THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY.

The early part of the nineteenth century was not very prolific in the department of speculative thought, but signs of movement may be detected in the third decade. Each of the English universities became the centre of a very active intellectual society. The Cambridge men showed a bent towards general literature and philosophy, or to theology of a type cognate to philosophy. In the works of Whately Oxford gave signs of a philosophical revival; but she devoted herself mainly to theology, and the practical isolation of Whately, a hard and arid though a vigorous man, calls the more attention to her speculative poverty. The celebrated ‘Oxford movement,’ whose roots are in the twenties, though its visible growth dates only from the thirties, is of incomparably greater importance than this feeble revival.

Newman, the great artificer of the movement, rightly traces its inception to the influence of John Keble. But Keble’s true literary form is poetry, and his principal contribution to poetry belongs to the preceding period. His prose works are not in themselves of great importance. As Professor of Poetry at Oxford he delivered lectures (in Latin) on critical subjects. In his character of pastor he preached many sermons, and a selection from them was published in 1847. The most famous of his pulpit utterances was one preached in 1833 on ‘National Apostasy.’ ‘I have ever considered and kept the day,’ says Newman, with regard to the delivery of this sermon, ‘as the start of the religious movement of 1833.’ Finally, in 1863, appeared Keble’s latest work of importance, a Life of Bishop Wilson.

Keble’s influence was essentially personal, and was due to his saintly life more than to anything he wrote, even in poetry. The Tractarian movement took its rise in a longing for saintliness, of which Keble furnished a living example. He was not to any considerable extent an originator of theory. Certain germs of theory about the Church, about its relation to pre-Reformation times, about authority in religion, were in the air, and they became absorbed in Keble’s system. But his was not a creative mind, and his position at the head of the Anglo-Catholic movement was little more than an accident. He was like a child who by a thrust of his hand sends a finely-poised rock thundering down a hill. In his literary aspects he is disappointing. A brilliant boy and a most blameless man, he remains throughout too little of this world. The pale perfection of his life is reflected in his works. He would have been better had he been less good; he would have been much better had he been less feminine.

In the ranks of the movement so initiated were included an unusual number of men who must be classed among the ‘might-have-beens’ of literature; men of great reputation eclipsed by premature death, men who never wrote, or men whose writings disappointed expectation. Nearly all its members had literary tastes, a fact not surprising when we consider how large a part imagination played in its start and development. But Hurrell Froude, one of the most daring-minded men engaged in it, died early, leaving only inadequate remains as evidence of his great gifts. W. G. Ward lived, but only to prove by his Ideal of a Christian Church that the power of writing good English was not among his endowments; and if the poetry of Keble is only second or even third-rate, that of Isaac Williams, a versifier of the movement, is of lower grade still. Manning was more the man of action than the man of letters; while the work of Dean Church and Canon Liddon, both of whom had marked literary talents, falls principally outside the limits of this period. There remain two remarkable men, one the very soul of the movement, the other its greatest recruit, who have attained, the first a great, the second a respectable place in letters. These are Cardinal Newman and Pusey, of whom the latter may be considered the exception to the rule that the Tractarians were by nature and instinct men of letters. Pusey was not; he was rather the technical theologian with no direct interest in letters at all.

John Henry Newman has been described by J. A. Froude, in language hardly too strong, as ‘the indicating number’ of the movement, all the others being, in comparison with him, but as cyphers. The story of Newman’s inner life has been told with inimitable grace in the Apologia pro Vita Sua, and this is not only his greatest contribution to literature, but the best document for his life and doctrines. There are few studies more interesting than the contrast presented by this book on the one side, and the Phases of Faith by its author’s brother, F. W. Newman, on the other. The younger Newman too has a mind prone to religion, but he decides to rest in reason, while his brother leans upon authority. Not unnaturally they drift very far apart; not unnaturally too the author of the Phases of Faith is amazed that it took his brother ten years to discover whither he was going.Newman’s education was private till he went to Oxford, where, in 1822, he won a fellowship at Oriel, then the great intellectual college of the university. He was at this time a Calvinist in his religious views, and held, among other things, that the Pope was Antichrist. At Oxford he came under the influence of Whately, who, he says, taught him to think. But the two men were essentially antipathetic and foredoomed to part, not the best of friends. Newman drew gradually closer to men of a very different stamp—R. J. Wilberforce, Hurrell Froude and Keble. His Arians of the Fourth Century was finished in 1832, and he took rest after the fatigue of writing it in a memorable journey with Hurrell Froude in the Mediterranean. During this journey he composed most of his verses printed in the Lyra Apostolica, and towards the end of it the exquisite hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light.’

After his return, in 1833, Newman began, ‘out of his own head,’ the Tracts for the Times. They culminated in the celebrated Tract XC (1841), which raised such a storm of opposition that the series had to be closed. Contemporaneously with the Tracts, Newman was busied with other works in defence of the Via Media. To this class belong The Prophetical Office of the Church (1837) and the Lectures on Justification (1838). He was moreover building up a great reputation as a preacher; and, as if all this was not enough, he was for several years editor of The British Critic. The storm raised by his opinions, and especially by Tract XC, drove him into retirement at Littlemore in 1841. He called it his Torres Vedras, in the conviction that he, like Wellington, was destined to ‘issue forth anew,’ and to conquer. But the actual course was different. In 1843 he retracted his former strictures on Rome, and resigned his charge of St. Mary’s. For two years more he lingered in the Church of England, foreseeing the inevitable end, but slow to take a step of such importance without absolute assurance. In 1845 he was received into the Roman communion. Here the history of his spiritual development may be said to close. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘like coming into port after a rough sea.’ He repudiates the idea that his mind was afterwards idle; but there was no change, no anxiety, no doubt. He seems to be unconscious that this individual peace may be dear bought for the human race, and that the absence of doubt is, to use his own favourite word, the ‘note’ of a low type.

Among the voluminous works of Newman, in addition to those of his Anglican period already mentioned, the most important are The Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), the Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), The Dream of Gerontius (1865), and the Grammar of Assent (1870).

Except the Apologia, no work of Newman’s is more valuable or more helpful to an understanding of him than The Dream of Gerontius, subtle, mystical, imaginative. Newman’s great reputation for prose, and the supreme interest attaching to his life, seem to have obscured the fame he might have won, and deserved, as a poet. His poetry is religious without the weakness, or at any rate the limitedness, which mars so much religious verse. He was, in poetry as well as in theology, a greater and more masculine Keble, one with all the real purity of Keble, but with also the indispensable flavour of earth. ‘I was in a humour, certainly,’ he says of the Anglican divines, ‘to bite off their ears;’ and one loves him for it. It is worth remembering also that he taught the need of hatred as well as love; and though he explained and limited the teaching, there is meaning in the very form of expression. There was iron in Newman’s frame and gall in his blood.Newman’s mind was fundamentally imaginative, and in him imagination, though of an intellectual cast, was conjoined with an acutely sensitive organisation. Moreover, he had a tendency to solitude which powerfully influenced his development. Finally, along with his sensitiveness and power of imagination there went a subtle gift of logic, subordinate upon the whole to imagination, but clamorous until it had received what might at least plausibly pass for satisfaction. These characteristics together explain Newman’s work.

There can be no dispute about the imaginative cast of Newman’s mind. He had, besides the poet’s, the philosopher’s or speculative imagination. He pondered habitually over the secret of the universe. There is an often quoted sentence at the beginning of the Apologia which is vital to a comprehension of him. ‘I thought life might be a dream, or I an angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.’ It has been said that no one has any genuine gift for philosophy who has never doubted the reality of material things. Newman evidently had the necessary ‘note’ of philosophy, but he had it with a morbid addition which, without careful control, might lead to strange and even disastrous results. If Newman had only known German he would have found in the German philosophers an idealism far more profound and more rational than any he was ever able to frame for himself. But in England the dominant philosophy was Benthamism, the dominant theology was equally hard, and Newman turned from both in disgust, took to the theological road-making of the Via Media, and finally found refuge in Rome, driven by the conviction that ‘there are but two alternatives, the way to Rome and the way to atheism.’Newman’s sensitiveness produced a shrinking from intercourse and strengthened a love of solitude probably constitutional and not altogether wholesome. He was believed to be, and to have the ambition to be, the head of a party. In truth, he shrank almost morbidly from the idea of leadership, and it was in spite of himself that he gathered followers. Even the few friends with whom he lived in familiar intercourse came ‘unasked, unhoped.’ It would have been better for him had he been able to speak out more freely and to harmonise himself with the world around him. Instead, he fell back upon himself and upon a study of the Fathers, hoping to find the full truth in the primitive days of Christianity. This is a fatal error which, in theory, vitiates most theology, but from the effects of which a great deal of it is saved by inconsistency. Newman himself was afterwards led in his course towards Rome to recognise development in doctrine. The Fathers are doubtless excellent reading, but they are safe reading to him only who can read them in the light of the present day. It is vain to think of stopping the wheels of change even in theology. A creed which meant one thing in the first century, even though its verbal expression remain the same, means something widely different in the nineteenth. Newman unfortunately could conceive of modern thought only as a detestable and soul-deadening ‘liberalism,’ a halfway house to atheism, as Anglicanism was, in his mature view, a halfway house to Rome. Had he been more a real participant in contemporary life, his conceptions would insensibly have taken their bent from the ‘liberalism’ he hated; and, little as he thought it, he had something to learn from that liberalism, just as it had something to learn from him.

Newman was moreover a logician, though he ultimately found refuge in a communion where the science of logic is little needed. The subtlety of his logic is unquestionable. The doubt which some feel is rather with regard to its honesty. This doubt however is only felt by those who fail to understand how behind and beneath and above his logic there spread and towered his imagination and his emotions. Newman was compelled by the law of his nature to find a foundation for his religion; he neither understood nor respected those who let it exist as a mere sentiment. ‘I determined,’ says he with reference to a time of crisis, ‘to be guided, not by my imagination, but by my reason.’ It was this resolve that kept him so long out of the Church of Rome. He is wholly, even transparently sincere. Nevertheless, in spite of himself, he is guided by imagination after all. The conclusion is at every point a foregone one; and his pause results, not in genuine reasons for the change, but in increased strength of feeling compelling it. This is what observers have noted in Newman’s logic, and what has led them to doubt his sincerity. His dice are always loaded, but they are loaded against his own will. The absolute need for him to rest on authority makes it certain from the start that authority will win.

There is no way of using reason except by consenting to be wholly guided by it. Newman never consented. He always knew the general character of the answer he must receive, though he did not know the precise terms of it, whether those of the Via Media or those of Rome. This is the secret of Newman’s power, in his argumentative works, over those who already fundamentally agree with him, and of his failure to move those who do not. For surely it is remarkable how little real effect followed from his secession, that blow under which, it has been said, the Church of England reeled. Newman, unlike both his friends and his enemies, was well aware that few would follow him to Rome; and he paused for years because he believed, on the other hand, that his secession would shatter the party for which he had so long toiled. The character of the Oxford movement was changed by Newman’s secession, because by that step many were awakened to the fact that his brilliant logic had no sound foundation in reason. Others had been awakened before. J. A. Froude in his Nemesis of Faith tells how his eyes were opened by a sentence in one of Newman’s sermons: ‘Scripture says the earth is stationary and the sun moves; science, that the sun is stationary and that the earth moves, and we shall never know which is true until we know what motion is.’ Froude adds the common sense criticism that if Scripture uses the word motion in a transcendental sense it may equally use other words so, and we can never know what it means.

When we add to this Newman’s impulsiveness we have a sufficient explanation of the aberrations of his reasoning. He tried to be and thought he was cautious; but he was mistaken. The pause he was accustomed to make before taking decisive action had only the appearance of caution; and the real impulsiveness of his nature is indicated by several things in his own narrative. For example, the phrase of St. Augustine, Securus judicat orbis terrarum, rings in his ears and recurs to his mind and produces more effect than volumes of argument. ‘By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theory of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised.’ Was such a result ever before produced by such a cause? or was it that the Via Media was in truth built of loose rubbish over shifting sand?

The fact is that Newman’s talent for philosophy, though considerable, nay, almost great even in a strict use of the word great, was insufficient to construct a comprehensive system without better guidance than he could find. He was

‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born;’

and, unable himself to bring about the birth, he turned back upon the dead old world, a conspicuous, though personally blameless and most attractive, specimen of the class of those who sink ‘from the van and the freemen’ back ‘to the rear and the slaves.’

Great part of Newman’s power and attractiveness depended upon his exquisite literary gifts. His mind grew up at Oxford, and few have shown so much of the genius loci. He is academical in the best sense. There is a polished scholarliness in all his work, and very little English prose can be ranked as superior to his. Yet it is perfectly simple. With the true scholar’s instinct he strives for lucidity rather than magnificence. His writings frequently breathe passion, but there could be nothing less like what is commonly called ‘impassioned prose.’ Compare him with De Quincey or with Ruskin. They frequently betray a straining for effect, Newman rarely or never. His passages of eloquence come, like his friends, ‘unasked, unhoped,’ because the fervour of his own thought, or the pressure of circumstances, like the calumnies that provoked the Apologia, wrings them from him. Always clear, faultless in taste, capable of great elevation but never too high for the occasion, Newman’s prose is as likely to be permanently satisfying as any of this century.

Edward Bouverie Pusey was, as regards his contributions to formal theology, superior to Newman; both as a man and as a writer he was indefinitely smaller. Pusey early won a great reputation for learning, and Newman considered his accession to the movement an event of the first importance. He had great tenacity, and his adhesion, once given, was sure. Notwithstanding suspicions at the time of Newman’s perversion, there never was the least chance that Pusey would go over to Rome; the Via Media, which had crumbled under Newman’s feet, was solid enough for him. He was not sufficiently imaginative to push his way into the bog which, like another Chat’s Moss, swallowed up all the material Newman could collect. On the contrary, for the forty years of his life after Newman’s secession, he went on diligently stopping the holes which Stanley and others were ‘boring in the bottom of the Church of England.’ And it is certainly a wonderful tribute to the strength of Pusey’s character that, never quailing beneath the blow of Newman’s perversion, never yielding to the opposition which looked so formidable when his party was small and feeble and despised, unretarded and unhurried, he should have steadily pursued his course and raised that party to a foremost place in the Church. One or two events of his life make it matter of thankfulness that its temporal power was not equal to its spiritual fervour. He did all he could to maintain the Anglican exclusiveness of the universities; and he would, if he could, have used the civil power to suppress opinions he deemed dangerous.

Pusey’s writings are purely technical theology, not literature like those of Newman. Of their value diverse opinions will long be entertained. They are oracles to the High Church party; but it is well to consider what opponents think, especially such as have some grounds of sympathy. Pius IX. compared Pusey to ‘a bell, which always sounds to invite the faithful to Church, and itself always remains outside.’ In a similar spirit another great Romish ecclesiastic, when questioned as to Pusey’s chance of salvation, is said to have playfully replied, ‘Oh, yes, he will be saved propter magnam implicationem.’ These are just the criticisms of those who have attacked the Puseyite position from the point of view of free thought. They are also the criticisms implied in Newman’s action. It is at least remarkable that critics from both extreme parties, together with the ablest of all the men who have ever maintained the views in question, should concur in the same judgment.

Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, deserves a passing mention, though he was more remarkable as a man of affairs than as a man of letters. He was of the High Church, but was opposed to the extreme Tractarians. He was still more opposed to the advanced Liberals. He wrote an article in the Quarterly Review against Essays and Reviews, he framed the indictment against Colenso, and he was one of the chief opponents of evolution before it had been discovered that evolution is all contained in Genesis. His most formal literary work is the allegorical tale of Agathos; but his wit and power of expression find their best outlet in the letters which give to his Life a zest rare in ecclesiastical biography.

There is no other theological sect as compact as the Oxford school, but there are two others of considerable importance and distinguished by fairly well-marked characteristics. Both are imbued with that German thought of which Newman was so unfortunately ignorant; and one of them especially had what he would have considered a deep taint of the hated ‘liberalism.’ John Frederick Denison Maurice was the chief of the first section, while Kingsley, who was more of a novelist than a theologian, and perhaps F. W. Robertson, may be regarded as affiliated to it. Maurice went to Cambridge, but was prevented by the Unitarian faith he then held from proceeding to his degree, and ultimately he graduated at Oxford. He became Professor of English Literature and History at King’s College, London, but fell into trouble because his views on eternal punishment were unsound. At a later date Cambridge honoured him and herself by appointing him Professor of Moral Philosophy.

Maurice’s theology was always a little indefinite, but it seems best described by the word broad. His friendship for the remarkable Scotch theologian, Thomas Erskine, of Linlathen, who, though not a Calvinist, thanked heaven for his Calvinistic training, is significant on one side; his position as a disciple of Coleridge on another. Coleridge made Maurice more orthodox than he had previously been, but also preserved him from narrowness. Thanks to Coleridge, reason fills a greater space in Maurice than it does in the Tractarians. From Coleridge also Maurice derived some of the mysticism, if not mistiness, which characterised his thought. The want of clear outline is one of his chief defects. Though always suggestive, he is often somewhat elusive; and perhaps it is for this reason that his influence seems to dissipate itself without producing anything like the effect anticipated from it. The practical outcome of the school of Maurice is poor in comparison with that of the school of Pusey. This however was not wholly Maurice’s fault. The Oxford school has drawn strength from what, nevertheless, may ultimately prove to be its weakness,—the appeal to authority, so tempting to many minds for the relief it promises. Maurice is not chargeable with this fault to the same degree. But neither is he entirely free from a kindred fault. He too, like Newman, argues to a foregone conclusion. In Mill’s opinion, more intellectual power was wasted in Maurice than in any other of his contemporaries, and it was wasted because all Maurice’s subtlety and power of generalisation served only ‘for proving to his own mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first.’

The principal theological works of Maurice are The Kingdom of Christ (1838), The Doctrine of Sacrifice (1854), and The Claims of the Bible and of Science (1863). He wrote also a not very valuable treatise on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy (1848-1862). And finally he wrote a number of tracts on Christian Socialism, of which he was the originator.

The Christian Socialists made a well-meant but not very wise attempt to raise the condition of the working classes. The name is unfortunate. If the party had thought a little more carefully they must have seen that if their socialism was economically sound there was nothing specially Christian about it; while, if it was not sound, neither it nor Christianity was benefited by the addition of the adjective. The Christian Socialists had no more thought out their principles than they had considered the name they chose, and for want of solid ground-work they failed. Nevertheless, Christian Socialism has left a mark on literature, in the works of Maurice himself, in the novels of Charles Kingsley, and to some extent in the writings of John Sterling, who was for a time of the school of Maurice.

Frederick William Robertson owes his position entirely to the celebrated sermons which he preached at Brighton during the last six years of his life. They are not great in scholarship, nor even in eloquence, but they exhibit a character of many-sided attractiveness which was the real secret of Robertson’s power.

The other section of theologians made a much firmer stand for freedom of thought than Maurice. Their leader in the earlier days of opposition to Tractarianism was Dr. Arnold of Rugby. Some of them were his pupils, and all were influenced by his spirit. In many cases however they came to hold very different ground from his, and supposing him to have lived and to have remained stable in his opinions, he might have regarded his disciples with as much disquiet and fear as he regarded the Tractarians. One of his pupils was A. P. Stanley, who entered the Church and remained in it; another was Clough, the story of whose doubts and unrest is written in his poems; and the author of Literature and Dogma was a third. Outside the circle of Arnold’s pupils but in general sympathy with them were Mark Pattison, a quondam follower of Newman, and Benjamin Jowett, the celebrated Master of Balliol, whose most important literary work, the translation of Plato, comes after 1870, but whose struggle for freedom of opinion and whose persecution in its cause belong to the period under consideration. Jowett was Regius Professor of Greek, and the animosity of those who detested his opinions took the contemptible shape of withholding a reasonable salary. They mistook their man and their means. Jowett was no money-lover; his enemies could not starve him out; and the effect followed which experience proves to attend persecution when it cannot be made crushingly severe. He became the hero of the more liberal-minded, and he moulded almost as he pleased the best intellects of the most intellectual college of the university.

Both Jowett and Pattison were writers in the celebrated volume entitled Essays and Reviews (1860). This was a collection of seven papers on theological subjects, united only by a common liberalism of view. Few books, in the main so harmless, have caused such a commotion. The volume is valuable chiefly as a landmark. Some of the opinions would still be considered heterodox, but they would be received now, if not with satisfaction, at least with calmness. At that time however people were sensitive on the point of orthodoxy. Darwin had just been promulgating an obnoxious doctrine, and it seemed hard that the faith, in danger from without, should be assailed also from within; for six of the seven essayists were clergymen. Legal proceedings were taken against two of them, but they only let off harmlessly humours which, if suppressed, might have been dangerous. It was with respect to the Gorham controversy, ten years earlier, that a Frenchman ‘congratulated Stanley on the fact that the English revolution had taken the shape of “le pÈre Gorham.”’ The truth underlying this remark applies to other things besides the Gorham case.

In 1862 the excitement was renewed by the publication of Colenso’s book on the Pentateuch. It seems arid now, for there is nothing attractive in the application of arithmetical formulas to Noah’s Ark; but it was just the kind of argument needed for the time and for the audience addressed. It is commonly objected that criticisms of the Bible are a wanton unsettlement of the faith of simple folk. One striking fact will demonstrate the need of some liberalising work. In 1864 the Oxford Declaration on Inspiration and Eternal Punishment was signed by 11,000 clergy; and according to Bishop Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, the effect of this declaration was that ‘all questions of physical science should be referred to the written words of Holy Scripture.’

The society in which such a thing as this was possible stood in crying need of an intelligent philosophy. The matter was all the worse because this incident came after the great English school, dominant during the first three quarters of the century, had grown and flourished, and was on the point of decay. This was the school which in the early years of the century had for its prophet Jeremy Bentham, and as inferior lights James Mill and the economists. During the third decade we see the thinkers who were in sympathy with these men gradually grouping themselves round John Stuart Mill, whose family connexions, as well as his own ability, made him a centre of the school. He was the son of the hard, dry, but able and clear-headed Scotch philosopher and historian, James Mill, who, almost from his son’s cradle, set about the task of fashioning him in his own image. In some respects James Mill’s success was wonderful. ‘I started,’ says J. S. Mill, ‘I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries.’ But even he was aware of the concomitant defects of the system. A want of tenderness on the part of James Mill led to the educational error of neglecting the cultivation of feeling, and hence to ‘an undervaluing of poetry, and of imagination generally, as an element of human nature.’ There are indications all through the younger Mill’s life as of a warm-hearted, affectionate nature struggling to burst the fetters linked around him by his early education; and there is a touch of irony in the fact that in an early mental crisis John Mill found relief in the ‘healing influence’ of Wordsworth.

Among those who frequented James Mill’s house were Grote and the two Austins, John and Charles, the latter a man of almost unequalled reputation for brilliant talents, who contented himself with extraordinary pecuniary success at the bar, and early retired with a fortune. The elder brother, John Austin, was rather an independent thinker who adopted many of the same views, than a disciple of James Mill. He never achieved what was expected of him.S. Mill says that his error was over-elaboration: he wore himself out before his work was accomplished through incapacity to satisfy himself. His writings are nevertheless full of redundancies; but he did a great deal towards forming a terminology for scientific jurisprudence. His works, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), and Lectures on Jurisprudence (1863), are, like nearly all the writings of his school, deficient in human interest.

Partly stimulated by and partly stimulating these men, John Mill began to think for himself and to initiate movements. It was he who in the winter of 1822-1823 founded the Utilitarian Society, the name of which was borrowed from Galt’s Annals of the Parish. A little later he was brought, through the agency of a debating society, into contact with a wider circle. The battles were originally between the philosophic Radicals and the Tory lawyers; but afterwards they were joined by those whom Mill describes as the Coleridgians, Maurice and Sterling. It was under the attrition of these friendships and friendly discussions that Mill’s mind was formed and polished after it passed from under the immediate control of his father. His interest from the start centred in philosophy. Before 1830 he had begun to write on logic, but his first important publication was the System of Logic (1843). For some years he edited the London Review, afterwards entitled the London and Westminster. His Political Economy appeared in 1848. In 1851 he married a widow, Mrs. Taylor, to whom he ascribes a share in some of his works scarcely inferior to his own. Her influence is especially strong in the essay On Liberty (1859), though this was not published until after her death.

About this time Mill took up the question of parliamentary reform, and in 1861 published his Considerations on Representative Government. Nearly contemporaneous in composition, though eight years later in publication, was the Subjection of Women; while Utilitarianism (1862) was the result of a revision of papers written towards the close of Mill’s married life. Auguste Comte and Positivism (reprinted from The Westminster Review) and the Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy both appeared in 1865. There remain to mention only the Autobiography and a collection of essays, both posthumous. During these later years Mill’s life was for a time more public than it had previously been. In 1865 the electors of Westminster asked him to be their representative, and he was elected without the ordinary incident of a canvass. In the election of 1868 however he was defeated, and the constituency never had an opportunity of redeeming its error.

Mill’s writings may be grouped under the heads of philosophical, economic, and political. The highly interesting but depressing and melancholy Autobiography stands outside these classes. Perhaps it is his best composition from the point of view of literature; and certainly it is the most valuable document for a study of the growth of his school. The three divisions are not mutually exclusive, for, strictly speaking, the first would embrace the other two. In it an attempt is made to lay down general principles which are applied in them.

Mill’s theory is contained in his Logic, his Utilitarianism, and his books on Comte and Hamilton. It has become known by the name he gave it as Utilitarianism; and as Bentham was the founder and first leader of the school, so was Mill the successor to his position and authority. It is a modern form of the theory associated with the name of the philosopher Epicurus; and on that ground it has been subjected to moral censure. Perhaps ultimately, as directed against the principle, the censure is sound; but it cannot be fairly turned against individuals. Certainly no thinkers of their time laboured more strenuously for the good of the community than Mill and Bentham. In Bentham’s exposition, the philosophy crystallised itself in the often-quoted phrase, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ His contribution consists in the introduction of the idea of the greatest number. Whether that idea is logically consistent with a philosophy of pleasure may be questioned; but it was to Bentham’s addition that the maxim owed its power and its practical influence on legislation. It was moreover this consideration, in addition to the fact that he breathed Benthamite ideas from the cradle, that attracted Mill. For he was a typically English philosopher. He never of his own choice dwelt long on purely metaphysical problems, nor did he succeed well when he was forced to attempt them. His attitude towards Hume’s theory of cause, after Kant’s criticism of it, is vividly illustrative of his speculative limitations. If Oxford is the place where German philosophies go when they die, apparently London in Mill’s time was the place where German philosophies did not go at all; and even dead German philosophies are better than the English predecessors which they slew in the day of their vigour.

As a Utilitarian, Mill was more valuable for exposition than for the original elements of his thought. In all his writings he is clear in expression and abundant in illustration. This abundance, in truth, appears to the reader not wholly ignorant of the subject to be cognate to verbosity. It was however part of the secret of Mill’s great influence. He forced people to understand him. He talked round and round the subject, looked at it from every point of view and piled example upon example, until it was impossible to miss his meaning. When we add wide knowledge, patient study, keen intelligence and a considerable, if not exactly a great talent for original speculation, Mill’s influence as a philosopher is explained. He wielded, from the publication of his Logic till his death, a greater power than any other English thinker, unless Sir William Hamilton is to be excepted for the earlier part of the period.

These characteristics, combined perhaps with a greater share of originality, appear in the System of Logic as well as in the Utilitarian treatises. Its merit is proved by the fact that through many years of adverse criticism it has maintained its ground at the universities as one of the most useful books on the subject. The freshest section is that which is devoted to Induction. The Examination of Hamilton shows Mill to have possessed the gift of acute and powerful criticism of philosophy. He may not have succeeded in establishing his own position, but he certainly damaged very seriously the rival system of Hamilton.

Mill’s Political Economy is, like his general philosophy, lucid, full and thorough. Though cautious here, as always, in the admission of new principles, Mill made considerable contributions to economics. The theory of international exchanges is almost wholly his, and many particular turns and details of economic doctrine are due to him. In a still greater number of cases he has been, not the originator, but the best exponent of economic theory. The caution and judiciousness of his reasoning were qualities peculiarly valuable in this sphere; and where the views of ‘orthodox’ political economy are accepted at all, Mill’s opinions are treated with respect.

The time when Mill’s authority was at its height was also the time when political economy was held in greatest honour as a science. The writers on it were numerous; and though, with the exception of Mill, they were not individually very distinguished, their collective work was important. They developed the doctrines of Adam Smith and Ricardo and Mill; while the speculations of Malthus acquired through Darwin a new importance, until a reaction, brought about more by sentiment than reason, led many to the conviction, or the faith, that they could not possibly be sound. The doctrine of laissez faire, so influential on government during the third quarter of the century, was the work partly of the economists and partly of the practical politicians of the Manchester school. It was never followed out logically, and before the close of the period there were signs of a movement which has since led to an opposite excess. Of the men who did this work Nassau W. Senior (1790-1864), in the earlier part of the period, and J. E. Cairnes (1823-1875) in the later deserve individual mention. The former was a great upholder of the deductive theory of political economy. The latter, in his treatise on The Slave Power (1862), produced one of the most noteworthy special studies in economics, and also one of the most powerful arguments in favour of the action of the Northern States of America.

It was the practical aspect of the science that chiefly interested Mill in economics. It was this still more, if possible, that inspired him in his more specifically political works, the treatises on Liberty, on the Subjection of Women, and on Representative Government. In his schemes of reform Mill was, in his own time, considered extreme; he would now be thought moderate. The caution of his speculation is nowhere more clearly marked than in his Liberty. It pleads certainly for more power to the state than the Manchester School would have granted; but it does so only in order to preserve the real freedom of the individual. In the Subjection of Women Mill was a pioneer on a road which has been well trodden since; and, for good or ill, there has been steady progress towards the triumph of his ideas. In Representative Government he shows a faith, probably excessive, in political machinery; but, whether it can do all Mill supposed or not, such machinery is necessary, and his labour tended to make it better.

Over against Mill, with some points of resemblance, but more of difference, may be set William Whewell, who, in 1841, became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and who acquired an immense reputation both for encyclopÆdic knowledge and for brilliant wit. On the human side he was certainly more attractive than Mill. Like the latter, he was fascinated by the great performances and the boundless promise of science; and he is one of those whose task it has been to formulate a philosophy of science. To this task he devoted himself more exclusively than Mill, and he brought to it a greater knowledge of scientific processes and discoveries. Moreover, his point of view was different. Mill was a pure empiricist. Whewell held that empiricism alone could not explain even itself; and he therefore taught that there was necessary truth as well as empirical truth. This was at once the starting point of his controversy with Mill and the ground-work of his writings, the History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). He is best known by his Novum Organum Renovatum, which was originally a portion of the second work.

Whewell’s strong point is his great knowledge of the history of science. His inductive theory is somewhat loose. It amounts to no more than a succession of tests of hypotheses; and of these tests the most stringent, prediction and consilience of inductions, are open to the fatal objection that they are not and cannot be applied to all inductions. Mill’s inductive methods also are more stringent in appearance than they prove to be in reality; but they at least point to an ideal towards which it is always possible to strive.

Of a widely different school of thought was Sir William Hamilton, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Edinburgh from 1836 to his death. Hamilton was a man of vast reading, and though it has been questioned whether his learning was as exact and profound as it appeared to be, there can hardly be a doubt that it was great enough to hamper the free play of his thought, and that it explains two of his characteristic faults. One is the excessive technicality of his diction. His style, otherwise clear and good, is overloaded with words specially coined for the purposes of the logician and metaphysician. The second fault is his inability to resist the temptation of calling a ‘cloud of witnesses,’ without making any serious attempt to weigh their evidence. Hamilton was a disciple of the Scottish school of philosophy, and a great part of his life was devoted to an elucidation of Reid, of whose works he published an elaborate edition in 1853. But Reid’s principle of Common Sense, as an answer to the philosophic scepticism of Hume, is little better than an evasion; and Hamilton had not much to add to it. Besides the edition of Reid Hamilton published Discussions on Philosophy and Literature (1852); and after his death there appeared the Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1859-1861), by which he is best known.

Hamilton had a great and not altogether a wholesome influence on James Frederick Ferrier, who in the domain of purely metaphysical thought was probably the most gifted man of his time. Ferrier describes his own philosophy as Scotch to the core. There is in it, nevertheless, a considerable tincture from the German, and Ferrier deserves the credit of being one of the earliest professional philosophers who really grappled with German thought. He was also the master of a very clear and attractive style, which makes the reading of his philosophy a pleasure rather than a toil.

Henry Longueville Mansel, a pupil of Hamilton’s, and joint editor of his lectures along with John Veitch, afterwards Professor of Logic in Glasgow University, was the ablest exponent of the Hamiltonian philosophy in England. Mansel’s power of acute and lucid reasoning was shown in his Prolegomena Logica (1851), and afterwards in his Philosophy of the Conditioned (1866). Both were developments of Hamilton’s principles, and they have suffered from the general discredit of the Hamiltonian school. Mansel is better known now, by name at least, on account of his Limits of Religious Thought, (constituting the Bampton lectures for 1858), which was the occasion of a controversy between him and Maurice.

The other philosophical writers of the period were, with one exception, of minor importance. Harriet Martineau was a woman of varied activity. She wrote political economy, history and fiction; and her story, Deerbrook (1839), is among the best and freshest of her works. She is however most memorable, not as an original thinker, but as a translator and expounder. She translated and condensed the philosophy of Comte, and did as much as anyone to make it known in England. She had the great merits of unshrinking courage, perfect sincerity and undoubting loyalty to truth.

Another miscellaneous writer of the Comtist school was George Henry Lewes, who has been elsewhere mentioned in connexion with George Eliot. He was an active-minded, energetic man, whose life touches literature at many points. He too wrote novels, but they did not succeed. He was a critic of no mean power. He took great interest in and possessed considerable knowledge of science, and in 1859-1860 published a popular scientific work, The Physiology of Common Life. But his best known book is the Life of Goethe (1855). It is an able biography and pleasant to read, though perhaps, considering the calibre of the subject, rather lacking in weight. It is however no small compliment to Lewes’s work that it was for many years accepted, both in Germany and in England, as the standard biography of Goethe. Lewes’s principal contributions to philosophy were A Biographical History of Philosophy (1845-1846), Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences (1853), and Problems of Life and Mind (1873-1879). In all of them Lewes shows himself an unswerving Positivist. He accepts and reiterates his master’s doctrine that the day of metaphysics is past, so that his philosophy is, in a sense, the negation of philosophy.

In the sphere of political science, the man next in power to Mill was Sir George Cornewall Lewis. As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first administration of Lord Palmerston, Lewis had the opportunity of making a practical acquaintance with his subject; but his theories were formed earlier. Extensive knowledge, combined with clearness of intellect and independence of judgment, gives value to his work. His Inquiry into the Credibility of Early Roman History (1855) was remarkable for its attack upon the theories of Niebuhr, which were in those days accepted with an almost superstitious reverence. But previous to this Lewis had written his most important book, The Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion (1849), a well reasoned and well written argument, worthy of attention in these days when there seems to be a disposition to forget the limits beyond which the influence is illegitimate. Lewis teaches the wisdom and even the necessity of submitting to ‘authority’ where we cannot investigate for ourselves, and where all who are competent to form an opinion are agreed; but he is careful not to set up any absolute and indefeasible authority which might dictate to reason and against reason.

Towards the close of the period there are noticeable traces of a new school superseding both Utilitarianism and Positivism. This school, nourished upon German idealism, had its centre at Oxford, and the men who have done the principal work in it were pupils of Jowett. They belong however to the later period and come within our present scope only as an indication of tendency.

The root of thought in all these men is the idea of development, the great formative idea of the present century. This idea however had an English as well as a German growth. In England it is best known through Darwin. But while Darwin shows its scientific side, the most celebrated of recent English philosophers, Mr. Herbert Spencer (1820), makes it the basis of a philosophy. The Synthetic Philosophy, just completed, is distinguished for the vastness of its design, the accomplishment of which gives Mr. Spencer a place among the few encyclopÆdic thinkers of the world. His philosophy is interesting also because it concentrates and reflects the spirit of the time. No other thinker has so strenuously laboured to gather together all the accumulations of modern knowledge and to unite them under general conceptions. The alliance between the Spencerian philosophy and physical science is unusually close; and Mr. Spencer in his illustrations shows an all-embracing range of knowledge, which becomes minute in those branches of science bearing directly upon the phenomena of life. The future only can determine the exact value of this knowledge, for there are grave differences of opinion between Mr. Spencer and some of the leading biologists, like Weismann; but it may at least be said of him that he is the first philosopher since Bacon (‘who wrote on science like a Lord Chancellor’), or at latest Leibnitz, who has met men of science on something like equal terms within the domain of science. Mr. Spencer’s unique interest is that he has attempted an exhaustive survey of all the facts relating to the development of life and of society. He does not go beyond that, to the origin of all things; for it is one of his cardinal principles that behind the Knowable there is dimly visible a something not only unknown but unknowable. We are compelled to regard every phenomenon as the manifestation of an infinite and incomprehensible Power. In this the philosopher finds the reconciliation of religion with science; a reconciliation for which the religious have seldom shown much gratitude, because they are forbidden to say anything specific about the Power whose existence they may, and indeed must, assume. On this point there is a quarrel between Mr. Spencer and the metaphysicians, who dispute the right of any man to assert the existence of an Unknowable. If we can assert its existence surely we know it at least in part; and if so may we not by investigation come to know it better?

The Spencerian philosophy is the most comprehensive and ambitious application of the principle of evolution ever attempted. Without showing anywhere that mastery of detail and that power of marshalling facts in evidence which give Darwin’s great work its unequalled significance, the Synthetic Philosophy yet reaches at both ends beyond the limits Darwin set himself. Mr. Spencer begins by recognising three kinds of evolution, in the spheres of the inorganic, the organic and the super-organic; and all the parts of the Synthetic Philosophy find a place under one or other of these; but the treatment of the first part is omitted as less pressing and as adding too greatly to the magnitude of the scheme. After the First Principles, in which are laid down the limits of the knowable and the unknowable, there follows therefore the Principles of Biology (1864-1867), where the evolution of life, the gradual differentiation of functions and kindred topics are treated. Still within the sphere of the evolution of the organic we have next the Principles of Psychology (1855), where organisms exhibiting the phenomena of mind are examined from various points of view to determine so far as possible the nature of mind, its relations with the universe, the composition of its simpler elements, etc. From psychology we step to super-organic evolution in the Principles of Sociology (1876-1896), which is probably regarded by the majority as the most characteristic part of the Spencerian philosophy. It is certainly one of the most interesting; for it combines in an unusual measure the best results of ancient thought with full justice to modern individualism. Mr. Spencer is a consistent individualist, but a far-sighted one. He sees that ‘the survival of the fittest,’ and with it progress, are impossible unless ‘the fittest’ both wins and keeps advantage to himself. Unlimited altruism would be as bad as unlimited egoism, and would indeed foster egoism, for it would in the end mean the stripping of generosity to pamper greed. On the other hand, pure egoism is fatal to society; and the animal for whom gregariousness is an advantage must fail in the struggle if he is unfaithful to the social principle. Hence there arises a society which is a balance between the two principles. It demands sacrifices from the individual in return for benefits; but the law of its existence prohibits the extension of this demand beyond the point where the individual ‘fittest’ survives and prospers. If the demand goes beyond this the course is downwards; for, as society is composed of individuals, a society in which the strongest has no advantage is a society in which progress is impossible, but, on the contrary, deterioration is sooner or later certain. There is no room on Spencerian principles for any socialism which does not recognise difference of reward according to difference of capacity.

In the Principles of Ethics (1892-1893) Mr. Spencer attempts to apply the results reached in the earlier parts of his scheme to the enunciation of a theory of right living. It is here that an evolutionary system based upon science is felt to be least convincing. There is a gulf never satisfactorily bridged between ethical principles as gradually evolved out of the non-moral state, and the ‘moral imperative’ as it is felt by the human conscience. Hence, the man of religion insists, the necessity of being specific about that vague Power dimly seen behind the philosophy of evolution; and hence the necessity, in the view of the metaphysician, of regarding evolution from above as well as from below. We learn much by tracing things to their origin; but to learn all we must consider as well what they ultimately become. It is in fact the final form that gives importance to the question of origin. The temptation of evolution is certainly to underrate the significance of the later stages; and the higher we go the greater are the effects of such an error.

But whatever its faults the Synthetic Philosophy remains unequalled in the present age for boldness of conception and for the solidity derived from its league with science. No other philosophy is so eminently modern in spirit and method; and whatever modifications may prove to be required, thought at once so daring and so patient can never be ignored.