The standing of Mr. Mill as a mental philosopher appears to be very differently estimated by late critics and opponents and by himself, whether we consider the extent of his influence, or the relations of his doctrines to his nation and time; and there is a most singular inversion in these estimates of what we should naturally expect from friend and foe—an estimate of Mill's position and influence by his opponents, which, compared to his own, seems greatly exaggerated. For example, Dr. McCosh, a thorough-going opponent, regards Mill's influence as the most active and effective philosophical force now alive in Great Britain, the strongest current of philosophic thought even at Oxford; and M. Taine, who some years ago discovered at Oxford that the British nation was not wanting in "general ideas" or principles in its modes of thought above the requirements of the accountant and assayer, found these principles in a really living English philosophy, which has brought forth one of M. Taine's most elaborate critical studies in his work on "Intelligence." In contrast with these estimates, we have from Mr. Mill himself the opinion, in a letter to M. Taine, that his views are not especially English, and that they have not been so since the philosophical reaction in Scotland, Germany, and later in England, against Hume; that when his "System of Logic" was written he "stood almost alone in his opinions; and though they have met with a degree of sympathy which he by no means expected, we may still count in England twenty a priori and spiritualist philosophers for every partisan of the doctrine of Experience."

This estimate of his own influence and of the importance to metaphysical discussion at the present time of the philosophy he "adopted" is entitled to much more consideration than ought in general to be allowed for an opinion inspired by the ambition, the enthusiasm, the disappointments, or even the modesty of a philosophical thinker. Nevertheless, the far different opinion of his standing as a metaphysician which his critics entertain is undoubtedly more correct, though in a sense which was not so clearly apparent to him. They see clearly that a philosophy of which he was not the founder, and never pretended to be, has gained through his writings a hold, not only on English speculation, but on that of the civilized world, which it did not acquire even in England when it was an especially English philosophy, as it was "in the first half of the eighteenth century, from the time of Locke to that of the reaction against Hume."

What, then, is it in Mill's philosophical writings that has given him this eminence as a thinker? Two qualities, we think, very rarely combined: a philosophical style which for clearness and cogency has, perhaps, never been surpassed, and a conscientious painstaking, with a seriousness of conviction, and an earnestness of purpose which did not in general characterize the thinkers whose views he adopted. It was by bringing to the support of doctrines previously regarded as irreligious a truly religious spirit that Mill acquired in part the influence and respect which have given him his eminence as a thinker. He thus redeemed the word "utility" and the utilitarian doctrine of morals from the ill repute they had, for "the greatest happiness principle" was with him a religious principle. An equally important part of his influence is doubtless due to the thoroughness of his early training—the education received from his father's instruction—which, as we have said, has made him truly regarded as the most accomplished of modern dialecticians.

To these grounds of influence may be added, so far as his influence on English thought is concerned, the fact that he was not a metaphysician in a positive fashion, though he dealt largely with metaphysical topics. He represented the almost instinctive aversion to metaphysics, as such, which has characterized the English since the time of Newton and Locke, we might also say since the time of Bacon. Metaphysics, to pass current in England, has now to be baptized and become part of the authoritative religious instruction, else it is foreign and barbarous to the English matter-of-fact ways of thinking. Mill's "System of Logic" was not intended as a system of philosophy in the German, French, or even Scotch sense of the term. It is not through the a priori establishment or refutation of highest principles that experiential, inductive, fact-proven principles of science are regarded or tested by the unmetaphysical English mind. Metaphysical doctrines prevail, it is true, in England, to the extent, probably, that Mr. Mill estimates—twenty to one of its thinkers holding to some such views. Yet it would be a misconception to suppose these to be products of modern English thought. They are rather preserves, tabooed, interdicted to discussion, not the representatives of its living thought.

Mr. Mill estimated the worth of contemporary thinkers in accordance with this almost instinctive distrust of rational "illumination;" setting Archbishop Whately, for example, as a thinker, above Sir W. Hamilton, for his services to philosophy, on account of "the number of true and valuable thoughts" which he originated and put into circulation, not as parts of a system, but as independent truths of sagacious or painstaking observation and reflection. It is by such a standard that Mr. Mill would doubtless wish to be judged, and by it he would be justly placed above all, or nearly all, of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, as a conscientious student of metaphysics he held in far higher esteem than is shown in general by English thinkers the powers peculiar to the metaphysician—the ability and disposition to follow out into their consequences, and to concatenate in a system the assumption of a priori principles. Descartes, Leibnitz, Comte, and, as an exceptional English thinker, even Mr. Spencer, receive commendation from him on this account. It is clear, however, that his respect for this talent was of the sort which does not aspire to imitate what is admired.



PANICS

It is impossible to see, much less experience, a financial panic without an almost appalling consciousness that a new and terrible form of danger and distress has been added in comparatively recent times to the list of those by which human life is menaced or perplexed. Any one who stood on Wall Street, or in the gallery of the Stock Exchange last Thursday and Friday and Saturday (1873), and saw the mad terror, we might almost say the brute terror like that by which a horse is devoured who has a pair of broken shafts hanging to his heels, or a dog flying from a tin saucepan attached to his tail, with which great crowds of men rushed to and fro, trying to get rid of their property, almost begging people to take it from them at any price, could hardly avoid feeling that a new plague had been sent among men; that there was an impalpable, invisible force in the air, robbing them of their wits, of which philosophy had not as yet dreamt. No dog was ever so much alarmed by the clatter of the saucepan as hundreds seemed to be by the possession of really valuable and dividend-paying securities; and no horse was ever more reckless in extricating himself from the debris of a broken carriage than these swarms of acute and shrewd traders in divesting themselves of their possessions. Hundreds must really, to judge by their conduct, have been so confused by terror and anxiety as to be unable to decide whether they desired to have or not to have, to be poor or rich. If a Roman or a man of the Middle Ages had been suddenly brought into view of the scene, he would have concluded without hesitation that a ruthless invader was coming down the island; that his advanced guard was momentarily expected; and that anybody found by his forces in possession of Western Union, or Harlem, or Lake Shore, or any other paying stock or bond, would be subjected to cruel tortures, if not put to death. For neither the Roman nor the Mediaeval could understand a rich man's being terrified by anything but armed violence. Seneca enumerates as the three great sources of anxiety in life the fear of want, of disease, and of oppression by the powerful, and he pronounces the last the greatest. If he had seen Wall-Street brokers and bankers last week trying to get rid of stocks and bonds, he could not of course have supposed that they were poor or feared poverty; he would have judged from their physical activity that they were in perfect health, so that he would have been driven to the conclusion that some barbarian host, commanded by Sitting Bull or Red Cloud, was entering the city, and was breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the owners of personal property. If you had tried to explain to him that there was no conqueror at the gates, that the fear of violence was almost unknown in our lives, that each man in that struggling crowd enjoyed an amount of security against force in all its forms which no Roman Senator could ever count upon, and that the terror he witnessed was caused by precisely the same agency as the flight of an army before it has been beaten, or, in other words, by "panic," he would have gazed at you in incredulous amazement. He would have said that panic in an army was caused by the sudden dissolution of the bonds of discipline, by each soldier's losing his confidence that his comrades and his officers would stand their ground; but these traders, he would have added, are not subject to discipline; they do not belong to an organization of any kind; each buys and sells for himself; he has his property there in that tin box, and if nobody is going to rob him what is frightening him? Why is he pale and trembling? Why does he run and shout and weep, and ask people to give him a trifle, only a trifle, for all he possesses and let him go?

If you were then to set about explaining to Seneca that the way the god Pan worked confusion in our day in the commercial world was by destroying "credit," you would find yourself brought suddenly face to face with one of the most striking differences between ancient and modern, or, even as we have said, mediaeval society. The most prominent and necessary accompaniment or incident of property in the ancient world was possession. What a man owned he held. His wealth was in his farm, or his house, or his granary, or his ships. He could hardly separate the idea of property from that of possession, and the state of society strengthened the association. The frugal man hoarded, and when he was terrified he buried his money, a practice to which we owe the preservation of the greater portion of the old coins now in our collections. The influence of this sense of insecurity, of the constant fear of invasion or violence, lasted long enough in all Continental countries, as Mr. Bagehot has recently pointed out, to prevent the establishment of banks of issue until very lately. The prospect of war was so constantly in men's minds that no bank could make arrangements for the run which would surely follow the outbreak of hostilities, and, in view of this contingency, nobody would be willing to hold paper promises to pay in lieu of gold and silver.

It is therefore in England and America, the two countries possessing not only most commercial enterprise, but most security against invasion, that the paper money has come into earliest and widest use. To the paper of the banks have been added the checks and bills of exchange of private individuals, until money proper plays a greatly diminishing part in the operations of commerce. Goods are exchanged and debts paid by a system of balancing claims against claims, which really has almost ceased to rest on money at all. So that a man may be a very rich man in our day, and have really nothing to show for his wealth whatever. You go to his house, and you find nothing but a lot of shabby furniture. The only thing there which Seneca would have called wealth is perhaps his wife's jewels, which would not bring a few thousand dollars. You think his money must be in the bank, but you go there with him and find that all he has there is a page on the ledger bearing his name, with a few figures on it. The bank bills which you see lying about, and which look a little like money, are not only not money in the sense Seneca understood the term, but they do not represent over a third of what the bank owes to various people. You go to some safe-deposit vaults, thinking that it is perhaps there he keeps his valuables, but all you find is a mass of papers signed by Thomas Smith or John Jones, declaring that he is entitled to so many shares of some far-off bank, or that some railroad will pay him a certain sum some thirty years hence. In fact, looked at with Roman eyes, our millionaire seems to be possessed of little or nothing, and likely to be puzzled about his daily bread.

Now, this wonderful change in the character and incidents of property may be said to be the work of the last century, and it may be said to consist in the substitution of an agency wholly moral for an agency wholly material in the work of exchange and distribution. For the giving and receiving of gold and silver we have substituted neither more nor less than faith in the honesty and industry and capacity of our fellow-men. There is hardly one of us who does not literally live by faith. We lay up fortunes, marry, eat, drink, travel, and bequeath, almost without ever handling a cent; and the best reason which ninety-nine out of every hundred of us can give for feeling secure against want, or having the means of enjoyment or of charity, is not the possession of anything of real value, but his confidence that certain thousands of his fellow-creatures, whom he has never seen and never expects to see, scattered, it may be, over the civilized world, will keep their promises, and do their daily work with fidelity and efficiency. This faith is every year being made to carry a greater and greater load. The transactions which rest on it increase every year in magnitude and complexity. It has to extend itself every year over a larger portion of the earth's surface, and to include a greater variety of race and creed and custom. London and Paris and Berlin and Vienna now tremble when New York is alarmed. We have, in short, to believe every year in a greater and greater number of people, and to depend for our daily bread on the successful working of vast combinations, in which human character is, after all, the main element.

The consequence is that, when for any reason a shade of doubt comes over men's minds that the combination is not working, that the machine is at some point going to give way, that somebody is not playing his part fairly, the solid ground seems to shake under their feet, and we have some of the phenomena resulting from an earthquake, and among others blind terror. But to anyone who understands what this new social force, Credit, is, and the part it plays in human affairs, the wonder is, not that it gives way so seldom, but that it stands so firm; that these hundreds of millions of laborers, artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, bankers, and manufacturers hold so firmly from day to day the countless engagements into which they enter, and that each recurring year the result of the prodigious effort which is now put forth in the civilized world in the work of production should be distributed with so much accuracy and honesty, and, on the whole, with so much wise adjustment to the value of each man's contributions to civilization.

There is one fact, however, which throws around credit, as around so many others of the influences by which our lives are shaped, a frightful mystery. Its very strength helps to work ruin. The more we believe in our fellow-toilers, and the more they do to warrant our belief, the more we encourage them to work, the more we excite their hopefulness; and out of this hopefulness come "panics" and "crashes." Prosperity breeds credit, and credit stimulates enterprise, and enterprise embarks in labors which, about every ten years in England, and every twenty years in this country, it is found that the world is not ready to pay for. Panics have occurred in England in 1797, 1807, 1817, 1826, 1837, 1847, 1857, and there was very near being a very severe one in 1866. In this country we have had them in 1815, 1836, 1857, and 1877, and by panics we do not mean such local whirlwinds as have desolated Wall Street, but wide-spread commercial crises, affecting all branches of business. This periodicity is ascribed, and with much plausibility, to the fact that inasmuch as panics are the result of certain mental conditions, they recur as soon as the experience of the previous one has lost its influence, or, in other words, as often as a new generation comes into the management of affairs, which is about every ten years in the commercial world both in England and here. The fact that this country seems to be only half as liable to them as England, is perhaps due to the fact that the extent of our resources, and the greater ratio of increase of population make it much harder to overdo in the work of production here than in England, and to this must be added the greater strength of nerves produced by greater hopefulness. In spite of the enormous abundance of British capital and the rashness of the owners in making investments, there hangs over the London money market a timidity and doubtfulness about the future which is unknown on this side of the water, and which very slight accidents develop into distrust and terror.

Outside those who are actually engaged in a financial panic—such as brokers, bankers, merchants and manufacturers, who have loans to pay or receive, or acceptances falling due, and who are therefore too busy and too sorely beset to moralize on it or look at it objectively, as the philosophers say—there is a large body of persons who are not immediately affected by it, such as professional men, owners of secure investments, persons in receipt of well-assured salaries, ministers, newspaper writers, speculative economists, financiers, and farmers, to whom it is a source of secret enjoyment. They are obliged, out of sympathy with their neighbors, to look blue, and probably few of them are entirely exempt from the general anxiety about the future, but, nevertheless, they are on the whole rather gratified than otherwise by the thing's having happened. In the first place, all those persons who give their attention to the currency question are divided into two great schools—the paper men and the hard-money men; and every panic affords each of them what it considers a legitimate ground of triumph. The paper men say that the crisis is due to failure to issue more paper at the proper moment, and the hard-money men ascribe it to the irredeemability of what is already issued; and each side chuckles over the convulsion as a startling confirmation of its views, and goes about calling attention to it almost gleefully. There is a similar division on the banking question. Indeed the feud between the friends of free banking and restricted banking is fiercer than that between the two currency schools, and has raged longer, and every monetary crisis feeds the flame. It is maintained, on the one hand, that if banks were let alone by the state their issues would be proportioned to the exact wants of business; and, on the other, that if the state would only restrict them more rigidly business would be kept within proper limits, and all would go well. Each disputant draws from a panic about the same amount of support for his views, because in the great variety of circumstances which surround it there are always some which favor any theory of its origin. In one thing, however, both sets of observers are apt to agree thoroughly, and that is in believing the "thing will not blow over," and that "we are going to feel it for a long time." They have long foreseen it, and have only been surprised that it did not come sooner; and they lower their voices to a hoarse whisper while telling you this.

But there is no class of observers which extracts so much solid comfort from a panic as that large body of social philosophers who are hostile to luxury, and believe that the world is going to the dogs through self-indulgence. It may even be said that two-thirds of the community, or indeed all except the very few, hold this opinion with a greater or less degree of strength. The farmers hold it strongly with regard to the city people, the artisans with regard to merchants, bankers, brokers, and manufacturers, and among the latter nearly every man is inclined to it with regard to persons of more means than himself. Moreover, it would probably astonish us if we knew how large was the number of those who fancy that their more well-to-do neighbors, if they do not belong to the category of millionaires, are living beyond their means. Every man whose own means are small, or even moderate, finds himself rather hard put to it to make both ends meet, and is constantly harassed by desires which he is unable to gratify. When he sees others gratifying them, his self-love drives him often unconsciously into ascribing it to recklessness and improvidence. Very close people, too, who have a constitutional repugnance to spending money freely for any purpose, and especially for purposes of personal enjoyment, can hardly persuade themselves that other persons who do so, spend it honestly. And then behind these come the large army of lovers of simplicity and frugality on moral and religious grounds, who believe that material luxury contains a snare for the soul, and that true happiness and real virtue are not to be found in gilded saloons. They write to the newspapers denouncing the reluctance of young people to marry on small incomes, and urging girls to begin life as their mothers began it, and despise the silly chatter of those who think luxurious surroundings more important than the union of hearts.

The occurrence of a panic fills the breasts of all these with various degrees of rejoicing. They always take a very dark view of it, and laugh contemptuously at those who consider it a "Wall-Street flurry," or ascribe it to any vice in the currency or in the banking system. Extravagant living they believe to be at the bottom of it, and, like the hard-money men, they are only surprised that it has not come sooner, and they believe most firmly that it is going to effect a sort of social revolution, and bring the world more nearly to their own ideal of what it ought to be. The amount of "rottenness" which they expect it to reveal is always enormous, and they look forward to the exposure and the general coming-down of their guilty neighbors to "the hard pan" with the keenest relish. They have long, for instance, been unable to imagine where the multitude of people who live in brown-stone houses get the money to keep them. There was something wrong about it, they felt satisfied, though they could not tell what, and when the panic comes they half fancy that the murder will out, and that there will be a great migration of fraudulent bankrupts from Fifth Avenue and its neighborhood into tenement-houses on the East and North Rivers. How Mrs. Smith, too, dressed as she did, and where Smith got the money to take her to Sharon every summer, and how Jones managed to entertain as he was doing, have often been puzzling problems, which "the crash" in the money market is at last going to solve. It is also highly gratifying to those who consider yachting a senseless amusement to reflect that the panic will probably diminish the number of yachts, and they even flatter themselves that it may stop yachting in future, and reduce the general style of living among rich young men. "We shall now," they say, "have fewer fast horses, and less champagne, and less gaudy furniture, and more honest, hard work, and plain, wholesome food." They accordingly rejoice in the panic as a means adopted by Providence to bring a gluttonous and ungodly generation to its senses, and lead it back to that state of things which is known, as "republican simplicity."

The curious thing about this expectation is that it has survived innumerable disappointments without apparently losing any of its vigor. It was strong after 1837, and strong after 1857, and stronger than ever after 1861. The war was surely, people said, to bring back the golden age, when all the men were prudent, sober, and industrious, and all the women simple, modest, and homekeeping. The war did nothing of the kind. In fact, it left us more extravagant and lavish and self-indulgent than ever; yet the ancient and tough belief in the purifying influence of a stringent money market still lasts, and is at this moment cropping out in the moral department of a thousand newspapers.

The belief belongs to what may be called the cataclysmal theory of progress, which improves the world by sudden starts, and clings so fondly to liquor-laws, and has profound faith in specific remedies for moral and political diseases. What commercial panics and great national misfortunes do not do, particular bits of legislation are sure to do. You put something in the Constitution, or forbid something, or lose a battle, or have a "shrinkage of values," or have a cholera season, and forthwith the community turns over a new leaf, and becomes moral, economical, and sober-minded. We doubt whether this theory will ever die out, however much philosophers may preach against it, or however often facts may refute it, because it gratifies, or promises to gratify, one of the deepest longings of the human heart—the desire which each man feels to have a great deal of history crowded into his own little day. None of us can bear to quit the scene without witnessing the solution of the problems by which his own life has been vexed or over which he has long labored. Indeed a great many men would find it impossible to work with any zeal to bring about results which would probably not be witnessed until they had been centuries in the tomb.

We accordingly find that the most eager reformers are apt to be those who look for the triumph of virtue by the close of the current year. Of all dreams of eager reformers, however, there is probably none more substantial than that which looks for a restoration of that vague thing called "simplicity of manners." Simplicity and economy are, of course, relative terms. The luxurious gentleman in the fourteenth century lived in a way which the well-to-do artisan in our own time would not tolerate; and when we undertake to carry people back to ancient ways of living we find that there is hardly a point short of barbarism at which we can consistently stop. A country in which money is easily made and abounds, will be one in which money will always be freely spent, and in which personal comfort and even display will occupy men's and women's thoughts a great deal. We can no more prevent this than we can prevent the growth of wealth itself; and our duty is, instead of wasting our breath in denouncing extravagance, or hailing panics as purging fires, to do what in us lies to give rich people more taste, more conscience, more sense of responsibility for curable ills, and a keener relish of the higher forms of pleasure. Extravagance—or, in other words, the waste of money on sensual enjoyment, the production of hideous furniture or jewelry, or of barbarous display—has to be checked not by the preaching of poor people, but by the rich man's own superiority to these things, and his own repugnance for them. This repugnance can only be inspired by education, whether that of school and college, or that of a refined and cultivated social atmosphere. Much would be done in this direction if public opinion exacted of the owners of large fortunes that they should give their sons the best education the country affords; or, in other words, send them to college, instead of setting them up in the dry-goods business or the grocery business. A man who has made a large fortune in honest trade or industry has not contributed his share to moral and intellectual interests by merely making donations. It is his duty, also, if he leaves children behind him, to see to it, as far as he can, that they are men who will be an addition to the general culture and taste of the nation, and who will stimulate its nobler ambition, raise its intellectual standard, quicken its love of excellence in all fields, and deepen its faith in the value of things not seen.



THE ODIUM PHILOLOGICUM

Our readers and those of The Galaxy are familiar with the controversy between Dr. Fitzedward Hall and Mr. Grant White (November, 1873). When one comes to inquire what it was all about, and why Mr. White was led to consider Dr. Hall a "yahoo of literature," and "a man born without a sense of decency," one finds himself engaged in an investigation of great difficulty, but of considerable interest. The controversy between these two gentlemen by no means brings up the problem for the first time. That verbal criticism, such as Mr. White has been producing for some time back, is sure to end, sooner or later, in one or more savage quarrels, is one of the most familiar facts of the literary life of our day. Indeed, so far as our observation has gone, the rule has no exceptions. Whenever we see a gentleman, no matter how great his accomplishments or sweet his temper, announcing that he is about to write articles or deliver lectures on "Words and their Uses," or on the "English of Every-day Life," or on "Familiar Faults of Conversation," or "Newspaper English," or any cognate theme, we feel all but certain that we shall soon see him engaged in an encounter with another laborer in the same field, in which all dignity will be laid aside, and in which, figuratively speaking, clothes, hair, and features will suffer terribly, and out of which, unless he is very lucky, he will issue with the gravest imputations resting on his character in every relation of life.

Now why is it that attempts to get one's fellow-men to talk correctly, to frame their sentences in accordance with good usage, and take their words from the best authors, have this tendency to arouse some of the worst passions of our nature, and predispose even eminent philologists—men of dainty language, and soft manners, and lofty aims—to assail each other in the rough vernacular of the fish-market and the forecastle? A careless observer will be apt to say that it is an ordinary result of disputation; that when men differ or argue on any subject they are apt to get angry and indulge in "personalities." But this is not true. Lawyers, for instance, live by controversy, and their controversies touch interests of the gravest and most delicate character—such as fortune and reputation; and yet the spectacle of two lawyers abusing each other in cold blood, in print, is almost unknown. Currency and banking are, at certain seasons, subjects of absorbing interest, and, for the last seventy years, the discussions over them have been numerous and voluminous almost beyond example, and yet we remember no case in which a bullionist called a paper-money man bad names, or in which a friend of free banking accused a restrictionist of defrauding the poor or defacing tombstones. Politics, too, home and foreign, is a fertile source of difference of opinion; and yet gross abuse, on paper, of each other, by political disputants, discussing abstract questions having no present relation to power or pay, are very rare indeed.

It seems, at first blush, as if an examination of the well-known odium theologicum, or the traditional bitterness which has been apt to characterize controversies about points of doctrine, from the Middle Ages down to a period within our own memory, would throw some light on the matter. But a little consideration will show that there are special causes for the rancor of theologians for which word-criticism has no parallel. The odium theologicum was the natural and inevitable result of the general belief that the holding of certain opinions was necessary to salvation, and that the formation of opinions could be wholly regulated by the will. This belief, pushed to its extreme limits and embodied in legislation, led to the burning of heretics in nearly all Christian countries. When B's failure to adopt A's conclusions was by A regarded as a sign of depravity of nature which, would lead to B's damnation, nothing was more natural than that when they came into collision in pamphlets or sermons they should have attributed to each other the worst motives. A man who was deliberately getting himself ready for perdition was not a person to whom anybody owed courtesy or consideration, or whose arguments, being probably supplied by Satan, deserved respectful examination. We accordingly find that as the list of "essential" opinions has become shortened, and as doubts as to men's responsibility for their opinions have made their way from the world into the church, theological controversy has lost its acrimony and indeed has almost ceased. No theologian of high standing or character now permits himself to show bad temper in a doctrinal or hermeneutical discussion, and a large and increasing proportion of theologians acknowledge that the road to heaven is so hard for us all that the less quarrelling and jostling there is in it, the better for everybody.

Nor does the odium scientificum, of which we have now happily but occasional manifestations, furnish us with any suggestions. Controversy between scientific men begins to be bitter and frequent, as the field of investigation grows wider and the investigation itself grows deeper. But then this is easily accounted for. All scientific men of the first rank are engaged in original research—that is, in attempts to discover laws and phenomena previously unknown. The workers in all departments are very numerous, and are scattered over various countries, and as one discovery, however slight, is very apt to help in some degree in the making of another, scientific men are constantly exposed to having their claims to originality contested, either as regards priority in point of time or as regards completeness. Consequently, they may be said to stand in delicate relations to each other, and are more than usually sensitive about the recognition of their achievements by their brethren—a state of things which, while it cultivates a very nice sense of honor, leads occasionally to encounters in which free-will seems for the moment to get the better of law. The differences of the scientific world, too, are complicated by the theological bearing of a good deal of scientific discovery and discussion, and many a scientific man finds himself either compelled to defend himself against theologians, or to aid theologians in bringing an erring brother to reason.

The true source of the odium philologicum is, we think, to be found in the fact that a man's speech is apt to be, or to be considered, an indication of the manner in which he has been bred, and of the character of the company he keeps. Criticism of his mode of using words, or his pronunciation, or the manner in which he compounds his sentences, almost inevitably takes the character of an attack on his birth, parentage, education, and social position; or, in other words, on everything which he feels most sensitive about or holds most dear. If you say that his pronunciation is bad, or that his language is slangy or ill-chosen, you insinuate that when he lived at home with his papa and mamma he was surrounded by bad models, or, in plain English, that his parents were vulgar or ignorant people; when you say that he writes bad grammar, or is guilty of glaring solecisms, or displays want of etymological knowledge, you insinuate that his education was neglected, or that he has not associated with correct speakers. Usually, too, you do all this in the most provoking way by selecting passages from his writings on which he probably prided himself, and separating them totally from the thought of which he was full when he produced them, and then examining them mechanically, as if they were algebraic signs, which he used without knowing what they meant or where they would bring him out. Nobody stands this process very long with equanimity, because nobody can be subjected to it without being presented to the public somewhat in the light of an ignorant, careless, and pretentious donkey. Nor will it do to cite your examples from deceased authors. You cannot do so without assailing some form of expression which an eager, listening enemy is himself in the habit of using, and is waiting for you to take up, and through which he hopes to bring you to shame.

No man, moreover, can perform the process without taking on airs which rouse his victim to madness, because he assumes a position not only of grammatical, but, as we have said, of social superiority. He says plainly enough, no matter how polite or scientific he may try to seem, "I was better born and bred than you, and acquired these correct turns of expression, of which you know nothing, from cultivated relatives;" or, "I live in cultivated circles, and am consequently familiar with the best usage, which you, poor fellow! are not. I am therefore able to decide this matter without argument or citations, and your best course is to take my corrections in silence or with thankfulness." It is easy to understand how all interest in orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody speedily disappears in a controversy of this sort, and how the disputants begin to burn with mutual dislike, and how each longs to inflict pain and anguish on his opponent, and make him, no matter by what means, an object of popular pity and contempt, and make his parts of speech odious and ridiculous. The influence of all good men ought to be directed either to repressing verbal criticism, or restricting indulgence in it to the family circle or to schools and colleges.



PROFESSOR HUXLEY'S LECTURES

Biologist like Professor Huxley have, as popular lecturers, the advantage over scientific men in other fields, of occupying themselves with what is to ninety-nine men and women out of a hundred the most momentous of all problems—the manner in which life on this globe began, and in which men and other animals came to be what they are. The doctrine of evolution as a solution of these problems, or of one of them, derives additional interest from the fact that in many minds it runs counter to ideas which a very large proportion of the population above the age of thirty imbibed with the earliest and most impressive portion of their education. Down to 1850 the bulk of intelligent men and women believed that the world, and all that is therein, originated in the precise manner described in the first chapter of Genesis, and about six thousand years ago. Most of the adaptations, or attempts at adaptation, of what is called the Mosaic account of the creation, of the chronological theories of the geologists and evolutionists by theologians and Biblical scholars have been made within that period, and it may be safely said that it is only within ten or fifteen years that any clear knowledge of the "conflict between science and religion" has reached that portion of the people who take a lively or, indeed, any interest, in religious matters. It would not, in fact, be rash to say that little or nothing is known about this conflict to this hour among the great body of Methodists or Catholics, or the evangelical portion of other denominations, and that their religious outlook is little, if at all, affected by it. One would never detect, for instance, in Mr. Moody's preaching, any indication that he had ever heard of any such conflict, or that the doctrines of the orthodox Protestant Church had undergone any sensible modification within a hundred years. Professor Huxley and men like him, therefore, make their appearance now not simply as manipulators of a most interesting subject, but as disturbers of beliefs which are widely spread, deeply rooted, and surrounded by the tenderest and most sacred associations of human existence.

That under such circumstances he has met with so little opposition is, on the whole, rather surprising. As far as our observation has gone, no strong hostility whatever to himself or his teachings has been shown, except in one or two instances, by either the clergy or the religious press. Indeed, ministers formed a very prominent and attentive portion of his audience at the recent lectures at Chickering Hall. But it has been made very apparent by the articles and letters which these lectures have called out in the newspapers that the religious public has hardly understood him. The collision between the theologians and the scientific men has been very slight among us; and, indeed, the waves of the controversy hardly reached this country until the storm had passed away in Europe, so that it is difficult for Americans to appreciate the combative tone of Mr. Huxley's oratory. Of this difficulty the effect of his substitution of Milton for Moses as the historian of the creation, on the night of his first lecture, has furnished an amusing illustration. The audience, or at least that portion of it which was gifted with any sense of humor, saw the joke and laughed over it heartily. It was simply a telling rhetorical device, intended to point a sarcasm directed against the biblical commentators who have been trying to extract the doctrines of evolution from the first chapter of Genesis. But many of the newspapers all over the country took it up seriously, and the professor must, if he saw them, have enjoyed mightily the various letters and articles which have endeavored in solemn earnest to show that Milton was not justly entitled to the rank of a scientific expositor, and that it was a cowardly thing in the lecturer to attack Moses over Milton's shoulders. Whenever Professor Huxley enters on the defence of his science, as distinguished from the exposition of it, there are traces in his language of the gaudium certaminis which has found expression in so many hard-fought fields in his own country, and which has made him perhaps the most formidable antagonist, in so far as dialectics go, that the transcendental philosophers have ever encountered. He is, par excellence, a fighting man, but certainly his pugnacity diminishes neither his worth nor his capacity.

In many of the comments which his lectures have called out in the newspapers one meets every now and then with a curious failure to comprehend the position which an average non-scientific man occupies in such a conflict as in now going on over the doctrines of evolution. Professor Huxley was very careful not to repeat the error which delivered Professor Tyndall into the hands of the enemy at Belfast. He expressed no opinion as to the nature of the causal force which called the world into existence. He did not profess to know anything about the sources of life. He consequently did not once place himself on the level of the theologian or the unscientific spectator. What he undertook to do and did was to present to the audience some specimens of the evidence by which evolutionists have been led to the conclusion that their theory is correct. Now, the mistake which a good many newspaper writers—some of them ministers—have made in passing judgment on the lectures lies in their supposing that this evidence must be weak and incomplete because they have not been convinced. There is probably no more widely diffused fallacy, or one which works more mischief in all walks of life, than the notion that it is only those whose business it is to persuade who need to be trained in the art of proof, and that those who are to be persuaded need no process of preparation at all.

The fact is that skill in reasoning is as necessary on the one side as the other. He cannot be fully and rightly convinced who does not himself know how to convince, and no man is competent to judge in the last resort of the force of an argument who is not on something like an equality of knowledge and dialectical skill with the person using it. This is true in all fields of discussion; it is pre-eminently true in scientific fields. Of course, therefore, the real public of the scientific man—the public which settles finally whether he has made out his case—is a small one. Outside of it there is another and larger one on which his reasoning may act with irresistible force; but just as the fact that it does so act does not prove that his hypothesis is true, so also the fact that it has failed to convince proves nothing against its soundness. In other words, a man's occupying the position of a listener does not necessarily clothe him with the attributes of a judge, and there may be as much folly and impertinence in his going about saying, "I do not agree with Huxley; he has not satisfied me; he will have to produce more proof than that before I believe in evolution," as in going about saying, "I know as much about evolution as Huxley and could give as good a lecture on it as he any day." And yet a good many people are guilty of the one who would blush at the mere thought of the other.

Another fertile source of confusion in this and similar controversies is the habit which transcendentalists, theological and other, have of using the term "truth" in two different senses, the scientific sense and the religious or spiritual sense. The scientific man only uses it in one. Truth to him is something capable of demonstration by some one of the canons of induction. He knows nothing of any truth which cannot be proved. The religious man, on the other hand, and especially the minister, has been bred in the application of the term to facts of an entirely different order—that is, to emotions produced by certain beliefs which he cannot justify by any arguments, and about which to him no argument is necessary. These are the "spiritual truths" which are said to be perceptible often to the simple-minded and unlearned, though hidden from the wise and prudent. Now there is no decently educated religious man who does not perceive the distinction between these two kinds of truths, and few who do not think they keep this distinction in mind when passing upon the great problems of the origin and growth of the universe. But, as a matter of fact, we see the distinction ignored every day. People go to scientific lectures and read scientific books with their heads filled with spiritual truths, which have come they know not whence, and which give them infinite comfort in all the trying passages of life, and in view of this comfort must, they think, connect them by invisible lines of communication with the great Secret of the Universe, toward which philosophers try to make their way by visible lines. When, then, they find that the scientific man's induction makes no impression on this other truth, and that he cannot dislodge any theory of the growth or government of the world which has become firmly imbedded in it, they are apt to conclude that there is something faulty in his methods, or rash and presumptuous in his conclusions. But there is only one course for the leaders of religious thought to follow in order to prevent the disastrous confusion which comes of the sudden and complete break-down of the moral standards and sanctions by which the mass of mankind live, and that is to put an end at once, and gracefully, to the theory that the spiritual truth which brings the peace which passeth understanding has any necessary connection with any theory of the physical universe, or can be used to refute it or used as a substitute for it, or is dependent on the authenticity or interpretation of any book. They must not flatter themselves because a scientific man here and there doubts or gainsays, or because some learned theologian is still unconvinced, or because the mental habits of which faith is born seem to hold their ground or show signs of revival, that the philosophy of which Huxley is a master is not slowly but surely gaining ground. The proofs may not yet be complete, but they grow day by day; some of the elder scientific men may scout, but no young ones are appearing to take their places and preach their creed. The tide seems sometimes to ebb from month to month, but it rises from year to year. The true course of spiritually minded men under these circumstances is to separate their faith from all theories of the precise manner in which the world originated, or of the length of time it has lasted, as matters, for their purposes, of little or no moment. The secret springs of hope and courage from which each of us draws strength in the great crises of existence would flow all the same whether life appeared on the planet ten million or ten thousand years ago, and whether the present forms of life were the product of one day or of many ages. And we doubt very much whether anyone has ever listened in a candid and dispassionate frame of mind to the evolutionist's history of the globe without finding that it had deepened for him the mystery of the universe, and magnified the Power which stands behind it.

Not the least interesting feature in the discussion about the theory of evolution is the prominent part taken in it by clergymen of various denominations. There is hardly one of them who, since Huxley's lectures, has not preached a sermon bearing on the matter in some way, and several have made it the topic of special articles or lectures. In fact, we do not think we exaggerate when we say that three-fourths of all that has been recently said or written about the hypothesis in this country has been said or written by ministers. There is no denying that the theory, if true, does, in appearance at least, militate against the account of the creation given in the first chapter of Genesis, or, in other words, against the view of the origin of life on the globe which has been held by the Christian world for seventeen centuries. It would, therefore, be by no means surprising that ministers should meet it, either by showing that the Mosaic account of the creation was really inspired—was, in short, the account given by the Creator himself—or that the modern interpretations of it were incorrect, and that it was really, when perfectly understood, easily reconciled with the conclusions reached of late years by geologists and biologists. This is the way in which a great many ministers have hitherto met the evolutionists, and for this sort of work they are undoubtedly fitted by education and experience. If it can be done by anyone, they are the men to do it. If it be maintained that the biblical account is literally true, they are more familiar than any other class of men with the evidence and arguments accumulated by the Church in favor of the inspiration of the Scriptures; or if, on the other hand, it be desired to reconcile the Bible with evolution, they are more familiar than any other class of men with the exegetical process by which this reconciliation can be effected. They are specially trained in ecclesiastical history and tradition, in Greek and Hebrew religious literature, and in the methods of interpretation which have been for ages in use among theologians.

Of late, however, they have shown a decided inclination to abandon the purely ecclesiastical approach to the controversy altogether, and this is especially remarkable in the discussion now pending over Huxley. They do not seek to defend the biblical account of the creation, or to reconcile it with the theory of the evolutionists. Far from it, they have come down, in most of the recent cases, into the scientific arena, and are meeting the men of science with their own weapons. They tell Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall that their evidence is imperfect, and their reasoning from it faulty. Noticing their activity in this new field, and the marked contrast which this activity presents to the modesty or indifference of the other professions—the lawyers and doctors, for instance, who on general grounds have fully as much reason to be interested in evolution as the ministers, and have hitherto been at least as well fitted to discuss it—we asked ourselves whether it was possible that, without our knowledge, any change had of late years been made in the curriculum of the divinity schools or theological seminaries with the view of fitting ministers to take a prominent part in the solution of the increasingly important and startling problems raised by physical science. In order to satisfy ourselves, we lately turned over the catalogues of all the principal divinity schools in the country, to see if any chairs of natural science had been established, or if candidates for the ministry had to undergo any compulsory instruction in geology or physics, or the higher mathematics, or biology, or palaeontology, or astronomy, or had to become versed in the methods of scientific investigation in the laboratory or in the dissecting-room, or were subjected to any unusually severe discipline in the use of the inductive process. Not much to our surprise, we found nothing of the kind. We found that, to all appearance, not even the smallest smattering of natural science in any of its branches is considered necessary to a minister's education; no astronomy, no chemistry, no biology, no geology, no higher mathematics, no comparative anatomy, and nothing severe in logic. In fact, of special preparation for the discussion of such a theme as the origin of life on the earth, there does not appear to be in the ordinary course of our divinity schools any trace.

We then said to ourselves, But ministers are modest, truthful men; they would not knowingly pass themselves off as competent on a subject with which they were unfitted to deal. They are no less candid and self-distrustful, for instance, than lawyers and doctors, and a lawyer or doctor who ventured to tackle a professed scientist on a scientific subject to which he had given no systematic study would be laughed at by his professional brethren, and would suffer from it even in his professional reputation, as it would be taken to indicate a dangerous want of self-knowledge. Perhaps, then, the training given in the divinity schools, though it does not touch special fields of science, is such as to prepare the mind for the work of induction by some course of intellectual gymnastics. Perhaps, though it does not familiarize a man with the facts of geology and biology and astronomy, it so disciplines him in the work of collecting and arranging facts of any kind, and reasoning from them, that he will be a master in the art of proof, and that, in short, though he may not have a scientific man's knowledge, he will have his mental habits.

But we found this second supposition as far from the truth as the first one was. Moreover, the mental constitution of the young men who choose the ministry as a profession is not apt to be of a kind well fitted for scientific investigation. Reverence is one of their prominent characteristics, and reverence predisposes them to accept things on authority. They are inclined to seek truth rather as a means of repose than for its own sake, and to fancy that it is associated closely with spiritual comfort, and that they have secured the truth when they feel the comfort. Though, last not least, they enter the seminary with a strong bias in favor of one particular theory of the origin of life and of the history of the race, and their subsequent studies are marked out and pursued with the set purpose of strengthening this bias and of qualifying them to defend it and spread it, and of associating in their minds the doubt or rejection of it with moral evil. The consequence is that they go forth, trained not as investigators or inquirers, but as advocates, charged with the defence against all comers of a view of the universe which they have accepted ready-made from teachers. A worse preparation for scientific pursuits of any kind can hardly be imagined. The slightest trace of such a state of mind in a scientific man—that is, of a disposition to believe a thing on grounds of feeling or interest, or with reference to practical consequences, or to jump over gaps in proof in order to reach pleasant conclusions—discredits him with his fellows, and throws doubt on his statements.

We are not condemning this state of mind for all purposes. Indeed, we think the wide-spread prevalence of the philosophic way of looking at things would be in many respects a great misfortune for the race, and we acknowledge that a rigidly trained philosopher would be unfit for most of a minister's functions; but we have only to describe a minister's education in order to show his exceeding unreadiness for contentions such as some of his brethren are carrying on with geologists and physicists and biologists. In fact, there is no educated calling whose members are not, on the whole, better equipped for fighting in scientific fields over the hypothesis of evolution. Our surprise at seeing lawyers and doctors engaged in it would be very much less justifiable, for a portion at least of the training received in these professions is of a scientific cast, and concerns the selection and classification of facts, while a clergyman's is almost wholly devoted to the study of the opinions and sayings of other men. In truth, theology, properly so called, is a collection of opinions. Nor do these objections to a clergyman's mingling in scientific disputes arise out of his belief about the origin and government of the world per se, because one does not think of making them to trained religious philosophers; for instance, to Principal Dawson or Mr. St. George Mivart. Some may think or say that the religious prepossessions of these gentlemen lessen the weight of their opinions on a certain class of scientific questions, but no one would question their right to share in scientific discussions.



CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

Some of the letters from clergymen which have been called out by our article on the part recently taken by them in scientific discussion maintain that, although ministers may not be familiar with the facts of science, many of them are fully competent to weigh the arguments founded on these facts put forward by scientific men, and decide whether they have proved their case or not; or, in other words, that we were mistaken in saying that the theological seminaries did not afford severe training in the use of the inductive process, and that it could not be used effectively without knowledge of the matters on which it was used. More than one of these letters points, in support of this view, to the answer of the Rev. Dr. Taylor, of this city, to Professor Huxley's lectures, published some weeks ago in the Tribune, and we believe the Tribune presented the author to the public as "a trained logician."

We have accordingly turned to Dr. Taylor's letter and given it a much more attentive reading than we confess we gave it when it first appeared, for the purpose of seeing whether it was really true that ministers were such dexterous and highly taught dialecticians that they could overthrow a scientific man, even on a subject of which they knew little or nothing—whether, in short, they could really treat the question of evolution algebraically, and, by the mere aid of signs of the meaning of which they were ignorant, put the Huxleys and Darwins to confusion. For Dr. Taylor opens in this way:

"Let it be understood, then, that I have no fault to find with Mr. Huxley as a discoverer of facts or as an exponent of comparative anatomy. In both of these respects he is beyond all praise of mine, and I am ready to sit at his feet; but when he begins to reason from the facts which he sets forth, then, like every other reasoner, he is amenable to the laws of argumentation, and his conclusions are to be tested by the relation which they bear to the premises which he has advanced, and by the proof which he furnishes for the premises themselves."

We pass over, as of no consequence for our present purpose, the various exceptions which he then takes to Huxley's arrangement of his lectures, to the tone of his exceptions, and to his mode of referring to the biblical hypothesis, and come to what he has to say of Huxley's evidence, which he truly calls "circumstantial evidence." The first thing he does is to define circumstantial evidence; but here, at the very outset, we have been surprised to find a logician who conceives himself capable of overhauling the argumentation of the masters of science, going to a lawyer to get "a statement of the principles which regulate the value of circumstantial evidence." This is a matter which lay logicians usually have at their fingers' ends, and we have never known one yet who would not be puzzled by a suggestion that he should do as Dr. Taylor did—go to a "distinguished legal friend" for information as to the conditions of this kind of proof. For, as we have more than once pointed out, lawyers, as such, have no special skill or training in the use of circumstantial evidence as scientific men know it—that is, as evidence which derives all its force from the laws of the human mind. The circumstantial evidence with which lawyers, qua lawyers, are familiar under our system of jurisprudence is an artificial thing created by legislation or custom, with the object of preventing the minds of the jury— presumably a body of untrained and unlearned men—from being confused or led astray. Moreover, they are only familiar with its use in one very narrow field—human conduct under one set of social conditions. For example, a lawyer might be a very good judge of circumstantial evidence in America, and a very poor one in India or China; might have a keen eye for the probable or improbable in a New England village, and none at all in a Prussian barrack.

A familiar illustration of the restrictions on his experience of it is to be found in the rule which compels the calling of "experts" when there is a question as to any point of science or art. "The words science or art," says Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, "include all subjects on which a course of special study or experience is necessary to the formation of an opinion," and the opinion of such an expert is a "relevant fact." So that Dr. Taylor's "distinguished legal friend," if a good lawyer, would not, in spite of his proficiency in circumstantial evidence, undertake to dispute with Professor Huxley about the relation of the anchitherium, hipparion, and horse; and if Dr. Taylor offered himself for examination on such a point he would be laughed out of court. In none of our courts is the presentation allowed of all the circumstances which strengthen or weaken a probability.

A lawyer, therefore, though he might not be as ill fitted for a scientific discussion as a minister, is, as such, hardly more of an authority on the force and limits of that portion of scientific proof which is drawn from simple observation. Dr. Taylor's consulting one as a final authority as to the very nature of the argument on which he was himself about to sit in judgment is at the outset a suspicious incident. The definition of circumstantial evidence which he got from his legal friend was this:

"The process of proof by circumstantial evidence consists in reasoning from such facts as are known or proved, and thence establishing such as are conjectured to exist. The process is fatally vicious, first, if any material circumstance from which we seek to deduce the conclusion depends itself on conjecture; and, second, if the known facts are not such as to exclude to a reasonable degree of certainty every other hypothesis."

"Now, tried by these two tests," says Dr. Taylor, "the professor's argument was a failure." Taking this definition as it stands, however, we think it will not be difficult to show that Dr. Taylor is not competent to apply the tests, or to say whether the professor's argument is a failure or not.

It is hardly necessary to say that all the evidence in our possession or attainable, with regard to the history of the earth and of animal and vegetable life on its surface, is circumstantial evidence. The sciences of geology, palaeontology, and, to a certain extent, biology are sciences of observation, and but few of their conclusions can be reached or tested by experimentation. They are the result of a collection of facts, observed in various places, at various times, and by various persons, and variously related to other facts; and the collection of these facts, and the arrangement of them, and the formation of a judgment as to their value both positive and relative, form the greater portion of the work of a scientific man in these fields. Professor Huxley's argument, which Dr. Taylor disposes of so summarily, consists of a series of inferences from facts so collected and arranged. They are the things "known or proved," on which, as his legal friend truly says, the reasoning in the process of proof by circumstantial evidence must rest.

Now, Dr. Taylor, by his own confession, is no authority in either geology, biology, or palaeontology. He has neither collected, observed, nor experimented in these fields. He does not know how many facts have been discovered in them, or what bearing they have on other facts in other fields. Therefore, he is entirely unable to say whether Huxley is arguing from things "known or proved" or not. Moreover, he does not, for similar reasons, know whether Huxley's process has been "fatally vitiated" by the dependence of any "material circumstance" on conjecture, or by the insufficiency of the "known facts" to exclude every other hypothesis; for, first, he does not know what is in geological, biological, or palaeontological induction a "material circumstance"—nor does any man know except by prolonged study and observation—and, second, he does not know whether "the known or proved facts" are sufficient to exclude every other hypothesis, because he neither knows what facts are known nor what is the probative force of such as are known. We can, however, make Dr. Taylor's position still clearer by a homely illustration. A wild Indian will, owing to prolonged observation and great acuteness of the senses, tell by a simple inspection of grass or leaf-covered ground, on which a scholar will perceive nothing unusual whatever, that a man has recently passed over it. He will tell whether he was walking or running, whether he carried a burden, whether he was young or old, and how long ago and what hour of the day he went by. He reaches all his conclusions by circumstantial evidence of precisely the same character as that used by the geologist, though he knows nothing about the formal logic or the process of induction. Now, what Dr. Taylor would have us believe is that he can come out of his study and pass judgment on the Indian's reasoning without being able to see one of the "known facts" on which the reasoning rests, or appreciate in any degree which of them is material to the conclusion and which is not, or even to conjecture whether, taken together, they exclude the hypothesis that it was not a man but a cow or a dog which passed over the ground, and not to-day but yesterday that the marks were made.

Dr. Taylor further on makes a display of this inability to appreciate the logical value of scientific facts by asking: "Where is the evidence, scientific or other, that there was evolution? We see these fossils (those of the horse). Huxley says they are as they are because the higher evolved itself out of the lower; we say they are as they are because God created them in series." To recur to the former illustration, it is as if the Indian should show Dr. Taylor the marks on which he relied in his induction, and the doctor should calmly reply: "I see the marks; you say they were made by a man's foot in walking; I, who have never given any attention to the subject, and have never been in the woods before, say they were made by the rain." The fact is that if there were any weight whatever in this kind of talk—if no equality of knowledge were necessary between two disputants—it would enable an ignorant field-hand to sweep away in one sentence the whole science of geology and palaeontology, and even astronomy, and to dispose of every conclusion on any subject drawn from a skilled and experienced balancing of probabilities, or nice mathematical calculation, by simply saying that he was not satisfied with the proofs.

Dr. Taylor's reasons for believing that the appearance of fossil horses with a diminishing number of toes is caused by the creation at separate periods of a four-, a three-, a two-, and a one-toed horse are, he says, "personal, philosophical, historical," and he opposes them with the utmost apparent sincerity to Huxley's assertion that "there can be no scientific evidence" of such creation. The "personal reason" for believing in successive creations of sets of horses with a varying number of toes can, of course, only be the reason so often urged in ball-room disputation—that "I feel it must be so;" the "philosophic reason" can only be the one with which those who have frequented the society of metaphysicians are very familiar, namely, a deduction from some eminent speculator's opinion about the nature of the Supreme Being, the conclusion being apparently that if the Creator wished to diminish the number of a horse's toes, it would not do for him to let one drop into disuse and so gradually disappear, but he would have to make a new horse, on a new design. What Dr. Taylor means by the "historical reason" we can only conjecture from his saying that it is of the same order as his historical reason for believing "that the Bible is the Word of God." The historical reason for this, we presume, is that there are various literary and traditional proofs that the Old Testament was held to be the Word of God by the Jewish nation at a very early period, and was by them transmitted as such to the modern Christian world, and that many of the prophecies contained in it have received partial or a complete fulfilment. But how by a process of this kind, partly literary and partly conjectural, and attended by great difficulties at every step, he would reach a fact of prehistoric times of so much gravity as creation in series, we think it would puzzle Dr. Taylor to explain. Indeed, the mere production in a controversy of this nature of these vague fancies, half pious, half poetical, conjured up in most cases as a help to mental peace, by a leading minister in the character of a logician, is a very remarkable proof of the extent of those defects in clerical education to which we recently called attention.



TYNDALL AND THE THEOLOGIANS

The recent address delivered by Professor Tyndall before the British Association at Belfast, in which he "confessed" that he "prolonged the vision backward across the boundary of experimental evidence, and discerned in matter the promise and potency of every quality and form of life," produced one by no means very surprising result. Dr. Watts, a professor of theology in the Presbyterian College in that city, was led by it to offer to read before the Biological Section of the Association a paper containing a plan of his own for the establishment of "peace and co-operation between science and religion." The paper was, as might have been expected, declined. The author then read it before a large body of religious people, who apparently liked it, and they passed him a vote of thanks. The whole religious world, indeed, is greatly excited against both Tyndall and Huxley for their performances on this occasion, and papers by no means in sympathy with the religious world—the Pall Mall Gazette, for instance—are very severe on them for having "recourse to a style of oratory and disquisition more appropriate to the chapel than the lecture-room," or, in other words, for using the meetings of the Association for a sort of propagandism not much superior in method to that of theological missionaries, and thus challenging the theologians to a conflict which may make it necessary, in the interest of fair play, to add a theological section to the Association. Of course, when Professor Tyndall passed "beyond the boundary of experimental evidence," and began to see with his "mind's eye" instead of with the microscope and telescope, he got into a region in which the theologian is not only more at home than he, but which theology claims as its exclusive domain, and in which ministers look on physicists as intruders.

But then, Dr. Watts's "plea for peace and co-operation between science and religion" is one of many signs that theologians are, in spite of all that has as yet been said, hardly alive to the exact nature of the attitude they occupy toward science. They evidently look upon scientific men as they look on a hostile school of theologians—as the Princeton men look on the Yale men, for instance, or the New looked on the Old School Presbyterians, or the Calvinists on the Arminians—that is, as persons having a common standard of orthodoxy, but differing somewhat in their method of applying it, and who may, therefore, be induced from considerations of expediency to suppress all outward marks of divergence and work together harmoniously for the common end. All schools of theology seek the glory of God and salvation of souls, and, this being the case, differences on points of doctrine do seem trifling and capable of being put aside.

It is this way of regarding the matter which has led Dr. Watts to propose an alliance between religion and science, and which produces the arguments one sometimes sees in defence of Christianity against Positivism, drawn from a consideration of the services which Christianity has rendered to the race, and of the gloomy and desolate condition in which its disappearance would leave the world. Tyndall and Huxley do not, however, occupy the position of religious prophets or fathers. They preside over no church or other organization. They have no power or authority to draft any creed or articles which will bind anybody else, or which would have any claims on anybody's reverence or adhesion. No person, in short, is authorized to bring science into an alliance with religion or with anything else. Such "peace and co-operation" as Dr. Watts proposed would be peace and co-operation between him and Professor Tyndall, or between the theologians and the British Association, but "peace and co-operation between science and religion" is a term which carries absurdity on its face. Science is simply a body of facts which lead people familiar with them to infer the existence of certain laws. How can it, therefore, be either at peace or war with anybody, or co-operate with anybody? What Professor Tyndall might promise would be either not to discover any more facts, or to discover only certain classes of facts, or to draw no inferences from facts which would be unfavorable to Dr. Watts's theory of the universe; but the only result of this would be that Tyndall would lose his place as a scientific man, and others would go on discovering the facts and drawing the inferences.

In like manner, the supposition that Christianity can be defended against Positivism on grounds of expediency implies a singular conception of the mental operations of those persons who are affected by Positivist theories, and indeed, we might add, of the thinking world generally. No man believes in a religion simply because he thinks it useful, and therefore no man's real adhesion to the Christian creed can be secured by showing him how human happiness would suffer by its extinction. This argument, if it had any weight at all, would only induce persons either to pretend to be Christians when they were not, or to refrain from assailing Christianity, or to avoid all inquiries which might possibly lead to sceptical conclusions. It is therefore, perhaps, a good argument to address to believers, because it may induce them to suppress doubts and avoid lines of thought or social relations likely to beget doubt; but it is an utterly futile argument to address to those who have already lost their faith. Men believe because they are convinced; it is not in their power to believe from motives of prudence or from public spirit.

However, the complaints of the theologians excited by Professor Tyndall's last utterances are not wholly unreasonable. Science has done nothing hitherto to give it any authority in the region of the unseen. "Beyond the boundary of experimental evidence" one man's vision is about as good as another's. It is interesting to know that Professor Tyndall there "discerns in matter the potency and promise of every quality and form of life," but only because he is a distinguished man, who gives much thought to this class of subjects and occupies a very prominent place in the public eye. As a basis for belief of any kind, his vision is of no more value than that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who would probably in that region discern the promise and potency of every form of life in a supreme and creative intelligence. Scientific men are continually pushing back the limits of our knowledge of the material universe. They have during the last eighty years made an enormous addition to the sum of that knowledge, but they have not, since Democritus, taken away one hair's-breadth from the Mystery which lies behind. In fact, their labors have in many ways deepened this Mystery. We can appeal confidently to any candid man to say, for instance, whether Darwin's theory of the origin of life and the evolution of species does not make this globe and its inhabitants a problem vastly darker and more inscrutable than the Mosaic account of the creation. Take, again, the light thrown on the constitution of the sun by the spectroscope; it is a marvellous addition to our knowledge of our environment, but then, does it not make our ignorance as to the origin of the sun seem deeper? No scientific man pretends that any success in discovery will ever lead the human mind beyond the resolution of the number of laws which now seem to govern phenomena into a smaller number; but if we reached the limit of the possible in that direction to-morrow, we should be as far from the secret of the universe as ever. When we have all got to the blank wall which everybody admits lies at the boundary of experimental evidence, the philosopher will know no more about what lies beyond than the peasant, though the peasant will probably do then what he does now—people it with the creatures of his imagination. If a philosopher in our day likes to anticipate that period, and hazards the conjecture that matter lies beyond, he is welcome to his guess, but it ought to be understood that it is only a guess.

The danger to society from the men of science does not, we imagine, lie in the direction in which the theologians look for it. We do not think they need feel particularly troubled by Professor Tyndall's speculations as to the origin of things, for these speculations are very old, and have, after all, only a remote connection with human affairs. But there are signs both in his and Professor Huxley's methods of popularizing science, and in those of a good many of their followers, that we may fear the growth of something in the nature of a scientific priesthood, who, tempted by the great facilities for addressing the public which our age affords, and to which nearly every other profession has fallen a victim, will no longer confine themselves to their laboratories and museums and scientific journals, but serve as "ministers of nature" before great crowds of persons, for the most part of small knowledge and limited capacity, on whom their hints, suggestions, and denunciations will have a dangerously stimulating effect, particularly as the contempt of scientific men for what is called "literature"—that is, the recorded experience of the human race and the recorded expression of human feelings—grows every year stronger, and exerts more and more influence on the masses. The number of dabblers in science—of persons with a slight smattering of chemistry, geology, botany, and so on—too, promises to be largely increased for some time to come by the arrangements of one sort or another made by colleges and schools for scientific education; and though there is reason to expect from this education a considerable improvement in knowledge of the art of reasoning, there is also reason to fear a considerable increase of dogmatic temper, of eagerness for experimentation in all fields, and of scorn for the experience of persons who have never worked in the laboratory or done any deep-sea dredging. Now, whatever views we may hold as to the value of science in general and in the long run to the human race, and in particular its value for purposes of legislation and social economy, which we are far from denying, there is some risk that lectures like Professor Huxley's at Belfast, dressed up for promiscuous crowds, and produced with the polite scorn of infallibility, in which the destruction of moral responsibility is broadly hinted at as one of the probable results of researches in biology, will do great mischief. For what does it matter, or rather ought it to matter, for social purposes, in what part of a man's system his conscience lies, or whether pressure on a particular portion of the brain may convert him into a thief, when we know, as of experience, that the establishment of good courts and police turns a robbers' den into a hive of peaceful industry, and when we see the wonders which discipline works in an ignorant crowd?



THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE

A considerable body of the graduates of the Irish Catholic University, including members of the legal and medical professions, presented a long and solemn memorial to Cardinal Cullen and the other Catholic bishops at the late commencement of that institution, which throws a good deal of light not only on the vexed question of Catholic education in Ireland, but on the relations of the Catholic Church to education everywhere. The memorial examined in detail the management of the university, which it pronounces so bad as to endanger the existence of the college. But what it most complains of is the all but total absence of instruction in science. The memorialists say that the neglect of science by the university has afforded a very plausible argument to the enemies of the university, who never tire of repeating that the Catholic Church is the enemy of science, and that she will carry out her usual policy in Ireland with respect to it; that "no one can deny that the Irish Catholics are miserably deficient in scientific education, and that this deficiency is extremely galling to them; and, in a commercial sense, involves a loss to them, while, in an intellectual sense, it involves a positive degradation." They speak regretfully of the secession of Professor Sullivan, to take the presidency of the Queen's College, Cork, and declare that "no Irish-Catholic man of science can be found to take his place." They then go on to make several astounding charges. The lecture-list of the university does not include for the faculty of arts a single professor of the physical or natural sciences, or the name of a solitary teacher in descriptive geometry, geology, zoology, comparative anatomy, mineralogy, mining, astronomy, philology, ethnology, mechanics, electricity, or optics. Of the prizes and exhibitions, the number offered in classics equals that of those offered in all other studies put together, while in other universities the classical prizes do not exceed one-fourth of the whole. They wind up their melancholy recital by declaring that they are determined that the scientific inferiority of Irish Catholics shall not last any longer; and that if they cannot obtain a scientific education in their own universities, they will seek it at Trinity or the Queen's Colleges, or study it for themselves in the works of Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Lyell. They make one other singular complaint, viz., that no provision is made for supplying the lay students with instruction in theology.

It ought to be said in defence of the cardinal and the bishops, though the memorialists probably could not venture to say it, that the church hardly pretends that the university is an efficient or complete instrument of education. It has been in existence, it is true, twenty years, but the main object of its promoters during this period has apparently been to harass or frighten the government by means of it into granting them an endowment, or giving them control of the Queen's Colleges. Had they succeeded in this, they would doubtless before now have made a show of readiness to afford something in the nature of scientific instruction, because, as the memorialists remark, there is no denying "that the physical and natural sciences have become the chief studies of the age." But the memorialists must be either very simple-minded or very ignorant Catholics, if they suppose that any endowment or any pressure from public opinion would ever induce the Catholic hierarchy to undertake to turn out students who would make a respectable figure among the scientific graduates of other universities, or even hold their own among the common run of amateur readers of Huxley and Darwin and Tyndall. There is no excuse for any misunderstanding as regards the policy of the church on this point. She has never given the slightest encouragement or sanction to the idea which so many Protestant divines have of late years embraced, that theology is a progressive science, capable of continued development in the light of newly discovered facts, and of gradual adaptation to the changing phases of our knowledge of the physical universe. She has hundreds of times given out as absolute truth a certain theory of the origin of man and of the globe he lives on, and she cannot either abandon it or encourage any study or habit of mind which would naturally or probably lead to doubt of the correctness of this theory, or of the church's authority in enunciating it. In fact, the Pope, who is now an infallible judge in all matters of faith and discipline, has, within the last five years, in the famous "Syllabus" of modern follies, pronounced damnable and erroneous nearly all the methods and opinions by which Irish or any other Catholics could escape the deficiency in scientific knowledge which they say they find so injurious and so degrading. It is safe to say, therefore, that a Catholic cannot receive an education which would fit him to acquire distinction among scientific men in our day, without either incurring everlasting damnation or running the risk of it. Beside a danger of this kind, of course, as any priest will tell him, commercial loss and social inferiority are small matters.

Of course, if we take the facts of a great many branches of physical science by themselves, it would be easy enough to show that a good Catholic might safely accept them. But no man can reach these facts by investigations of his own, or hold to them intelligently and fruitfully, without acquiring intellectual habits and making use of tests which the church considers signs of a rebellious and therefore sinful temper. Moreover, nobody who has attained the limits of our present knowledge in chemistry, geology, comparative anatomy, ethnography, philology, and mythology can stand there with closed eyes. He must inevitably peer into the void beyond, and would be more than human if he did not indulge in speculations as to the history of the universe and its destiny which the church must treat as endangering his salvation. This is so well known that one reads the lamentations of these Catholic laymen with considerable surprise. They may be fairly supposed to know something of church history, and, even if they do not, they must profess some knowledge of the teaching given by the church in those universities of other countries which she controls. She does not encourage the study of natural science anywhere. Mathematics and astronomy she looks on with some favor, though we do not know how the spectroscope may have affected her toward the latter; and we venture to assert that these are the only fields of science in which any Catholic layman attains distinction without forfeiting his standing in the eyes of the clergy. We do not now speak of the French, Italian, and German Catholic laymen who go on with their investigations without caring whether the clergy like them or not, and without taking the trouble to make any formal repudiation of the church's authority over their intellects. We simply say there are no pious Catholic scientific men of any note, and never will be if the Catholic clergy can help it, and the lamentations of Catholics over the fact are logically absurd.

The legislation which Prussia is now putting into force on the subject of clerical education is founded on a candid recognition of the church's position on this matter. Prince Bismarck is well aware that in no seminary or college controlled by priests is there any chance that a young man will receive the best instruction of the day on the subjects in which the modern world is most interested, and by which the affairs of the State are most influenced. He has, therefore, wisely decided that it is the duty of the State to see that men who still exert as much power over popular thought as priests do, and are to receive State pay as popular instructors, shall also receive the best obtainable secular education before being subjected to purely professional training in the theological seminaries. The desperation of the fight made against him by the clergy is due to their well-grounded belief that in order to get a young man in our time to swallow a fair amount of Catholic theology, he must be caught early and kept close. The warfare which is raging in Prussia is one which has broken out in every country in which the government has formal relations with the church.

The appearance of a mutinous spirit among the Irish laity, and this not on political but scientific subjects, shows that the poison has sunk very deep and is very virulent; for the Irish laity have been until now the foremost Catholics in the world in silence and submissiveness, and there is nothing in ecclesiastical history which can equal in absurdity a request, addressed to Cardinal Cullen, that he would supply them with the kind of teaching which other men get from Tyndall and Huxley. With ecclesiastical insubordination arising out of differences on matters of doctrine or discipline, such as that manifested by the Old Catholics, it is comparatively easy to deal. Schismatics can be excommunicated by an authority which they have themselves venerated, and from an organization in which they loved to live and would fain have died. But over wanderers into the fields of science the church loses all hold. Her weapons are the jest of the museum and the laboratory, and her lore the babbling of the ignorant or blind.



THE CHURCH AND GOOD CONDUCT

The Episcopal Church, at the late Triennial Convention, took up and determined to make a more vigorous effort to deal with the problem presented by the irreligion of the poor and the dishonesty of church-members. It is an unfortunate and, at first sight, somewhat puzzling circumstance, that so many of the culprits in the late cases of fraud and defalcation should have been professing Christians, and in some cases persons of unusual ecclesiastical activity, and that this activity should apparently have furnished no check whatever to the moral descent. It is proposed to meet the difficulty by more preaching, more prayer, and greater use of lay assistance in church-work. There is nothing very new, however, about the difficulty. There is hardly a year in which it is not deplored at meetings of church organizations, and in which solemn promises are not made to devise some mode of keeping church-members up to their professions, and gathering more of the church-less working-classes into the fold; but somehow there is not much visible progress to be recorded. The church scandals multiply in spite of pastors and people, and the workingmen decline to show themselves at places of worship, although the number of places of worship and of church-members steadily increases.

We are sorry not to notice in any of the discussions on the subject a more frank and searching examination of the reason why religion does not act more powerfully as a rule of conduct. Until such an examination is made, and its certain results boldly faced by church reformers, the church cannot become any more of a help to right living than it is now, be this little or much. The first thing which such an examination would reveal is a thing which is in everybody's mind and on everybody's tongue in private, but which is apt to be evaded or only slightly alluded to at ecclesiastical synods and conventions—we mean the loss of faith in the dogmatic part of Christianity. People do not believe in the fall, the atonement, the resurrection, and a future state of reward and punishment at all, or do not believe in them with the certainty and vividness which are needed to make faith a constant influence on man's daily life. They do not believe they will be damned for sin with the assurance they once did, and they are consequently indifferent to most of what is said to them of the need of repentance. They do not believe the story of Christ's life and the theory of his character and attributes given in the New Testament, or they regard them as merely a picturesque background to his moral teachings, about which a Christian may avoid coming to any positive conclusion.