Section II. Philosophical Movements

Feelings respecting man—Poetry and criticism—Pare metaphysics—Eclecticism.

1. At the time when Wesley and his fellow-labourers were proclaiming the doctrine of Spiritual Power and Influence with so much of energy and practical demonstration, the common faith among philosophical men was, that man is a mere creature of flesh and blood. It might be only in the enlightened coteries of France that this doctrine was proclaimed in its breadth and fulness; only in them was it clearly understood how to the processes of digestion, or rather to the mass of matter in which these strange processes go on, may be referred the phenomena of thinking, hoping, loving: elsewhere it was more or less confidently received as an article of faith, that there dwells in our bodily frame, a thing called a soul, which is known chiefly by certain negative definitions, and which will survive death. Nevertheless the Encyclopedists did not express, in the shape of a proposition, that which was the habit of feeling in the age to which they belonged. “Given matter, to find whether there is anything besides, or whether all things may be reduced under its forms;” this was the problem which the men of that time imagined had been set before them to solve in whatever way they could. The experiments which were made by those who were willing in argument to start from these premises are, it seems to me, profoundly interesting; the results to which they led most satisfactory. Among these we must reckon Hutcheson’s discovery of a Moral Sense, and Butler’s of a Conscience. Discoveries I have a right to call them, for though the facts which were affirmed had once been taken for granted, they had become a terra incognita; nay, one which, according to the charts then received, could not exist. But like many great facts in the physical world, these were supported by evidence which had much more weight with the next generation than with the one to which it was addressed, and the principle was tacitly recognised that the material is at all events the substantial point of man; that what is spiritual, if it exist at all, is only his accident. Nay, this doctrine, though refuted by all the conduct and by much of the language of those who took part in the evangelical movement, yet formed a very considerable element in their opinions. They taught men that the soul was all in all; that everything was to be postponed to the salvation of the soul; that all men had souls; and that the majority of men were guilty of neglecting their souls: yet if they had been asked whether they really looked upon men generally as spiritual beings, they would have been at a loss to know what the question could mean. “Spiritual beings!” they would have exclaimed, “no, indeed; an unconverted man, a man who has not been brought under the influence of divine grace, is simply a carnal being; there is nothing spiritual about him.” They knew that this language in some sense was true; they knew that it denoted something real, and the habits of their time hindered them from perceiving the contradiction which lay concealed in it. “What,” they would have said, “is philosophy to us? all we want is to declare the truth of the Gospel.” But philosophy was very much to them notwithstanding; the materialistic philosophy had unconsciously a great hold upon their minds, and it may be safely affirmed, that the most extravagant notions and acts which can be charged upon them, arose from the mingling of this philosophy with the spiritual maxims which they had derived from Christianity. It seemed so utterly strange to men in the eighteenth century, that human beings should exhibit any spiritual feelings or energies, that the appearance of them was almost necessarily looked upon as something not wonderful merely, but startling; not as the effect of a divine influence merely, but of a magical one.

The Methodists, however, led other men into a belief which they did not entertain themselves; they were the unconscious and unacknowledged, but not the least powerful instruments of a great change in the views of philosophers. It is difficult to determine when a change of this kind may be said to have actually taken place; in other words, when a principle which has long struggled with opposition and ridicule may be treated as the recognised and popular creed. The generally admitted test is this. As long as a doctrine is held only in such a country as Germany, a country of recluse students, so long it cannot be said to belong to the age. But so soon as it has become the common talk and profession of the lecturers and coteries of France, we may be sure that it has established its claim to that distinction, notwithstanding any resistance it may still encounter from the opinions and habits which have been bequeathed by previous generations. And this test is especially applicable to the doctrine that man is to be spoken of as a spiritual being. The materialism which the last age implicitly adopted did not fully develope itself in that age; the successors of the Encyclopedists carried their doctrines even further than they had done, and proclaimed them with even more confidence. Nevertheless, they have been losing ground every hour for the last ten or twelve years in the country which seemed to belong to them; till there is scarcely a subject, not even that of physiology and medicine, on which they have not been vehemently assaulted, nay, from which they have not been almost dislodged. We may, therefore, fairly assume, that a philosophical revolution has occurred, quite as signal as that which distinguished the middle of the seventeenth century, though of a directly opposite kind. The change which we noticed in the phrases of Unitarians and in the whole conception of their system is an index of it, and may help us to understand the character and effects of it. It does not consist in any dry, tame, acknowledgment that man has an immortal part or property which may survive the dissolution of his animal frame; it amounts to nothing less than a distinct affirmation, that those powers and properties which he has within him, of which the senses can take no account, and which are not reducible under any mechanical conditions, are what constitute him a man; and that all the most important part of his history is the history of these powers, of the restraints to which they have been subjected and of what they have achieved. A dynamical philosophy has gradually superseded a mechanical one in those countries where philosophy is considered of a distinct substantive value, and in spite of the influence of trade proper, and trade political, is endeavouring to supplant it in England also. And though I call it a philosophy, I mean something which diffuses itself through the most ordinary and popular literature, and has created a language for itself, which will become in a short time, if it have not become already, familiar to clubs and drawing-rooms.

This language will of course very often touch upon points which religious men have thought belonged exclusively to them. All the facts which concern the internal life and consciousness; all the religious changes which have taken place in different periods of society; all the personal conflicts of Christians, will be spoken of with the deepest interest, as being vastly more important than accounts of wars and state intrigues, and the fall of empires. Men in old times will be admired because they esteemed themselves the subjects of a divine inspiration, and faithfully acted upon that hypothesis. The ages in which faith gave place to infidelity will be denounced as barren and worthless. It will be affirmed that in our day, as much as in any former one, men ought to exercise faith, and to look upon their different talents as marks of a spiritual vocation. In such expressions, mingled as they generally are with many in which religious men can have no sympathy, it is common to say that there is fraud and insincerity; language is wilfully perverted to mean something different from its common meaning. In many cases there may doubtless be this insincerity; the more fashionable the tone becomes, the more of it there will be. But it is dangerous to prefer such charges, for they are very often untrue, and they may often be retaliated upon ourselves. The case I conceive stands thus. A considerable number of persons in Germany, in France, and in England, believe that they have found an explanation for most or all of the facts which readers of the Bible attribute to the power and the Spirit of God. They believe that the last age had no such explanation, and that its attempts to interpret or deny these facts were ridiculous. Treating human beings, they say, merely as material mechanical creatures, you will always be puzzled with what pious people tell you that they have felt, and with what they have actually done; treat them as spiritual beings, and the difficulty ceases. You can account for everything; their divine interventions, spiritual illuminations, and miracles, were not mere inventions of priestcraft, though priestcraft has much to do with the continued belief of them; they are all to be traced to man’s spiritual nature; by observing what theory prevailed in each age on such matters you can form a notion of its character, and of its relation to that which succeeded it. This is a language which perfectly satisfies some persons who can put all these subjects at a distance from them, and speculate about them with entire calmness. There are others, on the contrary, whose phrases will often be very like these—nay, the very same—but in whom they are indications of an entirely different state of mind. These are men who do not consider it their duty or vocation to explain away facts, or to philosophise upon them; they cannot look at anything as apart from themselves; when they talk of sufferings and conflicts, they are not expounding a scheme of metaphysics, they are speaking of what they have known and what they can therefore sympathise with in others. Such persons cannot adopt the old religious language, because it seems to set aside facts which they feel to be certain; it seems to deny that a man is anything in himself; that he has an eye wherewith he is to receive light. But neither can they wholly reject this old religious language; they feel inwardly that the philosophical is no substitute for it; they feel that the words about gifts and inspirations did mean something more than that a man has all powers within him; they feel that an abdication of powers, a denial of self, is the characteristic of all really honest men; they feel that humility, and not exaltation, the acknowledgment of receiving, not the boast of possessing, ought to be the criterion of spiritual excellence. They therefore hover between the two forms of language, using either as the feeling of the weakness or falsehood of the other predominates, often committing the grossest inconsistencies, often uttering the most absurd extravagancies, but proving the honesty of their intentions more by these inconsistencies and extravagancies than by much which seems to their admirers coherent and reasonable; and I believe laying religious men, but especially divines, under an obligation to inquire what this perplexity means, and whether their own modes of speaking or thinking, the indistinctness of their minds, or the faithlessness of their hearts, may not have given occasion to it.

2. I attributed much, both of the good and evil which distinguished the last age, to the exclusive study of Natural Philosophy. Self-forgetfulness and the sense of something permanent and absolute distinct from us, accompanied with a tendency to overlook the importance of man altogether, and to regard God as merely a synonym of nature, are habits of mind, which seem so much connected with this pursuit, that wise men have alternately exalted it as the one pure and safe region for the soul to dwell in, and have fled from it as dreary and infectious.

In our day the most vehement efforts have been made by eminent individuals and by societies to assert the superiority of this study to all others; the certainty of its conclusions and its progressive improvements have been set in strong contrast with the insecurity of all moral principles, when they are not mere commonplaces, equally obvious to the savage and the sage; the mighty practical results of it, which every one must recognise, have been appealed to as proving its claim to be the useful, and therefore the precious, part of knowledge. Yet all these arguments and encouragements have been insufficient to excite any ardent zeal for it in the minds of those young men who most represent the character of the age, or are most likely to stamp it with their own—insufficient to deter them from devoting themselves to the inquiries and speculations which are pronounced to be without any present advantage or promise of fruit hereafter. The Utilitarian does not acknowledge the ad hominem appeal of the natural philosopher; he declares that there are more useful studies than that of the stars or of strata. Religious men are in vain besought to believe that the great evidences of the divine existence and character are to be found in the outward universe: their tendency, as we have seen, is to reflect almost exclusively upon the feelings which belong to themselves. But above all, nature itself has been, to a very great extent, conquered from the natural philosopher. Sympathies have been discovered between the beholder and the objects which are presented to him, and attempts to express these sympathies or investigate the conditions and laws under which they exist have become the favourite, are threatening to become the exclusive, occupation of the more thoughtful and abstracted men in this time. A few hints respecting this important revolution are necessary in this place. I am quite unable to do justice to the subject; but the tendencies of our modern poetry and criticism cannot be overlooked by anyone who is studying the influences which are acting upon himself and his fellows.

From about the middle of the last century, we may trace the commencement of a poetry which had a much more direct and substantive reference to the outward universe than that of earlier periods. The doings of men, as well as the songs in which they were celebrated, had become artificial and conventional: those whom domestic habits had inspired with a dislike of the hollowness of general society, or whom their early cultivation had taught to desire something more living and permanent than the modes of a particular generation, took refuge in nature. To their simple and sincere utterances succeeded violent paroxysms of rapture, concerning its more magnificent images, and most vague and abortive efforts to describe them. But both these forms of writing were rather indications that a new state of feeling was at hand than themselves the expression of it. Presently European society was shaken by an earthquake; conventions were loosened or dissolved; the links between the past and the present were snapt asunder; passions which had been smothered or icebound by the rules of etiquette broke forth; men in different classes remembered that under some conditions or other they had common rights and a common humanity; the question what law are we to obey, if old observances and decorums can no longer command us, began to be earnestly discussed. The admiration and love of nature became strangely connected with all these movements of the human heart and will, and different forms of poetry appeared to illustrate and exhibit the connexion. One form of it presented us with chivalrous legends of other days, enabling us to feel that there was still a bond between us and them, though the institutions which they had bequeathed might be perishing. In this poetry scenes in nature came forth as a gallery of pictures, which had lasted for generations, and upon which the heroes as well as the readers of the poem had gazed. Another form of it expressed the wailings of those who had been prematurely disgusted with society, or had not been able to reconcile its demands with their desire for individual independence. All the storms and tumults in nature echoed these discontents and discords; its more peaceful scenes were welcomed as the only medicine for them. A third was the calm utterance of a calm mind, which had sought to discover what bonds of fellowship existed between it and men of all different orders and degrees. Nature was evidently a common thing in which lord and peasant might participate, from which no prescriptions and formalities could exclude. A fourth was of a far more comprehensive, if not of a deeper quality. It exhibited the efforts of a profound thinker to find a principle of life and action, and that principle is expressed in some such language as this— The perfection of a man is to be in harmony with nature.

Here then we are arrived at a result towards which the other experiments were evidently tending, a result of the very last practical importance, which is likely to produce a greater influence on the period which follows one of remarkable poetical genius and activity than on that period itself. But since many persons find it difficult to understand how works of the imagination can have become so involved with views belonging directly to human life and action since they are apt to suppose that the only moral effect of such works is to create and strengthen good or bad feelings and impressions, not to elucidate or to establish principles—I must endeavour to trace the steps by which they have acquired this new character.

In the last age it was customary to divide men of letters into two classes—those who followed the vagrant impulses of genius, and those who were content to subject themselves to rules and forms. The first received a patronising and qualified admiration, but they were beacons rather than examples; the latter because they had less originality might be more safely followed. The impulse of men just recovering the feeling that they had strange powers within them was exactly to reverse this decision, to assert the prerogatives of genius, to boast of its chartered libertinism, and to denounce forms as inconsistent with it. But this is a language which cannot last long: when men began to compare the writings which have stood for ages with those which affect their nature and freedom, it was perceived that the secret of power does not lie in its carelessness or vagrancy; that wantonness is allied to weakness; that it is the very characteristic of genius to own principles, not to despise them. It has been shown that the last age was not at all too careful in asserting the existence of laws to which all art and poetry must conform itself; it only mistook the character of those laws; it supposed them to be mere rules respecting the outsides of expression and construction, not forms belonging to the thought and mind itself. If there be such principles and forms, then the intuition of them, accompanied with the capacity of working according to them, is the very quality of genius, and the study of works of genius in a spirit of submission, not of dictation, is the way of obtaining that knowledge which the artificer possessed. There may be a purely creative intuition which does not necessarily imply consciousness of the laws which it follows; there may be a critical intuition which discovers them after they have been already exhibited in practice, and is not necessarily associated with the faculty of embodying that which it recognises; but the critic is no further a judge of the poet than as he is able to perceive when he has departed from the principles which give coherency and harmony to his work. These doctrines, which seem to carry in them a witness of their truth, a witness confirmed as much by the success of those who have followed them in their criticism of great authors as by the feebleness and confusions of their predecessors, have, however, necessarily led to further reflections. What are these laws and forms, and where are they to be sought for? Are they laws of nature, or laws of the mind? Is the man of genius the author of them, or does he merely perceive them, and adapt himself to them? It has been found impossible to affirm either position, to adopt either form of language as the sufficient and exclusive one. Those who endeavour to do so, are soon seen to contradict themselves; some unconscious phrase asserts in one sentence that which was denied in the previous one. It seems to follow, that the law of the imagination is a law of fellowship or intercommunion with nature; you cannot describe it in any terms which do not imply this to be the case; you cannot go deeper than to say, that it creates only so far as it sees, and that it sees only so far as it has the faculty of creating; just as sight and sound can neither be predicated solely of the eye nor of the thing beheld, of the ear nor of the thing heard, but are the product of both.

Now if we admit, as I think we may, that the clear apprehension of this position, and of the manifold consequences which flow from it in reference to poetry and the arts generally, has been reserved for our time; that as it was the characteristic task of the last age to discover the laws of the physical world, as it is in itself, so it has been the characteristic task of this age to investigate the relations in which men stand to that physical world; we need not wonder if this study, like the other, should seem to those who have made any proficiency in it all-satisfying, if it should seem to them to determine the very ends and conditions of man’s being. No one who has considered thoughtfully the history of astronomy, of logic, or of political economy, would be surprised to hear that any study in any age has assumed to itself the character of the universal, all-including study. But in this case I cannot help feeling that there is still a stronger reason. I cannot but think that those who have detected this law of the imagination—this law of sympathy and communion between themselves and that which is distinct from them, have been assailed by a conviction which they cannot resist or part with, that some such law of communion is the law of their whole life; that life is an unintelligible blank without it; that here must be the key to its deepest mysteries. Neither can I doubt that they feel they have been in some way or other robbed and cheated of this truth, and that it is time to assert it, or recover it. And therefore, when I hear persons affirming, that harmony with nature or the universe is the great attainment of the wisest and greatest man; when I hear them drawing from this proposition the natural corollary, that the artist or poet is the elect man, the demigod of the world; when I hear it maintained, that all the religious systems which have existed have been attempts to embody a theory of man’s relations with this universe; that the forms which are suitable to express these relations in one age become unsuitable in another; that the gifted man knows at what moment the old forms have worn themselves out and must be rejected, and new forms must be invented; when I hear such language as this—though I believe that greater danger lurks in it than in any phrases which have ever been current in any age; though it seems to me likely to subvert all acknowledgment of fixed, unchangeable truth, and to perpetuate and sanctify that tyranny of modes and fashions against which it feigns to protest—yet I cannot treat it merely as the quackery of talking men, merely as the fanaticism of men who have seen one fact, and wish to explain all facts by that; still less merely as a deliberate wickedness which wishes to undermine the faith of mankind under a show of paying it compliments. There may be persons in abundance who practise this quackery, are possessed by this fanaticism, and hope to accomplish this wicked design; but they did not invent these expressions, they have only adopted them as they would in the last age have adopted its cant which they now can afford to despise. The sincere minds who have given currency to this tone of thought and speech, or to whom it conveys a real meaning, will exhibit their difference from the rest by their inconsistency. At one moment you will hear them proclaim harmony with nature to be the great object of all men’s strivings; the next you will find them expressing the deepest admiration for those who have believed that they were sent into the world to contend against all those inclinations and appetites which connected them with nature and the outward world; who believed this to be the characteristic glory of men, and who exhorted others to be men by doing the like. One while they worship the artist because he submitted himself to nature, one while because he humbled nature to himself, and created it afresh; first they will speak as if the universe were created that poets and artists might live and reign, and as if all who had not their faculty, or the faculty of admiring and worshipping them, ought to be hunted out of it; then they will declare that the great difference between these poets and artists and others is, that they have more sense of a common humanity, and that there ought to be a spiritual commonwealth in which the meanest labourer and serf should feel that he had a portion. Now they can interpret all religious systems as imperfect attempts to explain the relations between man and the universe, and to embody the sense of those relations in certain forms; presently you will find them extolling some great Reformer or Iconoclast, whose peculiarity has been that he utterly repudiated those parts of the popular system which were the links between man and nature, as the spurious outgrowths of a later time when men had lost their sense of a connexion with a Being above themselves, and therefore had bowed down to images and likenesses of the things below them; and that he reasserted the worth and meaning of these old forms which witnessed for the fact of their higher relation.

These are strange inconsistencies, but they are honourable inconsistencies; they prove those who fall into them to be earnestly and affectionately desirous to hold what is true, even when it crosses and interferes with views which they regard, or think they regard, as the climax of all past discoveries and revelations.

And therefore it is impossible not to believe that there is something in these views which ought to be upheld, and which may be upheld, not amidst contradictions, which make the practical application of them impossible, but in conjunction with principles which determine their meaning and prove their reality. We cannot say to these men, You must cast aside this faith in the existence of bonds between man and the universe; these bonds exist—they have been felt and realised the more they are felt and realised the better. Neither can we say to them, There is an individual soul in you which is more precious to you than all these bonds; they will go all lengths with you in that affirmation; they have been generally bred in a school of pure, exclusive Protestantism; they believe in this individual soul; they all but worship it. Nevertheless they feel that there are human bonds—bonds not merely for the individual soul, but for humanity; they feel that these must be acknowledged quite as much as the needs of the individual soul; that that soul does itself witness of them. But they have been told by their Protestant teachers, that there are no such bonds between humanity and God; He is connected only with the individual; all forms signifying any more general relation than this are unmeaning and obsolete. They have been told this; they have learnt the lesson; they believe it as heartily as such a lesson can be believed. Only they believe also, that if this be true, then humanity must seek its happiness in fellowship with something else than God, or rather must make its god or its gods out of objects which can have living intercourse with it. And strangely agonizing as the thought may be, that after all, this humanity has had nothing firm to rest upon, or to commune with; that the only objects it could admire and love have been changing their aspects continually, and have received their beauty from the mind of the beholder; that therefore the idols have been changed with every new period; and that the incalculably few men who could discern a meaning in those things they conversed with, have been the real gods, because the god-makers of the universe; painful as it may be thus practically to deny the existence of any constant Being who has held the fragments of humanity together, even while you are in the very act of asserting that they are bound together, and thus to treat the idolatry which has been the apparent cause of all its divisions as the one only explanation of its unity, even this must be borne, because facts seem to enforce these conclusions though conscience and reason may revolt against them. Is it not the fact, say these men, that all Protestant systems—the last, the most perfect, attempts at a religious system—are crumbling in pieces? They have swallowed up all previous forms of faith, now they are proving themselves to be weak and good for nothing. Men have discovered wants in themselves which such systems cannot satisfy; it is idle to pretend that these narrow platforms can ever be a ground for mankind to rest upon; they are not wide enough for a few individuals to stand together upon without quarrelling and kicking. Their very merit consisted in the exclusiveness, as well of their admissions as of their objects. A few who have particular sympathies on certain points of religion, are drawn together in them; but the study of nature, of art, of man, they confess, belongs to another sphere from theirs; they may tolerate it, or prohibit it, but with it their religion or their fellowship has nothing to do, or if they do endeavour to find a connexion it is by making these studies dishonest; by compelling them to say what they do not say; by changing their object from the investigation of truth into the confirmation of certain pre-established maxims. This is language which we may hear in all quarters. I beseech divines, and the men who influence the religious feelings of this age, earnestly to ponder it, and to consider what it indicates.

3. Before either of the tendencies of which I have been speaking had decidedly manifested itself, the question respecting the grounds of knowledge which was supposed to be settled by Locke had been submitted to a new and a most rigid examination. For a long time a ridiculous notion prevailed here, and in Scotland, in reference to the eminent German thinker who conducted this investigation. It was seriously believed that he had been swayed by the impulses of a vagrant and mystical imagination; nay even philosophical writers were not ashamed to insinuate that the British public might form a tolerably fair conception of the metaphysics of their neighbours, from the wild freaks which were exhibited in the fictions of some of their least cultivated or most immature poets. It is now, however, well understood that the persons who sanctioned this pious fraud were really deterred from the study of this author, not by the looseness, but by the severity of his logic; by the absence in him of all those vague and popular modes of thought and speech to which they had accustomed themselves and their readers. He entered upon his inquiry with no theological bias which could make him averse from the system of Locke merely because it had led to infidel results; with the very strongest dislike of a system which an earlier German philosopher had set up in opposition to the worship of experience; with a conscience which admonished him to reject every customary notion and opinion if it hindered him in the pursuit of truth; with an understanding adapted to the most calm and patient analysis. Those who understand most thoroughly the tests by which physical facts and laws have been ascertained, will probably pay most respect to the course of critical inquiry which led him to assign a large and most important province to experience, and then, for the sake of saving that province from the destruction with which its extravagant pretensions threatened it, to show what region lies beyond it, and by what faculty that region is cognisable. But those who are least competent to judge of these merits must yet perceive that this doctrine has been subject to the most pelting storm of ridicule and abuse; has been resisted not only by the most accomplished intellects in Europe, but (which is more important) by all the habits of thought which had rooted themselves in the minds of ordinary men; has had as many appearances and plausibilities to oppose it, as the Copernican doctrine, or any other that is most startling, and yet has not merely stood its ground but has forced itself under one modification or other into the speculations of thoughtful men, and is moulding the language and opinions of those who have the least comprehension of its meaning, or are most disinclined to acknowledge its truth.

How important this fact is, in a theological point of view, may be judged from one circumstance. English writers continually use the word rationalism as if it designated one set of opinions or one mode of thought. But there is the widest difference between the rationalism of the last century and the rationalism of this—between that which grew up under the patronage of Locke, and that which is derived from the influence of Kant. The former, whether assuming the mild, modified, and feeble shape which it received from our critics in the last century, or the destructive character which terrifies us in some of the (now obsolete) German neologians, is merely the fruit of a desire to be rid of facts which are at variance with the ordinary notions and experience of mankind, and to make revelation the announcement of certain moral notions and axioms which men by their constitution must derive from without; the latter leads to the underrating of facts because they belong merely to the region of experience, and to the notion that naked principles, which alone are of paramount importance, and with which alone the reason is conversant, are not imparted to it, but contained in it. From this statement it is evident that the results of the two systems may often coincide; but the habits of thought which have engendered them are so adverse, that a person who takes one for the other, is likely to misunderstand the processes of his neighbour’s mind, if not of his own.

It may be said, “But surely the difference, be it great or small, is in favour of the older opinion, and not of the more recent one. That assumed the existence and the necessity of a revelation, only confining its use within very narrow limits; this dispenses with a revelation, perhaps denies the possibility of it altogether.” I am not anxious to disprove this statement. I may feel the force of it as strongly as those who are most inclined to put it forward in the shape either of denunciation or of warning. But before I can attach any great value to it in one form or the other, I must be sure that it is not disturbing the faith of those whom it condemns or counsels in a truth; that this truth is not one which God would have us of this age especially receive and hold fast; that it is not one which when thoroughly understood and heartily embraced may contribute much to the recovery of those principles and the assertion of those facts which it seems to set at nought.

I would ask anyone to reflect calmly upon the circumstances of the country in which this philosophical revolution has taken place. In that country Luther had asserted the doctrine that there were certain truths which were so necessary to the life and being of man that the simple proclamation of them—the foolishness of preaching—would carry home the conviction of them to innumerable hearts. They were proclaimed in the words of a book, because that book contained the simplest, most genuine, most vital exhibition of them. This was the first act of the Reformation. The curtain rises in the second, and exhibits to us the disciples of Luther poring over the words of this book, in the hope, often a most vain hope, of extracting some meaning from them; then fighting with one another in defence of the fragment of meaning which they had discovered in it. Then we see another generation engaged in quite a different occupation, that of tearing page after page out of this book because it speaks of unintelligible matters with which reasonable men have no concern; but yet maintaining the wisdom and propriety of certain parts of it which were consistent with the general verdict of nature and experience. Then a man arises who asks what this general verdict is? He takes to pieces all the demonstrations by which men had fancied that they could make out to themselves the importance of morality, the immortality of the soul, the being of a God. He says, “All these are good for nothing; they establish no conclusion; it is assumed in the premises.” But he says at the same time, “This is no reason for doubting or disbelieving these truths; if they be fundamental truths, they must be the premises of every demonstration, not the results of it; you cannot have a greater witness for these great elements of human faith than this, that everything seems to prove them, because in fact nothing can be proved without them.” And then this argument ab extra is clenched and established by a corresponding one from within. “You say that this cannot be, because there is no faculty which takes cognizance of such primary truths as these. I say there is and must be such a faculty, otherwise the existence of a mathematical science—the existence of that science upon which the demonstration of physical facts rests—would be just as impossible as the existence of a moral science. I say further, that this faculty is not merely one of the faculties of humanity, but that it is precisely the human faculty; that which does not belong to an individual as such, but which belongs to each man as a man, as the member of a race; the faculty which is conversant with that which is universal as well as with that which is necessary.”

Such language as this, so far as it is understood and believed, must, of course, displace a whole host of notions and conclusions which had previously been looked upon as sacred, not because they were old but because they were new—because they seemed to have been the last and most perfect effort of the human intellect in repealing and annulling the decrees of former times. The doctrine would therefore assume something of a destructive character—not that it really had that character, even in reference to the maxims of the school of experience so far as they were positive; for it distinctly ratified the doctrine of Locke, that all notions and conceptions are the results of sensible experience, and that the impressions of sense precede in order of time all generalisations (such as that the whole is greater than its part); it merely affirmed the existence of principles, at whatever time they may be discovered to the mind, which are presumed in the existence of the mind itself, and without which it could form no notions, conceptions, or generalisations, nay, could receive no impressions. Still the effect upon the persons who adopted the system was not altered by this circumstance; they felt that they had found out something which set aside the most favourite theories of their immediate predecessors. And if it had set aside their theories, had it not even in a more complete way set aside those of the thinkers who had preceded them, and over whom they had prevailed? Had it not proved that to be involved in the very constitution of man, which had been supposed to be merely delivered to him, and delivered to him moreover as if it were essentially at variance with his constitution, as if he could not receive it except by miracle? To be sure the school of the Encyclopedists had talked nonsense when they attempted to say what Reason was, and when they affirmed that what they called Reason was the judge of what is true; but they were right in saying that reason is the judge of what is truth; nay, that truth and reason cannot have any existence apart from each other.

I would entreat a patient consideration for the previous difficulties of the persons who adopted this language, for the temper of mind which they inherited even when they fancied they had thrown it off, for all the temptations to pride and self-exaltation which arise from the sense of a new discovery—I would entreat a consideration of all these circumstances before such phrases as these are immediately supposed to mean all the mischief which I am quite ready to acknowledge is lurking in them. But above all I would entreat my reader to reflect upon the fact, which I have been forced to present to him under several other forms already, that while the Protestant system encourages all possible demands on the part of the human mind for satisfaction, it provides nothing to satisfy the demand for some truths or principles which shall belong to us, not as individuals, but as members of a race. Protestants say that every truth is to be realised by each man for himself, and that when a certain number of individuals have been made conscious of the same truth, they are to meet together and have fellowship in the profession of it; they have never effectually taught men that there are truths appertaining to them as men, which do not depend for their reality upon our consciousness of them, but are the grounds on which that consciousness must rest. The doctrines of Protestantism do, as I believe, necessarily imply this, but they do not distinctly affirm it; they refer distinctly and formally to men as individuals. The systems of Protestantism not only do not affirm it, but in the most practical manner deny it.

I think then that this metaphysical revolution points the same way as those other changes in men’s feelings which I have noted already, namely, to the demand for something Catholic, and for that, not as an accident and addition to the faith which we hold as individuals, but as the very groundwork of it. And if I am asked to explain how I suppose it is possible that a doctrine, which seems to set all revelation and all tradition aside, and to claim a more direct independence for the human reason than any other has ever done, may yet be leading, through God’s gracious guidance and providence, to the assertion and confirmation of those principles which Christians refer to revelation or tradition, and which are said, and I think rightly said, to humble the reason of man—I believe the kind of conflicts which have been excited among philosophical men by the promulgation of Kant’s doctrine are an answer to the question.

Almost from the time that its meaning began to be earnestly canvassed, three great difficulties, or at least blanks, were discovered in it. One set of persons complained that it was a hard, dry doctrine, with which a man who had a heart could have no sympathy. It supposed the highest of all affirmations to be—God is, immortality is, freedom is. These great primary truths of the reason lay there without any power of addressing themselves to or connecting themselves with any one form of feeling—the Hercules pillars of the intellect, or the premises of a demonstration nothing more. This was one objection which may probably have led to that division between the objects of philosophy and religion which I noticed in the last section, and to the assigning to the latter whatever concerns our human feelings and sympathies. Others, to whom this distinction seemed artificial and impracticable, laboured to construct a philosophy which should possess the warmth and cheerfulness of a religion.

Next comes the feeling, which in a Protestant country could not but force itself upon a number of minds. The reason speaks of all these great and eternal verities; but what have I to do with them? What link is there between my personal consciousness and these grand and universal affirmations? Tell us this, or your scheme, be it as strongly fenced with demonstration as it may, cannot content a man.

But, lastly, there seemed to be a fatal contradiction, if not in the principle itself, yet between the principle and the inferences which were instantly deduced from it. There is an organ in man which speaks of that which is absolute and eternal. You believe that this organ, call it reason or what you will, is distinct from the one that merely forms notions and affirms propositions. But how distinct? If it merely affirm, “There is something absolute; there is something eternal;” these are propositions. To suppose this then, is to destroy your own doctrine. But if this be not the witness of the reason concerning that which is absolute, what must it be? It must affirm the existence of that which is absolute, not as the intellect affirms a proposition, but as the eye affirms an object. As an object, it must be something distinct from that which beholds it, anterior to it, that without which it could not be. Suppose the Universe be the great, eternal, absolute thing which we feel it must be—well, then, this Universe spake to us first; we did not form it, did not even discover it; it revealed itself to us. But it is the eye or the imagination which demands an external universe; the Reason must demand something different from that. Does it not, according to your own showing, demand that which is homogeneous to itself? Does it not demand an absolute Reason? And if there be such an absolute Reason to which the reason in man looks up, a real Being, is it more consistent to believe that the reason found him out, or that he revealed himself to the reason?

According to this last statement, the doctrine that there are principles antecedent to experience, whereof the reason of man takes cognizance, supersedes the necessity of a revelation only when it contradicts itself. But this is not all: if this view of the case be the right one, the revelation which the reason demands, cannot be one merely of moral principles or axioms,—it must be the revelation of a living Being. It cannot therefore be one in which events are merely accidents that can be separated from some idea which has tried to embody itself in them. Facts may be only the drapery of doctrines; but they would seem to be the only possible method of manifestation for the Being, the essential Reason. And seeing that, by the hypothesis, this Being of whom the reason speaks is one who transcends the conditions of space and time; seeing that this one faculty in man has the power of beholding that which is not under these conditions, but that all the other faculties are subject to them, it would be nothing strange or contradictory if the facts which embodied the revelation, should be such as at once presented him to all the faculties which we possess, and enabled that highest one to realise its own peculiar prerogative of looking through them. In this way one might perhaps discover a hope of reconciling the law of the affections and the law of the reason, without that contrivance of separating them under two departments and supposing that a mere scholastic boundary could keep them really apart. One might dream too, of a way by which the consciousness of each individual should be called forth, through the sense of his relationship to the Being who was revealing himself to him and condescending to his necessities. But whether this be the case or not, it seems clear that this new form of rationalism cannot be satisfied with itself; that it will become irrational if it cannot find something to unite and combine with it; that if it be followed out fairly it involves the conclusion that something must have been originally given or imparted to the reason; that this gift must be of some truth which is transcendant and divine; that it must proceed from, and have reference to, a living Being; that it must concern all men as men; that the best test of its concerning them and really being necessary to the constitution of humanity itself, is that it should have been received and believed by men merely upon the bare announcement of it, and that in every subsequent stage of human history it should have been doubted, contradicted, ridiculed, and yet have kept its ground, and proved itself, in the most advanced period of civilisation as well as in the simplest, to be that which men want as the sign and bond of their fellowship.

4. One feature more must be taken notice of in the philosophical countenance of our age, or we shall have still an imperfect image of it. The effort to bring all systems of thought into harmony, or to frame a system to which each one shall contribute certain elements, has been repeated in various periods of the world. But unquestionably the inclination for such experiments was not so strong, even in the period immediately following the promulgation of Christianity, as in our own. I do not think the strength of this inclination can be fully ascertained even by observing how many conspicuous men, and those of the nation which most represents the form and pressure of the time, have felt it and indulged it. Everyone can perhaps discover its workings in himself. One plan of union after another which we have devised may have failed; some strange, uncouth performer may have insisted with cruel pertinacity upon his right to play his solo, without the least regard to the order under which the rest have been reduced; or we may have found that when we had got rid of the discords, the music became so flat and uninteresting, that no one cared to listen to it; but amidst all discouragements, in spite of the just ridicule of others, or the more sad and painful scorn which the wearied Irenicus is tempted to indulge at his own expense, the wish continues unabated, and it is sustained by a secret spring of hope—an unconquerable conviction that the dream was a true one, though it may seem to have met with the most palpable practical contradiction.

This temper, as we have already seen, has exhibited itself among religious men—among a class of them in whom it might least have been expected, and who would have felt the strongest abhorrence of any system which was merely compounded of fragments from previous speculations and heresies. Nor can it be said with strict truth, that when it appears among the philosophers of our day, this is the object which they propose to themselves. The name Eclecticism, which they willingly adopt, seems to portend a mere hortus siccus of flowers gathered from all soils, and arranged according to the taste of the collector. But if they spoke for themselves, they would give a very different representation of their system. They would say that their will had nothing to do with it; that Eclecticism was a necessity of the age; that one partial theory had succeeded and displaced another in the bygone periods, that it was no longer possible to adopt any of these as adequate and self-sufficing, that they were all seeking some more capacious and universal scheme in which they might merge. The difference between this feeling and that which prevailed in the last century is made the more striking by the one point in which they are alike. The disciples of Cousin express as much reverence for the age into which they are born, as the disciples of Voltaire felt for their own; but the earlier school believed that it was created to destroy all forms of opinion which had existed previously; the later one, that it is meant to put a sanction and imprimatur upon all, and to discern the principle which is the climax of all. The first and most obvious effect of this difference is an entirely opposite estimation of the truth and uses of history. By the French school of the last century it was slighted as useless for any other purpose than as a record of absurdities to be ridiculed and avoided; by the French school of this century it is regarded as the key to all knowledge; the acts of past times are studied, not merely with diligence, but with reverence. Such a habit of mind, on whatever subject it is exercised, must draw a reward after it, and these philosophers have been permitted to throw a most valuable light upon the meaning and succession of events, especially in the annals of modern Europe.

Upon the meaning and succession of events, they have thrown this light; but very little, I suspect, upon the feelings or character of men. It is a complaint which I believe is universal among their greatest admirers, that they have no faculty for understanding a living human being in any other way than as a link in a chain of operations. They do not wish to set aside free agency; their theory would rather dispose them to give it great honour, but they cannot look at it except in relation to a theory, which is nearly the same thing as saying that they dispense with it altogether. Now this will surely be found a most unfortunate peculiarity in men who hope to adjust and harmonise the different thoughts and feelings of our time. Putting religious opinions and habits out of the question, assuming that they are too vagrant and fanatical to be subjects for an eclectical experiment, passing over also all political questions, and the struggles of different individuals or classes for a recognition in the polity of a state—we shall find in the philosophical dispositions of our days most awkward and refractory materials. The strongest of these dispositions, I observed, was to acknowledge a spirit in man, and to regard all other facts with which he is concerned in reference to that one. Then again we found men full of living sympathies with nature, and longings for forms in which this sympathy might be expressed. Now no theory, let it make what allowance it may for the existence of both these inclinations, can really provide any satisfaction for them. All the efforts of the Eclectic theory, therefore, must be confined to that region of thought which I have designated by the name of pure metaphysics; to the adjustment, that is, of the doctrine respecting the reason and the truths antecedent to experience with previous speculations. But there are difficulties in the way even of this limited application of Eclecticism. The first is, that the rationalist will say, The work is already done; the critical philosophy is that which discriminated between the provinces of reason and experience; any attempt to eclecticise upon that is to gild refined gold or paint the lily. But the other objection is more fatal. The reason, it would seem, from the remarks which have been made already, speaks of an actual Being, an absolute Reason; and all attempts to make it merely utter a proposition about that Being, tend to destroy its very nature, as that nature is expounded by the rationalist. It is evident then that no scheme of Ontology, be it as complete as it may, can dispense with or include the truth which he proclaims. It may be a sound theory, a valuable theory, but it will be a theory concerning something, and of that something itself he is endeavouring to bear witness.

Nevertheless, all these arguments will never persuade men in our day that reconciliation of some kind is not possible, and must not eventually take place, between warring opinions and feelings. All kinds of endeavours at the compromise and suppression of truth—endeavours which succeed just as long as men feel nothing, and care for nothing, and are laughed to scorn the moment any energetic man arises, or any energetic thought is awakened—endeavours which (however strange the assertion may sound) are, on the whole, more hopeless in our day than in any previous one—will be suggested and made by individuals and by governments, with a desperate conviction, that one at last must be meant to prosper, and with infinite rage and astonishment that the one proposed does not fare better than its ten thousand predecessors. Undoubtedly too there is great need that the philosophical feelings which I have spoken of as all belonging to this time should find some meeting point, for though all equally strong and apparently proceeding from the same source, they oftentimes clash strangely with each other. The assertor of man’s spiritual powers exalts the hero who maintains a battle with circumstances and triumphs over them; the artistical philosopher delights in him who can adapt himself to circumstances. If they maintain any fellowship with each other, it is a fellowship founded upon the pleasure which the one takes in noticing a curious and to him puzzling specimen of human nature, and upon the awe which the other entertains of a person who has realised a state which he knows that he can never reach, and with which he half confesses to himself that he has no sympathy. Again, both agree in dislike to the metaphysician, one because he seems to bind down the energy and freedom of man by fixed and absolute laws; the other because he sets up a dry truth against all forms and images. It would seem that if all these tendencies be sound and true, as I have maintained that they are, there ought to be some method of bringing them into harmony, which should preserve each of them in its strength; which should not merely account for them, but embody them, and enable them to produce some real fruit. But then would it not seem at least possible that if reason affirm a truth which must have always been; if the communion with nature be something implied in our constitution, and therefore implied in the constitution of those who lived a thousand years ago; if humanity be essentially spiritual; the reconciling method may already exist, and that the work of our age may be not to create it afresh, but to discover its meaning and realize its necessity?