Mr. Green. The conscious activity or self-realization is not the same as the pleasure which always accompanies self-realization, though " because they occur together some people think they are the same," Sm Se to firi xo)piZ,i(rSaL (jtaivarat Ttai ravrov} Few critics would have »Eth., X. V. 7. 122 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. resisted the temptation to exhibit an antago- nist fairly "hoist with his own petard," when a champion of association psychology is found naively unconscious that "uniform conjunction in experience " does not constitute identity. But Mr. Green is only careful to disentangle the truth from the error, and to show that what man seeks is never merely pleasure, but the self-realization of which pleasure is the invariable concomitant. Still, whether for the Utilitarian or the ideal moralist, a criterion has to be established by which to distinguish the good will from the bad. If the end of human action is always pleasure, there must be good pleasures and bad ; if the end of life is self-realization, there must be a true and a false way of attempting it. In the case of the voluptuary and the saint, either the pleasures they seek are different in kind or they seek self- satisfaction in different ways. The Utilitarian of to-day, with a noble disregard of his principles, asserts that pleasures differ in kind, and Mr. Mill appeals to this difference as an unquestionable "fact."^ When, however, we look closer into the matter we find that on strictly Utilitarian grounds one pleasure is mtrifisically better than another only because it is a greater pleasure on the whole. This is by no means enough for Mr. Mill, and, therefore, he bases the ^ Utilitarianism, pp. 12, 13. PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 123 qualitative distinction of pleasures on the com- parative excellence of those who pursue them. This, no doubt, is valid reasoning for any one who makes self-realization and not pleasure the end of action, but — "It is altogether against Utilitarian principles that a pleasure should be of more value because the man who pursues it is better. They only entitle us to argue back from the amount of pleasure to the worth of the man who acts so as to produce it " (p. 170). If, then, the Utilitarian attempt to establish a criterion of right and wrong in a difference in kind among pleasures fails us, what answer have they to give who speak of self-realization as the end of action? The impulse of self-realization according to the direction it takes is, we are told, " the source both of vice and virtue." Only the vicious self- seeking and self-assertion — the quest, for instance, for self-satisfaction in the life of the voluptuary — is ultimately self-defeating, while the differentia of the virtuous life is that it is governed by the con- sciousness that there is — " Some perfection which has to be attained, some vocation which has to be fulfilled, some law which has to be obeyed, something absolutely desirable, whatever the individual may for the time desire" (p. 184). What this ideal is we do not know at once. We only know that disinterested obedience to 124 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND FHILOSOPHICAL. it is what- the "Categorical Imperative" enjoins. We feel that, as an ultimate standard, it must be " an ideal of personal worth," that the idea of a spirit cannot realize itself except in spirits. Unless, therefore, we give up as insoluble the constant spectacle of unfulfilled human promise, we are led on to the conclusion that our personal self-conscious being which comes from God is for ever continued in God — which we suppose to be the Pantheistic conclusion — or else that the life which is lived on earth under conditions which thwart its development is — " Continued in a society with which we have no means of communication through the senses, but which shares in and carries further every measure of perfection attained by men under the conditions of life that we know" (p. 195). That there should be such an end of human perfection is the demand which our spirit makes upon us, which is implied in the very idea of development, for a process ad infinitmn cannot be a process of development at all. And when that which is being developed is not a natural organism but a self-conscious subject, the end of its becoming must be "a subject in which the idea of the human spirit is completely realized." This consideration suggests the true notion of the spiritual relation in which we stand to God. We exist not merely /br Him but in Him. He is the Being " with Whom we are in principle one ; PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 125 with Whom the human spirit is identical in the sense that He is all which the human spirit is capable of becoming" (p. 198). Such an ideal, known only at first vaguely and in outline, creates its own filling, and in history we can trace the process. The first step in the process, or rather that which the whole process implies, is the realizing of the fact that a perfect self-development is only possible when others share in the same development. The idea of an absolute good is seen to be the idea of a common good. The supposed objection that this notion of a common good is but the development of a gregarious instinct, which we see in brutes, calls forth a criticism which is of far wider application than that in which it is here used. However dependent upon feelings of animal origin social interest may be, it cannot be a product of them nor evolved from them : — " Any history that might be offered of it, which should enable us to connect its more complex with its simpler forms, would be much to be welcomed. But the same cannot be said for a history which should seem to account for it by ignoring its distinctive character, and by deriving it from forms of animal sympathy from which, because they have no element of identity with it, it cannot in the proper sense have been developed " (p. 211). Similarly when the idea of an absolute and common good expresses itself in social requirements, in laws written or unwritten, in the recognition of some- 126 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND FHILOSOPHICAL. thing which ought to be, whatever the individual likes or dislikes, no so-called histories of the origin of justice can help us : — " Though our information about primitive man were very- different from what it is, it could never be other than a contradiction to found upon it a theory of a state of mind underlying the earliest forms of social union, which should represent this state of mind as different in kind from that which, upon fair analysis of the spiritual life, now shared by us, we find to be the condition of such social union as actually exists '' (p. 216). Sight cannot be generated when there is no optic nerve, nor can the idea of an absolute and common good, which is alike the foundation of morality and of the institutions of daily life, be the product of that which is irrational and non-moral. So much, then, is necessarily implied in morality, that there should be the idea of an absolute good, which is a good for others as well as for one's self. But the earliest moral ideals and that which the modern age has caught from Christianity seem wide as the poles asunder. In what, then, does the process or evolution of morality consist ? To this the answer is that there has been a gradual widening of the area of common good and a gradual determination of the idea. We have been slowly learning that a common good is a good for all : — "The change is not necessarily in the strength, in the constraining power, of the feeling of duty — perhaps it is PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 127 never stronger now than it may have been in an Israelite who would have yet recognized no claim in a Philistine, or in a Greek who would yet have seen no harm in exposing a sickly child — but in the conceived range of claims to which the duty is relative. ... It is not the sense of duty to a neighbour, but the practical answer to the question, Who is my neighbour? that has varied" (p. 220). The modern world has accepted, if it has only in part realized, the idea of human equality, an idea which for Greek ethics was simply unintelligible. Even for Aristotle the slave was a living tool, and it was as absurd to suppose him capable of true tv^aiiuovin as to admit him to political rights. Nowadays people — Christian, non-Christian, or anti-Christian — accept the equality of all men as, in theory at least, a self-evident truth. "For practical purposes I' as Professor Green notices with considerable emphasis on the limitation, the Kan- tian maxim, " Act so as to treat humanity always as an end never as a means," and the Utilitarian formula, " Every one should count for one and no one for more than one," are coincident. Professor Green, however, declines to say who is mainly to be credited with the promulgation of humanitarian views unknowm to the Greek world : — "It is not to the point," he says, "to discuss the share which Stoic philosophers, Roman jurists, and Christian teachers may severally have had in gaining acceptance for the idea of human equality " (p. 222). He prefers to think of it as but the natural fulfil- 128 JSSSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. ment of a capability given in reason itself. That the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount should thus be left to take its place as a phase in a natural development seems to us to imply a false estimate of the influence which Christianity exerted upon ancient moral theories. It is, no doubt, true that the precept of the older revelation, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," had never attained, even for the Jew, its full meaning. Indeed, the Jewish people had narrowed, instead of widening, the area covered by the term "neighbour," and Christ had to interpret it in its true universality. It is true, too, that the world was prepared for such humanitarian teaching by the vision of a great World Empire, no less than by the unifying tendencies of Roman law and the utterances of Stoic philosophers. And yet, when Christ enunci- ated a principle as far-reaching as and much more generally intelligible than either of those formulas of the rival moral system of our day — " Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you do ye even so to them " — it was a new truth, and its finality is beyond dispute. It is, perhaps, in those passages in which the ancient and the modern ideals are contrasted that we are least able to follow Mr. Green. Though he disclaims any wish to " hold a brief for the Greek philosophers against the founders of the Christian Church, or for the latter against the former" PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 129 (p. 306), we cannot help feeling that the fear lest we of the modern world should think ourselves " better than our fathers " often leads him to minimize the real difference between the highest moral systems of the pre-Christian age and the ethics of Chris- tianity : — " Religious teachers," Professor Green tells us, " have, no doubt, affected the hopes and fears which actuate us in the pursuit of virtue, or rouse us from its neglect. Religious societies have both strengthened men in the performance of recognized duties and taught them to recognize relations of duty towards those whom they might otherwise have been content to treat as beyond the pale of such duties ; but the articulated scheme of what the virtues and duties are in their difference and in their unity remains for us now in its main outlines what the Greek philosophers left it." If " religious teachers " and " religious societies " include Christ and the Catholic Church this is surely misleading. It fails to recognize what Chris- tianity did for the moral ideal, and still more the new power which it gave for the realizing of that ideal. We have not the slightest wish to underrate the results of Greek ethics or to deny the fact that much of the teaching of Aristotle is final. But it seems to us not only inadequate, but unfair to credit the philosopher with the doctrine that " every form of real goodness must rest on a wish to be good, which has no object but its own fulfilment " (p. 271), and then to contrast with this "the appeal to semi-sensual motives which has been common K I30 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. and perhaps necessary for popular practical effect in the Christian Church." No doubt the Aristote- lian formula tov koXov evEica implied disinterested interest in an ideal. In Christianity this is replaced by the disinterested love of God for what He is, and the love of men as made in His image. A few pages later (p. 280), Professor Green admits that "the fact that Christian preachers have not been ashamed to dwell upon such compensation ought not to be taken to imply that the heroism of charity exhibited in the Christian Church has really been vitiated by pleasure-seeking motives : " but the fact is nevertheless appealed to in order to emphasize the contrast between the teaching of Aristotle and the Christian preacher. And yet Aristotle, who was certainly not hampered by the necessity of " popular practical effect," allows and authorizes the appeal to "semi-sensual" motives in the case of all except a very few : — " For the mass of men," he tells us, " are governed by moral compulsion rather than reason, and penalties rather than an ideal. And so some people hold, that though it is the duty of lawgivers to exhort men to virtue and to stimulate them TOV KoKov x<^P^^, in the belief that those whose character has been properly trained will listen to them, yet for the dis- obedient and less noble natures they must apply correction and punishment, while the morally incurable they must banish altogether." ^ If it be answered that he whose life was "steered * Ethics, X. ix. 10. PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 131 by the rudders of pleasure and pain " was imper- fectly moral, because he did not act tov koXov cvfjca, it is also true that he in whose life the hope of heaven and the fear of hell are the dominant prin- ciples falls equally short of the Christian ideal. We cannot now follow Professor Green into his comparison of the Greek virtues of courage and temperance with the Christian fortitude and self- denial. The superiority of the Christian" type is of course everywhere admitted, but it is difficult to feel that the contrast, especially between the o-w<^- poavvT] of the Greek — meaning, as it did, little more than moderation in eating, drinking, and the sexual passion — and the soberness, temperance, and chas- tity of Christian ethics is fully recognized, when it can be said that "the sexual temperance which they" (the philosophers) "demanded, they de- manded on the true ground, but not in full enough measure" (p. 289); nor can we accept without a good deal of interpretation the statement that " there is no true foundation for the strictest sexual morality other than the social duty which they asserted." It was not the fact of social equality which St. Paul appealed to against the prevailing vice of the ancient world. It was the dignity of the nature which had been taken into God, and the indwelling in the regenerate man of the Personal Spirit of God. The failure to appreciate what is distinctive in 132 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Christianity, even considered as a moral system, seems inseparable from the view, apparently ac- cepted by Mr. Green, that the history of ethics is a history of " the natural fulfilment of a capability given in reason itself." For Christian morality is indissolubly bound up with the dogma of the Incarnation and the Sacramental teaching of the Church. The Divine life, which is set before man as his ideal, is for those whose nature has been transformed by a Divine power ; and it is the belief that such a transformation of human nature has taken place that makes the Christian ideal a possi- bility for man. For the claim of Christianity is that, while it sets before man a new and higher ideal in the life of Him in Whom dwelt the fulness of the Godhead, it gives a new moral dynamic to enable him to realize it. But we can no more take our moral ideal from Christianity and our moral dynamic from Paganism than we can base the unselfish Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill on the Hedonism of Epicurus and of Hobbes. Mr. Green, in two remarkable lay sermons, has shown us what his attitude towards the faith of Christendom is. We are not now anxious to dis- cuss this, nor is it necessary in reviewing the " Pro- legomena to Ethics," except when that false view, as we hold it to be, shows itself in an imperfect conception of the nature of the Christian ideal. For the rest, if we are unable to believe that Mr PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 133 Green has found a metaphysical substitute for dogmatic theology, we at least are conscious that we owe him much for having given to the world the strongest attack which has yet been made upon theories which would reduce morality in the last analysis to a calculation of pleasures, or destroy it by a physical theory of conscience and of will. 134 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. VII. SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WILL. Freedom of the Will, (a) As a practical question. (/3) As a speculative question. (a) As A PRACTICAL QUESTION it is taken for granted that man is an apx^ trpa^^wv, that he can choose or reject. No arguments for this are advanced till it is denied, and it is never denied till we try to fit in the fact of freedom with the general view of the world and God. It rests upon — (i.) The consciousness that we are free, which is never denied even by those who explain it away. (ii.) The feeling of responsibility varying con- comitantly with the consciousness of freedom. (iii.) The transference of this to others in the vulgar notion of moral desert. (iv.) The practice of legislators and of the judicial system. (/3) As A SPECULATIVE QUESTION. How are we to reconcile freedom with what we know of SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WILL. 135 the universe and God ? Here " freedom " has to run the gauntlet with — (a) A metaphysical pantheism. (/3) A theological theory of omnipotence. (7) A physical doctrine of determinism. (a) The Stoics. Here we get the first collision between moral freedom and physical necessity : unapfxivT], avajKY] is supreme everywhere ; human freedom is therefore only a mode of necessity. Chrysippus struggles in vain with the difficulty, but at last responsibility disappears in fate.^ (/3) John Calvin. Theological necessitarianism dates from John Calvin, though the reaction from Pelagianism in St. Augustine gave a colour of necessitarianism to Augustinianism. The "Deus ducit volentem duci " of St. Augustine reminds one of Seneca's (Ep., 107. ii.) " Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt." But Calvin, starting with the omnipotence of God, made Him responsible for all human actions, evil as well as good. He did not a//ow, He willed evil. The "double predesti- nation " was not more immoral than this, though the injustice was more obvious. (7) Determinism. Hobbes, Hume, and Mill main- tained mechanical Determinism. H. Spencer and his followers maintain physiological Determinism. Kant's answer to the difficulty consists in an ^ See Zeller, Gesch. d. Griechischen Philosophic, III. Th. i Abth. pp. 168, seqq. n6 jEssays scientific and philosophical. attempted division of territory ; he separates the moral and the physical, the sphere of liberty and the sphere of freedom. The difficulties of the Kantian view are threefold. (a) It involves a hopeless dualism between man and nature, and between the free and the necessary in man. (/3) All our knowledge of nature and man tends to bring them together. (7) Freedom comes to mean "unmotived volition," mere indeterminateness, which is morally as worth- less as a determined will. Men ask — Does the Will mean the balance of motives, or has it a casting vote ? Answer. Neither one nor the other. They talk of the freedom of the will as something innate instead of a thing to be won} Psychology of the Will. What is the Will ? The animal system in man is organic to the satisfaction oi wants 3.nd impulses: the feeling of want leads to " desire " for a wanted object. ^ " The essential ingredient of desire is the ^ Cf. Noah Porter, pp. 79, 80. What the Will is not. It is not (o) power to carry out volition ; not {&) power to choose without motive, etc. Janet, Theory of Morals, p. 372, distinguishes between — (a) External determinism tacts done ^ia). {&) Internal determinism (acts done from Qv\i.6% and e7rt0y^/a). (7) Rational determinism or liberty, which is "the power of acting according to conceptions or ideas." 2 Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 92. SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WILL. 137 sense of the inferiority of the actual to the ideal!' ^ But the animal impulse ceases to be merely animal when it is determined by self-consciousness.^ Self-satisfaction is the form of every object willed by man — whether as in the highest life self-satisfac- tion is sought in the realizing of a vocation, or as in the vicious life in pleasure.^ Willy then, is "the man's direction of himself to the realization of a conceived or imagined * Sully, Outlines of Psychology, p. 578. * Cf. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 95. "The motive is not made up of an (animal) want and self-consciousness, any more than Ufe of chemical processes and vital ones. It is one and indi- visible ; but, indivisible as it is, it results, as perception results, from the determination of an animal nature by a self-conscious subject other than it ; so results, however, that the animal condition does not survive in the result." ' Cf. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 182-184. From this characteristic of being an object to himself "arises the impulse which becomes the source, according to the direction it takes, both of vice and virtue. It is the source of vicious self-seeking and self- assertion, so far as the spirit which is in man seeks to satisfy itself or to realize its capabilities in modes in which ... its self-satisfac- tion or self-realization is not to be found. ... It is one and the same principle of his nature . . . which makes it possible for the voluptuary to seek satisfaction, and thus to live for pleasure, at all, and which according to the law of its being, according to its inherent capability, makes it impossible that the self-satisfaction should be found in any succession of pleasures. . . . And hence the differentia of the virtuous life, proceeding as it does from the same self- objectifying principle which we have just characterized as the source of the vicious life, is that it is governed by the consciousness of there being some perfection which has to be attained, some vocation which has to be fulfilled, some law which has to be obeyed, some- thing absolutely desirable, whatever the individual may for the time desire ; that it is in ministering to such an end that the agent seeks to satisfy himself." 138 ^^^^KS- SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. object " ^ or the putting one's self forth in desire for the realization of some object present to us in idea. It is not merely selecting, but selecting for a reason. Thus Will can be identified with neither reason nor desire^ nor is it a third thing co-ordinate with both (Plato) nor a fusion of the two (Aristotle), yet it includes both. It includes (a) the instinctive craving for a good, an ideal to be realized — in Aristotelian language l3ovXr](ng, which though a part of op^^ig is already, as being f5ov\r}(Tig ayaOov, XoyicrriKov ti. (/3) A representation to ourselves of some good to be realized^( (^apra(7t'a). (7) The rational deliberation as to how it shall be realized (PovXtvcrig). (S) The identification of self with the best means for the end {irpoaLptaig).^ ^ Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 151, 152. 2 Cf. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 158. "Will, then, is equally and indistinguishably desire and thought — not however mere desire or mere thought, if by that is meant desire or thought as they might exist in a being that was not self-distinguishing and self- seeking, or as they may occur to a man independently of any action of himself; but desire and thought as they are involved in the direction of a self-distinguishing and self-seeking subject to the realization of an idea. . . . The will is simply the man. Any act of will is the expression of the man as he at the time is. The motive issuing in his act, the object of his will, the idea which for the time he sets himself to realize, are but the same things in different words. ... In willing he carries with him, so to speak, his whole self to the realization of the given idea. All the time that he so wills, he may feel the pangs of conscience, or, on the other hand, the annoyance, the sacrifice, implied in acting conscien- SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WILL. 139 The growth of the Will. The Freedom of the Will is the power to win freedom. The weak man cannot be a good man, the strong man may be. Man's heritage is the power to choose. The rlXoc is not (^vaiKov ri determined for us. We create our own tQ^oq, our own (pavTacTia, which is a mere ^atvo/xEvov ayadov or the real to ayaOov in proportion as we use our " power of self-emancipation." ^ Every act of choice wins or loses freedom. Hence "every choice is for eternity" (Goethe). We have (pvan " a capability of effort " (the germ of zuill) and capacity of distinguishing a right and a wrong, or a higher and lower (the germ of con- science). We never absolutely lose either. We are what we are according to our use of these capabilities. So in Aristotelian language. The o-ax^/owy is free; the aKoXacrrog is a slave ; the lyKparrig and the aKpaTijg are winning or losing freedom. As tiously. He may think that he is doing wrong, or that it is doubtful whether, after all, there is really an objection to his acting as he has resolved to do. He may desire some one's good opinion which he is throwing away, or some pleasure which he is sacrificing. But, for all that, it is only the feeling, thought, and desire represented by the act of will, that the man recognizes as for the time himself. The feeling, thought, and desire with which the act conflicts are influences which he is aware of, influences to which he is susceptible, but they are not Ae.^^ * Janet, Theory of Morals, p. 400. I40 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. a matter of fact the i to \ak^- TTtonpov au kol rexvr] yiverai kol apETi} (Eth., II. iii. lo). The same thought is expressed in eaOXol julv yap aTrXwc, TravTodairwg ^£ kukoi (II. vi. 1 4) pqdiov fitv to aTTOTvxuv Tov (TKOTTov, xaXeiTov Sf TO eTTiTvx^'iv (ibid.). The problem of Eth., III. v., man's responsibility for his character, is suggested by this fact. There is an effort in virtue, therefore man is responsible ; there is no effort in vice, therefore he is not responsible. To know implies learnings to be ignorant implies a mere laisser faire. Hence we commend a man for action, but shrink from blaming him for indolence. Even Aristotle (III. xii.) thinks a man more to blame for aKoXacria than for dnXia, because it required less effort to resist -n^ovri than XvTTV- Cf III. ix. 2. \a\eTrwT£pov yap to. Xvirr^pa virofiiviiiVy J] TU)v r}^iwv airix^ddai. What is the place of education in the self-emanci- pation of the will? It is the protection of the Will in its first struggles to be free, and the presenting to the conscience of the highest conceptions of the good. But no external force can give the will freedom. Freedom must be wo7i. Education SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WILL. 141 tries to neutralize the forces called by the general name of r\Zovy\, which, 77 /3m ?i yorirda, would make the development of freedom impossible. The fxovaiKi] of Plato, and the Woq of Aristotle ; the swimming-belt of Horace, the "sentiment" of Hume, all have for their object the protection of the Will while it is weak. The wildest advocate of " free trade " in politics believes in '' protection " in morals. Revelation itself is Divine education. It en- lightens the conscience by putting before it a Perfect Ideal ; and, like human education, strengthens the will by an appeal to love. The special virtues recognized by any age or society are thus the highest known forms under which TO dyaOov is recognized. To be virtuous, however, is not to conform to those conceptions, but to choose them tov koXov evtKa as an embodi- ment of the good. What is the good when I am in presence of fear, or sensual appetite, or lust of money, or base ambition, or mere self-love in society } For the Greek, the answer is given in Eth., III. vi.-xii., IV., and V. We may now explain some of the puzzles due to the confusion of formal freedom (liberum arbitrium) with real freedom, libertas. (a) T/ie Will is always free ^ because in all * Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, ii. p. 308. 142 jEssavs scientific and philosophical. willing the man is his own object. (In acts which are done St' ayvomv, " circumstances master a man," says Hegel : the will does not will. In acts done j3m, the will is free though the act is not.) (j3) The Will is always determined, it cannot act without a motive, and the motive of the will is always good, or conceived of sub specie boni. But this is self-determination ; and SELF-DETERMINA- TION is equivalent to FREEDOM. Necessitas natu- ralis non aufert libertatem voluntatis.^ " To act by motives is to act freely, to act with- out motive is to act under necessity, physical necessity is the only necessity, and moral necessity is freedom."^ (y) In the sense of real freedom, however, the good will is free, not the bad one.^ Liberty, as actual freedom, is a thing to be won, and it can be won only by realizing the law of one's being. The man who, by his formal freedom of self- determination, identifies himself with impulses not for his true good is a slave ; he who seeks satisfac- tion in what is for his true good is free. In the former case, he uses his freedom to make himself a slave ; in the latter, he wins freedom by self- emancipation from nature. This (Hegelian) view of freedom which we find ^ S. Thomas Aq., i «., 82, i ad. i. ' Stirling, p. 19. ' Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, ii. 321. SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WILL. 143 in Green and Stirling is also the view of Christian philosophers — St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, St. Thomas. With St. Paul, the natural man is a slave, the spiritual man is free. Freedom is the power to will the right, to live according to the true human " idea," or the will of God. The ideally perfect man, according to St. John, "cannot sin."^ The Pelagian argument that liberty means the possi- bility of doing right or wrong is met by St. Augustine thus : — " Si liberum non est nisi quod duo potest velle, id est et bonum et malum ; liber Deus non est, qui malum non potest velle" (Op. Imp. c. Julian I. c). Arbitrium igitur voluntatis tunc est vere liberum, cum vitiis peccatisque non servit (De Civ. Dei, xiv. xi. i). See too St. Anselm's "Cur Deus Homo.^" bk. i. ch. xii. Can God lie .^ And St. Thos. Aq. Summa, i' Ixii. viii. ad. 3 : " Major libertas arbitrii est in angelis qui peccare non possunt, quam in nobis pui peccare possumus." II.* 2ae Ixxxviii. iv. ad. i. Sicut non posse peccare non diminuit libertatem, ita etiam necessitas firmata-e voluntatis in bonum non diminuit libertatem, ut patet in Deo, et in beatis. . . . Unde Augustinus . . . "felix necessitas est quae in meliora compellit." II.' 236 xliv. I ad. 2. Obligatio praecepti non opponitur libertati nisi in eo cujus mens aversa est ab eo quod prae- cipitur ; sicut patet in his qui ex solo timore praecepta custodiunt. Sed praeceptum dilectionis non potest impleri nisi ex propria voluntate ; et ideo libertati non repugnat. * St. Aug. De Lib. Arb. i. 32: "Libertas quidem nulla vera est nisi beatorum et legi aeternse adhosrentium " (Cf. too De Civ. Dei, xxii. xxx. 3). 144 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 3* qu. xiv. art. ii. Duplex est necessitas : una quidem coactionis quae fit ab agente extrinseco : et haec quidem necessitas contrariatur et naturae et voluntati, quorum utrumque est principium intrinsecum. i*qu. 105, art. iv. ad. 2""". Moveri voluntate est moveri ex se, i.e. a principio intrinseco. ( 145 ) VIII. A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS AS COMPARED WITH MODERN ETHICAL THEORIES. Man is distinguished from the rest of the animal kingdom by the possession of reason. This reason shows itself in the search for knowledge, and the search for an end, Travreg opeyovrai tov ndivai : hence arise metaphysics and science (Eth., I. i. i). Hence, too, Ethics and the practical sciences ; Trao-a Tlxvri Kot iraaa /uiOo^og bfioitijg cl irpa^ig re kol TTpoaipEdLg ayaOov rivog ^(pUaOai ^okbT. As rational, man always aims at truth, for truth is the correlate of reason ; but in speculation it is ToXrtOeg airXwg, in practice it is aXr}6iia o/uioXoywg e\ov(Ta ry opi^u ry 6^6/5. Man's superiority to the brute is shown in both i^p6vY\mg and (Tot'a, man approximates to God ; while brutes, though strictly incapable of (ppovrjmg, show signs (txv»)) of that which in man is (ppovriaig. In the L 146 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Politics, 1253* 16, it is said to be the property of man that he passes moral judgments, avOpwiroig tofov TO ^iKa'iov KoX a^iKOv ai(T9r](TLV e'x^^^' Y^^ ^^ ^^^ Natural History (588'^ 20), it is admitted that traces are to be found in the brutes of moral states. So man is ^uo-et ttoXitlkov Zioov (Pol., 1253^2. 8., Eth., logy^ 11), yet among gregarious animals we see the beginnings of this (Z. 588^"). Brutes, by a sort of (fivariKri ^vva/uLig (588* 30), show a resemblance to the conscious life of man. They are to humanity as the child to the full-grown man. If man is the perfect animal, animals are imperfect men, and so right down the scale, for Aristotle feels the break between living and not living, as little as the break between brute and man or plant and animal. OvTU) S' SK tCjv axfjvxwv sIq to, Z^a fi^raf^aivH Kara juiKpov 7] (fivaig wart rj (jvv&\da XavOavsiv to fiSopiov aVTlOV KOI TO jUiCrOV TTOTipMV IdTLV' fXETa jap TO TbJV aipv\(jjv yivog to tujv (J)VtlJv irpCjTov Icttl' Kai TovTitw erepov irpog tTepov ^ia(})epu tio juaXXov ^okhv ficriyjEiv Z^^Q' oXov St TO yivog rrpog julv ToSXa GwjiaTa (^aivtTat (TX^^ov wairsp ippv\ov, npog St to tmv Z,^(s)v aipvxov. 'H Se juaTaf^amg £$ avTU)V hg to. Z^a (jvvexng IcTTiv (588^4, etc.). Still the line which separates man from brute is a real one since man can consciously set before himself an end, an ideal of knowledge or of action. He alone has speech \6yog. Mere sounds i^iiivm, indicate sensation, but speech indicates (rvpcjapov and A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. 147 PXajdepov, ^iKaiov and aBiKOV (Pol., 1 253). He not only instinctively satisfies wants, he seeks for good ; he not only feels, he seeks to hiow. The opi^tg of man and of the brute is different. In the brute it is emOv/uiia and Ovjuog ; in man it is these p/us (^ovXricng, which, being a wish for good, is implicitly rational. It is XoyKTUKYj ope^igj as opposed to the aXoyoi opi^eig. Contrast with modern thought. It is clear that for us this question is far more complicated. Evolution has brought out the close affinity of man with the brute, but (a) the breach between ac^vxov and \p.-^jv\ov is more marked, and (/3) though we trace the beginnings of conscious- ness in the animal world, it still remains true, as Tyndall puts it,^ that the chasm between physical processes and facts of consciousness remains "intel- lectually impassable." Herbert Spencer admits the same while asserting the origin of consciousness out of unconsciousness, of the physical from the physiological.^ The great metaphysical problem of the day is personality implying (a) self-consciousness, (/3) freedom. Can these be put on one side as illusory or reduced to the unconscious and the necessary ? Is man a thing of nature, or is he, as he thinks he is, greater than nature ? If so, is not conscious ' Scientific Materialism, p. 420. ' See, too, Fiske, Destiny of Man, pp. 62-65. 148 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. personal life, on which ethics, religion, and law- depend, as much a new departure with regard to nature as the living is to the not living ? The practical end. Here Aristotle has no hesita- tion, and he claims every one on his side. Man, as a practical being, sets before himself GOOD, to dyaOov, not an abstract Idm rayaOov, which is an object of reverence and worship as well as of desire, but TO dyaOov, the good, which, in the region of art, mechanic or aesthetic, is a tangible result (tpyov), in the region of practice, a condition which is not passive, but active. This is admitted to be ev^ai- juLovia, welfare or well-being, rather than what we understand by happiness. But man is a social as well as an active being, (pvasL TToXiTiKov ?wov, and the individual cannot be abstracted from the family and the state. YIoXltlkyi deals with the welfare of the state ; oiKovofjuKr) with the welfare of the family ; tcl iiOlko, with the wel- fare of the individual. Yet Ethics is ttoXitiki] tiq, because man is a ttoXitikov Swov, and to abstract his happiness from that of the whole is to make happiness impossible. Contrast with modern thought. When we turn from Aristotle to the modern world, we find that a new conception has appeared, that of duty. There is a life which I ought to live apart from the fact that such a life is both happy and the only happy life and also the life which wins by its moral A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. 149 beauty. There are endless views as to what our duty is, and why it is our duty ; but few would accept Bentham's paradox that the word " ought " ought to be banished from morals. This sterner view is due to two causes, the Stoic necessitarian- ism, and the religious sanction. Whether we talk of a perfect life as " following nature " or as conformity to the will of God, it has a character of necessity and universality which the Greek tv^ai/iiovia certainly had not ; and in both cases it subordinates man to what is conceived of as greater than himself. The Kantian conception of " Duty " lies between the Stoic and the religious view ; it has the sternness and inflexibility of the one, and the moral authority of the other. T/ie 7nethod of realizing to ayaOov. Evdaifiovia as equivalent to rayaOov is the well-being of the whole man, therefore it is an activity or perfect realization of his being (hepyeia). But his nature is not like God's, cnrXrj. He has body as well as soul, and the soul is not a simple whole : that which is an irrational principle of life in the plant, and of life and movement in the animal, is capable in man of transfusion by the rational. Yet the irrational rationalized is distinguished from that which is reason in itself Man's nature, though not like God's, fiia KOL (iTrXriy is yet a unity, a (jv(TTr]fia, in which there is a naturally higher and a naturally lower. And, just as in the world of nature, to (jtvTov ISO ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. OVK i^riiuiiovpyi]Ori ti jurj dia to tydov, to St Z,u)OV oi>k l^tijuiovpyriOri ^la to ^vtov (Hipl (I>vt(ov I. ii. p. 817** 25-40), and as the whole vegetable and animal kingdom was made for man, oirjrEov to. re c^vtu twv Zmu)v EveKEv dvai kol TaWa 2(J>a rwv dv0pu)7rwv Xapiv (Pol., I. 1256'* 16), avayKaiov tCjv avOpwirtvv tvaKSv avTci TTCLVTa ireiroinKEvai rrjv (jivmv (ibid., ^22), so in man the lower exists for the higher. The first thing, then, is to secure the subordina- tion of the animal nature to the rational with a view to tv^aifxovia, which is defined as the realized consciousness of living the most excellent life in the most favourable circumstances. Hrvxng tvEpyda KttT apETrjv api(TTr}v tv jStfj) reXe/tj). Excellence, a/oer^is physical, moral, or intellectual, but physical excellence is clearly subordinate and exists for the higher and more distinctively human excellences. As Plato put it, and Aristotle says much the same, yvfxvarrTiKri, which is the counterpart of povaiKT), is subordinate because it does for the body what povaiKi] does for the soul, and the per- fection of the soul is that for which both exist. A well developed and well trained physique is a condition of perfect tv^aijuovia. He who is mis- shapen or hideous may as little aspire to evBaijuovia as a slave may. ['Of iravv yap ^vdaifioviKog 6 t7]v Iceav 7ravai(T\r]g rj cvcrysvrjg rj povujTtjg Koi ciTeKvoQ (Eth., I. viii. 16) ; ev^aifxoviag d' ovBsig avdpairo^tjf} juLiTa^ldwcTiv, d juir} koX j^iov (ibid., X. vi. 8).] Here A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. 151 Aristotle is immensely behind Stoicism, which he criticizes by anticipation, or rather his conception of ev^aifiovla has dragged him down to a lower view of TO dyaOov. The Stoic sage was happy on the rack ; the slave Epictetus might vie with Marcus Aurelius. A life made happy by suffering was impossible for Aristotle and a paradox to us ; but a life " perfected by suffering " is a familiar Christian idea. But the real destroyer of man's well-being was not bodily weakness or the servile condition ; the Tmrr)pwfiivoL irpog aperriv were, after all, rare. The real destroyer of happiness was that which intro- duced ardaig into the (rvarriiua, the insubordination of that lower nature which might be permeated by reason, but often struggled against it. It was this which set man against man in the political KoivMvia, and the man against himself. The in- ordinateness of the passions was the first problem for Aristotle. No man can be in a state of well- being unless he is at peace with himself, and in charity with, or at least in relations of justice with, his neighbour. The moral apsTai occupy the major part of Aristotle's Ethics ; but first we must get clear the conception of moral virtue, before discussing them in detail. A virtuous life is life according to law or right reason, Kara tov opOov Aoyov. This dpObg \6yog is known to us first as an external standard, 152 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND FHILOSOPHICAL. embodied in the written or unwritten law of the state, and " writ small " in the irarpiicr} Trpoara^ig. In the early days of moral training obedience covers the whole ground, to on not to ^ioti. The law is to the child as yet " positive," not " natural." The child does just acts, but he is not yet just. He acts from instinct or habit, not from reason. It is not virtue, and yet it is a necessary prepara- tion for virtue, ie. for a state in which he not only acts Kara \6yov, but /usTa \6yov, does right and for the sake of right, when by an almost imperceptible transition and a progressive purification of moral motive, childish obedience gives way to manly virtue, and the man not only does right, but ts good, and in his conscious conformity to the law becomes a law unto himself, olov vo/xog wy tavTio . . . Kavwv Koi fiirpov avTMV lov. The virtuous act is known by the fact that it not only avoids excess and defect, but realizes a law of symmetry. Like a work of art, it manifests a sort of perfect proportion. You can neither add to nor take away from it without spoiling it. It lies between two vices of which one leans more to virtue's side than the other, yet in its nature it is perfect, aKpoTrjg. You cannot have too much of it, just as you cannot have too little of vice. The virtuous man does virtuous acts in a right spirit. He is in conscious accord with the \6yog or moral law which enjoins right action. He acts A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. 153 dcwg, irpoaipovfievijjc koi Trpoaipovfxivwg ci avro, /3t/3at'wc KOI dp.iTaKivi]Twq e'xwv. Of these the second is the all-important condition, for a man cannot act irpoaipovphtjg unless he acts ddtjg, and a formed i^iQ irpoaiperiKri is a guarantee for permanence. The test (crrjjudov) of the formed habit is, that a man acts from free choice and feels pleasure in it. And this is equally true whether the Trpoaipemg is good or bad. We can infer nothing as to the moral character of the acts from the pleasure which ensues, we can only infer that the habit, good or bad, is formed. The steps, then, in the formation of a virtuous character, according to Aristotle, will be as follows: — (a) Obedience to the law of right, secured, in the state, by pains and penalties, in the family, by affec- tion and the father's command. (/3) The formation of 'i^tig under these influences. (7) The transition from Stjcam nparTtiv to diKaiog dvai, when the child gradually becomes capable of rational choice and loves right for right's sake. This last step, however, needs further examina- tion. What is irpoaiptaig ? It is different from spontaneity (ro Uovmov), in which all animals share, because it implies what animals have not, fiov\r](Tig, wish for an end, and /BouXeuo-tc, deliberation with a view to the end. If man had not vovg, permeating even to op^icriKov, he would not have a conception of riXog, nor could he deliberate with a view to it. 154 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. But man is born a moral as he is born a rational being. He can choose between alternatives, and know them as higher and lower, i.e. as more or less conducive to the rtXoc. He is thus an h.pyj\ in a sense in which no other animal is, and because he is so, and can take either of two courses, all human affairs belong to the region of the contingent ro lv^i^\6litvov aXX(t)(j ex^tV' Human action can, there- fore, never fall under the science of the necessary. Ethics deals only with ra wq ettX to rroXvy and does not offer mathematical accuracy. As a practical matter of fact, Aristotle holds the freedom of the will, reduces to an absurdity the semi-necessita- rianism which made a man irresponsible for vice, and treats perfect determinism as not worth dis- cussing. Three modern questions are here involved — What is the moral standard ? What is the moral criterion } What is the moral faculty ? (a) Of these the first was the more important for Aristotle, the last the great question of modern days. For we are practically agreed as to the moral standard. Cynic and Cyrenaic, Stoic and Epicurean lived different lives and justified the difference by their moral theories. For us one type of character has won its way to security, the Christian type, the morality of the Gospel. So far as men differ about the moral standard now, they differ rather in their views of the history of morals, A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. 155 how the present type came to be what it is, whether it can be accounted for by a progressive natural evolution, or whether the Christian ideal was not a revelation, and a new departure prepared for, indeed, but not the product of previous develop- ment. As we take "the Christian type, so Aristotle took the Greek type, but he did not concern him- self as to how it had come to be what it was, or why it was the fullest known expression of reason. We claim the Christian standard as a standard for man as man, and criticize the moral standard of the Ethics as local and national, and therefore transient. This is felt directly we attempt to transfer the virtues of the Ethics to modern life. We feel the jmovoKtjXia of Greek ethics, as Aristotle felt the juovoKwXm of the Spartan type of character. (/3) In dealing with the question of criterion^ i.e. why is one act more right than another? (i.) Aristotle absolutely discards pleasure. Pleasure is neither good nor bad, nor do pleasures differ in kind except in the sense that they belong to different tvtpydai. It may be relative, as accom- panying a process of restoration, or absolute, and so far good as the reflex of an activity, but you can get no criterion from pleasure. (ii.) Aristotle has no idea of judging acts by their tendency to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He is as little a Utilitarian 155 £SSAVS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. as a Hedonist, though he would say that a perfect life ty^u rrjv ri^ovriv Iv lavTio, and is also conducive to the good of all. But the criterion, as with Plato, is psychological. Each act is good as it promotes the activity of a true evepyda, and " the better the part, and the better the man, the better the evspyda." The activity of the highest Ivtpyeia is the highest good. Morality is lower than philosophy, because the hepyda is lower and less unmixed ; within the area of morality each virtue is higher as it pro- motes the ascendancy of reason over animal impulse. How do we know higher from lower ? By ex- perience. He who has tried all gives a judgment which is beyond criticism, and he tells us of the marvellous happiness of the divine life of philosophy, (y) Finally, the question of the moral faculty raises no difficulty with Aristotle. It is reason, not reason in its speculative activity ((rocpia), but in its active region (cj)p6vr](nQ). If we call this (jipovrimg conscience, we are reading between the lines. For (^joovrjotc is simply reason exercised in matters moral, speaking in the imperative (iTTiro- KTiKY]) as well as judging what is right. It pre- supposes the wish for real good and the knowledge of what it is and how to attain it. And where ({ipovwig is perfect, as in the (rirovdaiog who is the (jipovijuogy there is a perfect harmony between opE^ig and Xoyog. Nature is thus at peace with itself, and A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. 157 the moral man may rise to the higher life of Now, the modern question is complicated by the fact that we mix up the inquiry as to the origin of the moral faculty with the question of its present nature and authority. We cannot separate the 'two. We either undermine or sustain the authority of what we all agree to call conscience by the theory we hold of its origin. Is it from beneath, or from above ? Does it grow out of the beast in us, or is it a revelation from God ? Is it an a priori principle, or is it merely enlightened self-interest, which has discovered that selfishness does not pay.^ There are only three possible ways of dealing with conscience. I. To accept it as an ultimate fact, authoritative, unique, and inexplicable. II. To justify its authority by showing that it is divine, not human. III. To undermine its authority by explaining that it is human, not divine, though a divine halo in early days surrounds it. Kant's great work is to have splendidly vindicated the fact of the authority of conscience. It chal- lenges obedience unhesitating and unquestioning. But men cannot stop here. Childlike trust is beautiful, but impossible for the old age of the world. We must ask for credentials, we must " scrutinize the imperial claims " of conscience. We 158 ESSA yS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. must know who it is who commands ? And when the question is asked it must be answered. We cannot go back to simple acceptance. As Dr. Martineau puts it, " A sovereign title must either be perfect or good for nothing ; against a detected pretender there can be no high treason." ^ We then enter on one of the two alternative courses. We defend its authority either by appealing to something else in human nature or by something outside and above human nature. The former group of theories are subdivisible. The question being, Why is right, right ? we have the answer of — (a) Hedonism, Utilitarianism, evolutionary ethics, in an ascending scale, declaring that Right is right because it is pleasant either to the individual, or the community, or to humanity at large, producing the highest or the highest possible amount of pleasure to each, consistent with the welfare of the whole. (j3) The " moral sense " school of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, who teach that Right is right because it is immediately and instinctively recognized as morally beautiful. Against this intuitive judgment there is no appeal, and hence it looked like an answer to the selfish hedonism of Hobbes. But de gustibus non disputandum is a dangerous prin- ciple of subjectivism to introduce into morals. If ^ See the whole passage, Study of Religion, i. pp. 25, 26. A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS. 159 the variety of moral tastes is appealed to in order to discredit conscience, the representing it as a moral sense robs its judgments of universality. (7) The rational school of Cudworth and Clarke answer that Right is right because it is true, and Conscience is assimilated to the speculative reason, discerning at a glance the eternal and immutable truths of morals, as it discerns the necessity of mathematical truth. Here we find the " moral sense school " and the " rational school " both opposing the " selfish school," both attempting to justify the absolute authority of conscience, but in doing so they rob it either of its uniqueness or its authority. The other line is that of what may be called theological ethics, which connects conscience with the divine rather than with the human. This in no way implies that morality is a d^pendance on religion, or conscience the product of Faith, but rather that conscience is, as Cardinal Newman calls it, " the creative principle of religion." To make morality " positive " instead of " natural," is to destroy it, and it is truer to base the will of God on morals than morals on the will of God. We start, then, from morals, from the authority of conscience, and the fact that right is right. But, as Mantineau puts it, ''Ethics must either perfect tliemselves into religion, or disintegrate them- i6o ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. selves into Hedonismr ^ " Conscience may act as human before it is discovered to be divine!' ^ But if we seek for an explanation at all, we must ultimately choose between some form of theology or some form of Hedonism. '' TAe attempts to con- struct intermediate theories have only shown by their instability^ the irresistible logical tendency to the single line of cleavage, which puts religious thought on the one side, and the eudaemonist on the other ^' (p. 26). There is no discussion of these questions in Aristotle. The moral faculty is reason, and reason is divine, but it is rather an immanent principle in man, leading him to know his own good, realized in the political community, and it is assumed that to know is to obey. Moral evil This brings Aristotle to the question of moral evil, so far as the question was known to the Greek world. Aristotle, like Plato, might have said of reason as Bishop Butler says of conscience, that " if it had might as it has right, it would govern the world." But it doesn't govern the world. Why is this ? What is the explanation of aKpaaia ? Socrates and Plato denied the existence of such a state, deivov yap £7rfcrr?j//?jc ^^vovariq aXXo ri Kparelv. Aristotle admits aKpama, but, in explaining it, re- solves it into a condition which is not aKpaaia. The aKparrig is the man who knows right and yet ^ Study, p. 26. * Ibid., p. 22. A SUMMARY OF ARISTOTLE'S ETHICS, i6i does wrong, and all that the Seventh Book tells us is, how it happens that knowledge may be latent or dormant, and if not overpowered yet outwitted by passion. There is nothing in Aristotle of the sense of sin, for sin implies a personal God, as crime implies the laws of society. Still the fact remains that the lower does triumph over the higher, the body over the soul, the selfish over the social, the animal over the divine. And just as the family guards against atomism and leads on to the TroXtc, so friendship guards against individualism and prepares the way for perfect justice. Friendship introduces the man to another self, fVt^oc avTog, whom he loves unselfishly, and in whom he sees the extension and the counterpart of his own best self. The friendship of the good, which is the only true friendship, is thus a realized love of ro kqXov divested of the lower and selfish elements of gain or pleasure. We live in our own acts, and in friendship we live in one another's acts. We need friends not for gain, for the perfect life is complete in itself, but because goodness loves to see itself reflected, and even the divine life of philosophy is twice blest when the philosopher finds a true avv^pyo^, and God loves the philosopher because in him He sees a dim and imperfect re- flection of His own dewpia. U i62 ASSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. IX. SOME CURIOUS PARALLELS BETWEEN GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. [A Paper read before the Aristotelian Society, April 29, 1889.*] There are at the present time three religions, if we are right in calling them religions (a question which we may postpone for the present), which have a legal standing in China. They are Con- fucianism^ Taoism, and Buddhism. Of these. Buddhism has no claim to be indigenous, as it never found its way to China till after the Christian era. With regard to Taoism, we find ourselves at once in a difficulty ; for Taoism, as it exists now, has little or no real affinity with the older Taoistic literature. Dr. Legge ^ speaks of it as " begotten by Buddhism out of the old superstitions of the country ; " and in his article on Lao-Tze in the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," he draws a sharp dis- tinction between Taoism as a philosophy and ^ This paper embodies the substance of a note on Chinese Philosophy prefixed by A. L. M. to H, A. Giles's Chuang-Tzu, Mystic, Moralist, and Philosopher. ^ Tao-te-Ching, p. 4. GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT, 163 Taoism as a religion. Similarly, Mr. Giles ^ speaks of it as a hybrid superstition, a mixture of ancient nature-worship and Buddhistic ceremonial, with Tao as the style of the firm. Dr. Edkins, in his "Religion in China" (p. 58), says that the mass of the people believe in all three religions, Confucian- ism, Taoism, and Buddhism, and explains the fact by saying that they are supplementary to each other. Confucianism being moral; Taoism, materialistic ; and Buddhism, metaphysical ; in criticism of which we may suggest that, if this were true, even if we could accept the cross division implied in his theory, they would be, not supplementary to each other, but mutually destructive. It is, however, with Chinese thought, rather than with Chinese religion, that I am concerned ; and here we are on a surer ground, for we may at once put aside Buddhism as an exotic, and Taoistic religion as being largely composed of foreign elements. We are left, then, with Confucianism and Taoism, meaning by the latter term the philosophical system, not the popular religion. Both probably arose out of a religion of which we know nothing, except so far as we can piece it together from the rival systems which claimed to represent it. But it is a question whether either can rightly be called religious. And, in any case, the parallelism to * Chuarg-Tzu, pref. xv. i64 JSSSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Greek thought is independent of any religious elements which were contained in them, or lay behind them. The main characteristics of Confucianism and Taoism are clear enough, and are independent of the question as to the authenticity of certain docu- ments on which Sinologues are divided. Confucianism is primarily a system of conduct ; Taoism is primarily a mystical philosophy. And, whatever may have been the relation of their respec- tive founders to one another, the documents which remain to us represent two rival systems. The one is moral, the other metaphysical. Confucianism is recognized by the state as orthodox ; Taoism is a heresy. Yet both were attempts to interpret and to rationalize the religion out of which both grew. Neither Lao-Tzu nor his younger contemporary, Confucius, professed to be founders of systems. They were rival interpreters, and the Confucianist interpretation received State sanction. Hence Confucianism has become " the religion of China par excellencer ^ Mons. Edgar Quinet's account of it is worth quoting. He says — " Rationalism is the religion of China ; positive faith the only heresy ; the strong-minded man the only pontiff. . . . Its principles are the equality of all its members, intellect is the sole ground of pre-eminence, personal merit the sole aristocracy. Everything there is exactly measured, cal- ^ Legge, Sacred Books, III. pref. xiii. GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. 165 .culated, weighed, by the laws of humnn nature ; its one idol is good sense." And he asks why it is that all this wisdom has produced only a sublime automaton ; and finds the answer in the fact that, according to Confucianism, " man is deprived of any ideal above himself" " Chinese society," he says, " makes man the final end, and so humanity finds its goal in its starting-point. It is stifled within the limits of humanity. In this dwarf society, everything is deprived of its crown. Morality wants heroism ; royalty, its royal muse ; verse, poetry ; philosophy, meta- physic ; life, immortality ; because, at the summit of every- thing, there is no God." ^ Renan,^ in the same way, speaks of Confucianism as " the least supernatural of all religions ; " and he adds, "hence its mediocrity." From the great Confucianist classics which remain to us, most of which are now accessible in the " Sacred Books of the East," we are able to judge of the truth of this. If Positivism is rightly described as "Catholicism minus Christianity," Confucianism may be called Positivism minus its universality. Confucianism has not even the " enthusiasm of humanity," like that which Positivism has caught from Christianity. It is rationalism pure and simple ; a system of conduct, hardly even a philosophy, summed up in rules regulating man's duty to his neighbour. Of Taoism, the religion of Lao-Tzti, it is less * Quinet, La Genie des Religions, pp. 224, 225. ' Quoted by Lilly, Ancient Religions, p. no. i65 £SSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. easy to speak, because we have less trustworthy documents. If the "Tao-te-Ching" is genuine, as Dr. Legge beHeves, it is the only work of Lao-Tzu which we have. If not, we know nothing of Lao- Tzu's teaching except through his followers. But, without deciding this question, its contrast with Confucianism is obvious. It is idealistic and mys- tical, it is metaphysical from first to last. It is contemptuous of Confucius and Confucianism. In its opposition to a mere practical system, a religion limited to the finite, Taoism must have appealed to those deeper instincts of human nature to which Buddhism appealed later on. Action, effort, benevolence, usefulness, — all these, in theory, have a place in Confucianism. But its last word is worldly wisdom. To the Taoist all this savours of " the rudiments of the world." Its " charity and duty," its ''ceremonies and music," are the "Touch not, taste not, handle not," of an ephemeral state of being, and perish in the using. And the sage seeks for the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal. He would attain to Tao. It would have seemed as if in these rival systems we should look in vain for parallelisms to Greek thought. Metaphysics and morals were never separated in the best days of Greek life, as we find them separated in Taoism and Confucianism. Socrates professed to deal with ethics, and put metaphysics aside ; but the questions which he GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT, 167 raised in the moral region were metaphysical questions, and suggested by a metaphysical cause. In Plato, the moral life rests on a metaphysical basis ; and in Aristotle, while a sharp dividing Hne exists between the sphere of the necessary and the sphere of the contingent, between OEupriTiKri on the one side and irpaKriKr] and iroiririKi] on the other ; yet, (l>p6vr}(ng, or the philosophy of Life, is the handmaid of iay the philosophy of Truth, and the moral life shades off into the life of philo- sophic contemplation. Yet, though in Greece of the time of Plato and Aristotle the meta- physical and moral are distinguished, but not yet separated, we are still able to find in it parallels to both Confucianism and Taoistic ways of think- ing. Due allowance, however, has to be made for the fact that Confucianism and Taoism were developed by antagonism to one another, and therefore for a more complete parallel to Taoism we must go to Neo-Platonism, while the closer parallelism, if it exist, to Confucianism must be sought amongst the Sceptics who had abandoned metaphysics for empiricism and a merely practical system. I propose, then, to point out the parallelism as it exists between Confucianism and Greek ethics, and between Taoism and Greek metaphysics, as we know them in the fourth and fifth centuries, B.C. 168 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND FHILOSOPHICAL. Confucius was born in 551 B.C., a hundred years earlier than Socrates. His character and the main facts of his life and doctrine are as matter-of-fact as his system. There is nothing ascetic or spiritual in his teaching. He never, so far as we know, dealt with higher and deeper questions, such as the existence of God, the soul, immortality. He was content to ask, How shall I do my duty to my neighbour ? How shall I live as a good citizen ? This is exactly the problem in Aristotle's Ethics ; and, if we remember that, whatever may have been Aristotle's theological or metaphysical basis, he steadily keeps it apart from his moral philosophy proper, we shall feel that he is at least so far on common ground with Confucianism. Now, the Aristotelian answer to the moral ques- tion is, as every one knows, summed up in the doctrine of the Mean, a doctrine which we can trace growing up in Socrates and taking definite shape in Plato. The virtuous life is the rational life, that is the harmonious life, the life of balance and equipoise. The virtuous man is at peace with himself; the vicious man's soul is in a state of (jramq. There is a one-sidedness (juovoKwXia) in which culture is neglected in the interests of bodily training, and a one-sidedness in which bodily training is forgotten through exclusive devotion to culture. The metal (to use another metaphor from Plato's " Republic ") may be brittle from GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. 169 want of tempering, or it may lose its strength by being tempered over-much. So in regard to plea- sures, the true life implies the /mETpriTiKr) Tix^ri, the art of measurement, the power of striking the balance, as it were, so as to secure the normal development of nature ; or, as we have it in terms more closely approximating to those of Aristotle, it is a jufT/oforrjc, a mean state secured by imposing the law of reason on the lawlessness of the pas- sions, the indeterminate element in human nature. The vicious go beyond or fall short of this state of equipoise, and so their nature is destroyed in various degrees and different ways. The Aristotelian doctrine of the Mean is the final statement of this view. The attempts which have been made to connect it with MHAEN AFAN and the praise of moderation and fihpia epja in Hesiod are often thoroughly misleading ; for the value of the Aristotelian doctrine is not its negative teaching as to the avoiding of extremes, which would give us no standard, and leave us with a glorification of the commonplace ; its real value is its positive teaching, that virtue is the realizing of a law, the law of one's being, which, though it varies in one as compared with others, is abso- lute for the individual. It is the preservation of that harmony which vice destroys, the state of perfect balance which may be lost in either of two opposite ways. Reason (\6yog), which never quite I70 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. lost for a Greek its earlier meaning of a law of proportion, was the principle which secured this order. Virtue was the life Kara rov opOov \6yov, or, rather, the life justo. Xoyou, and vice the lawless and irrational life. If it is not clear in Aristotle whether this Xoyog is external or immanent, this is only the difficulty which appeared " writ large " in his account of the world where the reign of law prevails. There, too, he cannot settle the question whether it exists like a general commanding an army, or as an immanent principle of order in the army itself It only needed that this should be expressed in Stoic language, as Kara (pvmv Zr\v, to arrive at the conclusion, already implicit in Aristotle, that the man who is in harmony with himself is ipso facto in harmony with the world, for it is the same Xoyog, or balancing principle, which in nature shows itself as law, and in man as rationality. Now, it is a remarkable thing that one of the chief Confucianist writings, which deals with the theory of morals, should have for its title "The Doctrine of the Mean." This treatise (known as Chung Yung) is a part of the " Li-Ki," or " Book of Rites," one of the five great canonical works of Confucianism. In 1861 it was translated by Dr. Legge, with the title "The Doctrine of the Mean." When in 1885 he retranslated it for the " Sacred Books of the East " (vols, xxvii. xxviii.), GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. 171 he changed the title to "The State of Equilibrium and Harmony." The meaning of these terms, which are united in the title, we find explained in the opening section. The treatise is the work of Tzse-zse, the grandson of Confucius, and a contemporary of Socrates. It will be perhaps better to give some extracts from this treatise, and then to point out the parallelism between it and the Aristotelian philo- sophy. There is a good deal in the treatise which is unintelligible, and a considerable portion, includ- ing some eleven sections (§§ 48-59), which seems to have been interpolated from a treatise on " Filial Piety." The actual description of the perfect character, though in some points it is curiously like the Greek ideal, is necessarily moulded by the circumstances of Chinese life, and the remains of ancestor worship still show themselves, and perhaps explain the atmosphere of reverence which we look for in vain in Aristotle. The doctrine of the Mean is, however, the main point of likeness. I quote Dr. Legge's latest translation, with a few verbal alterations. § I. " What Heaven has conferred is called the Nature. An accordance with this nature is called the Path [of Duty]. The regulation of this path is called [the System of] Instruction. § 2. " The path must not be left for an instant ; if it could be left, it would not be the path." Here we have already a theory of Virtue as ro 172 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. Kara (fivmv Zr\Vy the realizing the law of one's being. This is Tao, the path, and it is by education that life must be regulated and restrained to the Path, § 5. ''When there are no stirrings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, or joy, we call it the state of Equilibrium. When those feelings have been stirred, and all in their due measure and degree, we call it the state of Har?nony. This EquiUbrium is the source of all action, and this Harmony the universal Path. § 6. " Let the states of Equilibrium and Harmony exist in perfection, and heaven and earth would be in their due order, and all things would flourish. § 7. " The perfect man exhibits this state of equilibrium and harmony, inferior men the opposite of this. The perfect man does so because he is perfect, the inferior men fail to do so because they are inferior. § 8. " The master said, ' Perfect is the state of equilibrium and harmony ! Few have they ever been who could attain to it.' § 9. " The master said, ' I know how it is that the Path is not walked in. The cunning go beyond it, and the stupid fall short of it. The worthy (? the great) go beyond it, the unworthy do not come up to it. There is nobody but eats and drinks, but they are few who can distinguish flavours.' " (Cf. didKpicris xvyUcSj/.) These first sections are, as it were, the text of the treatise, and the commentary upon them is often very obscure. Still some points suggest a curious parallel to the Greek view of the virtuous or rational life being, in contrast with vicious lives, a mean, while in itself it realizes the idea of human nature. The title of Tze-tzse's treatise really consists of GREEK AND CHINESE THOUGHT. 173 two substantives, the one signifying Equilibrium, the other Harmony, and the two ideas are in- tended to be combined, which in English can only be done by making the one adjectival. We must speak of a state of equilibrated harmony, or har- monious equilibration, and neither phrase is un- objectionable. The meaning, however, is clear. The condition of the perfect man combines move- ment and rest. Mere cnraBeia would give equili- brium without harmony ; the iraOr} unregulated would be the destruction of harmony. The perfect man, who is said to "embody the Mean" (§ 19), is the only being in whom nature realizes its reXog. " The perfecting of nature is characteristic of heaven," we are told. " To attain to that perfection belongs to man. He who possesses that perfection hits what is right without an effort, and apprehends it without any exercise of thought ; he is the sage (for, as with Aristotle, 6 a-irovSahs is 6