Chapter VI Philosophy I. Mill's Opponents Mill's logic embodies the cardinal principles of his philosophy. The principles implied that little of what is called philosophy could be valid. Mill necessarily held that many of the most pretentious speculations were, in reality, nothing but words; cobwebs of the brain to be swept into the dustbin, finally, though politely, by the genuine thinkers. His view of the consequences to theology and religion could for a long time be inferred only from incidental remarks. Gradually he came to think that the reticence was undesirable, and had given his final conclusions in the Essays, which were published after his death. The philosophical position which underlies them is most clearly exhibited in his Examination of Hamilton (1865).(1*) This included a criticism of Mansel's application of Hamilton's metaphysical doctrines to theology. Mansel's doctrine, stated in the Bampton Lectures of 1858, had provoked some sharp and many-sided controversies. He defended himself against Mill's criticism. Other writers joined the fray, and in one way or other a perplexing set of intellectual encounters resulted. The leading champions were Mill, representing the pure Utilitarian tradition, Mansel, who represented the final outcome of what Mill called 'intuitionism,' and F. D. Maurice, who may be briefly called the intellectual heir of Coleridge; while another line of inference was represented by Mr. Herbert Spencer's First Principles. Many of the arguments have already a strangely obsolete sound; but they may serve to illustrate the direction of the main currents of opinion. The writings of Sir William Hamilton provided the ostensible battle-ground. Mill had seen in Hamilton certain symptoms of a hopeful leaning towards the true faith. Upon taking up the study more seriously, he discovered that Hamilton was really an intuitionist at bottom, and even a 'chief pillar' of the erroneous philosophy. I shall therefore inquire, in the first place, into the true nature of this version of the evil principle. It has been so often 'lucidly expounded' that it is hard to say what it really means. Hamilton,(2*) born 8th March 1788, was grandnephew, grandson, and son of three successive professors of anatomy at Glasgow. While still an infant, he lost his father, and was ever afterwards on terms of the tenderest affection with his mother, who died in 1827. After at Glasgow, he went to Balliol as a Snell studying exhibitioner in 1807, and there startled his examiners by his portentous knowledge of Aristotle.(3*) After some medical study, he decided to join the Scottish bar. He took, however, more interest in the antiquarian than the practical branches of the laws; and spent a great deal of time and labour on abstruse genealogical researches to establish his claim to a baronetcy. He had to show that he was heir to a Sir Robert Hamilton, who died in 1701, through a common ancestor who died before 1552. His love of obscure researches, or his want of aptitude for speaking, together with his adherence to Whig principles, kept him out of the road to professional success. He was known, however, as a 'monster of erudition.' He visited Germany with his college friend J. G. Lockhart in 1817, and on a second visit in 1820 began a systematic study of the language. In 1820 Hamilton was a candidate for the chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, vacant by the death of Thomas Brown. To the scandal of Philosophers, it was given to Wilson, or 'Christopher North,' mainly on political grounds. Probably it was also held that anybody could talk Moral Philosophy. Hamilton was appointed to a small professorship in 1821, but the salary, payable from a duty on beer, was stopped and he ceased to lecture. In 1829, Macvey Napier, upon succeeding Jeffrey as editor of the Edinburgh Review, applied to his friend Hamilton for an article. The result was the review of Cousin, which appeared in the number for October 1829. Jeffrey was rather scandalised by this novelty in his old organ; the writer showed an unholy familiarity with the Absolute and the Infinite and the jargon of German metaphysics; he could not, said Jeffrey, be a 'very clever man,' and the article was the 'most unreadable thing that had ever appeared in the Review.'(4*) The average reader, however, was awed if not interested; and a select few, including Cousin, were greatly impressed. Hamilton's reputation was made; he wrote other articles which confirmed the impression, and in 1836 was appointed to the Edinburgh professorship of 'Logic and Metaphysics'. He was at length in his proper place; and many students of that generation became ardent disciples. For the next twenty years he was regarded with an enthusiasm like that which had surrounded Dugald Stewart in the previous period and Reid at an earlier date. His impressive appearance and force of character contributed the respect due to his vast reading and tone of rightful authority. He was unmistakably upright, a lover of speculation for its own sake, and a man of warm and pure affections. No one could be happier in domestic life. In 1828, after his mother's death, he married his cousin, Janet Marshall, by whom he had four children; He is described as gentle and kindly in his family; joining in childish games, writing in the general room, and amusing himself with extravagant romances. He possessed great physical strength till, in 1844, his imprudent habits of study brought on a paralytic stroke. He recovered partially, but became weaker and died on 6th May 1856. With all Hamilton's claims to respect, there was a very weak side to his character. A queer vein of pedantry ran through the man. A Philosopher ought surely not to spend two years unearthing a baronetcy. Hamilton stickled for his rights in other cases in a way which one feels to have been scarcely worthy of him. His real magnanimity was combined with mental rigidity which made him incapable of compromise. He is undeniably candid and always speaks generously of his opponents; but his own logic always appears to him to be infallible, and neither in practical matters nor in argument would he yield a jot or a tittle of his case. His self-confidence was unfailing, and he speaks even in his first article with the air of an intellectual dictator. He was resolved, it seems, to justify his position by knowing everything that had ever been written upon philosophy. Like Browning's old grammarian, he would 'know all,' both text and comment, and when the 'little touch' of paralysis came, he was still preparing and accumulating. He had read a vast mass of obscure literature and helped a powerful memory by elaborate commonplace books. His passion for imbibing knowledge, indeed, was out of proportion to his giving out results. He has left comparatively little, and much of that is fragmentary. His writings are all included in the Discussions (from the Edinburgh Review and elsewhere), the often elaborate notes to his edition of Reid, and the Lectures. The two first volumes of these lectures (on Metaphysics), as we are told by the editors, were written in the course of five months for his first session. They were repeated for twenty years without serious alteration. The lectures upon logic, filling two volumes more, were written in the same way for the second session. Writing in such haste, Hamilton naturally eked out his work by making very free use of his commonplace book, and, in the course upon logic, by long quotations from previous textbooks. The notes to Reid consist in part of long chains of quotations. They show one palpable weakness. The extracts, detached from their context, lose their true significance. He gives a list of 101 authorities from Hesiod to Lamennais, with quotations, in which an appeal of some kind is made to 'common-sense.' He might have collected a thousand; but instead of showing the approval of the special Scottish doctrine, they really show that phrase may be used more or less freely by holders of every doctrine. He seems to share is opinion of old writers that every statement in a printed book is an 'authority.' The results are sometimes grotesque. It was natural enough that Hamilton should note an unfavourable opinion of mathematical study expressed by Horace Walpole; but a grave citation of Horace Walpole as an studies would have amused authority upon mathematical nobody more than Walpole himself. On such a method the fuel too often puts out the fire, and Hamilton's direct expositions are few and his opinions often to be inferred from fragmentary criticisms. They naturally vary as he places himself at different points of view; and we are left to guess how he would have tried to combine them. Henry Longueville Mansel (1820-1871),(5*) Hamilton's most noteworthy interpreter, was a typical Oxford don, as became his birth. He was the descendant of an old family of country-gentlemen, the younger members of which had entered the army or navy or held the family living. He had been a brilliant schoolboy, had distinguished himself in Oxford examinations, and became known as a wit in common-rooms, a writer of vivacious squibs, and a sound Tory and high Churchman. He had a clear intellect, a forcible style, and had studied theology and German metaphysics with remarkable energy. He apparently began as a Kantian; but he was greatly impressed by Sir William Hamilton, with whom he had no personal relations; and he adopted from Hamilton the peculiar theory which was to enlist Kant in the service of the church of England. His Bampton Lectures in 1858 made him famous as a champion of orthodoxy. In 1868 he was appointed to the deanery of St Paul's; but his labours had been too much for his brain, and he died suddenly in 1871. Hamilton started under the double influence of the Scottish philosophy and of Aristotle. Formal logic was to him the most congenial of studies. He would have been thoroughly in his element in the medieval schools, syllogising to the death. According to an enthusiastic pupil, he laid the top stone on the fabric founded by the 'master hand of the Stagirite.'(6*) He was in his element when dividing, subdividing, and cross-dividing all manner of philosophical tenets. The aim was admirable. To have all opinions properly articulated and correlated would be the final result of a history of philosophy and a step to further progress. The danger of accepting such a classification prematurely is equally obvious. The technical terms of metaphysics have the most provoking habit of shifting their meaning; they shade off imperceptibly into each other, and sometimes even change places; they represent aspects of truth caught from a particular point of view, which become inapplicable or carry different implications as the point of view imperceptibly shifts. What appear to be contradictory utterances may be merely qualifications of each other, or may mean the same thing in different dialects. A system built of such unsubstantial and slippery materials is apt to crumble into mere chaos without extreme care and penetration. Hamilton, most fully aware of this in general terms, was nevertheless not sufficiently on his guard. He always seems to fancy that he can avoid all ambiguities by a definition, and does not remember that the words by which he defines are as shifting in their sense as the word defined. The consideration is especially important because it is Hamilton's main purpose to mediate between conflicting opinions. He starts from Reid's 'common-sense,' and has to show how the position can be protected against scepticism on the one side and mysticism on the other. Cousin, as a disciple of the Scottish philosophers, represented one line of deviation from the judicious mean. Beginning with Reid, he had become, with certain reserves, a follower or developer of Schelling. Coleridge's 'genial coincidence' with Schelling had led to no very tangible result; but Cousin's systematic development showed the philosophy diverging into a false track, and wasting itself upon the pursuit of utterly chimerical aims. Hamilton, therefore, endeavoured to expose the fallacies involved in the whole procedure. He agreed, as we shall see, with an important part of Kant's doctrine; but thought that by certain oversights Kant had opened the door to Schelling's empty speculations. There was an opposite danger to which Hamilton was equally awake. He insisted upon it in an article published October 1830 upon the 'Philosophy of Perception.' This is, in the main, a fierce attack upon Brown -- the one philosophical writer of whom he cannot speak without betraying prejudice. Hamilton's antipathy has been already explained. Brown shows Scottish philosophy lapsing into mere empiricism and 'inductive psychology.' Hamilton never mentions him without accusing him of blunders and of crass ignorance. Hamilton thus stands up for the orthodox common-sense theory of Reid, and resents backslidings into transcendentalism on the right hand and sensationalism on the left. Like the excellent David Deans, he would keep the 'ridge of the hill, where wind and water shears.' When, however, he set about the edition of Reid's works, he began to discover inconsistencies. He doubted whether Reid had really taught the true faith; and he was led to restate more articulately his own view. To the end of his life, however, Hamilton called himself a Natural Realist; and held, though with increasing qualifications, that Reid's doctrine was an approximate statement of the same doctrine. What Natural Realism may be is another question. The two essays just mentioned(7*) give the pith of Hamilton's philosophical theories. His other writings on philosophy are mainly remodelled versions of the same views, or classifications of. other solutions of the problems. His speculations in logic, whatever their value, belong to a sphere which fortunately lies outside my province. In treating of perception, Hamilton gives the rationale of our belief in the external world; and in treating of the 'Unconditioned' the rationale of our belief in a deity. The results are in both cases remarkable. II. HAMILTON ON PERCEPTION What is the relation between the world of matter and the world of mind? That had been Reid's problem, and Hamilton starts from the acceptance of Reid's common-sense reply. We have to steer between opposing difficulties. Give too much to the mind and you will drift into mysticism, idealism, or ultimately to 'nihilism.' Give too much to matter and you will become a materialist or a mere sensationalist. Common sense gives the true answer. Reid was in the right path when he declared himself to be on the side of the 'vulgar.'(8*) Things are just what they seem to be. It is the philosophers who, in Berkeley's famous phrase, have raised a dust, and complain that they cannot see. This doctrine gives the principle of an elaborate classification of philosophers generally, and supplies the test of their soundness.(9*) The truth lies with the 'Natural Realists' or 'Natural Dualists,' who do justice to both sides. They believe both in mind and matter 'in absolute co-equality'; in a 'duality' which presents the elements of consciousness in 'equal counterpoise and independence.'(10*) Unluckily, there is a mock dualism which virtually makes the true position untenable. It surrenders the real key of the position. This is the unfortunate case of the 'Cosmothetic Idealists,' whose theory represents an illogical compromise. They assert that the mind perceives -- not matter but -- something which 'represents' matter. It is conscious only of its own 'ideas.' These form the visible imagery, an unreal screen, somehow 'representing' a real world behind. The sceptic, then, had only to point out that the world behind was a superfluity, and our whole world turns out to be illusion. Reid had answered Hume by sweeping away all this superfluous machinery, and proving (or at least asserting) that what we see is itself real. Reid's analysis of consciousness, when duly corrected, showing that, we have, as we believe we have, an immediate knowledge of the material world, accomplished everything at once.'(11*) 'Natural Realism' and 'Absolute Idealism' are the only systems worthy of a philosopher.(12*) The Cosmothetic Idealist occupies a position from which he can be driven at any moment by the more thoroughgoing idealist. Yet, as Hamilton declares, Cosmothetic Idealism has been held in various forms by the immense majority of philosophers,(13*) indeed, by almost all who have not been driven by its absurdity into materialism or scepticism. A few 'stray speculators'(14*) alone have found the narrow way. The list is apparently exhausted by the names of Peter Poiret, Reid, and Sir William Hamilton,(15*) and even Reid may be said with much plausibility to have held a version of the creed which would make his whole philosophy 'one mighty blunder.'(16*) What has caused this universal apostasy? The answer is remarkable. It is due to a 'crotchet of philosophers'(17*) -- a crotchet, moreover, not only unsupported by, but opposed to, all the evidence. It appeared first with Empedocles; it produced the 'gnostic reasons' of the Platonists; the 'pre-existing species' of Avicenna; the common intellect of Themistius and Averroes; the 'intentional species' of the schools; the 'occasional causes' of the Cartesians; the predetermined harmony of Leibniz; the plastic medium of Cudworth and the phenomena of Kant. When so many masters of thought have inVented theories it is unhappily easy to believe that they have all gone wrong; but one would at least infer that there was some difficulty to be solved. And yet all these fabrics of sham philosophy are founded upon a 'baseless fancy,' which Reid alone was too independent to take for granted. That 'fancy' was that the 'relation of knowledge inferred an analogy of existence.'(18*) Norris of Bemerton had urged that a direct perception of matter was impossible because 'material objects' are removed from the mind 'by the whole diameter of Being.' Reid, with 'an ignorance wiser than knowledge,' confessed his inability to understand this argument. Seeing no difficulty in supposing an immediate perception of a totally disparate thing, he did not make an 'irrational attempt to explain what is in itself inexplicable.'(19*) We can no more know how the mind is conscious of itself than how it is percipient of its contrary. The whole puzzle, then, is gratuitous; -- which is a consoling result for ordinary common-sense. Philosophers had thus bewildered themselves by refusing to admit a plain, though ultimate, fact. There is a gulf between mind and matter over which no bridge can be thrown, but no bridge is wanted. The attempt to construct one is superfluous. Yet in a different form the question is still prominent, and modern science has invested it with fresh interest. How are we to conceive of the relation between the mental and the material spheres? How, after all, do we draw the line between things and thoughts, object and subject, ego and non-ego? Where do we reach the impassable gulf, and what, therefore, is the precise sense in which we must pronounce all attempt at bridging it to be preposterous? Hamilton's first position is that we are bound to stand by 'consciousness.' The 'watchword' of the Natural Realist is 'the facts of consciousness, the whole facts and nothing but the facts.'(20*) He constantly appeals to the 'deliverance of consciousness,' and assures us again and again that unless we can believe this deliverance, we must suppose man to have been formed only to 'become the dupe and victim of a perfidious creator.'(21*) The error of the Cosmothetic Idealists consisted precisely in the arbitrary rejection of a truth given by the testimony of consciousness. An original conviction is to be distinguished from derivative knowledge, as he tells us, by various characteristics, among which is especially its 'necessity.' We cannot really resist it.(22*) If a disbelief in consciousness be impossible, why argue against it? If not impossible, how can you assert that the belief is necessary? You have only to state the belief and, on your showing, it will prove itself. To this Hamilton answers that 'necessity' may be of two kinds. We cannot believe a self-contradictory statement; and we are therefore sufficiently guarded by logic against errors which are in this sense impossible. But there are other assertions which may be denied without self-contradiction, and of which, notwithstanding this, the denial would lead to universal scepticism. This corresponds apparently to the difference between a statement of fact and a statement of judgment. A false statement of facts may be as consistent as a true statement, and can Only be met by somehow appealing to experience.(23*) So far, then, as consciousness assures us of a fact, we may deny it without contradicting ourselves; but yet, by denying it, we 'make God a deceiver and the root of our nature a lie.'(24*) We may thus say without self-contradiction, that memory in general is an illusion, and the world a mere dream or bundle of baseless appearances;(25*) but we cannot say so without denying the primary deliverance of consciousness, and striking at the base of all knowledge. Certain truths, though not logically self-supporting, so run through the whole fabric of belief, as to be essential to its existence. If I am conscious, I cannot really doubt the fact of consciousness. The knowledge of the fact and the fact become identical. The possibility of error begins with judgment, or with the interpretation of the fact. It is undeniable, again, that, in some sense or other, I believe in an external world. Every philosopher, as Hamilton says, admits this to be a fact, and Berkeley appeals to the common sense of mankind when denying, as confidently as Reid when affirming, the existence of matter. We must inquire, then, what precisely is this ultimate deliverance. Does consciousness testify merely to the fact of the belief, or also to the truth of the belief; and, in either case, of what belief? This is what Hamilton has to answer, before summoning us to admit the truth on penalty of making God a liar. The highwater mark of his opinion seems to be given in a passage of the Lectures. He there tells us that, though it is a strange, it is a correct, expression to say, 'I am conscious' -- not merely of perceiving the inkstand but -- 'of the inkstand.'(26*) Reid's blunder -- which, if he really made it, would convert his whole philosophy into one mighty blunder -- lay in misunderstanding this. Reid had been startled at his own boldness in asserting the immediacy 'of our knowledge of external things';(27*) and therefore weakly admitted that we are conscious of perceiving the rose, not conscious of the rose itself. This comes of distinguishing 'consciousness' from perception, and would end in philosophical suicide. It would seem, then, that according to this doctrine we are bound either to assert that the rose -- the visible, coloured, scented object, is revealed in consciousness as part of the 'material world' and therefore exists independently of us, or to admit that God is a liar. It is 'palpably impossible that we can be conscious of an act without being conscious of the object to which the act is relative.'(28*) To carry out this theory is the central aim of Hamilton's 'Natural Realism.' Reid's statement might seem to be not a blunder, but a truism. 'I am conscious of the rose' means precisely 'I have certain sensations which I regard as implying the existence of a permanent external reality.' But this is to interpret perception as involving an 'inference,' and therefore, according to Hamilton, is to abandon the essential doctrine of Natural Realism.(29*) It may seem strange, he admits, but it is true, 'that the simple and primary act of intelligence should be a judgment, which philosophers in general have received as a compound and derivative operation.'(30*) 'Knowing' and 'knowing that we know' are the same thing; as conceiving the sides and angles of a triangle are the same process, distinguishable in thought, but 'in nature, one and indivisible.'(31*) What, then, is this essential judgment? In an act of sensible perception, says Hamilton, I am conscious of myself and of something different from myself.(32*) This might seem to define the distinction between 'consciousness' and 'perception.' the object of my thought may, as Hamilton remarks, be a 'mode of mind' as well as a 'mode of matter.'(33*) Consciousness of self, we should infer, differs from consciousness of the not-self, and it is just the presence of the not-self which distinguishes perception from simple consciousness. Hamilton, however, argues that perception is simple consciousness; or that the distinction, for his purpose, is irrelevant. There is a 'logical' but not a 'psychological' difference.(34*) Every act of consciousness implies a conception of the ego. But 'the science of opposites is one.' therefore consciousness of the ego involves consciousness of the non-ego, or, in the simplest possible act of intelligence I must be taken to affirm the existence both of an ego and a non-ego. If I cannot even think about myself without affirming the existence of an external world, it would be superfluous to look about for further proofs of its existence. But here occurs a singular difficulty. Hamilton has to guard against the transcendentalist as well as against the sceptic. He is therefore not only a 'realist,' but with equal emphasis a 'relativist.' that our knowledge is essentially relative is one of the points upon which he insists most emphatically, and confirms as usual by a catena of authorities. It is, he says, the truth 'most harmoniously re-echoed by every philosopher of every school, except the modern Germans.'(35*) The phrase relativity has more than one meaning; but according to Hamilton means at least this: 'our whole knowledge of mind and matter is relative -- conditioned -- relatively conditioned.' Of mind and matter 'in themselves' we only know that they are 'incognisable.' 'All that we know is therefore phenomenal -- phenomenal of the unknown.' This, then, is a cardinal doctrine. How is it compatible with the Doctrine that the ego and non-ego are given in every act of consciousness? Mind and matter, as we have seen, are separated 'by the whole diameter of being.' they express 'two series of phenomena, known less' (? not) 'in themselves than' (? but), in contradistinction from each other.'(36*) What is given is not two facts, the ego and the non-ego, but the 'relation.' Somehow, the conscious act implies the presence of two factors, unknowable in themselves. The 'science of opposites' may be 'the same,' but, if I know neither opposite, there can be very little science. Strangely, Hamilton seems to confuse the difference between knowing a relation and knowing the two things related. He tells us as a rough illustration, that if we consider the perception of a book to be made up of twelve parts, four may be given by the book, four by the sight, and four by 'all that intervenes.'(37*) He infers, presently, that the 'great problem of philosophy' is to 'distinguish what elements are contributed by the knowing subject, what elements by the object known.'(38*) Between these statements we have a renewed and emphatic assertion of the 'relativity of knowledge.' Hamilton, that is, speaks as if from the fact that life supposes breathing we could infer how far life depends upon the lungs and how far upon the air. From a relation between two things, unknowable in themselves, we can surely learn nothing as to the things separately. Equality of two quantities is compatible with indefinite variation in the equal quantities.(39*) The difficulty is increased when we ask how the line is actually drawn. The distinction between subjective and objective corresponds to the distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of which Berkeley had denied the validity. Both, he held, are on the same plane, and exist only 'in our minds.' Hamilton holds that the so-called 'secondary qualities' are only 'subjective affections.' They are not properly qualities of Body at all, but sensations produced in the mind by the action of bodies on the nervous system.(40*) The opinion that these secondary qualities belong to the non-ego is the 'vulgar or undeveloped form of natural realism.' Hence, when we say that we are conscious of the 'rose' or the 'inkstand,' we ought to regard the colour, fragrance, temperature, and so on, as affections of the ego. To the non-ego belong the primary qualities alone; and these are substantially nothing but extension and solidity.(41*) In other words, the rose belongs to the non-ego as space-filling; to the ego, as coloured and fragrant. Upon this, it is easy to remark with Mill, that as the vulgar admittedly consider the whole rose to belong to the non-ego, and the distinction to have been first drawn by philosophers, we at once admit an illusion in what, On Hamilton's principles, is apparently a 'deliverance of consciousness.' Why are we forbidden to make the same hypothesis as to the primary qualities? 'Falsus in uno,' as Hamilton somewhere says, 'falsus in omnibus.' If my judgment of colour be illusory, why not my judgment of extension? The veracity of the Creator is equally concerned in both cases. But, in the next place, we now reach a more serious difficulty. The non-ego, we see, corresponds simply to the qualities fully assignable in terms of space. But Hamilton has read Kant, and moreover been convinced by him. Kant has proved beyond 'the possibility of doubt,'(42*) the truth that space is a 'fundamental condition' of thought, and therefore belongs to the ego. This at once throws us back into idealism. The whole rose has become a thought, not a thing. So long as he roundly asserts that mind perceives matter, that matter means solid space, and that this truth is implied by the very simplest act of intelligence, we may wonder at his audacity, but we may admit his consistency. But to combine this with the most positive assertions of the 'relativity' of knowledge, that is, of our inability to know either mind or matter, and then to accept as conclusive Kant's theory that space is a mental form, is to land us in a hopelessly inconsistent position. What Kant precisely meant, or whether he had not various and inconsistent meanings, is happily a question beyond my purpose. Hamilton's view of Kant is clear. 'The distinctive peculiarity' of Kant's doctrine, he says, is 'its special demonstration of the absolute subjectivity of space, and in general of primary attributes of matter.'(43*) He argues that if Reid virtually held the same view, he abandoned the principle of Natural Realism.(44*) If, then, Kant's theory was conclusively proved, was not Hamilton bound to give up his essential principle? He tells us that the primary qualities are 'unambiguously objective (object-objects),' whereas the secondary are 'unambiguously subjective (subject-objects).'(45*) Yet, he admits that Kant proves the primary to be absolutely subjective, 'I have frequently asserted,' he says again, that in 'perception we are conscious of the external object immediately and in itself. This is the doctrine of Natural Realism.' But he explains that by speaking of a thing 'known in itself' he does not mean known 'out of relation to us,' but known 'as the necessary correlative of an internal quality of which I am conscious.'(46*) That is, apparently, knowing a thing 'in itself' is knowing it 'not in itself,' but only in its effect; which again is to abandon 'Natural Realism.' Hamilton finds a way out of these apparent contradictions which satisfies himself. Both theories, he suggests, may be true. We have clearly an a priori knowledge of space 'considered as a form or fundamental law of thought,' but also an empirical knowledge of what, in this relation, may be called 'extension.'(47*) He agrees, he says, with Kant that an 'a priori imagination' of space is a 'necessary condition of the possibility of thought'; but differs from Kant by holding that we have an 'a posteriori percept' of space 'as contingently apprehended in this or that actual complexus of associations.'(48*) It is most natural to interpret this as a virtual acceptance of Kant's doctrine. It falls in with what he says elsewhere: 'the notion of space is a priori, the notion of what space contains, adventitious or a posteriori. Of this latter class is that of Body or Matter.'(49*) If I merely fill up space by the sense of resistance, as he thinks, that is a subordinate operation, in no way affecting the subjective character of space generally. If, on the other hand, I can acquire an empirical notion of space independently, it seems impossible to see why I should admit the a priori notion. Hamilton starts from the assertion that we actually perceive facts, and comes to admit that we simply organise sensations.(50*) Finally, Hamilton turns to yet another theory. His essential point is the necessity of believing consciousness. When we inquire what is the sphere within which consciousness is infallible, we have to accept something very like the condemned 'crotchet' of the Cosmothetic Idealists. The infallibility of consciousness has, after all, to be limited. The summary assertion that the mind can leap the gulf which separates it from matter insists upon some explanation. Consciousness is infallible when it is its own object. But it is plain, as Hamilton agrees, that this primary, direct, or presentative knowledge is only, as it were, the limiting case of knowledge. Accordingly he condemns Reid for speaking of memory as an 'immediate knowledge of the past.'(51*) The 'object' in this case is not the past event, but some picture of the past event; not (in his illustration) George IV landing at Leith, but a mental image of the landing, 'including a conviction' that it somehow represents a past reality. It is natural, then, to inquire whether my belief in an external world may not be a consciousness of a modification of myself, including a conviction that it merely 'represents' an external world,(52*) and is not in direct contact with the 'non-ego.' Immediate knowledge of the past is 'a contradiction in terms.' And this, he adds, applies equally to an 'immediate knowledge of the distant.'(53*) It is false to say with Reid that ten men all see the same sun. Each sees a different object, because each sees a different at of rays from which he infers the object.(54*) We perceive only modifications of light, or, as he has said before, the 'rays of light in relation to and in contact with the retina.'(55*) There is, as he adds, no greater marvel in our perception of the external world than in the admitted fact that mind is connected with body. Therefore, in his final statement,(56*) it is laid down as an essential principle that consciousness is a 'knowledge solely of what is now and here present to the mind.' What is meant by the 'here'? 'It is the condition of intuitive perception,' he says, that a sensation is actually felt 'there where it is felt to be.' To suppose that a pain in the toe is felt really in 'the brain is conformable only to a theory of representationism.'(57*) If the mind is not itself extended or in any way a subject of space-relations, does this not imply that the whole external world is somehow outside the sphere of immediate knowledge -- a construction, not a mode of consciousness? To this Hamilton replies that the 'nervous organism... in contrast to all exterior to itself, appertains to the concrete human ego, and is in this respect subjective, internal; whereas in contrast to the abstract, immaterial ego, the pure mind, it belongs to the non-ego, and in this respect is objective, external.'(58*) This view leads him into pure physiology. He asks whether the mind is conscious of sensations at the periphery of the nerves, or at a 'central extremity in an extended sensorium commune.' He declares, lest such language may appear suspicious, that the question of materialism is not raised by this assumption.(59*) Anyhow, since the body is now in some sense part of the concrete human ego, our consciousness of the primary qualities is in this sense part of our consciousness of ourselves. They are given as existing in our own organism, or, in other words, as we occupy space, we have an 'immediate' knowledge of space.(60*) I only note the peculiar interpretation now put upon the deliverance of consciousness. I fancy myself to perceive the sun; what I really 'perceive' is the action of rays of light on my retina. Yet it is obvious that I only learn of the existence of 'rays' or 'retina' long after the perception. Nobody's 'consciousness,' we may be sure, ever told him that he perceived not the sun but the action of rays of light on his eye. Hamilton has diverged from a consideration of the consciousness itself to a consideration of the physical conditions of consciousness. Having started with Reid, he next admits Kant to be conclusive, and ends by escaping to what is only expressible in terms of materialism. The deliverance of consciousness has come to be a statement that my fingers are different from my toes, and that, as I am fingers and toes, I am aware of the fact. I will not ask whether it is possible by any interpretation to put a tenable construction upon Hamilton's language. Hamilton begins by discarding the philosopher's crotchet that the difference between mind and matter prevents them from affecting each other; and now he seems to admit its force so fully that he conceives of the nervous organism as a kind of amalgam of mind and matter.(61*) I have followed Hamilton so far in order to illustrate the way in which, by superposing instead of reconciling two different sets of dogma, he became hopelessly confused. The old Scottish doctrine really becomes bankrupt in his version. Hamilton is still struggling with Reid's old problem, and attacking the 'cosmothetic idealism' as Reid attacked the ideal system. How are we to cross the gulf between mind and matter, especially when we know nothing about either mind or matter taken apart from matter or mind? The problem is insoluble on these terms because it is really meaningless. The answer suggested by Kant was effective precisely -- as I take it -- because it drew the line differently, and therefore altered the whole question. Kant did not provide a new bridge, but pointed out that the chasm was not rightly conceived. To try to settle whether the 'primary qualities' belong to 'things external to the mind' is idle. It leads to the inevitable dilemma. If the 'primary qualities' belong to the things or the object, geometry becomes empirical and deducible only from particular experiments, like other physical sciences. Then we cannot account for its unique character and its at least apparent 'necessity.' If, on the other hand, the primary qualities belong to the mind, we can understand how the mind evolves or constructs, but it is at the cost of admitting them to be after all unreal, because 'subjective,' or deriving knowledge of fact from a simple analysis of thought. But the dilemma is really illusory. We cannot say that the truths of geometry refer either to things 'out of the mind' or to things 'in the mind.' They are 'subjective' in the sense that they are constructed by the mind in the very act of experiencing. They are not subjective in the sense of varying from one experience to another or from one mind to another. They belong to perception as perception, or to the perceiver as perceiving. It is, therefore, meaningless to ask whether they are 'objective' or 'subjective,' if that is to be answered by deciding, as Hamilton would decide, what part is due to the subject and what part to the object. That feat could only be performed if we could get outside of our minds, which we always carry about with us, or outside of the universe to which we are strictly confined. Then we might perhaps understand what each factor is, considered apart from the other. As it is, we can only say that the truths are universal as belonging to experience in general, and necessary as corresponding to identical modes of combining our experience. But we must abandon the fruitless attempt to separate object from subject, and then to construct a bridge to cross the gulf we have made. III. MILL ON THE EXTERNAL WORLD Upon this I have spoken sufficiently in considering Mill's Logic. Mill's failure to appreciate the change in the real issues made by the Kantian doctrine in this and other questions is a source of perplexity in his criticism of Hamilton.(62*) His straightforward statement of his own view is a relief after Hamilton's complex and tortuous mode of forcibly combining inconsistent dogmas. He is able, moreover, to expose very thoroughly some of Hamilton's inconsistencies. But though he can hit particular errors very hard, he has not a sufficient clue to the labyrinth. Metaphysicians for him are still divided into two great schools -- intuitionists and empiricists, or, as he here says, the 'introspective' and the 'psychological' school.(63*) The Scottish and the Kantian doctrines are still lumped together, and therefore more or less misunderstood. Hence in treating of our belief in an external world he is still in the old position. Kant, according to him, supposes the mind not to perceive but itself to 'create' attributes, and then by a natural illusion to ascribe them to outward things.(64*) The mind, on this version, does not simply organise but adds to, or overrides, experience. Consequently the external world would become subjective or unreal; and unless we admit a quasi-miraculous intuition, we are under a necessary illusion. Mill substantially starts from Berkeley's position. The distinction between the primary and secondary qualities is, he holds, illusory. We know nothing of 'object' or 'subject,' 'mind' or 'matter' in themselves.(65*) Our knowledge is therefore 'subjective.' Our whole provision of material is necessarily drawn from sensations. The problem occurs, how from mere sensations we make an (at least) apparently external world. Mill endeavours to show that this is possible, though he thinks that Berkeley's attempt was inadequate.(66*) We can leap the gulf without the help of any special machinery invented for the purpose, such as Reid's 'intuitions' or Kant's forms of perception. He offers his own theory as an 'antagonist doctrine to that of Sir William Hamilton and the Scottish school,'(67*) and it certainly has the advantage of simplicity. Mill lays down at starting(68*) the postulates from which he is to reason. Here, of course, we appeal to association. Association, he tells us, links together the thoughts of phenomena which are like each other, or which have been contiguous or successive; the link strengthens as the association is repeated, and after a time becomes 'inseparable.' Now belief in an external world means the belief that things exist when we do not think of them; that they would exist if we were annihilated; and further, that things exist which have never been perceived by us or by others. This belief is explicable by the known laws of association. For at any moment a given sensation calls up 'a countless variety of possibilities of sensation.' They are regarded, that is, as sensations which I might experience if circumstances were altered. Again, these possibilities of sensation (which, he adds, are 'conditional certainties') are permanent, because they may be called up by any of the fleeting sensations. This permanence is one of the characteristics of the outside world; and we thus have always in the background, or as a 'kind of permanent substratum,' whole groups of 'permanent possibilities' suggested by the passing sensations. These become further consolidated when fixed orders of succession have suggested the ideas of cause and effect -- themselves a product of association. Hence, we get our external world, and can define Matter to be a 'Permanent Possibility of sensation.' The phrase became famous. This involves the metaphysical question which was reserved or evaded in the Logic. His whole purpose there is to show that thoughts should conform to things. But how things differ from thoughts was never made clear. 'Attributes,' we were then told, were the same as 'sensations.' The sensations somehow cohere in clusters. But what makes them cohere in different forms? When a sensation is not accompanied by the sensation previously associated, why is not the association simply weakened or destroyed instead of suggesting a 'conditional certainty'? I learn that fire is hot because the sensations of brightness and heat have occurred together; but when I see the brightness without feeling the heat, why does not the association simply become fainter? Why should I interpret the experience to mean, 'If I were nearer I should feel the heat'? Does not the interpretation imply that I have already some system of combining my impressions and a need of making the two experiences consistent instead of contradictory? Upon the single assumption of sensations occurring together or successively, and related in time alone, there seems to be no need for any external world whatever. The hypothesis would be exemplified in the case of an animal which, though capable of sensations, had no capacity for arranging them so as to represent space at all. And, again, the statement suggests no distinct reference to any criterion of truth or falsehood. It accounts for illusions as well as for true beliefs. What is the difference? The fact that certain sensations adhere in clusters is not the same thing as the belief in their regular recurrence; and considering the vast variety and intricacy of our sensations, the question which I have mentioned in connection with James Mill arises again: Why should any two people have the same clusters or (on this showing) the same belief -- or how one association can be said to be (not real but) true, and another (not unreal but) false? This difficulty shows itself when Mill proceeds to investigate the 'primary qualities.' They are to be simply 'attributes' co-ordinate with other attributes. With the help of Professor Bain and Mr Herbert Spencer, in whose then recent writings he saw a most encouraging development of his father's principles, Mill makes out a case to show how the perception of space may be developed. The problem discussed by those authorities and their successors is clearly a legitimate part of psychology; their investigations, though still on the threshold of a vast and difficult inquiry, are at least valuable beginnings; and when the experts have all agreed, we shall be ready to accept their conclusions. There is, however, a difficulty which exposes Mill to another criticism.(69*) Briefly, it is that his so-called explanation of space-conception really presupposes space. Hamilton had pointed this out in his Kantian moods.(70*) The difficulty is obvious. In a scientific theory a statement in terms of space is an ultimate statement. We do not try, nor does it appear to be possible, to get behind it. When I have said that a body moves in an ellipse. I do not go on to express the ellipse in terms of 'muscular sensation.' That would be to substitute for a definite measure one essentially fluctuating and uncertain. I can define a given muscular sensation as that which corresponds to a certain distance; but to reverse the definition -- to express the distance in terms of the pure sensation, excluding all reference to distance, is surely impossible. Now, it may seem that Mill is here attempting just this impossible feat. Therefore he is really still on the same side of the gulf, though he supposes himself to have crossed it. His 'pigtail 'according to the famous apologue -- still 'hangs behind him.' In other words, he is mistaking a psychological for a metaphysical explanation; an account of how it is that we come to perceive space, assuming space to exist, with an explanation of what space is; and a resolution of the perception into a set of sensations associated in time. Here, again, he is under the great disadvantage of supposing the space-perception to have been made within the limits of a lifetime. If it were possible to look into the mind of an infant we could, he thinks, see how the idea was formed.(71*) A modern psychologist can at least help himself by looking indefinitely further back and tracing the whole history of the organism to the earlier forms of life; and the space-perception ceases to imply a preternatural or a priori capacity. Something more is surely wanted, though I do not venture to say precisely what. Mill's doctrine that my belief in a external world is a belief in 'a permanent possibility of sensation' may be accepted in some sense. When, for example, I believe in the existence of Calcutta, I mean that I believe that if I were transported to the banks of the Hoogly, I should have the sensations from which Calcutta is inferrible.(72*) In other words, in making a statement about the external world, I construct a hypothetical and universal consciousness. When I exchange the geocentric for the heliocentric view, I am imagining what I should see if I were upon the sun instead of the earth. Instead of regarding my own series of sensations as the base from which to measure, I regard them as deducible from the series which would be presented to a different and, of course, incomparably more extended consciousness. I can thus fill up the gaps in my own experience and get a regular series instead of one full of breaches and interruptions. That I do this somehow or other is Mill's view, and I should admit with him that I do no more. But, then, the question remains whether Mill can account for my doing even this. It supposes, at least, a power of forming what Clifford called 'ejects,' as distinguished from 'objects.' I must be able to think not of things outside consciousness but of my own consciousness under other conditions, and of other centres of consciousness than mine. But this ability is not explicable from sensations, as ultimate atoms, combined in various ways by 'association'; for that process, it would seem, might take place without in any way suggesting an external world or a different consciousness. Here Mill, like his father, is trying to explain thoughts by dealing with sensations as things and refusing to admit any action of the mind in order to keep to the unsophisticated facts. He will not allow the mind to have even an organising power, even though it be a power which cannot be separately revealed or give rise to independent truths, but appears simply as implied in its products. The mind is the cluster of atomic sensations. It must not tamper with the facts in any way, on penalty of causing illusion. I can only associate simple atoms, and the world remains a chaos of independent and incoherent fragments. They stick together somehow, but the division into the external and the internal world still remains an unsolved problem. The 'attribute' will not distinguish itself from the 'sensation.' We are still unable, that is, to explain the metaphysical puzzle left unsolved in the Logic. Another question arises: If the world is still an incoherent heap of 'attributes' or 'sensations,' what are we to say of the mind? With his usual candour Mill applies his principles to the problem. We get, as he admits, to a real difficulty. The mind, in the phrase adopted from his father, is a 'thread of consciousness.' It is a series of feelings with the curious peculiarity that besides 'present sensations' it has 'memories and expectations.' What are these? he asks. They involve beliefs in something 'beyond themselves.' If we call the mind 'a series of feelings,' we have to add that it is a series which is 'aware of itself as past and future.' Is it, then, something different from the feelings, or must we accept the paradox that something 'which in hypothesis is a series of feelings can be aware of itself as a series?' Here is the final 'inexplicability' which must arrive, as he admits with Hamilton, when we get to an ultimate fact. The 'wisest thing we can do is to accept the inexplicable fact without any theory of how it takes place.'(73*) That what we call personal identity is 'inexplicable' will hardly be denied. Yet Mill's position seems to make the paradox something nearly approaching to a contradiction. If the mental processes are to be described as feelings, separable but simply forming clusters more or less complicated and linked to each other, we seem to get rid not only of a something which organises experience, but of organisation itself. It becomes difficult to understand not merely what the mind or soul can be, but what are the mental processes to which the conception corresponds. This, however, leads to a different set of questions and one of far greater interest. IV. THEORIES OF THE ABSOLUTE Discussions such as I have touched often seem to be little more than a display of dialectical skill. Hamilton and Mill probably believed equally and in the same sense in the reality of Edinburgh or London. When a belief is admitted, the question why we believe is of interest chiefly in so far as the answer may give canons applicable to really disputable questions. Now the application of Hamilton's theories to theology certainly involved issues in regard to which men generally suppose themselves to be profoundly interested. We clearly believe in an 'external world,' whatever precisely we mean by it. But do we believe in God? or, if we believe, what precisely is meant by believing in God? That is a problem upon which turn all the most important controversies which have divided men in all ages -- and the controversy which now raged over Hamilton's theory between Mill and Mansel corresponded to vital issues. Hamilton's essential position was given in the famous Cousin article in 1830. He frequently repeats, but he never much modifies or develops the argument. In the course of lectures repeated for twenty years, he divides his subject into three departments: 'empirical psychology' and 'rational psychology'; or the facts and laws of consciousness; and thirdly, 'ontology,' which was to deal with the ideas of God, the soul, and so forth.(74*) This third department was never written; and though We may guess at its general nature, his doctrine is chiefly indicated by his criticism of Cousin. One result is unfortunate. I doubt whether so many sayings capable of different interpretations were ever brought together in the same space. The art of writing about 'ontology' is, it would seem, to disguise a self-evident truism by pompous phrases till the words are vague enough to allow the introduction of paradoxical meaning. Schelling and Cousin between them had provided a sounding terminology; and Hamilton, though his main purpose is to show that these fine phrases were only phrases, takes them up, tosses them about as if they had a real meaning, and leaves us in some doubt how far he is merely using the words to show their emptiness, or suggesting that, when the bubbles are burst, there is still some residuum of solid matter. 'The unconditioned,' he says (giving his own view), 'is incognisable and inconceivable.'(75*) What, then, is 'the unconditioned'? 'The Unconditioned is the genus of which the Infinite and the Absolute are species.'(76*) These technical phrases are the balls with which the metaphysical juggler plays his tricks till we are reduced to hopeless confusion. Mill gives the straightforward and, I think, conclusive criticism.(77*) What is the sense of talking about 'The Absolute' or 'The Infinite' as hypostatised abstractions? Apply the epithets to concrete things or persons and we may understand what is really meant. A predicate going about at large cannot be really grasped; and the discussion would only be relevant if we were speaking of something which is absolute and nothing but absolute. The words themselves have meanings which become different when they are parts of different assertions. 'Inconceivable' is a word which varies from self-contradictory to mere difficulty of imagining. 'Absolute,' according to Hamilton, has two chief meanings, one of which is not opposed to the Infinite and the other contradictory of the Infinite. Mansel takes Mill to task for not seeing that Hamilton uses the word in two 'distinct and even contradictory senses,' and for not perceiving which meaning is implied in which cases.(78*) It may be very wrong of Mill, but Hamilton's practice is certainly confusing. There is Cousin's 'Absolute' and Hamilton's 'Absolute' and Mansel's own 'Absolute';(79*) and the difference is to be inferred from the nature of the argument. There is a false Infinite and a true Infinite; and this suggests another difficulty. The obvious 'contradictory' of infinite is finite; but words cannot be really contradictory at all till they form part of a proposition. It is contradictory to call a thing finite and infinite in the same sense; but, if we admit of infinite divisibility, a thing must be at once infinite in comparison with an infinitesimal, finite in relation to other things, and infinitesimal in relation to those which in relation to it are infinite. Some words, again, refer to our knowledge of things, and are meaningless when predicated of objects. A fact may be 'certain' to me and only 'probable' to you, simply because the probability to each depends upon the evidence which he possesses. When this is supposed to correspond to some difference in the facts themselves, endless fallacies are produced. 'The certain' is contradictory of the 'uncertain'; but a given fact may be both 'certain' and 'uncertain.' A discussion naturally becomes perplexed, which is really treating a question of logic in terms appropriate to a question of fact. I will not attempt to follow a controversy so perplexed in itself and in which the antagonists seem to be normally at cross purposes. I must try to bring out the main issue which is obscured by the singular confusions of the contest; and to this there seems to be a simple clue. Hamilton's theory is admittedly a 'modification of that of Kant,'(80*) and intended to eliminate the inconsistency by which Kant had left an opening for the systems of Schelling and Hegel. Now Kant's famous argument, given in the Critique of Pure Reason, is a most crabbed piece of writing. It makes an English reader long for David Hume. Still, beneath its elaborate panoply of logical technicalities, it contains a very clear and cogent argument, which gives the real difficulty and which is strangely distorted by Hamilton. According to Kant there are three Ideas of the pure Reason -- the Soul, the World, and God. Nobody really doubts the existence of the world; but doubts as to the existence of the soul or of God are possible and have been met by professedly demonstrative arguments. The 'dogmatists' whom Kant criticised had, as they thought, proved the existence of a monad, an 'indiscerptible' unit called the soul; and of a Supreme Being, or 'Ens Realissimum,' who is taken to be in some sense absolute and simple. Kant holds these arguments to be essentially a misapplication of logical method. It is the function of the reason to unify our knowledge. The ideal would be reached if all knowledge could be regarded as a system of deductions from a single principle. This, in reasoning about the soul, produces a 'paralogism.' All our thoughts and faculties are bound together into a unity which is consistent with multiplicity. We interpret this unjustifiably as implying the existence of an absolutely simple unit. We hypostatise the unity and regard it as a thing when, in truth, it represents a complex system of reciprocal relations. The arguments upon the supposed proofs of the existence of a supreme Being, though they are expanded and considered in many different forms, reach a similar conclusion. We are perfectly right in unifying as much as possible our whole knowledge of the world, but though we may continue the process indefinitely, we can never logically arrive at the knowledge of a single Being existing independently as the foundation of all other being. In this sense, Kant calls the idea 'regulative.' It corresponds to the legitimate process of thought; we must unify, but no reasoning can reveal an entity lying beyond all experience. We are thus led to 'irresistible illusions,' from which, however, we can escape, though only 'by the severest and most subtle criticism.' Kant compares this to the illusion produced by a mirror, which makes objects really in front appear to be behind it, or to the apparent increase of the moon's size when near the horizon. Still, it is impossible, as he emphatically says, that reason should be itself undeserving of confidence. It is only from its misuse in an inappropriate sphere, or, in other words, from its attempt to transcend experience, that the fallacy arises.(81*) It is needless to ask how this argument can be reconciled with the theism which Kant accepts. Hamilton's criticism of Cousin is essentially a statement of the converse argument. Schelling and Cousin had taken up Kant's challenge, not by inferring the simple being from the complex of experiences, but by professing to show how multiplicity might be evolved out of absolute simplicity. This feat, as Hamilton held, and as Mill of course held with him, could only be accomplished by a palpable juggle. Clearly you cannot count, if you are restricted to the use of an absolute 'one.' The germ from which an organic system is developed cannot be itself absolutely simple. Knowledge can only be made out of rules; and a simple 'is' gives no rule. Hamilton tries to express the principle implied in such instances in the proper pomp of metaphysical language. Cousin starts by admitting that knowledge supposes 'plurality,' that is, an object and a subject. Now, says Hamilton,(82*) the 'absolute' must be identified with the subject or with the object, or with the 'indifferency of both' (whatever that may be). On the first or second hypothesis, the absolute is not, as it ought to be, a unit, for it is one of a pair; on the other hypothesis, you suppose that consciousness does not imply plurality. A man, let us say in humbler language, if he thinks, must think about something. If so, we start from a man and a something. But suppose him to think about himself. Then there must be something to say about himself; and he will have nothing to say if he is absolutely simple. That seems to be true enough. Every proposition asserts a relation of some kind, and a proposition cannot be got at all if no relation be given. This, therefore, is one meaning of the 'relativity' of thought. 'To think is the condition'; that is, you cannot affirm or deny unless you deny or affirm something. If you try then to get to the absolute by stripping off all relations, you really get to zero. We think only by the attribution of certain qualities, and the negation of these qualities and of this attribution is so far a negation of thinking at all. Kant's arguments duly carried out prove 'the unconditioned,' says Hamilton, to be a mere 'fasciculus of negations.'(83*) Clearly, we reply, if the unconditioned is reached by unsaying all that we have said. A plain person is, indeed, chiefly astonished that such arguments should be required. Schelling's system, says Hamilton himself, is only fit for 'Laputa on the Empire,'(84*) but Schelling at least invented a supernatural faculty to perceive an 'incogitable' hypothesis. Cousin's hypothesis, which tried to omit this faculty, is worse, for it is self-contradictory.(85*) The spectacle of three of the most distinguished men in Germany, France, and England joining in this game, and even of Hamilton winning a 'European reputation' by declaring that we cannot believe two contradictory propositions at once, or make something out of nothing, is not edifying to a believer in philosophy. V. ANTINOMIES Mill does not want all this apparatus to get rid of the transcendental world. It is for him too obviously superfluous to require to be exploded. How then does he come into conflict with Hamilton? We must turn for explanation to another of Kant's arguments. The universe must be regarded as in some sense one, though that does not prove the existence of a simple and absolute Being as its ground or principle. On the other hand, the universe is an indefinitely complex multitude of reciprocally dependent things. We can bring the 'laws' into unity and harmony; but the things through which the laws are manifested are themselves infinitely numerous. We may then ask whether the universe is not only one but a whole; whether its unity entitles us to call it a single object. This leads to the famous 'antinomies.' They have been familiar enough in many forms since speculation began. The universe is given in space and time. Now, we cannot think of space and time either as finite or infinite. We cannot think of space as finite because, however far we go, there is still space beyond. We cannot think of space as infinite, because to imagine infinite space would require an infinite mind and infinite time. Space must be either infinite or finite, because one of two contradictories must be true, and yet each is 'inconceivable.' I must confess with due humility that I could never see any antinomy at all. In this I agree with Mill,(86*) though I cannot agree with his attempt to explain our beliefs in the infinity of space by an 'inseparable association.' The apparent antinomy is due, I fancy, to a shift in the meaning of 'infinite.' The mathematician calls space 'infinite' because space is limited by space, and there cannot be a 'whole' of space. If by 'infinite' I mean the completion of a process which ex hypothesi cannot be completed, I become self-contradictory. There is no meaning in 'a whole' of space, though every particular space is a whole. Acuter reasoners, however, can see the difficulty, and we will therefore admit the 'antinomy.' Then we must observe that, according to Kant, the antinomies apply solely to the cosmological idea. There is nothing, he says,(87*) antinomial in the psychological and theological ideas; for they 'contain no contradiction.' He infers that their reality can be no more denied than affirmed. If from the organism I infer a soul I fall into a 'paralogism,' but not into an 'antinomy.' We do not prove that soul and no-soul are necessary alternatives and both 'inconceivable,' but simply that the soul, as a monad, is a superfluity which explains nothing -- a thought interpreted as a thing. The antinomy occurs only when we deal with the perceived universe, and ask whether it has or has not limits. It has no application to the argument about God or the soul. Since they are not in space they have no concern with the antinomies involved in the conception of space. Hamilton's misappropriation of this argument is the master fallacy of his system. In the Cousin essay he lays down a dogma without the slightest attempt to prove it. 'The conditioned is the mean between two extremes -- two inconditionates -- exclusive of each other, neither of which can be conceived as possible, but of which, on the principles of contradiction and the excluded middle, one must be admitted as necessary.'(88*) He adds that our faculties are thus shown to be weak, but not deceitful. We learn, moreover, the 'salutary lesson' that the capacity of 'thought is not to be constituted into the measure of existence,' and we are warned from 'recognising the domain of our knowledge as necessarily coextensive with the horizon of our faith.' In a note we are invited to accept as true the declaration 'of a pious philosophy -- a God understood would be no God at all'; and we are told that 'the last and highest consecration of all true religion must be an altar to the unknown God,' -- which does not appear to have been St. Paul's opinion. This doctrine was repeated again and again in various lectures and notes. It was applied by Mansel to defend Christianity, and was in a sense accepted by Mr. Herbert Spencer as a support of Agnosticism.(89*) Yet it is sprung upon us in this abrupt fashion, not only without proof, but without any clear statement of its meaning; and, as I think, is really the expression of a confusion of two lines of argument. An exposition of this great axiom, he says,(90*) would show that 'some of the most illustrious principles' are only its 'subordinate modifications applied to certain primary notions.' Among such notions are those of 'cause and effect' and 'substance and phenomenon.' The discussion of Cause and Effect(91*) illustrates sufficiently the curious shifting of the argument. Our inability to conceive a beginning either of time or of the existence of things in time gives the apparent necessity of causation. But as we cannot suppose an infinite regress, the necessity corresponds only to an 'impotence' of our minds. Hence, he argues, in the case of the human will, we must admit the possibility, though not the conceivability, of an absolute beginning, and therefore of freewill. The argument, if sound, is applicable to cause in general as well as to the will. Hamilton may mean that since an absolute beginning is possible at some time, it is possible at any time. We might then have an antinomy. One of the propositions, 'things are caused' and 'things are not caused,' must be true, and both are inconceivable. But this would be to destroy the axiom of causation. The appearance of an antinomy is obtained by changing the question. Instead of asking why we take things to be caused, we ask whether we can imagine an infinite series of causes. The antinomy in this case is simply the old formula over again. This central position of Hamilton's philosophy is thus an illegitimate application of Kant's argument. Kant admits an antinomy only where it is at least plausible, namely, as applied to the universe which we clearly have to extend indefinitely if not to absolute infinity. But no such difficulty is involved in the problem of unity. Hamilton seems to have been so delighted with the 'antinomy' that he 'enounces' it as a general law; applies it where it has no meaning whatever, and invariably 'illustrates' it by repeating the case in which it is plausible. Hamilton thus contrives to blend two arguments into one. His view is the germ of inextricable confusions, and, one might have thought, too obvious a bit of logical legerdemain to impose even upon a metaphysician. It plays, however, a most important part in the attempt made by Mansel to bring Hamilton to bear against the unbeliever. Mansel's whole aim is to put his antagonists in a dilemma. They must not be allowed to say simply that an argument becomes meaningless; they must be taken to say that it leads to a balance between two alternatives. We therefore get a double result. On the one hand, we are reduced to complete scepticism -- that is, reason is made impotent in regard to a question which necessarily arises. On the other hand, we are left with an impression that we are compelled to take some position in this region of inconceivables, and this is translated into the pious assertion that 'belief' extends beyond 'knowledge.' Thus Hamilton emphatically declares that it is the 'main scope' of his speculation to show articulately that we 'must believe as actual much that we are unable (positively) to conceive as actual.'(92*) To follow him through the maze of 'inconceivables,' 'absolutes,' 'infinites,' 'unconditioneds' and so forth would be idle.(93*) I shall be content with one argument which in Mansel's hands led to an important conflict with Mill. The Infinite, says Mansel, 'if it is to be conceived at all, must be conceived as potentially' everything and actually nothing; for if there is anything in general which it cannot become, it is thereby limited; and if there is anything in particular which it actually is, it is thereby excluded from being any other thing.(94*) It must also be conceived as 'actually everything and potentially nothing; for an unrealised potentiality is likewise a limitation.' Hamilton had put the same argument. 'The infinite is conceived only by thinking away every character by which the finite was conceived.'(95*) That is, the 'infinite' is equivalent to the 'indeterminate,' or the result of unsaying all that you have said. This logically leads to pure nothing, not to an antinomy. We are told that we must believe something where we get not to a contradiction but to an absolute vacuum. Mill makes an obvious criticism.(96*) When I talk of infinite space, I do not 'think away' the character of space, but I only think of an indefinite extension of space. To believe in infinite space would otherwise be to disbelieve in geometry. We cannot think at all about an utterly indeterminate object, but we can think of space without asking how much space there is in the universe. 'The Infinite' may be meaningless, but to predicate infinity of space does not destroy the space conception. If, then, the infinity of space does not hinder us from obtaining a perfectly accurate knowledge of its properties, does the infinite or absolute nature of the Deity prevent us from understanding his attributes? Here is the real problem; and it leads to the odd spectacle of the sceptic arguing on behalf of theology against the divine. There is no contradiction, as Mill argues, in speaking of an infinitely knowing or powerful or good being. A being has infinite knowledge if nothing is unknown to him; and is infinitely powerful if nothing is impossible to him. That gives a plain meaning on the human side, though we are of course unable adequately to imagine the result on the divine side. Infinite goodness is, indeed, a less natural phrase than 'absolute,' because absolute does not suggest a numerical measure of 'goodness.' Goodness is a quality, not a quantity. But, understood as meaning the absence of even an infinitesimal degree of badness, it may be called infinite, and the 'limit' which is denied is not that implied by 'good,' but by the degree of goodness. Infinite, if it means anything, must mean an infinite amount or degree of something definite. Mill thus appears to argue that theology is not as irrational as its defender supposes. The introduction of such predicates as infinite and absolute do not make knowledge of their subject impossible. It would have cleared the matter if Mill had gone on to explain his own view of the 'Absolute.' We may guess what he ought to have said in conformity with his principles. If all knowing is essentially a knowledge of relations, it is idle to seek for an 'absolute' in the sense of a thing which (on Mansel's definition) 'exists in and by itself, having no necessary relations to any other being.'(97*) Since, in saying anything about it, we assert a relation, we cannot even speak of such an 'absolute' without contradiction. 'Absolute,' like certain, necessary, and so forth, is a name referring to our knowledge. An assertion about facts may be 'absolutely' true, however trifling the fact. It may be as absolutely true that a sparrow fell to the ground at 9 A.M. on the 1st of January last as that the sun exists or that two and two make four. Knowledge implies not an 'absolute fact' but an 'absolute truth' -- a truth which requires no qualification not explicitly given in the proposition asserted. To say that a thing exists absolutely is to add nothing but emphasis to the statement that it exists. Nor does the statement that it exists 'conditionally' alter the case. It is conditional in so far as it has a cause, or as from its existence we may infer some previous state of things. If, however, it exists, the conditions have ex hypothesi been fulfilled. It exists now 'absolutely,' however it came to exist. It is a part of the whole system of interdependent and continuous processes which make up the universe.(98*) If we know that anything, then, is part of the actual world, we have all 'the absolute' required; and this is an 'absolute' which is perfectly compatible with any complexity of relations. The clue is given by getting hold of any bit whatever of the actual web, not by getting into some transcendental world beyond. The error of supposing that we must find an 'Absolute' somewhere, and that we cannot find it in any part of our experience, is the same as would be the error of supposing that because we cannot fix a point in absolute space, we cannot get any valid space measures. The centre of the sun or Greenwich observatory will do equally well, though we cannot even speak intelligibly of their absolute position in the universe. To give a scientific account of astronomy we do not require an absolute centre of space. This is what I take to be implied in Kant's argument about the idea of God. We cannot get to an 'absolute' Being outside of the universe, but the whole must be regarded as a single and self-supporting system. This argument is distorted in the elaborate argumentations of Hamilton and Mansel against the attempts to get to an absolute Being outside of things in general. Such an absolute as they attack is doubtless an absurdity; but neither are we, as they urge, compelled to believe in it. If we still use theological language, we must say that God is not a Being apart from the universe, but implied in the universe; the ground of all things, the immanent principle whose 'living raiment is the world.' Mill of course holds that we must abandon 'transcendentalism' or the search for 'things in themselves' outside of the phenomenal world. Mansel often seems to agree. Philosophers who indulge in these freaks try, he says, to lift up the curtain of their own being to view the picture which it conceals. 'Like the painter of old, they knew not that the curtain is the picture.'(99*) That sounds like good positivism or phenomenalism. It should give the death blow to all 'ontology.' He assures us over and over again that the 'Infinite' is a 'mere negation of thought';(100*) that contradictions arise whenever we attempt to transcend the limits of experience; that human reason is so far from bring able to construct a 'Scientific Theology, independent of and superior to Revelation, that it cannot even read the alphabet out of which that Theology must be framed.'(101*) We can know the laws of nature or the phenomena, but we can know nothing of the substance or noumenon which lies behind them. Then, is the natural query, why not leave it out of account altogether? Why venture into this region, where, as Mansel admits, we find only 'antinomies' or,'contradictory inconceivables'? Why not, in short, be agnostics like Mr Herbert Spencer, who based his First Principles on the Hamilton-Mansel doctrine? This gives the secret of the whole procedure. 'The cardinal point,' says Mansel, 'of Sir W. Hamilton's philosophy... is the absolute necessity, under any system of philosophy whatever, of acknowledging the existence of a sphere of belief, beyond the limits of the sphere of thought.'(102*) Faith, then, remains when reason disappears, though faith cannot solve the doubts suggested by reason.(103*) What 'faith' tells us, in fact, is that we must believe one of two propositions, though we cannot conceive the possibility of either. Can it possibly, we ask, much matter whether we believe that there is or is not an X of whom nothing more can be intelligibly said? A belief which extends beyond 'the sphere of thought' is a belief which we can afford to leave to itself. But Mansel has to declare that we are forced to believe where we cannot even properly think. 'We are compelled by the constitution of our minds to believe in the existence of an absolute and infinite Being,'(104*) though, as we learn, to 'think of the infinite' is really a negation of thought. A decision to accept one of the contradictory beliefs is yet of the highest practical importance. The schemes of Free Will and Fatalism, says Hamilton,(105*) are 'theoretically balanced,' though the fatalist inconceivability is the 'less obtrusive'; but 'practically' we must accept free-will on penalty of admitting the moral law to be 'a mendacious imperative.' That is, right and wrong become meaningless unless you accept one of two equally inconceivable doctrines. So Mansel declares freewill to be 'certain in fact' though 'inexplicable in theory.'(106*) Why 'certain,' if, as he also declares, it is part of the 'fundamental mystery' of the coexistence of the Finite and the Infinite?(107*) According to Mansel, again, the denial that an infinite Being exists, is simply the acceptance of one of two 'equally inconceivable alternatives.'(108*) It is, he declares, 'our duty' to think of God as 'personal' and to believe that he is 'infinite.'(109*) It is a duty, then, to accept as a certainty what reason declares to be only one of two equally probable alternatives. The general attitude is familiar enough. Pascal has put it in his famous 'wager.' Believe a thing because it is impossible. You must back one side; and reason is too imbecile to settle which. Then give up reasoning. The argument is persuasive if not logically convincing. Hamilton was too much of a philosopher and a rationalist to accept it in that form. His application remained ambiguous. Probably he would have approved a rather vague theism, which might be interpreted in terms of many religious creeds. Mansel, unluckily, had to get from his philosophy to the position of strict Anglican orthodoxy; from the contradictory inconceivables to the Thirty-nine Articles. His method of performing this feat has little interest now; but I must notice it enough to show the relation to Mill. VI. REVEALED RELIGION How is this Infinite and Absolute Being to be brought into any relation whatever with facts? How, by accepting one of two equally inconceivable alternatives, can we throw any light upon the truth of a historical statement? Mansel protests that he is not arguing as to the truth of any particular revelation. Though he is not bound to prove the truth of the Christian revelation, he is clearly bound to show that a revelation is probable, and to suggest the criterions by which its reality must be tested. A religion, as Kant had said, could not be true which conflicted with morality.(110*) If morality binds me to be merciful, and a god orders me to be cruel, he cannot be the true God. The deist Tindal had argued long ago that Joshua could not be justified by a divine command in exterminating the Canaanites.(111*) In answering this difficulty, Mansel hit upon the unlucky phrase 'Moral Miracles.'(112*) A 'moral miracle,' a conversion of a bad act into a good one, was, he admitted, not the kind of experiment to be used too often. Every scoundrel can work 'miracles' of that kind. He can break the divine law though he cannot break the 'law of nature.' How are we to know that in a given case the divine law has been suspended by the supreme ruler and not really broken by the wicked subject? By what logical feat can we show the identity of Jehovah with the Absolute and Infinite? The deity of joshua was frankly anthropomorphic: the (generally) invisible deity of a tribe. We can judge of his character as we can judge of the character of joshua himself, or of the character of Baal, or Moloch, or Zeus. If we argue that all the deities represent an imperfect feeling after a supreme Being, our judgment would not be affected. The deity would still be imperfect. The commands obeyed were still cruel and immoral, as conceived at the time. To argue that they were good because somehow or other Jehovah was the Inconceivable seems to be too obvious a fallacy even for a Bampton Lecturer. Mansel denounces the 'morbid horror of what they (philosophers) are pleased to call Anthropomorphism.' 'Fools' to dream that man can escape from himself, that human reason can draw aught but a human portrait of God.'(113*) They really argue that the portrait has at any rate very ugly features, and doubt whether it is possible to draw any portrait whatever of the Inconceivable. Mansel makes play with this 'antinomy.' The God of his philosophy is too inconceivable to be a moral lawgiver. But, says Mansel, he is also jehovah. Jehovah, it is replied, is immoral. But, says Mansel, he is also the Inconceivable. This singular mode of eluding difficulties can of course be expressed in edifying language. The 'caviller,' for example, had objected to 'vicarious punishment.' Mansel says(114*) that this supposes that nothing can be compatible 'with the boundless goodness of God, which is incompatible with the little goodness of which man may be conscious in himself.' The ingenious argument, in spite of this way of putting it, excited Mill's very justifiable wrath. 'I,' he said, 'will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.'(115*) Mansel is amazed at this 'extraordinary outburst of rhetoric'; he will not 'pause to comment on its temper and good taste'; but he suggests a parallel.(116*) It is that of an 'inexperienced son' taking moral advice from an 'experienced father,' or believing that the elder man is acting rightly though his motives are not fully intelligible to the younger. This, as Mill replies,(117*) assumes that the father is 'good' in the human sense, although with more wisdom or knowledge. To make the parallel close we should have to suppose a son who only knows that it is an equal chance whether his father exists or not, and is told by somebody who is equally ignorant that the father desires him to cut a man's throat and appropriate his wife. If the morality of God be absolutely inscrutable, we must fall back upon the conclusion that we are entitled to criticise not the moral contents but the external evidences of a religion.(118*) Mansel tries to compromise. We may argue from the morality of religion within limits; the argument may prove that a religion cannot be divine; but not that it is divine. For that we must go to 'external facts.'(119*) Our knowledge of God, he still asserts, is derivable from our 'moral and intellectual consciousness'; from the 'constitution and course of nature' and from revelation. These generally agree. When they appear to differ, we must not settle a priori which is to give way.(120*) Mr Herbert Spencer, as Manal thinks, went wrong because he took only the 'negative position' of Hamilton's philosophy, and did not see, for example, that the belief 'in a personal God is imperatively demanded by the facts of our moral and emotional consciousness.'(121*) Mansel was trying to escape from his own logic under the shelter of 'vague generalities.' Mr Herbert Spencer, I think, was perfectly right in holding that when our Deity is the 'Unknowable,' he cannot be made to take sides even in a moral controversy and certainly not identified with the anthropomorphic deities of popular mythology. The Hamilton-Mansel controversy has become a weariness to the flesh. The interest which it still possesses is only in the illustration of the conflict between different lines of development. The position of Hamilton and his disciple means a desperate attempt to escape from a pressing dilemma. Kant's theology represents the deistic rationalism of the eighteenth century. The metaphysical argument necessarily tends to some form of pantheism, such as that of which Spinoza is the most complete representative. Carry out the logic and God is identified with Nature, and is not a being who can be conceived as interfering with the laws of Nature. The growth of science had made it essential to widen the theological conceptions, and to invest the supreme ruler with attributes commensurate with the new universe, which had been growing both in vastness and regularity. The result of attempting to fulfil that condition was inconsistent with the common-sense theology of the Scottish philosophy, which tried, by help of 'intuitions,' to preserve a 'personal deity,' a being still individual and therefore conceivable as interfering; and which, finding the metaphysical argument dangerous, was inclined to fall back upon the merely empirical argument of Paley. I have shown, at fully sufficient length, how by substituting an antinomy for a paralogism, Hamilton manages verbally to evade this difficulty; and by extending the sphere of belief beyond the sphere of reason, justifies belief in a God who is at once unknowable and yet may be an object of worship. Mansel's audacious extension of this to the historical and mythological creeds, and the consequent identification of Jehovah with the Absolute and Infinite, can only be regarded as a logical curiosity. The only results were, on the one hand, Mr Herbert Spencer's agnosticism, and on the other, perhaps, some impulse to the speculation of the rising generation. Hamilton and Mansel did something, by their denunciations of German mysticism and ontology, to call attention to the doctrines attacked. The Germans might after all give the right clue; and it might be possible, by substituting a new dialectic for the old logic, to regard the universe as still woven out of reason, and to preserve a theological or at least an idealist mode of conception. With that, however, I have no concern. VII. MILL ON THEOLOGY Hamilton's theory at least recognised the inevitable failure of the empirical or Paley theology which virtually makes theology a department of science. Mill, as a thorough empiricist, might have been expected to abandon theology along with all transcendentalism and ontology. In fact, however, his position was different. I have already pointed out that at one part of his argument he appears to be defending orthodox views of theology as against Mansel. This argument might appear to be merely ad hominem, as intended to show the absurdity of Mansel's doctrine of inconceivability; not to deny the inconceivability itself. Mill, however, really goes further. He approves Hamilton's strange assertion that 'religious disbelief and philosophical scepticism are not merely not the same, but have no natural connection,'(122*) and holds that all the real arguments for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul remain unaffected by the association theory. In his Logic Mill had accepted Comte's 'law of the three stages'; but in his later study of Comte he expressly declares that this doctrine is reconcilable with the belief in a 'creator and supreme governor of the world.' It implies a belief in a 'constant order,' but that order may be due to a primitive creation, and even consistent with the continual superintendence of an, intelligent governor.'(123*) In the posthumous essays this position was developed in such a way as to give some scandal to his disciples.(124*) He not only leaves room for theistic beliefs, but he seems even to sanction their acceptance. In the Three Essays on Religion Mill is clearly treading unfamiliar ground. He refers to the arguments of Leibniz, Kant, and Butler, but, as Professor Bain remarks,(125*) was a comparative stranger to the whole sphere of speculation. He is not so much at home with his subject as he was in the Logic or the Political Economy; and therefore scarcely appreciates certain conditions of successful navigation of these regions made sufficiently obvious by the history of previous adventurers. Yet his candour and his resolution to give fair consideration to all difficulties are as conspicuous as his wish to appreciate the highest motives of his antagonists. Of the three essays, the first two, written before 1858 (On 'Nature' and the 'Utility of Religion'), show less disposition than the last (upon 'Theism') to compromise with orthodoxy; and yet their principles are essentially the same. Mill, of course, is still a thorough empiricist. One version of theology is therefore inconsistent with his most essential tenets. The so-called a priori or ontological argument is for him worthless. It involves, he thinks, the unjustifiable assumption that we can infer 'objective facts from ideas or convictions of our minds.' The 'First Cause argument,' again, can only upon his view of causation suggest an indefinite series of antecedents, and one in which the 'higher' as often follows the 'lower' cause, as the lower the higher. Matter may be the antecedent of mind, as well as mind of matter. Moreover, no 'cause' is wanted for that which has no beginning; and as our experience shows a beginning for mind but no beginning for force or matter, the presumption is against mind.(126*) If, indeed, the world be simply a series of separate phenomena, connected solely as preceding and succeeding, there is no possibility, it would seem, of inferring any unity or underlying cause or ground. The very attempt to reach unity is as hopeless as is the proverbial problem of weaving ropes from sand. The possibility of Philosophical theism is thus destroyed; for the God of philosophy corresponds to the endeavour to assert precisely the unity thus denied in advance. By 'God' Mill must really mean, not Spinoza's necessary substance nor Kant's 'Idea of the pure Reason,' but a being who is essentially one factor of the universe. The confusion is of critical importance. It is constantly assumed, as Mill assumes, that the 'a priori' and the empirical arguments are different moDes of proving the same conclusion. The word 'God' is no doubt used in both cases; but the word covers entirely different senses. The existence of Jehovah might be proved or disproved like the existence of Moses. The God of Spinoza is proved from the logical necessity of the unity and regularity of the universe. One Being may interfere or superintend because he is only part of a whole. The other corresponds to the whole, and interferences or miracles become absurd. Mill, therefore, by calmly dismissing the a priori argument is really giving up the God of philosophy, and trying what he can do with the particular or finite being really implied in Paley. Theology on this showing can be only a part of natural science, and precisely that part in which we know nothing. To know anything or God, in whatever sense, we must go to 'Nature.' In the first essay Mill discusses the question whether anything can be made of the various systems which prescribe 'imitation of Nature' or obedience to the laws of Nature. If Nature be taken in the widest sense, as including man, such systems are migratory. Disobedience to a 'law of Nature' is not wrong but impossible. We may, however, take Nature in the narrower sense in which it is the antithesis of art; or, as he puts it, as meaning 'that which takes place without human intervention.'(127*) It is plain that, in this sense, the whole aim of all human endeavour must be to improve. Nature. Mill emphasises this by expanding the indictment against Nature, which has become more familiar in discussions of the 'struggle for existence.' The 'absolute recklessness of the great cosmic forces,'(128*) the variety of torments, such as the worst tyrants have hardly used, inflicted upon all living beings without the slightest regard to justice, are amply sufficient reasons for not 'imitating Nature.' Hence Mill protests emphatically against the notion that 'goodness is natural.'(129*) All the virtues are in his sense 'artificial.' Sympathy begins as a form of selfishness -- selfishness for two -- and the sentiment of justice is developed by the necessity of external law. It is the pressure from without, the interest of each in the goodness of others, which has really created the moral world. The 'germs' of all these virtues must, it is true, have been present; the species could not have existed had it not been endowed with desire for useful ends; but then, we must also admit the existence of bad instincts, producing 'rankly luxuriant growths' of vice against which a long and precarious struggle must be carried on.(130*) Mill is thus saying emphatically much that has been said by later evolutionists. One remark is obvious. The distinction between 'Natural' and 'Artificial' in this sense is clearly arbitrary for one who, like Mill, rejects the doctrine of Freewill. If Nature makes men with certain capacities, Nature must also be taken to be the cause of all human 'intervention.' The sphere of the 'artificial' is merely one part of the sphere of the 'natural.' 'Sympathy' and 'justice' are not the less natural because they are in this sense artificial. Mill is, of course, fully aware of the fact that his 'nature' is here at most department of Nature in the wider sense. Yet the illegitimate distinction seems more or less to affect his conclusions. He comes to speak as if the distinction corresponded to a line between different worlds. In the non-human world we appear to catch 'Nature' alone and unaided; we can see what it can do its by itself, and judge, if not of its justice, at least of benevolence. He is thus led to use language about men amending Nature or 'co-operating with the beneficent powers,'(131*) which would be more consistent in a thorough-going advocate of Freewill, but which in his mouth must be taken as a metaphorical or provisional mode of speech. To one who uses 'nature' in the widest sense as implying a conception of the universe as a whole, the narrower use would be meaningless. But, as we shall now see, the unity of nature is a conception which Mill virtually rejects. Mill has shown conclusively that it is impossible to interpret Nature as the work of omnipotent Benevolence. So far, he agrees with many predecessors, including Hume and Mansel;(132*) but he does not with Hume become simply sceptical, nor follow Mansel in pronouncing that we must believe a doctrine which we are unable to 'construe to the mind' as conceivable. He suggests an alternative view. It is possible to believe in a God who is benevolent though not omnipotent. This, he declares, is the only 'religious explanation of the order of Nature,' which is neither self-contradictory nor inconsistent with facts.(133*) He 'ventures to assert,' moreover, that it has been the real faith of all who have drawn a worthy support from trust in Providence; 'they have always saved [God's] goodness at the expense of His power.' This, for example, is the true meaning of Leibniz's 'best of all possible worlds.'(134*) Mill declares that the doctrine of the Manichaeans, which he knows to have been 'devoutly held by at least one cultivated and conscientious person of our own day,' is the only 'form of belief in the supernatural which stands wholly clear both of intellectual contradiction and moral obliquity.'(135*) He points out, too, that even Christianity admits a devil, though it places upon the Creator the responsibility of not annihilating him.(136*) Now Manichaeism is a clear confession of philosophical bankruptcy. The whole aim of reasoning is to reduce the universe to unity, and this is to admit that there is an ultimate and insoluble dualism. From the point of view of the ontologist, indeed, the moral difficulty which Manichaeism is supposed to meet is irrelevant. God is the ground or First Cause. Evil is caused as much as good, and if a first cause or an absolute substance be a necessary assumption, we must ascribe to it the whole system of things, good or bad, painful or pleasurable, without trying to separate what is inextricably intertwined. An argument from causation leaves no locus standi for any moral objection. Mill, however, denies the necessity for, or indeed the possibility of, such reasoning. He is fully prepared to admit that in the last resort we come to independent and equally uncaused factors. The question, then, remains, what positive ground we can assign for a belief in any first cause or causes or 'supernatural entities.' Having rejected the metaphysical arguments for a Deity, we reach at last, says Mill, an argument of a really scientific character -- the argument, namely, from design.(137*) That is to say, he tries to find room for an empirical deity who must therefore correspond to a part of nature, not to the whole. He does not hold that the knowledge of nature anywhere involves antinomies or contrary inconceivables. It is a coherent and throughout intelligible system, but it would correspond to the ideal of completed science, not to any metaphysical belief. Within this system there is room for a being who, though he is limited by something external to himself, may yet be an object of worship. In fact, there can be no a priori objection to the theory of a powerful being, who may be discovered, like any other beings known to us, by his action in particular cases. Metaphysicians may decline to call such a being God; but a proof of super-human wisdom and power may be enough for practical purposes.(138*) The proof, then, that such a being exists, must be made by induction; and, as Mill explains, by the first of the famous 'four methods,' namely, by that of Agreement.(139*) This argument, though generally the weakest, is in this case 'strong of its kind.' He illustrates it by the familiar case. The eye is a complex structure which, as it began in time, must have had a cause or causes. 'Chance' is eliminated by the number of instances, and therefore there must be some causal connection between the 'cause' which brought the elements together and the 'fact of sight.' Mill, that is, thinks it necessary to prove what science takes for granted. No man of science disputes that there is some cause of eyes and of every eye. But here we have the curious transition into another order of thought, which corresponds to the passage from the empirical to the transcendental meaning. It is clear that so long as we are in the sphere of science, the only 'cause' of the existence of an eye is the sum of the preceding organic processes. A given animal has eyes because the processes of reproduction involve resemblance to its parents. If we go back to eyeless ancestors, we have the problem how eyes were developed; but the purely scientific answer would still consist in assigning the previous conditions or the precedent stage in the whole process of nature. How do we get out of this series? The argument, according to Mill, would proceed by saying that, as sight follows the eye, the cause must be a 'final' cause; or, in other words, correspond to an 'intelligent Will.' But what is the relation of this Will to the admitted series of events? Causation always sends me back along an indefinitely producible series. Am I to interpret this cause as an 'alternative' to what may be called the natural cause; or as corresponding to a general power, which is manifested through the whole series? In the latter case we may consider the God of nature as an 'immanent' power. His operation is manifest in the general wisdom of the whole system. It is not only consistent with, but implies, the persistence of the 'laws of nature,' and therefore the evolution of eyes, if there was a period before eyes existed. If that view be tenable, we may save 'teleology' by applying it to nature as a whole, but there is no intervention in the actual series of natural events. On the view which Mill accepts, we have an intervention, at some particular point. But how is this to be inferred, or what can it mean? I have already noticed the familiar difficulties in speaking of 'Philip Beauchamp.' The philosophical objection is clear,(140*) and in science 'creation' can be only a word; it introduces an arbitrary and unmeaning interruption, and, under the form of explaining, declares explanation to be impossible. In fact, when such conceptions are brought into the argument, when 'creation' is used as an alternative hypothesis to a permanent order, the answer of the evolutionist is conclusive. Here, accordingly, Mill finds himself confronted by Darwin. He admits that the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest' would 'greatly attenuate,' though it would be in 'no way whatever inconsistent with creation.'(141*) This means, apparently, that Darwinism does not prove that there was not a 'creation' at some indefinite time; though it does show that there is no need for supposing a creation since the existing order began. I have already noticed Mill's view of this 'remarkable speculation.' Here he virtually admits that his theology, such as it is, and, indeed, his whole conception of nature, is virtually opposed to evolution. Science, he says, most truly, leads us to regard nature as 'one connected system, not a web of separate threads in passive juxtaposition with one another, but rather, like the human or animal frame,' in perpetual 'action and reaction'; and the natural version of this, he adds, is theism. The unity of nature, that is, has enabled monotheism to supersede polytheism, because it corresponds to the scientific view.(142*) Yet, while saying this in general terms, he cannot reconcile it to his own theories; he still talks of 'laws of nature' counteracting each other;(143*) he can speak of some things as 'uncaused'; and of a 'permanent' and 'a changeable' element in nature, as though persistence was not a case of causation. He is willing, as we have seen, to assume that anything may be the cause of anything else. The universe is therefore ultimately a struggle between independent forces, and God becomes a being who has to struggle against antecedent or independent things. When science is regarded, not as a system of interdependent truths, where the value of every theory must be judged by the way in which it affects and is affected by all other ascertainable truth, but as an aggregate of purely empirical observations of the order of succession of otherwise unrelated facts, it is easy to introduce such conceptions as 'creation,' which virtually deny the continuity and reasonableness of the order generally, and tend to confuse, as his antagonists would say, Nature with a particular element in Nature; and to make noumena take a side in the struggle between phenomena. Mill is thus able to hold that the adaptations 'in nature afford a large balance of probability in favour of creation by intelligence.'(144*) It is, he grants, only a probability, and not strengthened by any independent arguments. It still remains to consider whether we can find reasons to believe that the creator is moral. He thinks that most 'contrivances' are for the preservation of the creatures, and that there is no reason for attributing the destructive agencies to one Being, and the preserving agencies to another. We may therefore give up Manichaeism, or a conflict between good and evil powers; but we may still have an uncreated at of things with which the good being must struggle. We must be content to believe in a Being of great but limited power -- how limited we cannot even conjecture; whose intelligence may be unlimited though it may also be more limited than his power; who desires the happiness of his creatures but has probably other motives. If he shows benevolence, there are no traces of justice.(145*) Of immortality we can learn nothing, unless from revelation. He denies that a revelation, conflicting with morality, can be divine; but this forces him to limit the power of the Deity. His God desires morality. How can we discover that he desires it? Can these vague surmises be helped by any direct revelation or miraculous intervention? Mill discusses the argument of Hume's essay and reaches, what I take to be the true conclusion, that the real question is whether we have independent reasons for believing in a Deity whose intervention is conceivable.(146*) Considering that we have some reason for believing in such a being, he at last concludes that, in spite of most serious difficulties, historical and philosophical, we are 'entitled to say that there is nothing so inherently impossible or absolutely incredible in the supposition that the "extremely precious" gift of Christianity came from a divinely commissioned man as to preclude any one from hoping that it may be true.' He can go no further, for he sees no 'evidentiary value' even in the testimony of Christ himself. The best men are the readiest to ascribe their own merits to a higher source. Mill, of course, does not believe in the divinity of Christ; he holds that Christ himself would have regarded such a pretension as blasphemous; but it remains possible that 'Christ actually was what he supposed himself to be... a man charged with a special, express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue.'(147*) Mill, we see, declared positivism to be reconcilable with theism. Comte himself, who declared atheism to be the most illogical form of theology, would have agreed that positivism does not disprove God's existence. But Comte would have said that an unverifiable hypothesis about an inconceivable being was simply idle or 'otiose.' Mill seems to treat the absence of negative proof as equivalent -- not indeed to the presence of positive, but -- to the existence of a probability worth entertaining. His theism, if so vague and problematical a doctrine can be called theism, is defended as neither self-contradictory nor inconsistent with fact. Now a theory which is self-contradictory is really no theory at all. Nor is a theory scientifically valuable simply because 'consistent' with facts. A theory must have some definite support in facts. It must at lowest be not only consistent with the known facts, but inconsistent with some otherwise imaginable facts. If it fits every conceivable state of things, it can throw light upon none. But this is obviously the case with Mill's theory. He makes way for a good being by an arbitrary division of nature into two sets of forces. He saves the benevolence by limiting the power of the deity; but then the limits are, by his own admission, utterly unknowable. A power, restrained by unknowable bounds, is a power from which nothing can be inferred. Whatever its attributes, we do not know whether they will affect any state of things. The goodness may be indefinitely frustrated. In fact, on Mill's showing, a power omnipotent but not benevolent, or an indefinite multitude of powers of varying attributes, or a good and a bad power eternally struggling, or, in short, any religious doctrine that has ever been held among men, would suit the facts. Mill's 'plurality of causes' might have suggested this difficulty. I see a corpse. The death may have been due to any one of an indefinite number of causes. What right have I to select one? I am in the same position when I regard the whole of nature as what Hume called a 'unique effect.' The four methods of induction become inapplicable, for there are no other universes and I have no compass to steer by in the region of the unverifiable. What, then, can be the advantage of any belief where conflicting hypotheses must be all equally probable? The question is partly discussed in the second essay upon the utility of Religion. Here Mill takes up the old argument of 'Philip Beauchamp,' the 'only direct discussion' of the point with which he is acquainted,(148*) and endeavours to state the case more fairly and in a less hostile spirit. His argument, however, is in general conformity with Bentham and Grote, and is very forcibly put. One point may be noticed. He virtually identifies 'religion' with a belief in 'the supernatural.'(149*) He compares the efficacy of such beliefs with the efficacy of education (which, as he characteristically says, is 'almost boundless')(150*) and of public opinion, and shows with 'Beauchamp' that when conflict occurs, these influences are stronger than those derived from supernatural sanctions. Now when we believe in a revelation it is intelligible to ask, What is the influence of a creed? It represents a new force influencing men's minds from without. But when the creed is supposed to be generated from antecedent beliefs, the argument must be altered by considering what are the true causes of the belief. How did it come to prevail? An admirer of Comte might have brought out more distinctly the fact that such beliefs mark an essential stage of progress, that what are now sporadic superstitions were once parts of a systematic religion and represented the germs of science. They were approximate hypotheses which had to be remodelled by extricating or dropping the 'supernatural' element. A full recognition of this would diminish the paradoxical appearance of the statement from which he starts, that 'a religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.' The truth surely is that we cannot separate the two elements of a creed. Doubtless there were no such beings as the Zeus or Apollo of popular belief; but polytheism may still have provided the only form in which certain truths could be presented; and was, as Comte would have said, a stage in the process from fetichism towards monotheism and positivism. A discussion of the utility of belief in the 'supernatural' without reference to the place of the supernatural in the whole system of belief must be necessarily inadequate. Mill admits this in substance, and argues that the moral truth may survive the superstitions in which it was bound up.(151*) He goes on to argue, as Comte had argued, that the instincts which once found their sanction in the supernatural world might find their embodiment in the 'Religion of Humanity.'(152*) This he holds to be not only entitled to the name of religion, but to be 'a better religion than any of those ordinarily called by that title.' It is disinterested and does not tend to cramp the intellect or degenerate into a worship of mere power. Mill says emphatically that the Bentham mode of considering religion as a supplement to police by providing 'sanctions' is inadequate; and that religion, like poetry, is valuable as suggesting higher ideals and gratifying the craving for knowledge of corresponding realities. To the selfish, supernatural religion offers heaven; and to the 'tender and grateful' it offers the love of God. He points out that it does not follow that we must 'travel beyond the boundaries of the world we inhabit' in order to obtain such consolation.(153*) And the essay concludes by saying that, though the 'supernatural religions' have always the advantage of offering immortality, the value set upon immortality may diminish as life becomes higher and happier and annihilation may seem more desirable.(154*) Yet in the middle of this argument we have the defence of Manichaeism as a possible creed,(155*) and in the last essay we seem to reach the true account of his leanings to such a belief. He still, that is, requires a breathing-space for the imagination. 'Truth is the province of reason,' but 'in the regulation of the imagination literal truth of facts is not the only thing to be considered.'(156*) Reason must keep the fortress, but the 'imagination may safely follow its own end and do its best to make life pleasant and lovely inside the castle.' Thus, though we are only entitled to hope as to the government of the world and a life after death, the bare hope may have a beneficial effect. 'It makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feelings, and gives greater strength and solemnity to all the sentiments which are awakened in us by our fellow-creatures and mankind at large.' Aspirations are no longer checked by the disastrous feeling of 'not worth while.' Religion, too, has at before us a 'Divine Person, as a standard of excellence and a model for imitation.'(157*) The ideal, it is true, would remain, even if the person were held to be imaginary; and would not be encumbered by theological difficulties. Yet there is an advantage in the belief that a perfect being really exists and represents the ruler of the universe, which cannot be shared by the rationalist.(158*) Hence as, after all, the truth of the belief is possible, it may be combined with the Religion of Humanity. That religion, 'with or without supernatural sanctions,' will be the religion of the future; but it will be strengthened by the feeling that we are 'helping God' and supplying 'cooperation' which 'he, not being omnipotent, really needs.'(159*) Truly, Mill was nearly qualified for a place among the prophets. Mill's arbitrary assumptions, like the metaphysical wire drawings of Mansel, are rather unprofitable in themselves: few people will care to follow them in detail; and neither could boast of many converts. Believers soon became aware of the real scepticism of Mansel's position; and positivists saw that Mill left an opening for superstition. Both Mansel and Mill were troubled about the Religion of Nature. It is abundantly clear, as Mill might have foreseen, that such a theology as he contemplates could be of no real value. It depends essentially upon compromises and arbitrary distinctions. It is still within the sphere of science, though doomed to disappear as science advances, and from the first is inconsistent with the very aims which are proposed by theology. God is admittedly not omnipotent, and his existence is no guarantee for morality or optimism. And hence there is an odd approximation between Mill and Mansel. Mill observes(160*) that the moral character of an alleged revelation cannot be of itself a proof of its divinity. The importance of the 'internal evidence' is therefore 'principally negative.' So says Mansel. 'The evidence derived from the internal character of a religion, whatever may be its value within its proper limits, is, as regards the divine origin of the religion, purely negative.'(161*) Where is the difference? If the morality of a revelation be bad, Mill argues that the revelation must be at once rejected. Mansel thinks that although the morality be not clearly good, it may in some way represent a divine command. Immoral laws cannot be divine, says Mill, though a good law may be human. A law apparently bad, replies Mansel, may be divine, though, of course, the badness can only be apparent. Here, as elsewhere, the believer in the empirical character of morality appears to attribute most certainty to the moral judgment. The solutions differ accordingly. Mill supposes that God must be good, but reconciles this to facts by assuming that God is not all-powerful. Mansel will not give up the power, and to preserve the goodness has to assume a radical incapacity in the intellect -- a necessity of believing where there is an impotence of conceiving. Mill, that is, is content with the empirical deity, who is necessarily limited; and Mansel keeps the deity of ontology but admits that he cannot be known. Mill's conception is purely arbitrary, though he keeps within the limits of conceivable experience; while Mansel preserves the language appropriate to the conception of absolute unity, and yet admits that it can mean nothing for us. 'Agnosticism' seems to be an easier and more rational alternative; if it means an open admission that we know nothing, when we can only save our appearance of knowledge by arbitrary assumptions or by the use of meaningless words. Of Mill's position it must be frankly admitted that his desire for a religious and even supernatural belief is a proof of dissatisfaction with his own position. He felt here, as elsewhere, that something was wanting in his philosophy. What that really was may partly appear by considering other contemporary solutions. Mansel represents a particular phase of thought which is already extinct, and views differing both from theirs and from Mill's had in practice a far wider influence than either. The Utilitarian view naturally identifies a religious creed with a belief in certain historical statements of fact. If the facts be provable the religion is true; if disproved it is false. If there was such a being as Jehovah, it was desirable to worship him; and the creed would then be useful. If there was no such being, worship was folly. The test of the utility of a religion was, therefore, simply the truth or falsehood of its historical statements. If its gods were made by the fancy, not by the reason, the result is a condemnation of religion in general. That is simple and logical, and recognises an indisputable truth. So far as a religion makes false statements, they must be abandoned; and so far as its influence depends upon the falsity, it is pernicious. A religion, however, represents more than can be estimated by this simple test. The poetical value of Homer is not destroyed by disproving the existence of the Pagan deisms, nor the value of the Hebrew Scriptures by disproving the existence of jehovah. The facts alleged may be fabulous and absurd; but they are also symbols for setting forth views of the world and of conduct, and so giving emphatic utterance to important truths. The old religions were attempts of men, in early stages of thought, to embody ideals of conduct which may really have been of the highest value to mankind. They were essential, again, to the social bonds which have, in fact, determined the formation of society and facilitated the growth of sympathy and philanthropy. Therefore, if a religious creed be false when interpreted as a simple statement of fact, we have not exhausted its significance or even touched the really most important significance of the religion itself. Believers felt more or less clearly that such attacks as 'Philip Beauchamp' affected only externals, and left the need for religion unsatisfied. Only as the actual creed was pledged to maintain the truth of certain statements, which were daily becoming more incredible, the necessity appeared of finding some stronger position than the old Paley scheme, which virtually regarded religion as a mere statement of historical fact, or as a department of natural science. To trace the consequences would be to write a history of modern theology. I shall try only to indicate the relation to the Utilitarians of a few thinkers. Two main lines of thought were conspicuous in Mill's generation, and correspond to what Newman called 'liberalism' and 'dogmatism.' VIII. LIBERALISM A very instructive example of one phase of liberal thought was Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872). Before Mill's attack upon Mansel, Maurice had been engaged in a sharp controversy invoked by the Bampton Lecturer. No two men could be more thoroughly at cross-purposes. In their arguments each word bears a different signification for the two disputants. Each, of course, vehemently disapproved the other; and Mansel was provoked to call Maurice a liar(162*) in direct terms. The real difficulty is to reduce the argument to any common measure; and Maurice's position, though not easy to define, is significant. Maurice,(163*) as I have said, was one of Mill's friendly adversaries in the early debating society. His references to Mill are always respectful, little as could be their intellectual sympathy; while Mill's judgment was that 'more intellectual power was wasted in Maurice than in any one else of my generation.' Deep respect for Maurice, admiration of his subtlety and power of generalisation, only increased Mill's wonder that he could find all truth in the Thirty-nine Articles.(164*) Maurice had been brought up as a Unitarian, and was profoundly impressed by the barren wrangling over the dogmatic partitions of various sects. After long hesitation he at last found satisfaction in the Church of England and, as he declared, by accepting the Anglican formula in their obvious and most natural sense. To men of other persuasions, his interpretation appeared on the contrary to amount to a complete transformation of their natural meaning. Maurice was therefore excluded from all the higher preferment, and passed for an insidious heresiarch. He replied by a full and frank, though hardly a lucid, assertion of his own convictions; and gradually proved, even to his enemies, his entire superiority to any worldly motives. He was expelled in 1853 from his professorship at King's College for denying the truth of the popular version of hell, a little before the denial had become a commonplace. Disciples had already gathered round him and regarded him with the reverence due to the purity and loftiness of his character. As the head of the Christian Socialists in the critical period of 1848, he had at least given a proof that divines could take a genuine interest in the great social problems of the day. Maurice himself was little qualified for business details, and the whole movement failed for the time, like most others which start from the sympathy of the outsiders instead of the actual experience of the actual sufferers. It was, however, significant of a most important change, more easily underestimated than exaggerated. Maurice deserves all respect, as Mill observes, for his action, of which, moreover, it is only just to say that it was really characteristic of his whole position. What, then, was Maurice's position in theology? In the first place he recognised most fully a truth which, in various forms, gives the real strength to all great religious teachers. He held that the value of a religion depends upon its congeniality to the highest parts of human nature. He is thus at the opposite pole to the Philip Beauchamp doctrine, according to which the essence of religion is to create a spiritual police, and to add the sanction of hell to the sanction of the gallows. Maurice is equally opposed to the sacerdotalism which makes the essence of religion consist in a magical removal of penalties instead of a 'regeneration' of the nature. He takes what may be vaguely called the 'subjective' view of religion, and sympathises with Schleiermacher's statement that piety is 'neither a knowing nor a doing, but an inclination and determination of the feeling.'(165*) It is evident, again, that Maurice could as little base his belief upon external evidence as his morality upon external Sanctions. So far he may be said to coincide with the philosophical view. A religion must be an expression of general truths accessible to all men, and independent of time and place. Maurice had been a wide reader of philosophy; he spent much time upon a history of 'Metaphysical and Moral philosophy'(166*) which, if vague in the statement of definite theories, shows wide sympathy and desire to enter into the spirit of the various schools. In the Kingdom of Christ(167*) he declares that 'eclecticism is a necessity of the age'; meaning by eclecticism a doctrine which shall discover what is the truth contained in all the partial systems and creeds of all ages. Here, again, Maurice was sharing the best liberal impulses of the day, and sharing them because they were congenial to a generous and tender-hearted nature. The same tendency makes him averse to any definite system of metaphysical dogmas. The dialectical wranglings over dogmas which disgusted him in his youth appeared again in Mansel's metaphysics. The Bampton Lectures showed, according to him, that we cannot leave the ground of solid fact for the 'logical ground without being involved in a series of hopeless quibbles which no human being ought to trouble himself with, unless he means to abandon the business of existence and to give himself up to feats of jugglery.'(168*) In such regions no lasting foundation can be found. Nor, on the other hand, can we be satisfied with the mere historical critics who, like Strauss, pick holes in the gospels or, like Strauss's opponents, manage to mend them; or with the philologists who argue whether 'the line in the O can be detected with the aid of spectacles or not.'(169*) A religion which is to move men's hearts must have some wider and deeper basis. So far Maurice's teaching would command the sympathy of all who called themselves liberal. But what becomes of Logic? Can philosophy dispense with it altogether? Maurice professedly appeals to the heart. The appeal is made over and over again in a great variety of forms: to the 'great human heart,' to 'bedridden sufferers,' to 'peasants, women, and children,'(170*) and we are told that it is the 'office of the theologian' to appeal not to his own judgment or that of the ages, but to the 'conscience, heart, reason of mankind.'(171*) Nothing can be more to the purpose if we are considering the efficacy of a religious belief; but we must ask how this appeal is related to the question of its truth. The emotions are not reason, though they are bound to be reasonable. The position is that of all mysticism. The mystic is one who virtually dethrones reason in favour of the heart. Therefore mysticism leads to all the varying beliefs which are suggested by our unguided feelings. When Maurice was charged with being himself a mystic or neoplatonist, his reply was that the error of the mystic is not in recognising an 'inner light,' but in supposing that his intuition is something personal and private, and not a universal faculty of the human heart.(172*) He admits, that is, that all religion implies the direct recognition of divine influences by the human heart, though it is terribly apt to confound the true intuition with certain erroneous doctrines. By what test, then, are we to separate the true light from the misleading gleams of human passion and prejudices? How can we know that it is the divine Logos which is speaking to us, and not some sophist substituting a mere human theory? This gives Maurice's characteristic doctrine, repeated in countless forms with most genuine fervour, and yet leaving the painful impression that we can never get a distinct meaning. He tells us again and again that we require not a system but a revelation; that we are to believe in God, not in a theory about God; not in 'notions' but in principles; that a theology is groundless which 'accepts as a tenet what is revealed as a truth,'(173*) and that we shall be 'driven to creeds' by 'weariness of tenets.'(174*) These, and countless variations upon the same theme, involve a puzzling distinction. How, precisely, does the belief in God differ from the acceptance of a theory about God? Maurice, I may perhaps say, takes the belief in God to be an operation, not a mere bit of logic; an act of the man's whole nature, not a purely intellectual process such as the deduction of the conclusion of a syllogism. It is the apprehension of the 'inner light,' always perceptible if the eye be opened, and which is in the same indissoluble moment not merely enlightening but life-giving. The vision is also 'dynamical': the submission of ourselves to a force as well as the recognition of the existence of certain outward facts. It implies not merely the admission of a new theory about the universe, but the bringing ourselves into harmony with the one central force of the universe -- that is with the God who is Love as well as power and wisdom. This is the true mystical doctrine; and that doctrine, if not the most logical, is the most unanswerable form of religious belief. If a man believes that he has the 'inner light,' he is in his own court beyond appeal. But the difficulty of making his decisions valid for others cannot be evaded, and implies some use of logic. If the inner light implies knowledge as well as an emotion, it should be expressible in forms true for all men. The mere formula by itself may be barren, or merely subordinate; but if any definite creed is to emerge, it must include tenets capable of logical expression. This is, in fact, the problem round which Maurice is always turning. The result is indicated in his little book upon the Religions of the World.(175*) It embodies one of the most marked tendencies of modern thought. No divine can now speak of strange religions as simply devil-worship, or limit divine truth to his own at of dogmas. The simple or logical rationalist had inferred that the true creed must be that which is common to all religions. But to reject all special doctrines was to leave a blank residuum of mere abstract deism, if even deism could survive. It was but another road to the 'religion of nature.' Yet that was the tendency of most liberal divines within the church. The 'broad church' party, as it was called, was getting rid of 'dogma' by depriving the creed of all meaning. Maurice's method is therefore different. The element of truth in all religions is not any separable doctrine common to all. It is to be found by regarding all creeds as partial or distorted expressions of the full truth revealed in Christ. On this showing therefore Buddhism testifies to the truth of Christianity, but Christianity does not testify to the truth of Buddhism. Or, to take a trifling but characteristic argument,(176*) Wilberforce and the Unitarian, W. Smith, were colleagues in a great benevolent work. Does that show that the doctrine of the Trinity is unimportant? No; Smith should have seen that the zeal of Wilberforce 'manifestly flowed out of the faith' in the divinity of Christ. Wilberforce, on the other hand, should see that Christ might rule in the heart of the Unitarian though the Unitarian knew it not. The divine influence may operate upon the heart which does not recognise its true nature. Thus Wilberforce, instead of becoming 'latitudinarian,' could escape 'latitudinarianism.' This may be true, but it would clearly not convince Smith. If you appeal to your heart, why may I not appeal to mine? Is not your conviction, after all, 'subjective' -- as representing your own personal prejudices -- and would it not be just as easy, with equal skill, to invert the argument? Or is not the real source of action in both cases the benevolence which has nothing to do with either set of dogmas? The unintentional shifting is implied in the process by which Maurice manages to accept the Thirty-nine Articles. Taken as truths, they utter the voice of the heart, or imply an apprehension of the divine light. Taken as merely logical, they are but tenets or 'notional' dogmas. The doctrine of the Atonement, for example, as made into a quasi-legal theory by Archbishop Magee, is simply horrible: it deserves all that Paine could have said of it, and actually 'confounds the evil spirit with God.' But take it in another sense-not as proclaiming the supremacy of a harsh and unjust ruler, but as declaring the process by which the love of God and of his son reconciles men to himself -- and it becomes infinitely comforting, and expresses the feelings of 'tens of thousands of suffering human beings.'(177*) So the doctrine of 'endless' punishment is horrible and revolting. But eternity has properly nothing to do with time. 'Eternal punishment is the punishment of being without the knowledge of God.'(178*) That knowledge does not procure but constitutes the life. This is no metaphysical theory, but gives the natural meaning which commends itself to 'peasants, women, and children.'(179*) To the ordinary mind, the natural inference would be that we should throw aside dogmas so capable of misinterpretation, and which admittedly have, as a historical fact, covered a confusion between God and the devil. The Athanasian Creed appears to be at least an awkward and ambiguous mode of expressing a universal benevolence and an aversion to metaphysical dogma. But to reject it would be, as Maurice thinks, to fall into mere rationalism. The formulae which are so revolting in the mouth of the mere dogmatist are essential when read as utterances of the deepest feelings of the human heart. We can only hold to their true meaning and denounce their misapplication. After all comes the real difficulty of fitting a 'subjective' religion to a historical religion. The Christian creed does assert facts, and facts to which historical evidence is applicable. A dogma can be made into an utterance of sentiment. A statement that there was a deluge in the year 4004 B.C. must be decided by evidence. Maurice was painfully shocked when the excellent and simple-minded Colenso brought up this plain issue.(180*) Though Colenso had stood by him generously in the king's College time, Maurice, who had fully recognised the generosity, felt himself bound to protest. The dilemma was, in fact, most trying. To declare that historical evidence is irrelevant, that our faith is independent of the truth of the Old Testament narrative, is really to give up historical Christianity. On the other hand, to argue that the criticisms are trifling or captious is to stake the truth of the religion upon the issue of facts. Maurice complains of Colenso for beginning at the wrong end.(181*) As, however, Colenso has made certain statements, whatever his method, the truth must be either denied or admitted. Are they true but irrelevant, or relevant but false? Maurice cannot unequivocally take either side. He appears to hold that we may accept the deluge because it teaches us a good lesson (that bad people will be drowned, apparently), that is, to accept whatever is edifying; or to think perhaps the deluge was a little one, that is, to put himself on the ground of historical criticism. Here, in fact, was the growing difficulty. Mansel could still speak scornfully of the quibblings of Strauss. But historical criticism had now to be reckoned with, and subjective religion must consent to be merely subjective, or submit to have its results tested by the broad daylight of common sense. From Maurice I turn to Carlyle, the beacon-light of the age, according to his disciples -- the most delusive of wildfires, according to his adversaries; but in any case the most interesting literary figure of his time. Extraordinary force of mind and character are manifested in the struggles with inward difficulties and external circumstances, which made much of his life tragic and his teaching incoherent. With the imagination of a poet he yet cannot rise above the solid ground of prose: a sense of pervading mystery blends with his shrewd grasp of realities; he is religious yet sceptical; a radical and a worshipper of sheer force; and a denouncer of cant and yet the deviser of a jargon. Such contrasts are reflected in his work, and are not really hard of solution. A spiritual descendant of John Knox, he had the stern sense of duty, the hatred of priestcraft, and the contempt for the aesthetic side of things which had been bred in or burned into the breed. He came into the outer world, like his hero Teufelsdröckh,(182*) as a 'Baptist living on locusts and wild honey,' and occasionally presented himself to others as a dyspeptic polar bear.(183*) He had imbibed radicalism in a home of sturdy peasants, pinched by all the sufferings of the poorer classes in the war time. When the yeomanry was called out in 1819 he was more disposed to join the sufferers than the guardians of order.(184*) So far, Carlyle was in sympathy with James Mill, whose career also illustrated one mode of passage from Puritanism to political radicalism. Nor would Carlyle differ from Mill widely on certain religious points. The conventional dogmatism of the kirk had lost its savour for both, and meant a blind tradition, not a living force. Carlyle only went with the general current of youthful intellect in abandoning the dogmatic creed. When Irving made a painful effort to put life into the dead bones, Carlyle recognised the hopelessness of the enterprise. But he was no nearer to Mill. Carlyle's 'conversion' took place in Leith Walk in June 1821.(185*) It followed three years of spiritual misery; and it is recorded in the famous chapter in Sartor Resartus on the 'Everlasting No.'(186*) That passage is, indeed, the keynote to Carlyle's history. Briefly, he had found himself face to face with materialism and atheism. The weapons of defence afforded by such teachers as Brown were futile. Carlyle felt that he too was drifting towards the abysses whither they were being dragged by Hume. The word duty, so sceptics would persuade him, had no meaning, or was the name for a mere calculation of pleasure; an exhortation to build not on morality but on cookery. The universe seemed to be 'void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one dead, unmeasurable steam-engine, rolling on in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O the vast solitary Golgotha and Mill of Death!' The nightmare was broken by an act of will. The 'Everlasting No' pealed 'authoritatively through all recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then it was that my whole Me stood up in native God-created majesty and with emphasis recorded its protest.' The result is noteworthy. 'Even from that time the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining sorrow at it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.' Carlyle had won not peace but a 'change of misery.' He could look at the enemy with 'fire-eyed defiance' but not with the calm of settled victory. His emancipation was not won by a reasoned answer to doubt. In the earlier essays Carlyle shows apparent sympathy with German philosophy.(187*) He speaks with profound admiration, though in general and popular language, of the doctrines of Kant, Novalis, and Fichte, and seems to accept Coleridge's theory of a Reason superior to the Understanding.(188*) Carlyle, however, was still less of a metaphysician proper than of a poet. He is a man of intuitions, scorning all logical apparatus in itself, and soon afterwards appears to regard metaphysics in general as a hopeless process of juggling which tries to educe conviction out of negation and necessarily ends in scepticism.(189*) To him Goethe rather than any metaphysician presented the true solution. No two men of genius, indeed, could be more unlike. The rugged, stormy Puritan could hardly, one would have thought, breathe the serene atmosphere of the prophet of culture. But the very contrast fascinated him. Goethe had cast aside all the effete dogmas, and had yet reached the victorious position in which symmetrical development was possible. Carlyle remained to the end desperately struggling, full of 'fire-eyed defiance,' but never getting outside the chaotic elements. The metaphysical systems of Kant's successors attracted him as protests against materialism, but he preferred a shorter cut to the end, and his Scottish common sense was always whispering that philosophy was apt to be mere 'transcendental moonshine.' Carlyle therefore was essentially protesting against the mechanical doctrines embodied in Utilitarianism. But he saw the hopelessness of meeting the attack in the old-fashioned armour of theology. The dogmas of the churches were dead, beyond all hopes of resuscitation. The verse in Past and Present gives his view: 'The builder of the Universe was wise, He planned all souls, all systems, planets, particles; The plan He shaped all worlds and aeons by, Was -- Heavens! -- was thy small nine-and-thirty Articles.'(190*) An earlier version of these lines speaks of the 'logic of Maurice,' who had characteristically proved that the articles were a charter of religious liberty.(191*) Carlyle rejected formulas. The Maurician rehabilitation led to mere cant. Like Maurice, he was in principle a mystic, and holds that mysticism may be taken in a true sense,(192*) in which it seems to be much the same with an Idealist as contrasted with a materialist doctrine. When he first made Mill's acquaintance, it was under the erroneous impression that Mill too was a mystic.(193*) I have spoken of Carlyle's personal relations to Mill. His judgment of the Utilitarians generally is significant. Froude publishes some entries from Carlyle's journal of 1829-30, a time when the prophet was only preluding his fuller utterances.(194*) The Utilitarians, he holds, exhibit tendencies spread over the whole intellect and morals of the time. Utilitarianism must collapse, because the reason will triumph over the senses, and the angel at last prevail over the brute. The moral nature of man is deeper than the intellectual; the significance of Christ, he says, is altogether moral, and the significance of Bentham 'altogether intellectual, logical.' Where logic is the only method, the resulting system can be only mechanical. 'Alas! poor England! Stupid, purblind, pudding-eating England,' Bentham with his Mills(195*) grinding 'thee out morality -- and some Macaulay, also be-aproned and a grinder, testing and decrying it.' The mention of Macaulay reminds him that the Utilitarians have a relative merit. 'They have logical machinery,' and do grind 'fiercely and potently on their own foundation, whereas the Whigs have no foundation. The Whigs are amateurs, the radicals are guild-brethren.'(196*) The public utterances are versions of the same doctrines. In Sartor Resartus Teufelsdröckh would consent that the 'monster Utilitaria' should trample down palaces and temples 'with her broad hoof,' that new and better might be built.(197*) So in the Hero-Worship(198*) he calls 'this gross steam-engine Utilitarianism' an approach towards a new faith. It is at least a 'laying down of cant,' an honest acceptance of the belief in mechanism: 'Benthamism is an eyeless heroism; the human species, like a hapless blinded Samson, grinding in the Philistine mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of its mill, brings huge ruin down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.' In later years Carlyle insists more emphatically upon the bad side of Utilitarianism. He had grown more bitter, and was more alienated personally. In the Chartism (1839) he attacks the 'Paralytic Radicalism' -- paralytic being substituted for 'philosophical' which has sounded statistically a 'sea of troubles' around us, and concluded that nothing is to be done but to look on. Paralytic Radicalism, accordingly, is 'one of the most afflictive phenomena the mind of man can be called upon to contemplate!'(199*) The summary of his later view is given in the famous summary of the 'Pig Philosophy' in the Latter-day Pamphlets. The universe is regarded as an 'immeasurable swine's trough,' and the consequences deduced in a kind of Swiftian catechism.(200*) Utilitarianism means mere sensualism. Carlyle's interpretation, true or false, reduces the issue to the simplest terms. Will you accept the mechanical or the mystical view? Carlyle's metaphysical leanings were to some forms of transcendental idealism. Time and space, as he says in the Sartor Resartus, are the canvas on which our life-visions are painted. They are mysterious 'world-embracing phantoms,' to be rent asunder by the seer who would pierce to the Holy of Holies. They are illusions, though while we are on earth we try in vain to strip them off. Men are spirits; the earth but a vision. We issue from and fall back into mystery. 'We are such stuff,' in his favourite quotation,' As dreams are made of, and our little Life Is rounded with a sleep.'(201*) This is poetry rather than philosophy; and though the thought is always present to Carlyle and constitutes one secret of his most powerful passages, it would be impossible to grasp it as a logical theory or imprison it in any formula whatever. All systems and formulas are suspicious to him. He is a 'seer' who not only does not require any logical apparatus, but holds that to require one is to give up the point. It is the sense of the ephemeral nature of man, of his suspension in the midst of infinities, which stimulates or overpowers him. That sentiment lies deeper than all reasoning. The 'mechanical' view has the advantage derived from the authority of the physical sciences; but the sciences, he holds, lie in a superficial region; they belong to the world of appearance, not to the world of reality. When the mystic ventures into the ordinary daylight and fights the man of science with his own weapons, he will get the worst of it. Science must have its rights on its own ground; and to suppose the supernatural intruding here and there into natural phenomena is to court defeat. There are no 'miracles,' but the universe is itself miraculous. His great message, given in Sartor Resartus, is that the natural is the supernatural.(202*) We are not to pick up 'intuitions' here and there; but we have one intuition, that the world is not a mechanism but a revelation of God. No set of words can hold the great mystery. They are hopelessly inadequate, and the sooner they are swept into oblivion the better. But the one profound mystery remains. Even such a vague indication of Carlyle's general meaning is an attempt to define an imaginative tendency which shrinks from definite formulation. The more practical application is perhaps more definable. The 'Everlasting No' means: I will not believe that the world is a mere dead mechanism, nor that the sole forces by which society is moulded are the sensual appetites. Rightly or wrongly, Carlyle attributed those views to the Utilitarians. They had a certain negative merit, in so far as they took their own line directly and consistently. The ordinary theology was a mass of 'shams' and 'cants' -- a collection of subterfuges by which men could blind themselves for the time to the necessary drift of the current. The way to meet the Utilitarian was not to compromise or to argue, but to leave the world of outward fact and to plant yourself on a deeper base: the direct, imperative, and unassailable conviction or intuition of the divine order implied everywhere beneath the 'living raiment.' The issue then becomes simple and absolute. No set of creeds and 'formulas' can matter; 'evidences' are an absurdity; the one formula is the divinity of the universe; the only evidence, the direct intuition of the eternal verities. The religions of the world are good so far as they recognise this truth; bad so far as they try to imprison it in any sort of formula or make it dependent upon any particular fact. To Maurice, as to others, this attitude seemed to be hopeless. Does it not become mere pantheism a sentiment too vague to be efficient? Pantheism is a phrase scarcely appropriate for Carlyle's creed. If Carlyle believed in God, he also believed for practical purposes in the devil. He might have been expected to accept some such pessimistic scheme as Schopenhauer's. He was deterred by his innate Puritanism. The voice of God for him, however vaguely defined, is heard in morality. God is essentially the giver of the supreme laws of human conduct, however much the legislator may be wrapped in mystery. The 'simple creed,' according to his chief disciple, which was the 'central principle' of all Carlyle's thought, was the creed of the Jews and the Puritans, namely, that obedience to the divine law is the one condition of human welfare, and that nations who worship Baal even in the guise of art or of material prosperity are on the road to destruction.(203*) Carlyle, then, is so far like Coleridge and Maurice, that he feels that a religion must find some deeper and more universal base than can be discovered in the region of empirical fact. It must correspond to an imperative dictate of the whole heart or the intellect. He carries out the principle with incomparably more vigour by rejecting all historical supports and particular formulas. Neither the Thirty-nine Articles nor the decrees of councils or popes can be adequate to express the mystery; nor can the religious sentiment be dependent upon particular events and 'miracles.' It is the difficulty of all such methods that the appeal to the heart comes to be the appeal to the prejudices of the individual prophet. In a man of such marked idiosyncrasies as Carlyle's this is of course conspicuous. His version of history and of philosophy reflects his inherited prepossessions. It is enough here to mark one or two of the main points upon which he came into conflict with contemporaries. A characteristic result is his theory of hero-worship. The divine element in the world cannot be enshrined in one sacred book or a single supernatural order. The revelation comes not only through Moses or Christ, but through every great man. Odin, Mahomet, Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, John Knox, Johnson, Rousseau, Burns, Cromwell, and Napoleon are his chief instances in the 'lectures'; each, more or less perfectly, was the vehicle of a more or less partial revelation. But then, may we not see gleams of the same light in all the multitudinous strugglings of the poor human beings who have more or less consciously co-operated in the world's progress? Here and there his shrewd common sense leads him to recognise the value even of the stupid and the formula-ridden.(204*) But, as a rule, he thinks of the world as a collection of 'dull millions' who 'as a dumb flock roll hither and thither,' led by little more than 'animal instincts.' Among them at rare intervals are scattered men of intellect and will.(205*) The great men, as he says elsewhere, are 'children of the idea' -- such a one as Ram Dass, who set up for a god because he had 'fire enough in his belly to burn up all the sins in the world.'(206*) Inspiration belongs to the inspired few, who have to struggle amid the vast chaotic masses incapable of originating thought or action. To Carlyle, the essence of history was biography; the personal influence of a small minority of great men. The view condemns scientific modes of history. To disbelieve in the importance of great men is supposed to show materialistic principles. A 'law' of human development denies the importance of individual peculiarities. To hold that Cromwell or a Napoleon was a relatively insignificant accident, the mere fly on the wheel of great evolutionary processes, seems to be to lead to the exclusion of all action of the will or of thought. To Carlyle accordingly the historical method in some of its tendencies was profoundly antipathetic. To diminish the power of the individual was, in his view, to deny the spiritual forces upon which society is dependent. Inspiration, therefore, though no longer confined to a particular church, is still confined to the elect who stand out as burning and shining lights in the dim twilight of his Rembrandtesque pictures. The great movements, then, of modern times correspond to the blind 'animal instincts' of the 'dumb flock.' They are good as the Utilitarians were good, or as the French revolutionists were good, so far as their blind action leads to the deposition of the false leaders and the destruction of their effete systems. The French Revolution is 'the crowning phenomenon of our modern time; the inevitable stern end of much: the fearful but also wonderful, indispensable, and sternly beneficent beginning of much.'(207*) This is a brief summary of the great prose epic, than which no book, as he truly declared, had for a hundred years come more direct and flamingly 'from the heart of a living man.'(208*) The passage from which I have quoted, however, indicates a further point. The French Revolution, he holds, was essentially part of the revolt of the oppressed classes of Europe against their oppressors. But the positive doctrine of the 'rights of man,' theories which denied the need of government or demanded simply to throw the reins upon the neck of the governed, could lead only to chaos. The reconstruction must be by a new government; by a government of wisdom or, what to him stems the same thing, a government by the wise. The 'new Downing Street,' as he puts it, is to be a Downing Street inhabited by the 'gifted of the intellects of England.'(209*) Nothing therefore could seem more contemptible.than the doctrine of laissez faire. That is simply to leave the fools to themselves. Modern parliaments, with twenty-seven millions mostly fools listening to them, fill him with amazement.(210*) A definition of 'right,' then, which makes it ultimately depend on the wishes of the fools, is simply absurd. Not the 'animal instinct' but the conformity to the divine law is the test of morality; and therefore not obedience to the majority but loyalty to the 'hero.' But how is the hero to be known? Could he tell us that, he replies, he would be a Trismegistus. No 'able editor' can tell men how 'to know Heroism when they see it that they might do reverence to it only, and loyally make it ruler over them.'(211*) Here is, however, the difficulty. Obedience to the hero is our only wisdom, and obedience to the quack is the road to destruction. One is, it may be said, obedience to right, and the other obedience to might. How are we to tell right from might? The statement that Carlyle confused the two, that he admired might in reality, while professing to admire right simply, was the most popular and effective criticism of his opinions. He is constantly accused of approving mere brute-force. Nothing could less correspond to his intention; but he is puzzled in particular cases. He declares again and again that they coincide in a sense. 'Might and right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be identical.'(212*) 'That which is just endures,' is an edifying statement, and one which he constantly emphasises; but may we not infer that that which endures is right, and be led to admire very questionable proceedings? Does the success of a Cromwell for his life-time, or the more permanent success of a Frederick, justify their proceedings? Carlyle may have often begun at the wrong end; but the curious point is that this part of Carlyle's teaching approximates so closely to a doctrine which he first detested. Froude tells us that he fought against Darwinism, but apparently 'dreaded that it might turn out true.'(213*) Yet is not the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest' just the scientific version of Carlyle's theory of the 'identity of Right and Might'? Was not evolution really in harmony with his conclusion? To him, according to Froude, it seemed that Science led to 'Lucretian Atheism.' He still believed in God, but when Froude once said that he could only believe in a God who did something, Carlyle replied, with a cry of pain which I (Froude) shall never forget, He does nothing!' The reconstruction which was to follow the destruction was indefinitely delayed. The hero did not come; and Carlyle was a prophet who had led his followers into the desert, but found that the land of promise always turned out to be a mirage. Carlyle held that hypocrisy was still worse than materialism; but, as he grew older and watched modern tendencies, he became less hopeful of the 'Exodus from Houndsditch,' and sometimes wished the old shelter to remain standing. He shrank even from the essayists and reviewers and from Colenso, though he had rejected historical creeds far more summarily than they had done. Carlyle, then, and Maurice might both be called 'mystics' in the sufficiently vague sense used by Carlyle himself. They object to logic on principle. They appeal to certain primitive instincts which can be overridden by no logical manipulations or by any appeal to outward facts. Both, after all, are forced in the end to consider the plain, simple, 'objective' test. Maurice finds that he must answer the question of the historical critic: are the statements of fact true or false? Carlyle, not seeking for a base to support any particular creed, can throw the Thirty-nine Articles overboard, but finally comes into conflict with scientific conceptions in general. He finds himself opposed to the scientific view of historical evolution, and sees in the most conspicuous tendencies of modern thought the disappearance of all the most ennobling beliefs. The 'supernatural' and 'transcendental' have, after all, to conform to the prosaic matter of fact understanding. Accepting, as I do, what I suppose to be the scientific view, I fully believe that Carlyle's method is erroneous; that in denouncing scientific methods as simply materialistic, he is opposing the necessary logic of intellectual development, and that his hero-worship and theory of right really lead to arbitrary and chaotic results. There is, however, another remark to be made. If Carlyle's view of a scientific doctrine be correct; if its legitimate result be the destruction of morality, of all our highest aspirations, even of any belief in the reality of the mind or the emotions; if the universe is to be made into a dead mechanism or a huge swine's trough, we are certainly reduced to a most terrible dilemma. It was really the dilemma from which Carlyle could never escape, and the consciousness of which tormented him to the last. He had to choose between allegiance to morality and allegiance to truth. Scientific tendencies, especially as embodied in Utilitarianism, seemed to many men, and, as Carlyle's case shows, to the men of the highest abilities, to have that tendency. The absolute sincerity of that conviction is unmistakable. I do not doubt that men, holding the conviction sincerely, were bound to seek some escape; nor could I condemn them if under so terrible a dilemma they allowed their love of truth to be partly obscured. In fact, too, I think that it cannot be denied that many of the men to whom we owe most, whose morality was the highest and most stimulating, and who, moreover, were most hostile to the lower forms of superstition, did in fact take this position. Though Maurice was far from clear-headed, I fully believe that his liberal and humane spirit was of the greatest value, and that he did more than most men to raise the social tone in regard to the greatest problems. Carlyle's doctrine is, I equally believe, radically incoherent; but I am also convinced that Carlyle's impetuous and vehement assertion of certain great social, ethical, and political principles was of the highest value. It must be allowed, I think, that such men as Carlyle and Emerson, for example, vague and even contradictory as was their teaching, did more to rouse lofty aspirations and to moralise political creeds, though less for the advancement of sound methods of inquiry, than the teaching of the Utilitarians. There was somewhere a gap in the Utilitarian system. Its attack upon the mythological statements of fact might be victorious; but it could not supply the place of religion either to the vulgar or to the loftiest minds. Then the problem arises whether the acceptance of scientific method, and of an empirical basis for all knowledge, involves the acceptance of a lower moral standard, and of a materialism which denies the existence or the value of all the unselfish and loftier elements of human nature? Can we adhere to facts without abandoning philosophy; or adopt a lofty code of ethics without losing ourselves in dream-land? Some thinkers sought a different line of escape. IX. DOGMATISM The 'Oxford Movement,' according to Newman, was really started on the 14th July 1833 by Keble's sermon on 'National Apostasy.' The 'movement' has become the subject-matter of vast masses of literature, as becomes a movement among a cultivated class. While Mill and his friends were under the impression that reason was triumphant and theology effete, the ghost of the old doctrinal disputes suddenly came abroad. Learned scholars once more plunged into dogmatic theology, renewed the old claims of the church, and seriously argued as to what precise charm would save an infant from the wrath of a righteous God. What explanation can be given of this singular phenomenon? There was clearly a 'reaction,' but why should there be a reaction? The Evangelical movement had been mainly ethical or philanthropical. It protested against evils when the national conscience was already in advance of the actual practice. That was its strength; its weakness was that it accepted, without examination, the current beliefs of the day, and simply did without philosophy. The Oxford movement, though many of its leaders were keenly awake to social evils, did not start primarily from a desire for social reform. Nor can its origin be traced directly to a philosophical development. Its leaders had, of course, been influenced by literary and speculative developments. They had, as Newman tells us, been stirred by Scott and Wordsworth and by Coleridge's philosophy. And yet it is plain enough that the impulse did not start from philosophical speculation. The movement corresponded to changes which would be part of the whole history of European thought. I have said enough of the Utilitarians to indicate the special English conditions. The Utilitarians saw in the established church the most palpable illustration of a 'sinister interest.' Bentham was attacking 'Church of Englandism'; James Mill was proposing to apply Bentham's principles by substituting an ethical department of the State for a church, and replacing the sacrament by tea-parties; the radicals of all varieties regarded disestablishment and disendowment as the natural corollary from the Reform Bill, and a Whig statesman significantly advised the prelates to put their house in order. It was taken as a hint to prepare for confiscation. Yet the Church was enormously strong; it was interwoven with the whole political and social organisation, and the genuine radical represented only a fraction of the population. Oxford in particular, the very focus of conservative and aristocratic interests, the favourite place for such culture as was popular with the landowners, the clergy, and all the associated classes, was startled and alarmed, and began to rouse its latent energy. Into Oxford no serious philosophical movement had penetrated. It had been slowly amending its system, but it still adhered in substance to the ancient traditions. Dimly it knew that infidels and rationalisers were preaching dangerous theories. Pusey had visited Germany in 1825-27, and had come back with some knowledge of German thought. He was even accused, very superfluously, of rationalism. Of that there was no real danger(214*) for a man thoroughly steeped in the Oxford spirit. A sufficient illustration of Oxford education may be found in the curious controversy between Copleston, who had done much to rouse his University, and the Edinburgh Reviewers. Copleston replied vigorously, and yet his boast is a tacit confession. He declares that Oxford possesses good classical scholars, and we need not inquire how far they were really abreast of the day. Oxford men had to get up logic in Aldrich and make some acquaintance with Aristotle; and he argues that the mathematical studies of the place were more than 'elementary.' They were even beginning to include 'fluxions.' If this were a matter for boasting, it could not be seriously held that Oxford was doing anything comparable to the German universities as an adequate organ of the national intellect.(215*) In point of fact, the system allowed the great majority to remain in complete ignorance of any recent movements of living speculation, a century or two behind-hand in philology, and absolutely indifferent to science. Naturally, when the champions of the Church came out to fight, they were armed with antiquated weapons. Yet many of them were men of great ability, and one at least a man of most indisputable genius. The alarm spread by radical assaults upon the Church was equally felt by the liberal divines. No one, for example, was more alarmed than Dr Arnold. But Arnold, a man of lofty and generous instincts and strong political interests, took the essentially liberal view. The Church, as all active-minded men agreed, was in danger. It was threatened by 'the godless party,' the radicals and revolutionists who were the heirs of jacobinism, and were as hateful to him as to the high-churchmen. But here his diagnosis becomes essentially different. Arnold thought that the Church had become a separate sect because it adhered to old prejudices and to sacerdotalism. His remedy was to make it truly national, by widening its borders, admitting dissenters, and encouraging philosophic thought. The Church should be, as Coleridge urged, an essential part of the State organism; not a close corporation belonging to a priestly order. It was properly identical with the State. It must be liberalised that the State might be made religious, and drop the antiquated claims to magical authority which opposed it to the common sense of the masses and the reason of the thinkers.(216*) This was precisely the antithesis to the view taken by the leaders of the 'movement.' They held that the Church was weak, precisely because it had been unfaithful to its higher claims and made an alliance with the State, which had passed into a bondage. This, then, is one aspect of the division between the liberals and the dogmatists; and what I have now to do is to endeavour to indicate the dogmatical view. I confine myself to two representatives of the movement: Newman, whose literary genius needs no emphasis; and W. G. Ward, conspicuous as one who never shrank from an inference, and who, to do him bare justice, was incapable of supporting logic by misrepresenting his opponents. He represents the forlorn Hope, and reveals the tendencies which frightened his less daring comrades. The true starting-point of the 'movement' can hardly be given more distinctly than in Ward's Ideal of a Christian Church.(217*) It represents the stage at which Ward was becoming fully aware of the consequences of his own logical position. The Ideal has ceased to be lively reading; it is like an echo from old common-room disputations of young men intensely interested in the ecclesiastical movements of the day. Ward contrasts the actual Church of England with the ideal Church of Christ, and already finds in the Church of Rome a more promising embodiment of the true spirit. The true Church is of divine institution, the channel of supernatural graces, and independent of all human authority. The Church of England, if not the creature, has become in fact the slave, of the State. It claims a parliamentary title, and in return for privileges has abandoned its rightful authority. Above all, a true church is known by its discipline. It should be the incarnate conscience of the society, and should superintend, enforce by its sanctions and stimulate by its example, the spiritual nature of its members. A true church should exercise an omnipresent spiritual authority, reaching every detail of life and organising the perpetual warfare against the world, the flesh, and the devil. The utter decay of any such power is the most fatal symptom of the Anglican body. From a contemporary book, Ward extracts a ghastly account of the misery, vice, and spiritual degradation of the mass of the population.(218*) To remedy such evils, he declares, the 'science of dogmatic theology' is more essential than the science of political economy.(219*) Dogmatic theology is in fact the basis of 'ascetic theology,' or of the whole theory of religious discipline. If, indeed, the Christian theology be taken seriously, if spiritual degeneration has an importance altogether out of proportion to material progress, and the salvation of souls be the one thing necessary, the conclusion is inevitable. To enforce those truths upon the reason, to impress them upon the imagination, and to ensure a constant reference to them in all our conduct, must be the essential work of an authoritative church. Ward expatiates enthusiastically upon the ceaseless activity of the Church of Rome; upon the elaborate training of the priesthood; upon the catechising of children, the daily meditations, the constant practice of confession, and the various methods by which the church fixes the eyes of believers steadily upon spiritual realities. A church incapable of this can no longer be the salt of the earth, and, in fact, the Church of England, though it has boasted of being 'the poor man's church,' has been utterly blind to the 'accumulated mass of misery which has been gradually growing to a head for the last sixty years.' 'Through no agency of hers,' attention has been roused by such men as Lord Ashley; and yet the church has shown no symptoms of shame at such important neglect.(220*) What else can you expect from the organ of the comfortable classes? The social evils were serious enough. Dogmatic theology may not seem at first sight to be the most appropriate remedy; but, if it were, it certainly needed a better army of defenders. The ideal church must have a theological school, a body of trained teachers capable of meeting the assaults of unbelievers, of pointing out the true results of biblical criticism, of scientific and historical inquiries, and of defining the attitude of the church in regard to them.(221*) Ward is awake to the growth of a new infidelity, more dangerous than that of the last century. Carlyle, Kant, Michelet, and Milman are mentioned as representing different manifestations of this evil spirit. Strauss, too, is selling more rapidly than any foreign work.(222*) Moreover, 'Protestantism,' as he maintains, is utterly effete and unable to cope with the antagonist. The 'theory of private judgment' involves doubt, and will tend inevitably to 'Comte's philosophy.'(223*) Comte was represented in England by Mill, who was accordingly the butt of Ward's sharpest attacks. If Ward thus expresses the seminal principle of the movement, Newman was the most efficient leader. Newman, as he tells us in the Apologia, held three doctrines: first, the 'principle of dogma,' which was the ' fundamental principle' of the movement of 1833, and was the antithesis of 'liberalism'; secondly, the principle, implied by this, of a 'visible church'; and thirdly, the doctrine that the Pope was antichrist.(224*) The last, of course, vanished; but the two others remained and only took a sharper form in his mind. The history of his thought is simply the history of his growing conviction that the true authority was that of Rome, not of the Anglican Church.(225*) The 'principle of dogma' is equivalent to the statement that 'religion as an ere sentiment' was to him 'a dream and a mockery.' The liberal principle applied to theology means the substitution of vague feeling for definite truth. But to speak absolutely of a 'principle of authority' is to raise a difficulty. To believe in authority is to ground my belief on the belief of some one else. Therefore the questions remain: why does the authority believe, and why should I accept its belief as authoritative? The Church must be competent to judge, and I must be able to judge of its competence. The special answer given by Ward and Newman to these points gives their true position. First of all the dogmatists, agreeing so far with the liberals, were convinced that the ordinary opinions of the day led to infidelity or to complete scepticism. A perfectly consistent mind must, as Newman declared, accept Catholicism or Atheism. Anglicanism is 'the half-way house to Rome, and Liberalism is the half-way house' to Atheism.(226*) Protestantism, again, as involving the right of private judgment, must lead, as Ward agreed, to Comte. Taken simply, such sayings amount to pure scepticism. To admit the consistency of Atheism is to admit that you have no grounds of confuting the Atheist. Upon the assumptions common to both, the sceptic would get the better of the Protestant. The rationalised theology of Paley had really given away the key of the position. It could not permanently hold out against the legitimate development of the eighteenth century infidelity. 'As a sufficient basis for theism,' says Ward, the argument from final causes is 'absolutely and completely worthless'.(227*) and he declares that Paley's argument is quite unable to prove God's love, or goodness, or justice, or personality.(228*) But Paley and his contemporaries had explicitly given up any other argument. A Protestant, then, was logically bound to Atheism. Newman agrees. 'I have ever viewed this argument with the greatest suspicion,' he says, and for good reasons. It may prove the power and, in lower degrees, the wisdom and the goodness of God; but it does not prove his attributes as judge and moral legislator.(229*) So again, Newman declared(230*) that it was 'a great question whether atheism is not as philosophically consistent with the phenomena of the physical world, taken by themselves, as the doctrine of a creative and governing power.' Paley's proof of Christianity is naturally as unsatisfactory as his proof of theology. In one of the Tracts for the Times,(231*) Newman applied what he called a 'kill-or-cure' remedy. He argued, that is, that if his antagonists rejected his doctrines for want of Scripture proof, they would have to abandon their own for the same reason. After recalling and enforcing a number of the objections made by sceptics to the historical evidence, he concludes that the evidence is by itself insufficient. Shall we for that reason refuse to believe? No, we must begin by believing. If we refuse 'to go by evidence in which there are (so to say) three chances for revelation and only two against it, we cannot be Christians.'(232*) Hume, then, or Mill or Comte, can at least hold his own upon empirical ground. Unaided reason, as Newman says in the Apologia,(233*) can indeed discover sound arguments for theology, but historically and in practice it will tend towards simple unbelief. The 'liberals' endeavoured to meet the enemy by appealing to some philosophical or quasi-mystical doctrine; but in so doing they either dropped dogmatic and historical creeds altogether, or saved them by non-natural interpretations. Religion sublimated into philosophy becomes a mere sentiment, or a system of subtle metaphysics. It cannot effectively discipline the ordinary mind or inspire a church to meet the world. Yet some philosophical principle is necessary. To the Oxford men philosophy meant chiefly some modification of Aristotle. They held, of course, that the necessity of a first cause was demonstrable, and that a theology could be constructed by the pure reason. This, however, leads to the old difficulty, the perplexity which runs through Christian theology in general. It is forced to combine heterogeneous elements. Philosophy must be combined with mythology; and the first cause identified with the anthropomorphic deity. Your metaphysic proves the existence of God in one sense, and your concrete creed assumes the existence to be proved in a sense quite inconsistent. By calling inconsistency mystery, you verbally force contradictions into a formula, and speak of a God-man; but the difficulty of getting from the metaphysical to the historical theology is thus only masked. How is it to be overcome? Ward, laying the greatest stress upon the metaphysical argument, came into conflict with Mill. Ward and Mill always spoke of each other with marked respect. They communicated their writings to each other before publication. Ward reviewed Mill's Logic in the British Critic in the most complimentary terms. Mill wrote to Comte in hopeful terms of the services to be rendered to speculation by the new school of divines. Ward thought Mill by far the most eminent representative of the 'antitheistic school,' and spoke with generous warmth of his high moral qualities.(234*) The point, however, upon which Mill specially valued himself was just the point upon which Ward took him to be utterly in the wrong. Mill denied the existence of 'necessary truths.' Ward believed in the existence of a great body of 'necessary truth.' Ward argues forcibly for the 'necessity' of mathematical truths, and denies the power of association. Ward, in short, is Mill's typical 'intuitionist.' Intuitions, he says, are truths which, 'though not parts of present consciousness, are immediately and "primarily" known with certitude.'(235*) He adopts from Lewes the word 'metempirical,' as expressive of what lies beyond the sphere of phenomena.(236*) and holds that all 'intuitions' give us 'metempirical' knowledge. Lewes invented the phrase to express the difference between the legitimate 'intuitions' implied in experience and the illegitimate, which are 'metempirical' as professing to transcend experience. Ward holds that 'metempirical' truths are valid and essential to reason. Morals, again, says Ward, are as certain as mathematical intuitions; the truth that 'malice and mendacity are evil habits' is as necessary as the truth that 'all trilateral figures are triangular.'(237*) Further, I 'intue' that 'all morally evil acts are prohibited by some living Personal Being'; and from this axiom it follows, as an obvious inference, 'that this Person is the supreme Legislator of the Universe.'(238*) The obvious difficulty is that Ward proves too much. His argument is leading to an independent theism, not a theism reconcilable with an historical creed. Accordingly he has to limit or resist his own logic. He admits the uniformity of nature as 'generally true,' but makes two exceptions, in favour, first, of 'an indefinite frequency' of miracles, and secondly of the freedom of 'human volitions.'(239*) The Freewill doctrine leads to an elaborate and dexterous display of dialectic, though he must be a very feeble determinist who could not translate Ward's arguments into his own language. Beyond this we have further difficulties. If the creed be as demonstrable as Euclid, how can anybody deny it? Ward has to account for the refusal of those who do not accept his intuitions by some moral defect; they are like blind men reasoning upon colours. Mill's 'antitheism' shows that he was guilty of 'grave sin'; for, on the Catholic doctrine, there can be no 'invincible ignorance of the one true God.'(240*) Many men, however, condemn the creed of revelation precisely upon the moral ground. The Utilitarians denounced the profound immorality of the doctrine of hell and of vicarious punishment. Ward's argument requires such a conscience as will recognise the morality of a system which to others seems radically immoral, The giver of the moral law is also the giver of the natural law. But it seems to be as hard to show that Nature is moral in this sense as to show that the moral legislator, if omnipotent, can also be benevolent. The one great religious difficulty, as Ward allows, is the existence of evil. He quotes Newman's statement that it is a 'vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind a sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution.'(241*) Plainly, it comes to this: the 'intuitions' are in conflict with experience. They assert that the creator is omnipotent and infinitely just and benevolent. The admitted facts are incompatible with the theory, and are therefore declared to imply an 'insoluble mystery.' Ward intimates that he can show the true place of this difficulty after setting forth the 'impregnable basis on which Theism reposes.' But he does not appear to have found time for this ambitious enterprise. This introduces the more special problem. How from your purely metaphysical position do you get to the historical position? What is the relation between the authority of the Church and the authority of the pure reason? Though Ward was perfectly satisfied with his own metaphysics, it was of course evident to him that such reasoning was altogether beyond the reach of the mass of mankind. If you are to prove your creed by putting people right about Freewill and the uniformity of nature, you will adjourn the solution till the day of judgment. An essential point of his whole argument is the utter incapacity of mankind at large to form any judgment upon such matters. The Protestant 'right of private judgment' means scepticism. Everybody will have his own opinion if nobody trusts any one else. If the truth of Christianity is to be proved by the evidences after Paley's fashion, nobody has a right to believe who has not swallowed whole libraries and formed elaborate canons of criticism. The peasant who holds opinions about history, to say nothing of science and philosophy, must obviously take them on trust. Hence we must either give up the doctrine that 'certitude' is necessary, or we must find some proof accessible to the uneducated mind. But it is an essential point of Catholicism, if not of Christianity, that faith is necessary to salvation. If wrong belief be sinful, right belief must be attainable. But men by themselves are utterly impenetrable to right reason. We have, then, to combine scepticism as to the actual working of the human intellect with dogmatism as to the faith. How is that feat to be accomplished? Ward replies, by the doctrine of 'implicit reasoning.' Acceptance of the intuitions implies acceptance of all legitimate deductions. But this position is more fully 'drawn out' (in his favourite phrase) by Newman. It runs through a whole series of the writings in which the delicacy and subtlety of his style are most fully displayed,(242*) and the difficulty of the position most fully exhibited. Chillingworth had stated the Protestant argument. To admit the infallibility of the Church, he had said, takes the individual no further, unless he is infallibly certain of the infallibility. To this Newman replies(243*) that I may be certain without claiming infallibility. Certainty that two and two make four is quite consistent with a power of mathematical blundering. Perhaps it should rather be said that, if there be necessary truths, every one must, within their sphere, be infallible. But no one asserts that the infallibility of the Church is a necessary truth. If real, it is a concrete fact to be proved by appropriate evidence. After exhausting your eloquence in proving the fallibility, and indeed the inevitably sceptical result of 'private judgment,' you are bound to show how, in this case, the individual can attain certitude. The judgment that 'the Church is infallible' has been disputed by reasonable people. How are we to show that, in this case, their doubts are unreasonable, if not wicked? Why do not the proofs of the weakness of private judgment apply to this as to every other judgment? Have you not really cut away the foundation on which sooner or later your argument must be based? Yet certitude is made out to be a moral duty even for the average believer. The theory is most explicitly worked out in the Grammar of Assent. Newman exerts all his skill in expounding a very sound doctrine. As a matter of fact, we form innumerable judgments by what he calls the 'illative sense'; that is to say, not by formal argument, but by a complex system of 'implicit' reasonings. 'Logic,' as he says, 'does not really prove. It enables us to join issue with others... it verifies negatively'; and for 'genuine proof in concrete matter we require an organism more delicate, versatile, and elastic, than verbal argumentation.'(244*) Logic is a chain which 'hangs loose at both ends,'(245*) for the first principles must be assumed, and the abstract concept never fits the actual complexity of concrete fact. By the 'illative sense,' again, we reach innumerable truths. We hold that England is an island, or that the man whom we see is our brother, with a faith indistinguishable from absolute conviction. We go further; we believe that a friend is honest, or, say, that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, without admitting the slightest scruple of doubt. All knowledge whatever of fact plainly implies something different from formal logic; and, so far, the only question seems to be why so palpable a truth needs so elaborate and graceful an exposition. The answer is indicated by the polemic against Locke. Locke had proposed, as a test of a love of truth, the refusal to hold any proposition, with a greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.'(246*) The statement seems to be not only unassailable but in conformity with Newman's doctrine. Should we believe England to be an island? When Julius Caesar landed, it was not proved; and he would have been wrong to be certain. When did it become right to be certain? Surely at whatever moment it was adequately proved. It is never so proved that to deny it would be self-contradictory, but by this time it is as much proved as any fact can be proved. Locke would simply justify himself by saying that in this case our 'assurance' does not exceed the 'proofs on which it is built.' The approximation to demonstration is indefinitely close, though never absolute, and the difference becomes too small to be perceptible. A difficulty emerges only if we at once admit the rightness of belief and deny the sufficiency of the evidence. Newman, having shown that we believe in concrete truths not proved by abstract logic, argues that we also assume many truths not proved even by sufficient empirical evidence. We have what Locke called a 'surplusage of assurance.' The fact, again, is undeniable. We believe implicitly in countless things upon insufficient evidence. This, as Locke would add, is one main explanation of the prevalence of error, and also a proof that error may be innocent. It is a duty to be candid; it cannot be a duty to be right. We must listen to reason; but the effect of reasoning must depend upon the constitution of our minds, and the various beliefs with which they are already stored. Now to Newman this doctrine always seems to be sceptical. It amounts to the 'liberalising' view that all creeds are equally good if only they be equally sincere. Hence he lays stress upon the doctrine that 'assent' is a volitional as well as an 'intellectual act.' It is our duty to obey the reason; and when the 'illative sense' declares the truth of a proposition, we are bound to an 'active recognition' of the truth.(247*) Locke, on the contrary, holds that if we listen to reason, the assent follows automatically by a non-voluntary act. On Newman's showing, an element of volition intrudes into logic. Belief belongs to action as well as to pure speculation. 'To act you must assume,' he says, 'and that assumption is faith.'(248*) If acting upon an hypothesis is the same thing as believing the truth to be demonstrated, this leads to a singular result. A judge, says Newman, acts upon the assumption that a criminal's guilt is proved.(249*) Yet, as it is never mathematically demonstrated, he has a 'surplusage of assurance.' The judge may be of opinion that the prisoner's guilt is highly probable and yet be bound to acquit. Is he to believe that the prisoner's innocence is demonstrated? The case really shows the opposite: simply that as we have to act upon probabilities, we are not the less, but the more, bound to guard against the illusion that they are certainties. At every moment and in every relation of our lives, we are forced to act upon imperfect knowledge. The obvious inference is that we are bound to keep in mind that it is imperfect; or otherwise we shall be morally bound to commit intellectually error. If, therefore, a creed be not demonstrably true, we may wisely act as if it were true, but have no right to deny that we are acting upon probability. Butler's famous doctrine that 'probability must be the guide of life,' is true if 'properly explained.' But the difficulty is that, in religious questions, 'certitude' is declared to be essential; it must correspond to something more than a 'balance of arguments';(250*) and yet the certitude rests upon faith, and faith is 'assumption.' The probability must be somehow converted into certainty. In the Essay on Development, Newman meets Locke by declaring that 'calculation never made a hero,' and praising the Fathers for 'believing first and proving afterwards.'(251*) Though calculation does not make a hero, it is essential to making heroism useful. The true hero is the man who is ready to act, though he fairly estimates the chances and knows perhaps that they mean a probability of death. This gives the real dilemma. Allow conviction to be influenced by the will, and you must admit that a belief morally right may be intellectually wrong. You justify the judge for mistaking presumption for demonstration, and the child for believing that a drunken parent is strictly sober. If so, you sanction erroneous beliefs. And this admittedly applies in particular to religious beliefs. The world, it is granted, is full of false beliefs, attained precisely by your method. Not one man in ten of all that have lived has belonged to the true Church. Newman, in fact, admits that his ultimate proof is 'subjective.' There is no ultimate test of truth beside 'the testimony borne to truth by the mind itself.'(252*) He does not, indeed, deny the possibility of demonstration: he often asserts it; but he holds that the demonstration will not in fact convince. Men differ in their first principles, and he cannot change a man's principles more than he can make a crooked man straight or a blind man see.(253*) Hence we have the final answer. We have really to desert a logical ground and to take our stand upon instinct. Our instincts are in one respect infallible. Belief in revealed religion depends upon belief in natural religion. Natural religion is founded on the conscience. The conscience means the sense of sin, and therefore the desire for intercession which is satisfied by the priesthood. The religion of philosophy ignores the conscience, though it recognises the moral sense.(254*) The order of the world, indeed, seems to contradict this. What strikes the mind 'so forcibly and so painfully' is God's absence from His own world. He has left men in ignorance, and is a 'hidden God.' We are forced to the conclusion that 'either there is no Creator or He has disowned His creatures.'(255*) Such doubts 'call for the exercise of good sense and for strength of will to put them down with a high hand as irrational or preposterous.'(256*) Why 'irrational,' if they cannot be answered? Newman, indeed, declares that he is as certain of the existence of God as of his own, although he has a difficulty in putting the grounds of his certitude into 'mood and figure.'(257*) The position is illustrated by a remarkable sermon(258*) in which, after his conversion, he again applies the old 'kill-or-cure' remedy. He puts the various difficulties of theistic belief with his usual force. He declares that there are 'irrefragable' demonstrations of the doctrine; but he admits the difficulties.(259*) They are so great, indeed, that if you once believe in God you need not shrink from accepting any of the mysteries of the Catholic creed. The result seems to be that while Newman declares that 'demonstrations' exist, he also emphatically declares that they will not practically convince. The proof for the ordinary mind must depend upon the 'illative sense'; and the illative sense implies the existence of the conscience, and, moreover, of the conscience as distinguished from the 'moral sense.' The 'moral sense' leads only to the hollow morality of 'so-called civilisation' and of superficial philosophy. To convince men we must appeal to their conscience. But for the conscience he would be 'an atheist, a pantheist, or a polytheist when he looked into the world,' that is, if guided by experience alone.(260*) What, then, is, as he puts it, the 'burdened conscience' which is my true informant?(261*) The conscience is the sense of sin. It tells us of a judge; of one who is 'angry with us and threatens evil.' It tells us of the need of atonement, and yet of the absence of God from the world. Natural religion, the foundation of revealed religion, is therefore, as Lucretius said, a yoke; it 'burdens and saddens the religious mind.' It proves, too, the doctrine of which Butler was the 'great master,' the absolute necessity of 'vicarious punishment.'(262*) Thus, as he says, in another famous passage, natural religion teaches gloom and horror of ourselves. To be 'superstitious... is nature's best offering, her most acceptable service, her most mature and enlarged wisdom, in the presence of a holy and offended God. They who are not superstitious without the gospel, will not be religious with it.'(263*) This is, indeed, the real pith of the doctrine. Without asking what may be the logical demonstration, the actual persuasive force is the appeal to the conscience as a 'sense of sin.' Starting from the conception of the Church implied in Ward's Ideal, that is the foregone conclusion. We accept the Church theology, because we feel the terror which the Church soothes. Newman, as was inevitable from the confusion between rules of conduct and canons of logic, has given us the real cause of belief, but not a good reason for believing. And here the apologists are precisely at one with the ordinary deist of the eighteenth century. They agree that the doctrine was accepted because it fell in with 'natural religion' in 'superstition.' The power of the Church, or the power of priest-craft, depends essentially upon the belief in its power of pardoning sin and reconciling man to God. The difference is that the deist asserted the superstition to be false, and pardon a quack remedy; whereas Newman sees a fundamental truth in the superstition, and the full explanation in the revelation committed to the Church. How, then, is the issue to be decided? You are wrong, says Newman, as a blind man judging of colours is wrong. You have quenched the conscience, and therefore have no guide. Yet, if a blind man can never realise what sight is, no blind man ever doubts that sight exists. Nothing is easier than to prove to him that I have means of knowledge which he does not possess. Why, if conscience reveals truths, cannot the truths be impressed even upon those who have no conscience? Why should I believe that your theory is right, when the ultimate test is one which, by its nature, can appeal only to its own authority? If men have radically different instincts which can be brought to no common measure, scepticism is the inevitable result, unless a supernatural authority can be applied. That is precisely Newman's conclusion; leave men to themselves, he says, and they will have no 'common measure,' unless controlled by a supreme power. The 'absolute need of a spiritual supremacy' is the 'strongest argument in its favour.'(264*) This gives Newman's relation to the philosophy of the time. The 'irrefragable demonstrations' of the schools are left in the background. Granting them to be irrefragable, do they prove or disprove his point? Does the 'first cause' argument properly lead to Nature or to the God of Catholicism? To overlook this is to assume that your reasoning is confirmed by the very logic to which it is radically opposed. Is Newman really sceptical when he denies the validity of the scientific view, or the man of science when he denies the validity of Newman's? What is the relation of 'science' to philosophy? Private judgment is said to lead, in religion, to scepticism. The obvious reply is that in the physical sciences it has led to indisputable truths. Whence the difference? Newman speaks as though the proofs of scientific truths rested exclusively upon the arguments for each proposition separately. Men of science accept Newton's theory, he says, without rigidly testing it each for himself, and assume that it conforms to the facts, even if the conformity be not obvious.(265*) Believers in theology should make similar assumptions. But this omits the real ground of conviction. We believe in Newton's theory of gravitation, not simply because we have read the Principia; not even simply because the argument is part of a whole system of consistent and independent truths; but also because it can be verified by proofs intelligible to all, and because it can predict facts open to the severest tests. The enormous authority of science is not due to the fact that it is believed by this or that expert or body of experts, but because it manifests its power by working wonders which are not miracles. It can appeal to a criterion which is not supernatural, and is as valid for the sinner as for the saint. Here is one result of the Oxford indifference to science. When Newman was invited by innocent people to appear as the champion of faith against science, he refused, for the reason (among others) that he could not tell what was the position to be assailed. He would not deny that 'science grew, but it grew by fits and Starts,' and threw out hypotheses which 'rose and fell.'(266*) He supposes science to represent a fluctuating set of guesses. Even if it appeared to contradict revelation, the contradiction could be evaded by an easy device. Science and Scripture contradict each other as to the motion of the earth. We cannot decide till we know what motion is, and then it may turn out that science is false or reconcilable to Scripture.(267*) This saying alienated Froude and Kingsley, and, I fancy, with good reason; but we can see how Newman came to it. Theology, he thought, rested on a deeper foundation than science. It represented a single body of deductive truth; while science represented a set of detached conclusions formed upon particular facts. This appears to reverse the truth. 'The scientific principle, in the first place, is at issue with the theology not upon this or that point, not on the conflict between particular statements, but all along the line. Two differing conceptions of the universe are at issue, and one must be accepted. Newman substantially replies that science has its own -- a lower -- sphere.(268*) In the Idea of a University he argues that theology must be admitted into the course, because it deals with the realities underlying phenomena, and is therefore the rightful queen of sciences. The history of the actual relations of science and theology would supply a curious commentary upon this opinion. Newman meanwhile holds that the conflict arises from a scientific misconception. The latest infidel device, he says, is to leave theology alone. The man of science trusts to the interest of his own pursuits to distract the mind from theology, which then perishes by inanition.(269*) His error consists in leaving the higher study out of sight, or applying methods legitimate in one sphere to those of the other sphere. Science, then, does not give certainty, or gives certainty which has no bearing upon the higher orders of truth. The reply is obvious. The physical sciences, in the first place, give a body of consistent and verifiable truth, and the only such body of truth. In the next place, it is impossible to assign science and philosophy to two different provinces. The scientific doctrines must lay down the base to which all other truth, so far as it is discoverable, must conform. The essential feature of contemporary thought was just this: that science was passing from purely physical questions to historical, ethical, and social problems. The dogmatist objects to private judgment or free thought on the ground that, as it gives no criterion, it cannot lead to certainty. His real danger was precisely that it leads irresistibly to certainty. The scientific method shows how such certainty as is possible must be obtained. The man of science advocates free inquiry precisely because it is the way to truth, and the only way, though a way which leads through many errors. His test is that which so impressed Newman himself, Securus judicat orbis terrarum; only orbis terrarum must not be translated one European Church during a few centuries. The man of science fully agrees with Newman that there is a true 'illative sense'; that men can reason implicitly before they can reason in logical form, and make approximately true formulae though involved in innumerable superstitions and errors. The ultimate criterion is the power of verifying conclusions, of testing truth by its capacity to explain phenomena, and by its conformity to the scientific truth already established beyond dispute. But there is no royal road to truth in philosophy any more than in science; or, rather, it must be far longer and more difficult to reach it. Therefore we must not lay down rules as absolutely certain, but subject them to perpetual examination, to what Newman calls 'the all-corroding force' of the intellect, in the conviction that by that process we are slowly approximating to sounder belief. The errors have to be 'corroded.' This is admittedly true of all the natural sciences; we have to puzzle out the truth in every development of thought, from astronomy to physiology, by a slow and painful process. Moreover, it is true of all the religions of the world except, as Newman would say, the Catholic. Why is that to be an exception? Newman candidly admits a difficulty. The suggestion that a religion to be universally accepted should be universally revealed, as though written 'on the sun,' is, he admits, plausible.(270*) He urges that there always was a revelation somewhere, though a revelation in Jerusalem was not of much use in Peking. Yet the admitted fact seems to be a fatal objection to the a priori probability which he assumes of a revelation. To nine-tenths of the world there has been only a 'virtual,' that is to say, no revelation. How, then, does he try to make room for the one exceptional case? The secret is to keep to the geocentric point of view. Shut yourself up within the Church, interpret the world by reference to it, instead of interpreting it by its place in the world; pronounce the instincts by which it has been supported to be ultimate and infallible, instead of listening to the obvious explanation, and you can certainly escape self-contradiction -- as it is still always possible on the same terms to hold to the Ptolemaic astronomy. You have only to assume as a first principle that the earth does not move, and the facts can always be forced into conformity. To outsiders this is to confuse the causes with the reasons of belief. So Newman in his famous development theory provides a kind of parallel to the scientific theory. He shows with the greatest clearness how a certain body works out the properties implied in the type, and so obeys an implicit logic. He illustrates the case by analogies with other bodies, such as the Anglican Church.(271*) But why stop there? How did the first beliefs aria from which the full theological doctrine expanded? Newman again suggests the answer. They arise from the 'natural religions' or superstitions, many of which were admittedly embodied in the Church.(272*) We have only to carry out his view logically, and the 'supernatural' element becomes needless. Christian and Hebrew legends take their place in the general process of human thought, and the assertion of the ultimate authority of one particular body is simply the description of the arbitrary claims which it developed under natural conditions. If we keep the earth in the centre of our system, we require a supernatural force to make the sun revolve. Let things fall into their right order and all becomes harmonious. The positions thus occupied by the leading writers of the time indicate the true issues. The 'dogmatists,' the 'liberals,' and the 'Utilitarians' are virtually agreed upon one point. The Paley theology was in a hopeless position. Protestantism could only lead to infidelity. The arguments from design and from miracles are radically incoherent. They confuse a scientific with a philosophical argument, and cannot lead legitimately to proving the existence of a supreme or moral ruler of the universe. While accepting scientific methods they are radically opposed to scientific results, because they tend to prove intervention instead of order, and disappear as scientific knowledge extends. Mill's attempt to suggest some kind of tentative and conjectural theology was obviously hopeless, and interesting only as showing his sense of the need of some kind of religion which would embody high ethical ideals and stimulate the purest emotions. Empiricism was destructive of the historical creeds, but could not of itself supply the place of the old faiths. Here then we come to the great problems by which men are still perplexed. The Utilitarian, which is the scientific view, lays down an unassailable truth. A religious creed, so far as it is a statement of fact, must state facts truly, and be in conformity with the results of scientific teaching. Moreover, no theology can be legitimately constructed upon this basis. The gods become figments; and theology is relegated to the region of the unknowable. If that be the whole truth, religious creeds are destined to disappear as knowledge is extended and organised systematically. 'Philip Beauchamp, gives the true Utilitarian position. Religion, however, as J.S. Mill felt, is a name for something far wider. It means a philosophy and a poetry; a statement of the conceptions which men have formed of the universe, of the emotions with which they regard it, and of the ethical conceptions which emerge. It has played, as it still continues to play, a vitally important function in human life, which is independent of the particular statements of fact embodied in the historical creed. The 'mystical' doctrine, represented by Carlyle, corresponds to this element of religion. Men will always require some religion if religion corresponds not simply to their knowledge, but to the whole impression made upon feeling and thinking beings by the world in which they live. The condition remains that the conceptions must conform to the facts; our imagination and our desires must not be allowed to override our experience; or our philosophy to construct the universe out of a priori guesses. What doctrine can be developed upon those terms, whether a 'religion of humanity' in some shape be possible, is still an open question. To the dogmatist this view seemed to be equivalent to the simple evaporation of all religion into mere vague emotional mist. To him a religion appeared essentially as a system of discipline or a great social organism, governing men's passions and providing them with a cult and a concrete vision of the universe. The difficulty is that such a creed cannot be really deduced from a general philosophy. The dogma has to be based upon 'authority,' instead of basing the authority upon proof That is a radically incoherent position, and leads to the acceptance of the dogmas and traditions which have become essentially incredible, and to a hopeless conflict with science. To found a religion which shall be compatible with all known truth, which shall satisfy the imagination and the emotions, and which shall discharge the functions hitherto assigned to the churches, is a problem for the future. I must be content with this attempt to indicate what was the relation to it of the Utilitarian position. NOTES: 1. Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy and of the Principal Philosophical Questions discussed in his Writings was first published in 1865. I refer to the fourth edition (1872). The book was more changed than any of Mill's other writings in consequence of the insertion of replies to various criticisms. A list of those replies is given in the preface to the third and fourth editions. The essays on 'Religion' appeared in 1874. 2. See Veitch's Life of Hamilton (1869), and an article by Hamilton's daughter in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 3. A letter from Hamilton to Dr Parr in 1820 (Parr's Works, vii, 194-202), on occasion of the contest at Edinburgh, gives an account of his studies. He was personally unknown to Dugald Stewart, to whom he desires Parr to write a letter upon the advantages of studying ancient philosophy, to be shown to the Town Council (who then elected the professor). Hamilton says that he took up nearly all Aristotle, most of Plato, and of Cicero's philosophical works; that he had read many Greek commentators upon Plato and Aristotle and that many of his books were declared to be too metaphysical for the schools and were forbidden to be taken up again. Veitch gives a similar account. 4. Napier's Correspondence, p. 70. 5. Notice by Lord Canarvon prefixed to Gnostic Heresies (1875), and Burgon's Twelve Good Men. 6. See Mill's Examination of Hamilton, p. 496. 7. Reprinted as the first two chapters in the Discussions on the 'Philosophy of the Unconditioned' and the 'Philosophy of Perception'. 8. Reid's Works, p. 823. 9. See in Discussions, p. 55; Lectures, i. 295, etc.; Reid's Works, p. 817 (the most elaborate). 10. Lectures, i. 292. 11. Discussions, p. 93. 12. Reid's Works, p. 817 n. 13. Discussions, p. 56. 14. Ibid., p. 192. 15. Lectures, i, 230, 293. Peter Poiret corresponds to 'Johnny Dodds of Farthinsacre,' the one orthodox friend of Davie Deans. 16. Lectures, i. 331. 17. Discussions, p. 61. 18. Discussions, p. 61; Lectures, i. 225. 19. Discussions, i. 62. 20. Discussions, p. 64. 21. Reid's Works, p. 745. 22. Ibid. p. 754. 23. Hamilton admits the distinction between 'primary truths of fact' and 'primary truths of intelligence,' but says that as their sources are not different, he will not give them different names. -- Reid's Works, p. 743 n. 24. Reid's Works, p. 743. 25. Lectures, i. 294. 26. Lectures, i. 228. 27. Ibid. i. 224. 28. Ibid. i. 212. 29. Reid's Works, p. 822. 30. Lectures, i. 204. 31. Ibid. i. 194. 32. Reid's Works, p. 744. 33. Ibid. p. 806. 34 Discussions, p. 50, etc.; Lectures, i, 225, etc. 35. Discussions, p. 639. This is the passage welcomed by Mill. Hamilton, as Mr Stirling notices, applies to the Cosmothetical Idealist Virgil's Rerumque ignarus, imagine gaudet, and elsewhere uses the same words to give the position of the true philosopher (Discussions, pp. 57, 640; Lectures, i. 138). The inability to get beyond the phenomenon is ridiculed in one case and accepted in the other. 36. Lectures, i. 225. 37. Ibid. i. 147; ii. 129. 38. Ibid. i. 160. 39. Mill puts this in Examination, p. 35. 40. Reid's Works, pp. 854, 857. 41. Lectures, ii. 112. In the more elaborate discussion in Reid's Works. Note D, he concludes (p. 857) that the primary 'may be roundly characterised as mathematical, the secundo primary as mechanical, the secondary as physiological.' 42. Lectures, ii. 113, 114. 43. Reid's Works, p. 845. 44. Ibid. p. 820. 45. Ibid. p. 858. 46. Reid's Works, p. 866 n. 47. Lectures, ii. 114. 48. Reid's Works, p. 882. 49. Ibid. p. 846. 50. Mr Hutchison Stirling, in a severe examination of Hamilton's Philosophy of Perception (1865, p. 79 n.) thinks that Hamilton never understood that, according to Kant, space was a 'perception', not a 'conception'; and infers that he knew little of Kant except from the 'literature of the subject.' 51. Lectures, i. 218. 52. Mill's argument about this in the Examination (ch. x.) is entangled in the question about the opinions of Thomas Brown and 'Cosmothetic Idealists,' which perhaps lays him open to a reply made by Veitch. I cannot go into this, which illustrates one confusion in the controversy. 53. Lectures, i. 218 and 221 n. 54. Ibid. ii. 153. 55. Ibid. ii. 130. 56. Reid's Works, Note B, p. 810. 57. Reid's Works, p. 821. 58. Reid's Works, p. 858 n.; cf. p. 880 n. The 'organism' is 'at once objective and subjective', 'at once ego and non-ego.' Unless we admit this we must be materialists or idealists. 59. Reid's Works, p. 862. 60. Mr Stirling (pp. 80-110) thinks this 'exceedingly ingenious', though really fallacious. Mansel accepts it in his Metaphysics (1860), p. 114; and in the Philosophy of the Conditioned (pp. 72, 75, 83) tries to reconcile it with other phrases. He talks of matter being 'in contact with mind,' and the object of perception being 'partly mental and partly material.' The composition is like the chemical fusion of an acid and an alkali. 61. Veitch tries to make a coherent doctrine from these utterances. All that Hamilton requires, he thinks, is that the object perceived his the 'quality of a non-ego.' -- Veitch's Hamilton, p. 191. As the non-ego is a merely negative conception, this tends to coincide with the doctrines of Tracy and Brown. 62. Mill had by this time read Kant, and makes frequent references to him. He may perhaps be excused for not appreciating the Kantian view by Kant's own inconsistencies and obscurities. This is a very ticklish point, which I cannot discuss, but which, as I think, does not really affect the argument. 63. Examination, etc., p. 176. Mill here uses 'introspective,' which might be applied to psychology, as equivalent rather than to logical; or to the a priori method which attempts to discover fact by analysis of pure reasoning. 64. Examination, etc., p. 456; cf. p. 194. 65. Examination, etc., p. 266. 66. Cf. Mill's interesting article upon Berkeley. -- Dissertations, vol. iv. pp. 154-87. 67. Examination, p. 248. 68. Ibid. p. 225. 69. Made especially familiar in recent English speculation by T.H. Green's criticism of Hume. 70. e.g. Reid's Works, p. 869. 71. Examination, pp. 146-47. 72. Ibid. p. 235. 73. Examination, p. 248. 74. Lectures (Preface). 75. Discussions, p. 12. 76. Ibid. p. 13. 77. Examination, pp. 58, 73. 78. Philosophy of the Conditioned, p . 95. 79. Philosophy of the Conditioned, pp. 108, 147. 80. Ibid. p. 67. 81. Hamilton strangely declares that Kant makes the speculative reason an 'organ of mere delusion' (Discussions, p. 18, Lectures, i. 402), and Mansel says that if we accept Kant's doctrine we must believe 'in a special faculty of lies, created for the express purpose of deceiving those who believe in it.' For Kant's statement that the reason cannot be itself untrustworthy, see Appendix to Transcendental Dialectic (section on 'the ultimate end of the natural dialectic of human reason,' and for the comparisons above quoted the same Appendix (section of 'the regulative employment of the 'ideas of pure reason') and the Introduction to the Transcendental Dialectic. Bolton (Inquisitio Philosophica, ch. iv) quotes many passages from Kant to illustrate this point, which seems to confirm Stirling's opinion of the superficiality of Hamilton's knowledge of his author. 82. Discussions, p. 33. 83. Discussions, p. 17. 84. Ibid. p. 20. 85. Ibid. p. 32. 86. Examination, p. 103. 87. 'An ultimate end of the natural dialectic,' etc. 88. Discussions, p. 14. 89. I may say that although I am an 'Agnostic' I cannot accept Mr Spencer's version of Hamilton's doctrine. But I must not attempt here to estimate the value of Mr Spencer's theory. 90. Reid's Works, p. 743 n. 91. Lectures, ii. 376-413; Discussions, pp. 604-28. 92. Letters to Calderwood in Lectures, ii. 530-35. 93. One specimen of Hamilton's method may be given for those who care for such things. In the essay on Cousin he opposes 'the Infinite' as the 'unconditionally unlimited' to the 'Absolute' as the 'unconditionally limited'. In both cases we have simple negations of thought, and therefore reach the inconceivable. If I say a thing and then unsay it, I get simple zero. That is obvious. If, again, the absolute asserts the same limit which is denied by the 'infinite,' they are of course contradictory. And, in this case, we get the old antinomy, which he accordingly introduces in the next sentence about the impossibility of conceiving space either as infinite or finite. But here the contradictory of infinite ought to be -- not 'absolute' but 'finite'. Having thus got an 'antimony' by making 'the absolute' equivalent to 'the finite', Hamilton apparently assumes an antinomy between absolute and its contradictory everywhere. But I am not compelled to think of a thing either as being some quality and so far 'conditioned,' or as being no quality at all. The alternative is either to think of it or not think of it and that leads to no antimony. So again (pp. 29, 30) infinite time is identified with endless time, and absolute with ended time. 94. Bampton Lectures, (3rd edition, 1859), p. 71. 95. Lectures, iii. 103. 96. Examination, p. 105. 97. Bampton Lectures, p. 45. 98. Cf. Tennyson's 'Flower in the Crannied Wall' -- '...... If I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.' 99. Bampton Lectures, p. 89. 100. Ibid. p. 72. 101. Ibid. p. 61. 102. Philosophy of the Conditioned, p. 51. 103. Bampton Lectures, p. 8. 104. Ibid. pp. 67, 68. 105. Reid's Works, p. 974. 106. Bampton Lectures, p. 228. Yet he positively asserts (e.g. p. 220) that free-will is a 'fact of consciousness.' 107. Ibid. p. 217. 108. Ibid. p. 121. Though, as he adds, of that alternative which renders that very inconceivability 'itself inexplicable'. 109. Ibid. p. 89. 110. Bampton Lectures, p. 202. 111. Ibid. p. 12. 112. Ibid. p. 244. 113. Bampton Lectures, pp. 17, 18. 114. Ibid. p. 212. 115. Examination, p. 129. 116. Philosophy of the Unconditioned, p. 167 (also quoted in Mill's not to above) 117. Examination, p. 123 n. 118. Bampton Lectures, p. 234. 119. Ibid. p. 239. 120. Philosophy of the Conditioned, p. 245. 121. Ibid. p. 39 n. 122. Examination, pp. 170, 240; Hamilton's Lectures, i. 394. I do not try to reconcile Hamilton's 'Obiter dictum' in this passage with his assertion in his second lecture that 'philosophy' and 'psychology' give the only possible proofs of theology; or with his claim to have met Kant's scepticism. 123. Auguste Comte, (1865) pp. 14, 15. 124. See Mr John Morley's article in Critical Miscellanies (second edition). 125. Bain's J.S. Mill, p. 139. 126. Three Essays, pp. 142-54. 127. Three Essays, p. 19. 128. Ibid. p. 28. 129. Ibid. p. 46. 130. Ibid. p. 53. 131. Three Essays, p. 65. 132. 'Why' asks Hume, 'is there any misery in the world? Not by chance, surely. From some cause, then? Is it by the intervention of the Deity? but he is perfectly benevolent. Is it contrary to his intentions? But he is Almighty. Epicurus's old questions,' he says, 'are yet unanswered.' 'If,' says Mansel, 'an infinitely powerful Being wills evil, he is not perfectly good. If he wills it not, his will is thwarted and his sphere of action limited.' -- Hume's Works (1874), ii. 440, 442; Bampton Lectures, p. 51. 133. Three Essays, p. 39. 134. Ibid. p. 40. 135. Ibid. p. 116. 136. Ibid. p. 184. Friday asks Robinson Crusoe why God did not kill the devil. 137. So in the Examination of Hamilton (p. 567) he says that this is 'by far the best' and 'by far the most persuasive argument.' 138. Examination, p. 246. 139. Three Essays, p. 170. 140. The 'ingenious simile,' says Mansel, 'by which God is compared to a mechanic fails only in this particular, that both its terms are utterly unlike the objects which they profess to represent.' -- Bampton Lectures, p. 188. 141. Three Essays, p. 174. 142. Three Essays, p. 133. 143. Ibid. pp. 16, 17, Observe the language about 'conforming to the laws of equilibrium among bodies,' instead of 'conforming only to the law of gravitation,' as though we did not necessarily 'conform' to all 'laws of nature' in all cases. 144. Three Essays, p. 174. 145. Mill has here come to speak of 'Nature' in the narrower sense, as opposed to art or to nature working through man. 146. Three Essays, p. 232. 147. Ibid. p. 255. 148. Three Essays, p. 76. 149. Ibid. p. 100. 150. Ibid. p. 82. 151. Three Essays, p. 97. 152. Ibid. p. 111. 153. Ibid. p. 104. 154. Three Essays, p. 122. 155. Ibid. p. 116. 156. Ibid. pp. 248-49. 157. Ibid. p. 253. 158. Ibid. p. 252. 159. Three Essays, pp. 256-57. 160. Ibid. p. 216. 161. Bampton Lectures, p. 238. 162. Examination of the Reverend F.D. Maurice's 'Strictures' (1859) p. 80. This is a reply to Maurice's What is Revelation? (1859). Maurice in a Sequel (1860) answers this and other accusation with dignity; though his remarks upon Mansel were certainly sharp enough. 163. Maurice's most complete book, the Kingdom of Christ (1838, enlarged 1842), is less rhetorical and more logical than its successors. The Theological Essays (1853) gives his teaching in the shortest compass. 164. Mill's Autobiography, p. 153. 165. i.e. eine Neigung und Bestimmtheit des Gefuhls, quoted in What is Revelation? p. 316. Maurice defends this against Mansel. 166. Begun about 1835 for the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. The whole collected in an edition of 1871-72. 167. Kingdom of Christ (1842) p. 253. 168. What is Revelation? (1819) p. 275. 169. Theological Essays, pp. 65, 119. 170. Ibid, pp. 113, 338, 465. 171. What is Revelation? p. 232. 172. Kingdom of Christ, i. (1842) 41. This book, first published as a series of letters to a Quaker, is an exposition of the way in which the mystical doctrine of Fox and Barclay degenerated from the confusion between a valid, because universal, principle and a claim to a private or individual application. 173. What is Revelation? p. 228. 174. Theological Essays, p. 316. 175. Originally the Boyle Lectures for 1846. Fourth edition in 1861. 176. Theological Essays, p. 211. 177. Theological Essays, p. 145. 178. Maurice, as I remember Carlyle saying, thought that you might be eternally damned for five minutes. 179. Theological Essays, pp. 430, 450, 480. 180. Maurice's criticism is in a little book called the Claims of the Bible and of Science (1863). 181. Claims of Science, etc. pp. 76, 125. 182. Sartor Resartus, ch. iv.; cf. Froude, i. 334. 183. Froude, iii. 67. 184. Froude, i. 73. 185. Ibid. i. 101. 186. Sartor Resartus, ch. vii. 187. Essays on 'State of German Literature' (1827); 'Novalis' (1829); 'Signs of the Times' (1829). 188. Novalis, Essays, ii. 76. 189. 'Characteristics' 91831); Essays, iii. 20. 190. Past and Present, ch. xv. 191. Froude, iii, 40. 192. 'Novalis' in Essays, ii, 72, etc. 193. Mill's Autobiography, p. 175, etc. 194. The journals have been separately printed in America for the Grolier Club (edited by Prof. Norton). 195. Carlyle, I fear, is punning. 196. Froude, ii, 79, 90. 197. Sartor Resartus, bk. iii. ch. iv. 198. Lecture v. 199. Chartism, ch. x. 200. Latter-day Pamphlets, 'Jesuitism'. 201. Sartor Resartus, bk. i. ch. viii.; bk. iii. ch. viii. 202. Froude, ii, 345. 203. Froude, iii. 12. 204. e.g. Past and Present, bk. ii. ch. xvii., and bk. iii. ch. v., with the humorous description of John Bull, who manages to settle down with his centre of gravity lowest. 205. Essays, iii. 69 (Boswell). 206. Essays, iv. 146. (Scott). 207. Chartism, ch. v. 208. Froude, iii. 84. 209. Latter-day Pamphlets, 'The new Downing Street.' 210. Ibid., 'Stump Orators'. 211. Past and Present, bk. i. ch. 19. 212. Chartism, ch. viii. 213. Froude, iv. 259. 214. See Pusey's (afterwards suppressed) Historical Inquiry into German rationalism (1828). H.J. Rose had attributed the evil to want of bishops. Pusey thought it was due to 'dead orthodoxism'. He looked leniently for the moment upon the attempt to infuse a little philosophy into the creed, but soon perceived that the Thirty-nine Articles would be more to the purpose. 215. Oxford had been incidentally attacked in the Edinburgh Review in an article upon 'Laplace' by Playfair; in a review by R. Payne Knight of an Oxford edition of Strabo; and by Syndey Smith in a very amusing review of a book upon education by Edgeworth. Copleston replied, and was answered by the three conjointly. The controversy wandered into various small points. Newman, in his Idea of a University, quotes Copleston with deserved respect for his general principle. But the application to the Oxford system is less cogent. 216. See especially Arnold's pamphlet on Principles of Church Reform (1833), reprinted in Miscellaneous Works (1845), pp. 257-359. Arnold's aversion to sacerdotalism was vigorously expressed in an article in the Edinburgh for April 1836, entitled (by the Edinburgh) 'The Oxford Malignants and Dr Hampton.' It was reprinted in his works. See Stanley's Life of Arnold, ii. 9. 217. The Ideal 91844) was a defence of articles contributed by Ward to the British Critic against the 'Narrative' of William Palmer (1803-1885). It led to the final catastrophe, and was soon followed by the conversions to Catholicism of Ward and Newman. 218. Ideal, p. 27. The Perils of the Nation (1843) is the book quoted. 219. Ibid. p. 416. 220. Ibid. p. 420. 221. Ideal, pp. 34-44. 222. Ibid. pp. 266. 223. Ibid. p. 504. 224. Apologia, p. 121. 225. Apologia, p. 205. 226. Ibid. pp. 322, 329. 227. Ideal, p. 277. 228. Ibid. p. 499. Ward would apparently have modified these statements at a later period. 229. Idea of a University (1875) p. 453. 230. University Sermons (1843), p. 186. In the later edition this phrase is carefully qualified as referring only to an illegitimate use of reason. 231. No. 85 (1838), reprinted in Discussions and Arguments, 1872. 232. In Discussions and Arguments, p. 249, the curious correction is made of substituting twelve for three. That marks without mending the blot. 233. Apologia (1864), p. 380. 234. Ward's Essays on the Philosophy of Theism (1884), pp. 120-125. 235. Philosophy of Theism, pp. 143 n, 304. 236. Ibid. ii. 87. 237. Philosophy of Theism, i, 50. 238. Ibid. i. 90, 94. 239. Ibid. i, 325. 240. Philosophy of Theism, i. 121. Ward, we are told subsequently ceased to hold this opinion 'with any confidence,' or abandoned it altogether. Ibid. ii. 132. 241. Ibid. ii. 359. 242. Especially the University Sermons, the Essay upon Miracles, the Essay upon Development, and the Grammar of Assent. 243. Grammar of Assent (1870), p. 219. 244. Grammar of Assent (1870), p. 264. 245. Ibid. p. 277. 246. Ibid. p. 155. See also Essay on Development, p. 328. 247. Grammar of Assent, p. 337. 248. Grammar of Assent, p. 92. 249. Ibid. p. 320. 250. Ibid. p. 231. 251. Development, pp. 328, 331. 252. Grammar of Assent, p. 343. 253. Ibid. pp. 405, 408. 254. Grammar of Assent, p. 391. 255. Ibid. p. 392. 256. Ibid. p. 211. 257. Apologia, p. 377. 258. Sermons to Mixed Congregations, No. xiii. 259. In one of his famous phrases, Newman says that ten thousand difficulties do not make one objection (Apologia, p. 374). This is clearly true in a sense. I may find it impossible to solve a mathematical problem without doubting that a solution exists. But it suggests a very convenient logical device. An unanswerable objection can always be met by calling it a difficulty. 260. Apologia, p. 377. 261. Grammar of Assent, p. 392. 262. Ibid. p. 401. 263. University Sermons (1872) p. 118. 264. Development, pp. 127, 128. 265. Essays on Development, p. 129. Laplace and Lagrange had a different opinion. 266. Apologia, p. 404. 267. University Sermons (1872) p. 348. 268. Idea of a University (1875) pp. 428-455. 269. Ibid. pp. 401, 402. 270. Grammar of Assent, pp. 372, 426. 271. Essay on Development, pp. 102, 108, 170. 272. Essay on Development, pp. 358-365.