.NRLF ^,^^- ¥ '^- li '^JC^ ^.. m^%^ %i,]:: v;:i3i "^«^' :^raFV: Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/fundamentalsorbaOOgrifrich MAN AND GOD. • Concerning the bonds of unity, extremes are to be avoided ; which will be done, if the league of Christians framed by our Saviour Himself were, in the two cross clauses thereof, soundly expounded : " He that is not with us is against us ; " and again : " He that is not against us is with us ; " i.e. if the points fundamental and of substance in religion were truly discerned, and distinguished from points not of faith, but of opinion only.'— Bacon, Essays, iii. FUNDAMENTALS OR BASES OF BELIEF CONCERNING MAN, GOD, AND THE COREELATION OF GOD AND MEN. A HANDBOOK OF MENTAL, MORAL, AND RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY. BY THOMAS GEIFFITH, A.M. 1/ PREBENDARY OF ST. PAUL'S : Author of ' The Spiritual Life,' ' The Apostles' Creed,' ' The Fatherhood of God. fTJHIVBRSITTJ LONDON : LONGMANS, GEEEN, AND CO. 187L 3 LSI Or 7 LOlTDOir: PEIKTED BY 8P0TTISW00DB AND CO., NEW-STKEET SQUARE AND PARLIAMENT STREET ^r CONTENTS. I. OF THINKING. • PAGB All thinking must begin with Facts ; but it must complete itself by conclusions from these Facts . . . 3-10 IL OF MAN. The fundamental Fact with which I begin is, that I am. I find myself existing as a Simple, Self-aame, Substantial Being 13-30 I find myself, moreover, existing with certain Qualities ; in some of which I am like lower animals, but in others altogether unlike them ...... 31-78 I am like, lower animals in being Sensitive, Causative, Intel- lective 31-46 I am altogether unlike them in being Moral, Religious, Pro- gressive ....,,,.. 47-78 And these Facts involve a conclusion that I am also a Per- manent being 79-100 III. OF GOD. The Facts of an organised world oblige the conclusion of an Intelligent Will as the Originator of this organisa- tion 103-116 This Intelligent Will is a Person ; unknowable in his essence, but knowable in his character, through his dealings with this world ........ 117-134 VI CONTENTS. IV. OF THE CORRELATION OF GOD AND MEN. i. God's dealings with us. PAGE The Facts of History oblige the conclusion that God is carry- ing on a process of Development for the human race . 137-145 In order to this Development He has endowed us witli a nature like his own .... ... 145-152 To this development He makes subservient even interme- diate evil 153-167 This Development He commences by awakening men to their need of Himself, and sending gifted spirits to respond to this need . . ... . . . 168-197 This Development He advances by means of an ascending series of religious communities, from a sicred Family in Abraham, through a sacred Nation by Moses, culmi- nating in a sacred Brotherhood in Christ . . . 198-206 And in this Brotherhood He dwells ; to consecrate men to his service, commune with them by his Spirit, assimi- late them to his image, and perfect them in his final kingdom 206-212 ii. Our duties in return. God is the universal Sovereign. Our corresponding duties therefore are, to this divine King^ those of loyal sub- jects; to his 'people, those of faithful fellow-citizens; to our own selves, whatever will make us most efficient in these two relations . . . , . • • 213-230 APPENDIX. Notes 1. to XXV 233-281 |k r OF THINKING, ^ ' L'homme est visiblement fait pour penser ; c'est toute sa dignity et tout son merite. Tout son devoir est de penser comme il faut; et I'ordre de la pensee est de co7nmencer par soi, par son auteur et 8a,JlnJ — Pascal, Pensees (Paris, 1812), ii. 179. 'Never write on a subject without having first read yourself into it j and never read on a subject till you have thovght yourself hungry on it.' — J. P. RlCHTER. ' Faith is the reasoned-out conviction of things not seen.' — Heb. xi. 3. ' La foi est la deruiere demarche de la raison.' — Pascal. * Nicht jedes metaphysische System der Religion gleich gute Dienste leisten kann. ' Der religiose Glaube auf dem Gegehmen, auf der Naturbetrachtung, als eine theoretische nothwendige Ergdnzung unseres Wissens, beruhtJ — Herbaet, Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 2ud edit., p. 216. Not every metaphysical system is equally favourable to religion ; but religious faith rests on the facts which we observe in nature, and is the necessary complement of these facts and of our knowledge concerning them. ^TJHIVBRSITT] LETTEE I. OF THINKING. My dear Friend, You tell me that amidst tlie dust raised by the conflict of opinion in this unsettled age, you begin to lose sight of the landmarks which have hitherto been your guides. You are perplexed by the contradictions between reason and faith; between the novelties of sctence and the traditions of theology; and especially between the cheerless creed of a material philosophy and those beliefs of a spiritual world which are so precious to you. And you ask, ' How shall I attain to firm convic- tions on these points ? Are there no foundation truths on which to plant my tottering feet ? ' Now I think there are such truths ; I seem to myself to have found them. And hence my present response to your complaint; hence the endeavour I am going to make to help you to grasp them for yourself. And I say emphatically, ' to help you to grasp them for yourself,' for no man can teach another ; he can only help this other to be his own teacher. The loud voice of authority is here utterly vain. Only in the low, soft tones of sympathy can we reach the mind. In these tones, therefore, I b2 4 FUNDAMENTALS. would speak. Not unacquainted with the pains of thought myself, I know how to feel for every sufferer under such pains ; and having discerned what seems to me the majestic form of Truth, I would gladly place you in my point of view that, thence looking, you may behold her too. Like Eichard Baxter, I may say, ' One reason of this work is, Qaod cogitamus loquimur ; that which is most and deepest in our thoughts is aptest to break forth to others. Man is a communicative creature. Necessity, through perplexed thoughts, hath made this subject much of my meditations. It is the subject which I have found most necessary and most useful to myself; and I have reason enough to think that many others may be as weak as I ; and I would fain have those partake of my satisfac- tion who have partaked of my difficulties.' ^ My method will be to begin with Man ; that through a well-grounded knowledge of ourselves we may reach a correlative conviction concerning God, and his relations towards us. And my object is to lead you through a realistic as opposed to a material psychology, a spon- taneous as opposed to a calculated ethic, and a dynamic as opposed to a mechanical theism, to find your rest in a Christianity of eternal ideas instead of ephemeral notions ; wherein the great facts of inspiration, revelation, and re- demption take their true place, as moments in the ever- widening process of the divine education of the human race. And in pursuing this object, I shall not confine myself to laying before you the fruit of my own medita- tions, but shall illustrate, confirm, and adorn my subject by copious extracts from the deepest thinkers of the old world and the new. Thus, what I write to you will * Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion ; Preface. THOUGHT SPRINGS FROM FACTS. 5 furnish a text-book for students as well as an outline of my own personal thought ; and when you are wearied of the dryness of my utterances, you wdll get refreshment from the sparkling flow of theirs. I begin, then, with those beautiful words of the philo- sophic emperor, in which he counsels for himself the laying such foundation stones of truth as I am about to lay for you. ' As physicians are always provided with instruments ready for all emergencies, so do thou keep by thee fixed determinations concerning things divine and human. And whatsoever comes before thee, deal with it in constant remembrance of the close connexion which exists between these two; for never wilt thou do anything well in human matters without reference to divine ones, nor in divine matters without reference to human ones.' ^ ' And let these decisions be brief and fundamental^ such as shall at once suffice, when thou recurrest to them, to purify thy soul from all its perturbations, and to send thee back, no more disheartened, to the work which lies before thee.' '^ With which compare wdiat Seneca quotes from Demetrius : 'A few precepts of wisdom, well remembered and well used, are far more useful than a thousand things which you may have read, but have not ready at hand' ^ To supply such handy wisdom is the object of my writing to you. But then all wisdom must be derived from careful ob- servation oi facts. With facts, in every department of thought, must it begin ; and yet not with these terminate. ' Those,' says Bacon, ' who have handled science have 1 Antonini Comment. Hi. 13. Compare Lactantiiis, In^stit. i. 4. ^Neque relip^io iilla sine sapieutia suscipienda est, nee ulla sine relij^ione probanda sapientia.' 2 Anton. Comment, iv. 3. ^ Seneca, De Benef. vii. 1. 6 F UNDA MENTALS. either been men of experiment or men of theory. The men of experiment are hke the ant — they only collect and use. The theorists resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course ; it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy.' * We must then gather the material for our decisions from facts, yet not indolently rest in them. Facts have their meaning, and this meaning must be evolved from them. The relations which they bear must be noted. The suggestions which they furnish must be followed out. Newton indeed said, 'I invent not hypotheses.' Yet Newton refused not to admit the widest inferences from the simplest facts. He began with the falling apple, but he stopped not till he reached the universal law of gravi- tation.^ Nay, we must not only accept the suggestions which facts furnish, we must search out the intimations which may be involved in them. The process of philosophy is a putting nature to the question in order to extract from her the secrets of which her surface facts awaken some suspicion. What's sought for may be found, But truth unsearch'd for seldom comes to light.^ And yet Mr. Lewes praises Hume because 'probing deeper in the direction Berkeley had taken, he found that * Bacon, Nov. Organum. Aph. 95. ^ ' Will'st du ins Unendliche schreiten ? Geh im Endlichen nach alien Seiten.^ — Goethe, * Sophocl. CEd. Tyr. 110. t6 dk lijrovnivov THOUGHT TRANSCENDS FACTS. 7 not only was matter a figment, but mind was no less so. The substance of which our ideas are supposed to be impressions is occult, is a mere inference ; the substance in which these impressions are supposed to be is equally occult, is a mere inference.' Observe : ' a mere inference.' Yet what is an * inference ' but a conclusion which facts not only suggest but require for their legitimate interpre- tation ? ^ What is all thinking but a series of ' inferences ' ? Nay, whence comes our knowledge of facts themselves, but through our belief in the vahdity of ' inferences ' ? What certainty have we of anything that we call a fact, which does not rest upon the inferences^ that our senses are to be relied on, that our powers of observation are to be relied on, that our power of memory is to be relied on, that the senses of others are to be relied on, that their testimony to what these senses report is to be relied on ?'^ And you know well, from your own experience, how vain it is to insist on shutting out all inferences from the facts which lie before us, how impossible it is to enforce the self-denying ordinance of positivism, ' Thus far shalt thou go and no further.' ^ The tide of thought 1 * Rationem qusB debitis modis elieitur a rebus, Interpretationem naturae vocare consiieviinus.' — Bacon, Nov. Org. Aph. 26. Similarly H. Ritter, Unsterhliehkeit, p. 13 : ' Of what use is experience if it be not understood ? All sciences whicli rise above the mere verification of facts undertake the comprehension of these facts, and speculate about their meaning.* 2 So Herbert Spencer: ^Positive knowledge never can fill the whole region of thought. At the uttermostreach of discovery there must ever arise the question, What lies beyond ? The human mind, throughout all time, must occupy itself, not only with ascertained phenomena and their relations, but also with that unascertained something which phenomena and their relations «w/j/y.' — First Principles, 16, 17. See further. Appendix, Note I, ^ ' The term "positive," as implying a system of thought which assumes nothing beyond the content of observed facts, implies that which never did exist and never will.' — Huxley, Lay Serm. 178. 8 FUNDAMENTALS. must rise. Its onward flow must sweep away the arti- ficial dams which would confine it. Try to drive back from your mind every intimation which this school brands with that term 'occult.' Try to contract your thoughts within the narrow confines of the visible, to imprison them within the walls of sense. Try to conceive the possibility of there being nothing deeper than what appears ; no substance, of which all show must be the manifestation ; no inwardness, of which all outwardness can be nothing but the husk ; no under side of which the upper side of the medal is but the obverse. You cannot accomplish this. The very words you use keep you back from this. For what if you call all facts ' pheno- mena' only? The very term includes a reference to things of which they are phenomena. ' Phenomenon ' is an adjective^ which cannot stand alone. It has no meaning but in relation to a substantive as its subject and support.^ Just as the images you see in a mirror are reflections of things which throw these images upon it. Just as Mr. Pepper's ghosts bear witness to substances somewhere of which they are the apparitions. Just as all shadows testify to something which casts the shadows. The law is universal ; if nothing were^ then nothing could appear. Some appearances, it is true, are the product of other appearances, as the visible flower springs from its equally visible seed ; but all these manifest antecedents have their ultimate ground in something not manifest, nay not manifestible. ^ This is what St. Paul means 1 See Appendix, Note II. 2 And tlierefore Socrates says, ^ You ought never to think contemptuously of thing-8 invisible, but recognise from tlieir manifestations the power they possess, and reverence the divine that is in them (jinqLv to daifioyiov).^ — Xenoph. Metn. iv. 3, 6. See further, Appendix, Note III. THOUGHT TRANSCENDS FACTS. 9 when he says, 'the things which are seen' (the whole sphere of the visible, ro ^X^:ro/Jl=vov) ' are not made of things which do appear ' ; spring not, as to their ultimate ground, from anything observable in this sphere. That ground is non-apparent, transcendent.^ Besides, we must not forget that the very sciences which seem most exclusively occupied with facts, and the possessors of which most strenuously claim to keep entirely and solely within the domain of facts, cannot themselves be cultivated without the assumption of laws and principles, to which indeed the facts point, and which are legitimately inferred from the facts, but which, never- theless, are something more and other than these facts. There is no such thing as a science purely experimental, any more than there is a science purely speculative. No science, for instance, seems so independent of experience as that of mathematics, yet it takes its first data from experience. Suppress the testimony of the senses touching extension, and you have no geometry. Sup- press the testimony of consciousness concerning force, and you have no mechanics. So, equally, those sciences of observation which profess to consult nothing but facts cannot shape themselves into any system but by the aid of principles anterior to observation. Physics, chemistry, physiology could have no existence if their professors were not guided by the axioms, 'Every phenomenon implies a cause of its manifestation,' and ' Nature is subject to laws constant and universal.'^ Therefore it is not only allowable but indispensable for us, beginning with facts as our data, to proceed to such conclusions from these facts as they themselves » Heb. xii. 3. ^ See De Margeiie, Th^odicde, i. 69. 10 FUNDAMENTALS. point out. We must travel, warily yet hopefully, from the known to the unknown, assured that this unknown is contained within things known, as certainly as the corn in the husk, the kernel in the shell, the rich fruit in the hard rind. But the things known which are the most immediately before us, and of which we are best assured, are the facts of our consciousness as Men} These facts include in themselves intimations of a Somewhat whose existence can alone explain them, and whom we recognise as God. And then arises the inquiry, what correlation is there between God and Men ? So that we fall naturally into the course of thought prescribed to himself by Antoninus. Beginning with ' things human ' we rise thence to ' things divine,' and end with ' the connexion between the two.' And thus we accomplish what St. Bernard prayed for, 'May I gather myself in from things outward to things inward, and then ascend from things inward to things upward ! ' ^ * ^ Of the two existences, that of mind as independent of matter is more certain than that of matter apart from mind.' — Lord Brougham, Nat. Theol. 57. ^As Descartes tells us, our knowledge of the soul is more intimate and certain than our knowledge of the body.' — Huxley in Macmillan^s Mag., May 1870. * 'Ab exterioribus ad interiora redeam, et ab interioribus ad superiora ascendam.' — S. Bernard, OF MAN. Know ilien thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.' — Pope. * On earth there is nothing great but man ; In man there is nothing great but mind.' — Sir W. Hamilton. ' Deux choses instruisent I'homme de toute sa nature : I'instinct et I'ex- pdrience.' — Pascal, Pensees, i. 191. ' It is not sufficient to have read the Delphic inscription, "Know thyself! " We must fix our attention upon it, and set earnestly to work to examine our own selves ; for it will be difficult for us to know anything if we know not ourselves,' — Xenoph. Mem. iv. 2, 10, MAN'S PERSONALITY. 13 LETTEK II. OF MAN'S PERSONALITY. We have seen that all well-grounded thought must have its foundation in facts ; and that the first set of facts nearest and clearest to us are those which concern our nature as Men. Now, of these facts, the most immediate and most cer- tain is that we are. Of nothing can I ever be so sure as that I am. No one has taught me this, no one can prove it to me ; yet no doubt can darken such a truth, no sophism can confute it. This is a certainty, if there be none other. This, therefore, is the basis of all science ; and hence we make this certainty the measure of all other certainty. Our strongest possible form of assevera- tion is, 'As sure as I am ! ' or, ' As sure as thou art ! * As the woman of Tekoah said to David, '^45 thy soul liveth^ king, none can turn to the right hand or to the left from aught that the king hath spoken ! ' And so Uriah to David, '^4^ thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not do this thing ! ' It seems therefore, to me, a somewhat subtle distinction of Dr. Huxley's when he says that while we have an ' un- questionable and immediate certainty of the existence of mind, we have less certitude of the existence of ourself as the base of this mind.' For what is ' mind ' according to his own definition ? — ' A state of consciousness.' But ' a 14 FUNDAMENTALS. state' must be a state oi something ; and 'consciousness' is not mere knowledge, but knowledge to and by something, of states pertaining to this something. It is con-scio ; mecum scio ; mihimet ipse scio. And the ' state of con- sciousness ' which he recognises as ' an immediately observed fact ' is a fact observed, not by somebody else, but by the Something, and observed by this something as a ' state ' of its own self. So that, when he speaks of the certainty of ' mind,' he falls into that abstract language which he so justly censures. The 'mind' which I observe is no abstraction ; it is my mind. It presents itself to my observation as a ' state ' or modification of my self ; and all the transformations of this ' mind,' in their various stages of sensation, perception, volition, action, are recog- nised by me as, not indeed my self but, affections and exertions of my self. That which I call my Self is not a mere congeries of thoughts, but a something which has these thoughts, to which they present themselves, in which they converge, and from which they emerge. Sensations and perceptions are but ^?7^pressions made on this something ; vohtions and actions are but ^.impressions of this something. Always this something suggests itself, makes itself present to us as the ultimate subject and source of all that we are conscious of. As surely, therefore, as we affirm our consciousness, so surely do we affirm therewith this Me, as inseparable from it; and this Me we affirm as a something single amidst the complexity of its manifestations, selfsame amidst their variety, and substantial amidst their merely phenomenal character. 1. In affirming that ' I am,' I affirm myself a some- thing single amidst the complexity of my thoughts ; a MAN'S PERSONALITY. 15 central point on which all the influences which affect me converge, and from which all the effluences by which I affect other things diverge. That single word ' I ' asserts emphatically Number One (No. I.) ' The student of history,' says Professor Maurice, ' finds himself amidst a world of I.s. And am I, then, to allow that this term is a mere abstraction? that it points to no substance? Every man who is most busy in the affairs of the world would raise his voice against me if I did that. " What ! You put this slight upon Number One ? You say that I am a nonentity ! What then, pray, is not a nonentity ? " A question which I should have much trouble in an- swering.' ^ By this word ' I,' then, I mark myself as one and in- divisible in contradistinction from the world with which I am mixed up, from the body which is so close to me, and even from the mind which is the object of my con- sciousness. I am indeed mixed up with a surrounding world. ^ To this world I owe the particles which compose my frame, the breath I draw, the nourishment by which I am sustained. Nay, by this world I have been moulded into what I am. Through the parents from whom I sprang, the nurses who reared me, the teachers who ^ Professor Maurice on the Conscience, p. 5, 15. ^ ' Mean's connexion with the great scheme of animated nature is intimate and inseparable. The physical conditions under which life exists are the same to him as to other animals. Air, laud and water, heat, light, and moisture are as essential to him as to the other forms and grades of vitality. He originates like the other animals, embryologically passes through the same stages, and when launched on the field of independent being is sub- jected to the same functional round, and the same struggle for existence. Life, growth, reproduction, and decay are phases of being characteristic of all that lives. As a mere animal, man, like other animals, has his place in nature.' — Dr. Page, Man, p. 35. 16 FUNDAMENTALS. trained me, tlie family in which I have grown up, the race to which I belong, the clime, the nation, the country, the department, the town, the circle in which I live, the temperament of my body, the texture of my nervous system ; through all these agencies I am what I am. But yet I am distinct from them ; I am not a mere particle and product of other things, but a separate indivisible thing. Nor am I less separate from the body which is so close to me. This has been so thoroughly shown by Butler that I need not add a word. You know how he argues : ' The simplicity and oneness of the living agent which each man calls himself cannot indeed, from the nature of the thing, be properly proved by experimental observations, but as these fall in with the supposition of our unity, so they plainly lead us to conclude with certainty that our gross organised bodies are no more ourselves or part of ourselves than any other matter around us. For we see by experience that men may lose their limbs, their organs of sense, and even the greatest part of their bodies, and yet remain the same living agents.'^ And you know the argument by which Plato distinguishes between the body, and the soul, or self: ' What is the man ? Is it not that which makes use of the body as its instrument? But what makes use of the body as its instrument but the soul? And the user of a thing is assuredly distinct from the thing used. Besides, this user of the body is also master of the body, and there are only three suppositions we can make concerning the mastery of the body ; this mastery must lie either in the body, or in the soul, or in a compound of both. But 1 Butler, Anal. i. 1. MAN'S PERSONALITY. 17 it cannot lie in the body, for we have seen already that the body is by no means master, but is mastered. Nor can it lie in a compound of body and soul, for one element of this compound is, as we have conceded, mastered. By what contrivance then can you make the two elements together become master ? It remains there- fore that the man, being neither the body by itself nor any compound of body and soul, must be either nothing at all, or that one thing in which the mastery resides, i.e. the soul. And therefore when I, Socrates, address myself to you, Alcibiades, I speak not to your bodily frame, but to your soul ; my soul communing with your soul. And consequently, when we are admonished by the oracle to become acquainted with our self, it is plain that this self must mean our very self, our soul. For however thoroughly I may become acquainted with my body I thereby know only what belongs to me, not what is properly my self. Even a physician, as a physician, does not necessarily know himself.' ^ All which is in perfect consonance with the Scriptures, which repre- sent the body as but the scabbard in which the soul is enclosed;^ its earthly domicile;^ its tabernacle or tent\^ and its clothing^ which it shall exchange for a better gar- ment.^ And this soul, thus distinct from the body and occupying it only as a temporary residence, is one and ^ Plato, 1 Alcib. (Bipont, v. 58). See Appendix, Note IV. ^ Daniel vii. 15, ' I was grieved in my spirit in the midst of its sheath.' ^ Job iv. 19, ' "We dwell in houses of clay.' * 2 Cor. V. 1, ^ Our earthly house, this tabernacle.' 2 Pet. i. 13, * I must shortly put oiF this my tabernacle.' ^ Job X. 11, ' Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh ; ' xxx. 18, 'By the great force of my disease is my garment changed.' 2 Cor. v. 24, ' Desir- ing to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.' C 18 FUNDAMENTALS. the same with our very self. For whereas in Matt. xvi. 26, the question is, ' What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? ' this term is exchanged in Luke ix. 25, for ' What is a man advan- taged if he lose himself?' But further still, our soul or self is distinguished not only from the world at large, and from our own body in particular, but from even what we call our mind ; that is, from the phenomena of consciousness. For we say in common parlance, not only ' my body,' ' my brain,' but ' my mind,' as a something not constituting our proper self but belonging to this self. ' A man is one thing,' says Professor EoUeston, ' his mind another, his body a third. Although they both belong to him they are no more the man himself than his horse or his dog. It is a mere blunder in natural history to confound these things.'^ And so the sacred writers distinguish in like manner between the multiphed phenomena which make up the mind of a person — i.e. which he is conscious of — from the individual person himself to whom these phenomena present themselves. These last St. Paul calls ' the things of a man' ( ' What man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of man,' the man himself, the spirit, ' which is in him?' ).^ And the Psalmist says, ' The Lord knoweth the thoughts of man that they are but vanity.'^ And again, ' In the multitude of my thoughts within me, thy comforts delight my soid'^ Whence St. Paul again distinguishes the mind as much as the flesh or body, from the man who possesses both ; ' with the mind, I myself * Lecture at the Royal Institution. 2 1 Corinth, ii. 11. ' Ps. xciv. 10. * Ps. xxxiv. 19. MAN'S PERSONALITY. 19 (the same man) 'serve the law of God, and with my flesh the law of sin.' ^ All the most intimate phenomena of consciousness are therefore, as much as the world without us, and the body- around us, affections, movements, manifestations of the simple self; but are not themselves this self. Whence we say, ' / am thinking ; ' ' 7 feel ; ' ' / determine ; ' ' i did this or that/ In no way can we rid ourselves of this ever present and ejfficient me? And always do we recognise it, not as the product of the bodily or mental elements, but simply as in correspondence with them, their em- ployer, and their regulator. ' Whatever I be,' says An- toninus, ' this is certain, that besides my flesh and my breath of life there is in me a governing principle' ' I am more than a life,' says the author of Thorndale, ' I am the somewhat who has life'^ And so John Smith of Cambridge, — '^ because the soul feels itself,' as TuUy de- clares, ' not moved by extraneous force but from itself alone,' it can say of all the assaults which are made against these sorry mud walls which enclose it, ' you are nothing to ME ! I can live anywhere, without this feeble carcase ; for / was not that^ but had only a command over it while I dwelt in it ! '^ And you find this conviction mixed up inseparably with all men's views of each other as well as of their own selves. No one treats us, any more than we treat them, as other than a person and not an abstraction ; a producer and not a product ; a substantial reality and not a mere logical figment. ' Amidst all the insinuations of doubt, this Me stands up in native majesty and records her protest against the everlasting No. I am not No, 1 Rom. vii. 25. , * See Appendix, Note V. ' Thorndale, 385. * Discourses, 91. c 2 20 . TUNDAMENTALS. but Yea, and free ! In me is vital fire, spirit, invisible force! '\ 2. But the same consciousness which recognises my self as one, equally testifies to my being, under all changes of manifestation, the selfsame one. Not only do I find myself, amidst the complexity of the thoughts concomitant in my mind, a simple^ incomplex^ being ; but T find myself also, amidst the variety of the thoughts consecutive in my mind, the same unchanging being. That is, I possess not only personal individuality^ but personal identity. It is true indeed that we are conscious of many con- comitant thoughts filling together our field of vision at one and the same moment, and we speak of them in their entirety as constituting the ' self ' of this moment. And it is also true that we are conscious of many consecutive thoughts replacing each other in this field, and consti- tuting, each group, the self of successive moments ; as Job, for instance, exclaims, ' that / were as in months past, when by God's light / walked through darkness,' distin- guishing, thus his present self involved in sorrow from a past self sufiused with joy ; and as we say in common parlance, ' / was at such a time so and so, and / am not * Carlyle," Sartor Resartus, ch, 7 & 9. Compare Mr. J. A. Froude in his Address at St. Andrew's : * V^^hat the thing is which we call ourselves we know not. It may he true, and I for one care not if it he, that the descent of our mortal hodies may he traced through an ascending series to some glutinous jelly formed on the rocks of the primeval ocean. It is nothing to me how the Maker of me has heen pleased to construct the organised suhstance which I call my hody. It is mine, hut it is not me. The intellectual spirit, heing an essence, I helieve to he an imperishahle something engendered in us from a higher source. *' The soul that rises in us, our life's star Hath elsewhere had its setting, And cometh from afar." ' MAN'S PERSONALITY. 21 what /was/^ But still, though we thus gather up the consciousness of each successive moment into the formal centre of an ideal self as the seat of it, we seldom con- template these successive groups of thought, with their conventional centres, as other than merely changing re- presentatives of an unchanging self, a real selfsame ' I,* underlying all these phenomenal transformations. Sometimes indeed it is otherwise. Sometimes we lose this conviction of a real identity underlying all apparent diversity, because the strangeness of the manifestations makes it difficult for us to recognise under them the same- ness of the manifester. Hence the poet, in his moments of inspiration, seems to himself (or once did seem when poetry was real) ' carried out of himself ; ' actuated by a personality different from his own, and pouring forth his unpremeditated lay at the suggestion of some Muse within him. Hence the Seer, ' beside himself,' seems to be only the mouthpiece of an overmastering Deity. Hence the miserable slave of passion imputes to sin as a personality distinct from himself the aberrations of his own disordered individuality. Hence the madman fancies himself taken possession of by a demon ; nay, a legion of demons. Hence the mystic distinguishes from himself what he be- lieves to be the voice of the Spirit of God within him. And even common speech inclines continually to this multiplication of persons within us, when people say, ' Eeason assures me of this ! ' ' Imagination suggested to you that ! ' ' You are indebted to fancy for your facts, ^ ^People are not only their present selves, but all their old selves at the same time. Sometimes one and sometimes another comes uppermost.' — Cornhill Mag., April 1870. 22 FUNDAMENTALS, and to memory for your fancies ! * ' Queen Mab has been with you ! ' But, that we are invariably the selfsame person, amidst all the variations of our mind, is attested by many proofs. And first by the intimate unity of all thought within us. The association of ideas shows the sameness of the base into which they all converge. The chain of reasoning shows that the reasoner is, throughout each successive link, the same. The phrase, indeed, ' Discourse of reason ' acknowledges the running on (discurro) from one thought to another. Yet still this running on must be accomplished by one and the same thinker. For no one imagines that one person within him has supphed the major of a syllogism ; a second the minor ; and a third the conclusion.^ But next, the phenomena of Memory prove our per- sonal identity. For memory is the emergence above the horizon of my consciousness, of conceptions already formed in me, but kept down for a season out of sight by other thoughts. To remember a thing is to call up 1 Janet, Materialisme contemporain, 122 ; see also 129, 130 : * L'unite du Moi est un fait indubitable. Toute la question est de savoir si cette unite est une resultante ou un fait indivisible. Mais, si l'unite du Moi est une resultante, la conscience qui nous atteste cette unite est aussi une resultante. Mais comment admettre que deux parties distinctes puissent avoir une conscience commune ? L'unite per9ue par le dehors pent etre le rtSsultat d'une composition ; mais elle ne le pent pas quand elle se perQoit elle-meme au dedans.' And so John Smith (Discourses, 82) : ' We find such a faculty within us as collects and unites all the perceptions of our several senses, and is able to compare them together ; something in which they all meet as in ,one centre. And Plotinus well says, " That in which all our several sensa- itions meet, as so many lines drawn from several points in the circumference, and which comprehends them all, must needs be one. For should that be ■various and consisting of several parts, which thus receives all these various impressions, then must the sentence and judgment upon them be various .too." Aristotle says, ^' That must be one which judges things to be diverse," ^md which tpo must^tlius judge setting all before it at once.' r" MAN'S PERSONALITY. 23 ray own previously existing conceptions of this thing. It is the waking up a past act of my self, to become again a present act of my self. And ' if our souls were nothing but a complex of fluid atoms we should be continually roving and sliding from ourselves, and soon forget what we were. The new matter that would come in to fill up that vacuity which the old had made by its departure, would never know what the old was. Heraclitus truly said, " You cannot bathe twice in the same stream." ' ^ Nor, thirdly, could we feel ourselves responsible persons, or treat others as responsible, if we were not instinctively conscious that all the variations in every man's mind and will must have their centre and source in one and the same thinker and actor. ' It is a fallacy to charge our present selves with anything we did yesterday, if our present self is not in reality the same with the self of yesterday, but another self or person coming into its room and mistaken for it.'^ And this explains why persons, striving to throw off from themselves the respon- sibility of their doings, attempt this by suppressing their sense of personal identity and attribute these doings to other centres than their own self They plead, for in- stance, ' The furies possessed me ! ' ' It was drink that did it ! ' ' The devil put it into my mind ! ' But St. Paul, though he, too, sometimes pushes distinction of states of mind into difference of the subject in which these states inhere (as when he says, ' It is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me '), yet soon returns to the full assertion of personal identity. 'I, the selfsame man [aiJTog syco), with my mind indeed ' (when in a rational 1 Smith, Discourses, 83. 2 Butler, Analogy, 380, 24 FUNDAMENTALS. state) ' serve the law of God, but with my flesh ' (when in an animal mood) ' the law of sin.' ^ 3. But now to one more fact to which our observation of ourselves and others bears abundant testimony. I find myself, in actual experience, not only a something simple^ amidst the complexity of my concomitant concep- tions, and also selfsame amidst the ever-changing variety of my co7isecutive conceptions, but substantial amidst the merely phenomenal character of all these my concep- tions.^ This last fact is indeed denied by materialists. They ascribe all the phenomena of consciousness simply to the bodily organism. Thought is only the molecular action of the brain ;^ or a secretion from its substance;* or a function of its constitution ; ^ or a resultant of its vibra- tions.^ But, grant that the occasion of innumerable thoughts is furnished by the state of the cerebral matter ; grant even that many movements take place in our frame by ^ Romans vii. 17, 25. 2 Where note well that by 'substantial' I do not mean (what is so often confounded with it) material. Matter is no substance; it is only the /orm in which substances manifest themselves, and this with continual flux and variation ; as, e.g. from the hardest iron to the most volatile vapour of iron. Substance is that which stands under matter (or extended phenomena) as their base. It has none of the qualities of matter, neither extension nor weight. See Appendix, Note VI. ^ 'Thoughts result from the movements of matter.' — Moleschott. ■* 'Lapenseeest une secretion du cerveau.' — Cabanis. 'Thought bears the same relation to the brain as the bile to the liver.' — Vogt. ^ 'Nous avons dit, M. Robin et moi, que Fame est une fonction du cerveau. Le physicien reconnait que la matiere pese ; le physiologiste que la substance nerveuse pense.' — Littre. See Le Blais, Mat^rialisme et Spiritualisme, xix. And Janet, Le Mat^rialisme contemporain, 32. ^ ' Thought is not a secretion which the brain throws out, but it is the action itself of the brain, the resultant of all the forces which make up the composition of the brain; the efiect of the nervous electricity' — Biichner. MAN'S PERSONALITY. 25 simple reflex action ; still, there is another fact which these writers always ignore. This namely, that in all conscious presentment there is the sense of a Something to which the presentment is made ; a something distinct from the ultimate cerebral vibration which is in corre- spondence with this vibration, nay co-operates with it, and is a coefficient in the generation of thought. Not nervous vibrations ^^r 5^ make thought; but you yourself, in correspondence with these vibrations, make thought. Nay, more than this, you find this something not only making thought out of cerebral vibrations (which in themselves are not thought), but itself in return generat- ing cerebral vibrations. And this something, which is not merely receptive of movements but creative of move- ments, you cannot merge in the movements. Produce these movements, if you please, by a galvanic battery, you cannot thereby produce the something which observes these movements, is conscious to itself of these movements, responds to these movements, uses these movements, and originates counter movements in return. This something therefore must he^ independently of the movements which converge on it or emerge from it. This is what Descartes meant by his formula, 'I think, therefore I am.' He did not mean, ' I am thinking, therefore I am.' Such a sur- reptitious begging of the question, which Huxley among others imputes to him, was far from him. But his argument is, ' Thoughts are present. Every one allows this. But thoughts, to be present^ must be in relation to a something to which they are present. The existence of sensations, perceptions, volitions, proves the beiug of a something sentient, percipient, willing. In short, you- must apply to this particular case of mental phenomena the universal 26 FUNDAMENTALS. axiom which is true of all phenomena, " Where there is show there must be substance. If there were no sub- stance there could be no show." ^ On this axiom Herbart insists as the foundation of all behef in real being.^ This axiom Herbert Spencer has laid down in these words : " The relative is conceivable as such only by opposition to the irrelative or absolute. The momentum of thought inevitably carries us beyond conditional existence to un- conditional existence ; and this unconditional existence ever persists in us as the body of thought to which we give no shape. Hence our firm belief in objective reality. Though we can know only of certain impressions pro- duced in us, we are yet by the relativity of thought com- pelled to tfiink of these impressions in relation to a positive cause ; and so the notion of a real existence which gene- rates these impressions becomes nascent.'"^ And this axiom Spencer himself applies to the particular case of proving the reality of the human soul. I give you an outline only of his argument.^ ' Belief in the reahty of self is a belief which no hypothesis enables us to escape. What shall we say of those successive impressions and ideas which constitute consciousness? Are they affections of the mind which is the subject of them ? Then, this ^ Cf. Giordano Bruno — ^God would never deceive us, and, therefore, things that appear must exist; they are in a certain sense shadows, but even as shadows imply the presence of a sun ' (De Umbris Idearum). — Mac- millmi's Mag., Feb. 1871. 2 See his Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik, 19, 20. And Allgemeine Meta- physik, ii. 78, 79, 351. Compare also Hegel, in Stirling's Schwegler, 327 : 'Manifestation is not essenceless appearance, but appearance which is filled up, implemented by essence. There is no appearance without an esseiice, as there is no essence that passes not into manifestation. Every essence is unity of matter [i.e. of material] and form; i.e. it Exists. Existence is not immediate being, but grounded being, traced back to an antecedent source.' 3 First Principles, 89. ^ jj^jj, Qi-m. MAN'S PERSONALITY. 27 mind must be an entity capable of such affections. Are they modified forms of thinking substance ? Then, modi- fications involve the notion of a something modified. Are they impressions ? Then, an impression implies a something impressed. And you cannot consider them as your impressions if there be no you of which they are the impressions. You must admit therefore the reahty of the individual mind. And if you urge that this reality cannot be comprehended, this is the fate of all ultimate scientific ideas. They are all representatives of reahties which cannot be comprehended. So that the personality of which the existence is to us a fact beyond all others most certain, is yet a thing which cannot be truly known at all.' And yet, though not strictly known, this personality we cannot but be certain of from the simple principle that all things known, without us or within us, must have a some- what unknown for their base. ' The notion of the Atom, the indivisible, the thing that has place, being., and power ; this ' (says Sir John Herschel) ' is an absolute necessity of the human thinking mind, and is of all ages and nations. It underlies all our notions of being, and starts up per se whenever we come to look closely at the objective nature of things.' ^ And for the full validity of such applica- tion of the law of causation to facts. Professor Tyndall pleads when he urges the use of imagination (by which he means, of soaring from the actual into the ideal) in science ; for ' without this power, which lightens the darkness that surrounds the world of the senses, our knowledge of nature would be a mere tabulation of co- existences and sequences. We should still believe in the * Herschel, Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 454. 28 FUNDAMENTALS. succession of day and night, summer and winter ; but the soul of force would be dislodged from our universe ; causal relations would disappear^ and with them that science which is now binding the parts of nature to an organic whole.' ^ And therefore these ' causal relations,' which science assumes in all phenomena, we may with full confidence apply to the phenomena of consciousness also. What says Eitter on this point? 'As all predicates imply a subject, of which they are predicated, so all attributes 'imply a substance, to which they are attributed. Wher- ever, therefore, you observe the attributes of thought, there you must recognise a thinking substance^ of which they are attributes. And let no one be shy of this word substance when it indicates the base of actual phenomena, for we are obliged by an universal irresistible law of thought to regard every phenomenon as the manifestation of a thing, a base, a substance to which it refers.' ^ And how does Mr. Grote apply this argument, in words which seem the very echo of Herbart ? ' What we have as the two things to be contradistinguished are not matter and mind, but fact and seeming. And seeming is nothing in contrast with truth, but the presentation to something of things as being ; for this seeming of things implies more than the existence of things ; it implies something to which they seem as they do. However it may be a fact that the phenomenal world ^5, it is at least as much a fact that it seems (i.e. presents itself as an object of thought) to something which, in virtue of this fact., we must consider as different from itself. And this something, we come to * Tyndall, Use and Limit of the Imagination^ 16^ 17. 2 Ptitter, Unsterblichkeit, 24, 25. MAN'S PERSONALITY. 29 find, is we ; and it is only in virtue of this seeming of the universe to us that we have all along been talking of " being." All that we call " being " we can only call so as " seeming " to us to be, as thought of by us as being.' ^ Here, then, we have reached the solid conviction of a real substance as the base of all our phenomenal con- sciousness. When we affirm a soul or self as the unit of this consciousness, we do so not in the sense in which we speak of ' a tree ' or ' a river ' as the merely formal unity of its constituent parts. We affirm for the phenomena of thought a substance non-phenomenal as their base, in pre- cisely the same sense and with precisely the same right and validity as we affirm for the phenomena of the bodily frame various ' elementary substances ' as their base ; as we affirm for each kind of these phenomena their distinct base. No one ascribes the phenomena of acidity (for instance) to hydrogen, or the phenomena of water to oxygen. Nor can any one with any more reason ascribe the phenomena of mind to chemical or electric bases ; but by the same necessity and the same authority with which we conclude from the phenomena of acidity to a peculiar ' elementary substance ' generative of acidity, and call this substance oxygen, and from the phenomena of water to a peculiar ' elementary substance ' generative of water, and therefore call it hydrogen, with just the same authority, from just the same necessity, are we en- titled and obliged to conclude from the phenomena of thought to a peculiar 'elementary substance' generative of thought, which therefore I propose, by parity of no- menclature, to call Noerogen. Cicero tells us that Aristotle recognised, besides the four elements then ' Grote, in Macmillan's Magazine for March 1867. 30 FUNDAMENTALS, accepted, a fifth, as the base of mind, ' Because to think, to foresee, to learn, to teach, to invent, and so many other things, such as remembering, loving, hating, desiring, fearing, being distressed, and being joyful, could not possibly have their seat in any of those usually accepted elements, therefore did he add a fifth, which completes humanity, though he gave to it no name.'^ This element, therefore, which (Cicero adds) ' is easier understood than named,' is what I would call Noerogen. Each man is a particle, an atom of noerogen ; and this atom of noerogen, working in correspondence with the other atoms which lie at the base of the chemical and vital phenomena of body, is the seat and source of the specially mental phenomena. What it is, remains, indeed, as thoroughly unknown to us as do the other ' elementary substances ' of nature ; but that it z<§, and that it is essen- tially distinct fi:om them, is sufficiently indicated by its manifestations.' ^ * Cicero, Tusc. Bisp. 1-10. * See further, Appendix, Note VII. MAN'S GENERAL QVALITIES. 31 LETTEE III. OF MAN'S GENERAL QUALITIES. In trying to Jay down some stepping-stones on which you may pass securely over the shifting sands of doubt, I have seized first those immediate facts which underlie the conviction of all men when they affirm ' / am.'' For in this affirmation there is involved the assurance" of my simplicity, as the individual base of all the pheno- mena of my mind ; my selfsameness as the identical base of these phenomena ; and my substantiality as their real base. But then I find myself not only existing, but existing in ever varying forms of consciousness. My mind is con- stantly assuming new states, though my self, as the base of this mind, remains the same. And the description and classification of these states of consciousness is the business of mental philosophy. Now these facts of consciousness tell us that, as included in the animal kingdom, we have certain general qualities (though in much higher degrees) in common with other members of this kingdom ; but that we have also other special qualities, which altogether contradistinguish us from them, j As to our general qualities, we find ourselves sensitive, causative, and intellective beings. 32 FUNDAMENTALS. 1. As Sensitive beings we are incessantly susceptive of impressions, sensations, feelings, and affections pro- duced by the influence of persons and things external to ourselves. Of Impressions there is a vast number made through the nervous system of our body, of which we do not take any cognisance, but which, nevertheless, move in us correspondent reflex actions. But another and larger class do produce changes in our consciousness, and bring thereby to our cognisance objects of various kinds. ^ These objects, thus brought before us, are what Locke calls, though incorrectly, ' ideas.' And they are simple or complex. Simple.^ such as when the eye presents to us colours, red, blue, and so on ; or when the ear makes us sensible of sounds, loud, low, and so on ; or when the touch renders us aware of bodies, hard, soft, and so on. And complex^ when by means of several senses these simple impressions are combined into wholes, and make us sensible of the presence of complex objects, such as a tree, a house, a man. Next to impressions, and generally roused in us by them, come Sensations. As when, by means of the nerves of taste., we become sensible of things as sweet or bitter ; and, through the nerves of smell, as fragrant or offensive. Or when, in a much more extensive way, the general condition of our frame renders us sensible of various degrees of bodily ease or disease ; deepening from 1 These Shakespeare calls ' pressures ' : — ^ Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of hooks, all forms, dXl pressures past, That youth and observation copied there.' Hamlet, i. 5. MAN'S GENERAL QUALITIES. 33 a vague sense of comfort or of discomfort, to definite pleasure or pain, and prolonged enjoyment or misery. All these experiences are termed (not from their seat., for this is ever the incorporeal self, but from the source whence they arise) bodily sensations. ^ But above these come experiences which have their source not in the body, but solely in the mind, and which result from the various relations of harmony or discord into which our thoughts fall. And these we call distinc- tively Feelings., mental feelings. Such are our feelings of elevation., when our thoughts move freely and harmo- niously, and ' our bosom's queen sits lightly on her throne.' And feelings of depression., when the web of thought is entangled, clogged, perplexed. The intensifi- cation of such feelings raises them up to joy^ or casts them down to sorrow. And their prolongation constitutes a condition of happiness or unhappiness. Nor are these all the feelings which result from modifica- tions of our thoughts. There are others which spring from the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of our sense ofj^roportion., whether in thoughts, forms, colours, sounds ; or in words, dispositions, and acts. Thus, in objects of nature and art, the well-proportioned, the beautiful, the harmonious, pro- duce in us a feeling of complacency, and their contraries a feeUng of displacency. And these may be intensified, on the one hand, into relish and ' gusto ; ' on the other, into disrelish and disgust. And so in thoughts and words ; when we observe them to be accurate, well adapted, and logically ordered, there arises in us a recognition of truth ^ ' Qu'est-ce qui sent du plaisir en nous? Est-ce la main? Est-ce le bras ? Est-ce la chair ? Est-ce le .^ang ? On verra qu'ii faut que ce soit quelqiie chose criramaterieL' — Pascal, i. 187. D 34 FUNDAMENTALS, bringing with it a feeling of complacency, and when we see their contraries, a recognition of falsehood, accompanied by a feehng of displacency> Still more when we ob- serve, or even only imagine to ourselves, the proper, the correct, the well-proportioned, in disposition and character, there awakes in us a feeling towards these of complacency, similar to that with which we look on natural and artistic beauty. We call them lovely, charming. We derive from them a relish, a sweet savour ; while for the opposites of such sentiments and acts we have a feeling of displacency and disgust. Hence such feelings, from their similarity to the sensations of touch and taste, and to the sense of what is lovely or deformed, are called the Esthetic sentiments. And they are considered as the ojBTspring of a certain natural ' taste,' because they rise in us as spontaneously, in presence of their appropriate objects, as do our sensations of savour. Their verdict comes forth as instinctively and as quickly as do the judgments of the palate concerning what is bitter or sweet. ' Taste,' says Voltaire, ' is a quick discernment, a sudden percep- tion, which, like the sensations of the palate, anticipates reflection.' But, as our impressions and sensations result from states of body, and our feelings from modifications of mind, there is a fourth class of movements which spring from our relations of social life. These are the Affections, whether benevolent or malevolent. Affections of agree- ment with others, of sympathy, and of concord. And ^ This logical complacency Herbart distinguishes from sesthetical com- placency as consisting simply in a pleased recognition of the object before lis. And yet he himself allows that there is combined therewith a feeling made up of the force with which the evidence strikes us, and the gratifica- tion of finding what we have been seeking. — Lehrbuch der Psychologic, 41. MAN'S GENERAL QUALITIES. 35 affections of disagreement with others, of antipathy, of discord. Affections of trust in them, or mistrust of them. Affections of love for them, or hatred of them. 2. As sensitive beings we are mainly passive, recep- tive of influences from things without us. But as Cau- sative beings we are active, productive of influences on these things ; ^ and such causative acts take place in us either consciously or unconsciously. The causative acts which work in us, at least in their first movements, without our consciousness, rise in the scale of intensity from instincts^ through propensities and appetites., to passions. Those which spring from consciousness, and are mixed up with consciousness, of the object towards which we move, proceed in an ascending scale from desires., through determinations^ to doings. Desire is a move- ment within us towards something seen to be ' desirable ' (Ignoti nulla cupido) ; and it contains in it the com- mencement of corresponding determinations for the attainment of the object desired, and doings for the accomplishment of these determinations ; whence it is that our Lord treats desire as incipient doing, and would have us nip in the bud whatever ought not to flower into fruit.2 And St. James gives the genealogy of sin when he declares that ' each man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desire and enticed, so that desire when it has conceived brings forth, as its natural offspring, sin ; ^ For as a unit of force the self within us has, like other centres of force (as the heart), its systole and diastole ; its movements of self-contraction and self-expansion. In self- contraction it retires into the abyss of self, with intensification of the self-preserving power. In self-expansion it issues into sympathy and intercommunication with other forces, putting forth its self- assertive power. '' Matt. V. 22, 28. D 2 36 FUNDAMENTALS. and sin, when it comes to maturity, brings forth, as its offspring, death.' ^ 3. But we are not simply sensitive beings, the subject of impressions from things without us ; and causative beings, the source of expressions bearing on these things ;. but we are Intellective beings, talcing notice of these impressions and expressions, and forming in ourselves an extensive range of thoughts or presentments to our mental eye concerning them. These thoughts ascend along the scale of inteUigence from perceptions to conceptions, to notions, to imagina- tions, and to conclusions or judgments. But the one mark stamped upon them all is that they are intellective ; that is, that they are formed by a process of distinguishing and selecting (inter-lego) the phenomena which, through our senses and our consciousness present themselves to our notice. All thought is essentially differentiation.^ (1.) This differentiation commences at its lowest stage with the raising mere sensations of outward things into perceptions., or recognitions of the objects whence the sensations flow. And herein, therefore, we do not merely receive impressions, as wax receives the impress of a seal, or prepared paper takes the rays of hght, but we are active as well as passive, formative as well as receptive. ' We may often ' (as Mrs. Somerville well says) ' see an object without perceiving it, and we may hear a sound without attending to it. So that we must look in order to see, listen in order to hear, and handle in order to- feel; that is, we must adjust the muscular apparatus of all our senses, if we would have a distinct ^ James i. 14, 15. ^ See Appendix, Note VIII. MAN'S GENERAL QUALITIES. 37 perception of external exciting objects.' Perception is in fact, according to its literal meaning, the taking up wholly (p^r-capio) what presents itself to us. And it varies, therefore, according to the force and the fulness of our attention to this prevsentment. ' In every object,' says Carlyle, ' the eye sees what the eye brings the means of seeing. To Newton, and to Newton's dog, Diamond, what a dijQTerent pair of universes ; while the painting on the optical retina of both was most likely the same.' ^ (2.) A second stage in thought is that of conceptions. These are formed when we take together different objects that we perceive, and arrange them into wholes. For to conceive is con-capere ; to take up this along with that, so as to form, by the combination a whole, distinct from other wholes. Look at your conception of a table, as a something distinct from the objects surrounding it. An infant regards the table and the floor on which it stands as one thing, as much as you regard the table top and its legs as one thing. But when it comes to observe this table removed from its place on the floor, a separation takes place in its mind between the perceptions hitherto combined there. It distinguishes., difierentiates, the table from the floor, and parts them asunder as two separate things. It has grasped the one along with the other (con- cepit), as related indeed but yet distinct. It has distin- guished in order to combine and unify. It has separated off one set of perceptions from another neighbouring set, in order to grasp each as a whole. It has formed a con- ception of a table, and along with this of the floor on which it ordinarily stands, as another whole. So the first perception of the Spanish cavalry by the South Americans ^ Carlyle, French Ke volution, i. 8. 38 FUNDAMENTALS. was that of horse and man as one person. But when they afterwards saw the Spaniards dismount, and remain separated from their steeds, then they learned to conceive of man and horse as two things. They took together, not all their perceptions of man and horse as one object, but their perceptions of the man combined into one whole, and their perceptions of the horse combined into another whole, as two objects. And in this way, by a continuous process of 'discernment' or differentiation into new wholes, we discriminate things from things, and the parts of things from each other, almost without end. And such differentiation is as much a fundamental law of growth., for our mind, as a similar differentiation is for the cellular tissues of our body. In our first general percep- tions of objects we see little more than a sort of Turner picture, with masses of reds, whites, blues. Next, we dis- cern, or separate off, amidst these masses, ' things ' such as houses, roads, trees. Next, we discriminate from this ' still life,' men, ' like trees walking.' Next, men as alto- gether different from trees. Next, one man as distin- guishable from another. And next, the particular parts and features of each single man by himself.^ (3.) And this process of differentiation, carried further still, brings us to form another and more abstract class of thoughts which we call Notions. Beyond the first simple impressions made on us through the senses, the perceptions which we form out of them, and the conceptions into which we separate and combine them, the mind passes on, by its power of abstraction, to arrange and classify these conceptions among themselves according to their common and their specific marks. And thus we have no ^ See Appendix, Note IX. MAN'S GENERAL QUALITIES. 39 longer ' regard to things as they are as horse, ship, tree, but to things as they are understood by us,' i.e. as known and cognised by us (notio from nosco) ' under the relations of genus, species, attribute, subject,' whence we are said to ' understand ' things (have a notion of them) in proportion as we find for them a class under which to ' stand ' them. For ' to stand ' was formerly not only a neuter but an active verb, and remains so still in popular speech. 'He stood the candle on the table.' ' She stood the child down.' And ' the understanding ' therefore is the faculty by which we ' stand ' (or place) things ' under ' or among their several classes. And ' notions ' are the product of this ' understanding.' They are clear or obscure, and distinct or confused. Clear, when we discriminate a notion as a whole from others ; obscure when not so. Distinct^ when we discriminate the several marks in each notion from each other ; and confused when not so. Thus we have a clear notion of a triangle when we discriminate it from other figures. We have a distinct notion of it when we think of it as a figure whose three angles taken together are equal to two right angles. ^ Now, this process and clarification and distinction may be carried on through successive stages, from particular notions, up to special^ general, and universal notions. And it is the highest class, that of universal notions, which Plato terms ' Ideas,' and to which this much-abused word ^ See Herbart, Einleit. in d. Pliilosopliie, 3 : ' Die Deutlichkeit besteht in der Unterscheidung der Merkmale eines Begriffs, sowie die Klarheit in dei* Unterscheidung mehrerer BegrifFe unter einander.' And so Crabbe (Syno- nyms) : ' A notion is clear when we know what it is not ; distinct when we know what it is. Clearness discerns between two or more notions ; distinct- ness discerns all the characteristics of any one notion.' And Coleridge (Aids to Reflection, 138) : * This every human being knoivs with equal clearness, though difierent minds may reflect on it with different degrees of distinctness.^ 40 FUNDAMENTALS. ought to be limited. ' Ideas,' because he regarded them as the patterns (IMat), or prototypes, of which all general, special, and individual existences are more or less imper- fect copies.^ Notions, therefore, as abstractions of the mind, as (to use Sir W. Hamilton's language) ^ ' concepts of concepts, formal, mediate, reflex,' in distinction from conceptions, which are ' concepts of things real, immediate, direct,' are of immense importance and extent ; since out of them the whole system of logical reasoning is constructed. For ' a logician has nothing to do with ascertaining whether a horse, or a ship, or a tree exists, but whether one of these things can be regarded as a genus or species ; whether it can be called a subject or an attribute ; whether from the conjunction of many notions a proportion, a definition, or a syllogism can be formed.'^ (4.) But beyond the sphere of things observed by us as they are, and thought of by us under the relations in which we 'stand' them to each other, there is a fourth stage of the intellective process in which it passes from the accept- ance of things actually existing, into the creation, out of them, of new forms of thought, analogous indeed to what observation has supplied us with, but yet transcending it. These new forms are imaginations. And they are the product of that ' daring ' activity ^ of the mind which ^ See Appendix, Note X. ^ Discussions, p. 137: 'Conceptions' he calls 'first notions' (intellecta prima). Notions he terms ' second notions ' (intellecta secunda). And thus defines them : 'A first notion is the concept of a thing as it exists of itself, as man, John, animal. A second notion is the concept, not of an object as it is in reality, but of the mode vnder which it is thought by the mind, as individual species, genus.' See J. S. Mill on the Nature of the Copula, Logic, i. 194. ^ Abp. Thomson, Laws of Thought, 39, 40, in Fleming's Vocabulary, 348. * ' Pictoribus atque poetis Qtddlihet audendi semper fuit eequa potestas.' — Horace, Ars Poet. 9. MAN'S GENERAL QUALITIES. 41 constitutes its poietic (creative) and plastic (formative) power. This Mr. Bain well describes when he says, ' While the understanding has to do only with the literal resuscitation, revival, or reinstatement of former sensations, images, emotions and trains of thought, the operation known by the names of imagination, creation, constructiveness, origination, puts together new forms or constructs images, pictures, and modes of working such as we have never before had any experience of. It includes the genius of the painter, poet, musician, and inventor in arts and sciences.' To this, therefore, Coleridge gives the name of ' the esemplastic power, dissolving, diffusing, dis- sipating, in order to recreate.' But when he goes on to call it ' the tendency to expand infinitely,' and ' the struggle to idealise and unify,' he confounds it with the very dif- ferent power of ideality., of passing, through the several stages of abstraction, into the region of universals, or ideas. For imagination, so far from raising notions into their highest sublimation, tends to concrete them into definite forms and figures. It reduces them into ' images.' It is in fact, by its very name, image-making. And Ferrier truly affirms that ' the idea, or universal, cannot be pictured in the imagination. We must be satisfied with thinking it as a fact of intellect, which cannot be apprehended either by the senses or by the imagination, which derives all its data from the senses, and copies their impressions. An idea is thus diametrically opposed to an image, although in ordinary language the two terms are frequently re- garded as synonymous. You can form no sort of repre- sentation of the ideal, or universal, or paradeigma. It cannot be pictured to the imagination without being reduced to the particular. And then it is destroyed as an 42 FUNDAMENTALS. idea and converted into an instance.' ^ With which agrees what Coleridge had already said, 'No idea can be rendered by a conception. An idea is essentially inconceivable.' ^ And yet he goes on to speak of the Trinity as ' the only form in which an idea of God is possible,' vv^hich seems like saying, ' It is the only way in which it is conceivable.'' Mr. Dallas, indeed, contends that imagination includes ideality. For ' it is but a name for the free play of thought, the spontaneous action of the whole mind. It is the love of likeness and of wholeness. It is the dis- covery of resemblance advancing to the perception of unity. It leaps from the particular to the universal ; from the accidental to the necessary ; from the temporary to the eternal.' ^ Which last features are precisely those of the ideas, and of those alone. And Dr. Tyndall has clearly ideality in view when he writes ' concerning the scientific use of the imagination.'' For he says, ' Newton's passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was, at the outset, a leap of the imagination ' (say rather of the reason discerning beforehand consequences). But then he adds, ' Not, however, an imagination which catches its creations from the air, but one informed and inspired by facts capable of discerning consequences^ and of devising means whereby these forecasts of thought may be brought to an experimental test.' And again, 'Imagination broods upon facts, and by the aid of reason tries to discern their interdependence.'^ More simply, therefore, we may say that it is reason brooding on facts, and so discerning their interdependence. 1 Ferrier's Lectures, i. 338, 339. ^ -^^^^^ o^ English Divines, i. 12. 3 Dallas, The Gay Science, i. 262, 292. * Tyndall, Use and Limit of the Imagination, 4, 16. See my ^ Faith grounded on Reason.' MAN'S GENERAL QUALITIES. 43 Now, all this is true of the power of idealisation. This is found only in the highest minds. It is what Coleridge calls ' the fortunate anticipation and instructive /(9r^^ac^ of truth.' ^ It is reasoning per saltum. It is the divining, guessing, and forecasting new thoughts in connection with those already before us; included in them, and flowing out of them. It is what the Germans call ' Ahn- ung,' Anticipation ; and some English writers, ' Invention.' And it works mightily in the discoverer., whether in science or art. Shakespeare calls this quick apprehen- siveness, ' the prophetic soul.' But imagination, on the contrary, tends, not to ' idealise,' but to sensualise our conceptions ; not to ' expand ' but to contract them, and thus debase them. From this came all the ' endless genealogies ' of the Gnostic theology. From this all the gross anthropomorphisms of Deity among the heathen, and their counterparts among hea- thenising Christians. The ' idea,' or abstract notion, of a One, supreme, all powerful, everywhere present, is true and sublime ; but the ' images ' of such a Being, whether material or verbal, carved in stone or moulded by the fancy, are necessarily false, low, and gross. See this in the sculptures of Hinduism ; in the pictures and idols of Eomanism, in the poetry of Pollock, and even of Milton. And the efforts of many poets and divines to image the unseen world, its pleasures and its pains, are another proof of the essential contrariety of imagination, which cleaves to the concrete and the sensuous, from reason which soars into the abstract and ideal. See this con- trast in the inspired John. Full as his Apocalypse is of the boldest imagery, he carefully abstains from depicting * Coleridge, Notes on English Divines, i. 4. 44 FUNDAMENTALS. any sensuous form of the Great Supreme. All he can say of Him is that He was ' dazzling to the sight as are a jasper and a sardine stone.' (5.) The last product of our intellective nature deals with all these previous ones, whether perceptions, concep- tions, notions, or imaginations, and pronounces on them judgments concerning their truth or falsehood, their beauty or deformity, their being right or wrong. Such judgments are of two kinds, mediate or imme- diate. Mediate judgments result from comparing a notion with other notions so as to determine the relation which it bears to them, the class under which we are to ' stand ' it. As when, for instance, we assume that we know all men to be mortal, and placing under this universal notion the particular one that John is a man, thence conclude that John therefore is mortal. Our final judgment con- cerning John is reached by means of the middle term, which connects John with the class of beings who are mortal. It is therefore a mediate judgment. And its decision is that the notion of John as mortal is a true one. But then there are also immediate judgments ; so called because on the presentation of their objects we pronounce concerning them (or seem to do so) without any intermediate reasoning. We need no process of proof, but see the truth concerning them at once., as the eye sees light by being only turned towards it. ' Thus the mind perceives that white is not black ; that a circle is not a triangle ; that three are more than two, and equal to one and two.' -^ Such judgments are called by Aris- ^ Locke, iv. 2. 3IAN'S GENERAL QUALITIES. 45 totle ' intuitive,' or self-evident, and are accepted by him as grounds of all knowledge. For ' all demonstrated knowledge,' he says, ' must rest on principles which are true and primary and immediate {aix?(roi) ; better known than the conclusions to be drawn from them, prior to these conclusions, and causative of these conclusions. . . And such principles must be primary and indemonstrable, because we should need a previous demonstration for them also, if they were not in their very nature intuitive and self-evident. Hence the principle of all demonstration (or mediate proof) must be an immediate proposition (Trporaa-ig oifxscrog) ; and by an immediate proposition I mean that to which there is nothing prior.' ^ Thus, then, we arrive at judgments concerning what is true ov false !^ But our judgments pronounce themselves with equal or greater immediateness concerning what is beautiful or deformed^ and concerning what is right or wrong. For these decisions also are judgments. They arise from observation, not of any one thing by itself but of the relations of things ; though their verdict is generally so immediate, at the first glance of their objects, that it resembles our bodily sensations, such as taste and touch. Whence we call our judgment of the beautiful, taste, and * Aristotle, Analyt. Post. i. 2. ^ It remains, however, to be considered whether many judgments which seem immediate are not the results of latent reasoning, or have been accepted simply through external teaching and authority. Axioms are different to different minds. That is ' self-evident ' to one which is not to another. Even that ' three are more than two ' becomes first manifest through the ocular demonstration of the fingers or of a ball frame. Mill reduces all ' first principles ' to two : ' that things equal to the same are equal to each other,' and the converse (i. 241). And these are none other than the two old principles of 'identity and contradiction;' that A is A, and that A is not B, which Aristotle calls ' intuitive ' judgments. 46 FUNDAMENTALS. our judgment of the right, the moral sense. And Aristotle terms such judgments ' assertive,' because we are fully persuaded of them without requiring any grounds for this persuasion, and because they so com- mend themselves to our moral nature as to warrant our expectation that all whose SBSthetic taste or moral sense is sound and normal, will of themselves, from simple sympathy with us, respond to and endorse them. MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. 47 LETTEE IV. OF MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. Much thought has been expended on the question wherein man differs from the lower animals, for they have many qualities similar to ours. They exhibit not only a sensitive, but an intellective nature, of the same kind though not of the same degree as our own. And this through almost all the stages which I have already pointed out to you ; from impressions, perceptions, con- ceptions, imaginations, up even to judgments. It is in our ability to form notions^ especially notions of high abstraction, that our distinction from them becomes manifest. ' This I think,' says Locke, ' that the power of abstracting is not at all ' (?) ' in brutes, and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction between man and brutes.' ^ But I call your attention now to a class of attributes in which there is no question merely of degree but of kind. Man is distinguished from all other animals, essentially, by the possession of a nature morale religious^ and pro- gressive. And first I would beg you to consider how essenti- ally Man is a moral being.''^ By which I mean a being 1 Locke, ii. 11, 10. ^ ' Nee vero iUa parva vis naturre est rationisqiie quod u?mm hoc animal sentit quid sit ordo ] quid sit quod deceat ; in factis dictisque quid sit modus. Itaque eoruiii ipsorum qusB aspectu seutiuntur nullum aliud 48 FUNDAMENTALS. capable of being affected by beauty or deformity of cha- racter and conduct ; of contemplating himself in the light of such affections ; of pronouncing on himself a verdict of approval or disapproval according to his conformity or nonconformity with them, and of moulding himself into fuller correspondence with them. In other words, this constitutes our first distinctive feature as Men.^ that we are capable oi moral sentiments^ and of self-observation, self-judgment, self-control, and self-culture with reference to such sentiments. 1. These moral sentiments are of the same nature with those ' immediate ' aesthetic judgments which pronounce at once concerning what is beautiful and deformed. ' The beautiful and the ugly,' says Herbart,^ ' and still more the praiseworthy and the shameful, possess a primitive evi- dence, in the light of which they show themselves out clearly, without instruction or proof. ^ Not that this evidence can always of itself break through the accessory conceptions in which the objects of these judgments are often entangled ; they need to be helped out into dis- animal pulchritudinem, venustatem, convenientiam partium sentit. Quam eimilitudinem natura ratioque ab oculis ad animum transferens, multo etiam magis pulchritudinem, constantiam, ordinem in consiliis factisqtie conservan- dum putat, cavetque re quid indecore facial.' — Cicero, De Offic, i. 4. ^ Lehrbuch der Philosopliie, 76. 2 This ' naturalness ' of tlie moral sentiments is finely urged by Cicero : ^ Nos legem bonara a mala nulla alia nisi naturce norma dividere possumus. Nee solum jus et injuria natura dijudicantur, sed omnino omnia honesta ac turpia ; nam et communis intelligentia nobis notas res efficit, easque in animia nostris incboat, ut honesta in virtute ponantur, in vitiis turpia. Ea autem in opiniotte existumare, non in natura posita, dementis est. Nam nee arboris nee equi virtus quae dicitur in opinione sita est sed in natura, quod si est, honesta quoque et turpia natura dijudicanda sunt. Est enim virtus perfecta ratio ; quod certe in natura est ; igitur omnis honestas eodem modo. Nam ut vera et falsa ut consequentia et contraria siia sponte judicantur, sic constans et perpetua ratio vitse, quse est virtus, itemque inconstantia, quod est vitium, sua natura probatur.' — De Lecjy. i. 16. MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. 49 tinctness by a clear exhibition of the pattern ideas on which these judgments are grounded. And such help is what the science of aesthetics, including that of ethics, has to supply,' And so also Mr. Lecky : ' The close connection be- tween the good and the beautiful has been always felt ; so much so, that both are, in Greek, expressed by the same word, and in the philosophy of Plato moral beauty was regarded as the archetype of which all visible beauty is only the shadow or the image. We all feel that there is a strict propriety in the term moral beauty. We feel that there are different forms of beauty which have a natural correspondence to different moral qualities ; and much of the charm of poetry and eloquence rests upon this harmony. We feel that we have a direct, immediate, intuitive perception that some objects, such as the sky above us, are beautiful ; that this perception of beauty is totally different, and could not possibly be derived, from a perception of their utility ; and that it bears a very striking resemblance to the instantaneous and unreasoning admira- tion that is elicited by a generous or heroic action. We perceive too, if we examine with care the operations of our own mind, that an sesthetic judgment includes an in- tuition or intellectual perception, and an emotion of attrac- tion or admiration very similar to those which compose a moral judgment. The very idea of beauty, again, implies that it should be admired, as the idea of duty implies that it should be performed. There is also a striking corre- spondence between the degree and kind of uniformity we can in each case discover. That there is a difference between right and wrong and between beauty and ugli- ness are both propositions which are universally felt ; that E 50 FUNDAMENTALS. right is better than wrong, and beauty than ugliness, are equally unquestioned. When we go further and attempt to define the nature of these qualities, we are met, indeed, with great varieties of detail, but by a far larger amount of substantial unity. Poems like the Iliad or the Psalms, springing in the most dissimilar quarters, have com- manded the admiration of men through all the changes of some 3,000 years. The charm of music, the harmony of the female countenance, the majesty of the starry sky, of the ocean, or of the mountain, the gentler beauties of the murmuring stream or of the twilight shades, were felt as they are felt now when the imagination of the infant world first embodied itself in written words. And in the same way, types of heroism and of virtue descending from the remotest ages command the admiration of mankind. We can sympathise with the emotions of praise or blame revealed in the earliest historians ; and the most ancient moralists strike a responsive chord in every heart. The broad fines remain unchanged. No one ever contended that justice was a vice, or injustice a virtue ; or that a summer sunset was a repulsive object, or that the sores upon a human body were beautiful. Always, too, the objects of sesthetical admiration were divided into two great classes, the sublime and the beautiful, which in ethics have their manifest counterparts in the heroic and the amiable.' ^ 1 Lecky on European Morals. Judgments of this kind are called moral, because they are pronounced on the mores, or manners, i.e. modes of conduct, of mankind. And they are comprised under the phrase, the moral sense, because they come forth with a spontaneity equal to the judgments of taste and touch. And how instinctive such judgments are is well expressed by Seneca (Ep. 94) : * Quis autem negaverit feriri quibusdam prseceptis etiam imperitissimos ? Hesc cum ictu quodam audimus, nee uUi licet dubitare, aut interrogare Quare?' Whence St. Chrysostom attributes them to the inspiration of God Himself in us. See his twelfth Homily. ^ It cannot be MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. 51 And heuce it is that the primary judgments of the moral taste have ever been recognised as part of the nature with which man is endowed, as universal for all men, and eternal for all time. Sophocles calls them Laws descended from above. Which, not like those by feeble mortals given, Buried in dark oblivion lie. Or worn by time, decay and die. But bloom eternal like their native heaven.^ And again, The firm unwritten laws Of the just gods. These are not of to-day Or yesterday, but through all ages live, Aad none knows whence they sprang.^ Socrates says of them, 'There are laws unwritten, yet universally in force, which no human legislation has es- tablished, for men cannot all have come together in one place with one tongue for this purpose ; and such laws, therefore, I ascribe to God.'^ Seneca extols them as ' laws not written, indeed, but far more valid than all that have said that the heathen legislators held communication with Moses, or that they heard the propkets. It is evident, therefore, that their moral judg- ments came from the law which God placed in man when he formed him.' 1 Sophocles, (Ed. Tyr. 865 :— 'Y-^iTTodeg^ ovpaviav At aiOspa reKPUjOsvTeCj uv "OXvfiTrog Tlati^p fiovogy ovds viv QvaTCL (pvaig avspojv 'EtiktsVj ovdk ixr]TroTi XaOa KaTaKOi{ia.(Tij, Mkyag kv TovToig Otog^ ovSe yripcicTKH, « Antig. 454 :— dypawTa Kd(T(paXr} Oeiov "Sopifia ..... Ov yap Ti vvv yt fcax^sc, aXX' dti ttots Zy TavTUf Kov6dg oldtv k^ brov '^dvij, * Xenophon, Mem. Soc. iv. 4, 7. c 2 52 FUNDAMENTALS, been written.' ^ And Cicero describes them as forming a code of wisdom, ' eternal, and valid for the rule of the whole world ; whose authority is not simply older than the age of peoples and states, but equal to that of Him who watches over and governs heaven and earth/ ^ For 'the dictates of our nature,' he says again, 'constitute a perfect law, diffusing itself through all men, unchange- able, eternal, which calls us to duty and scares us from wrong. No one may abrogate this law, no one lessen its authority, no one explain it away. Nor is it a law pre- scribing one thing at Eome, another at Athens ; one thing to-day, another thing to-morrow; but in every nation and through every age it constitutes one and the same eternal and immutable code, and reigns as the one common teacher, sovereign, nay, god of all things ; for none but God has conceived it, has put it forth, and en- forces it. Whosoever, therefore, refuses to obey this law, flies from the control of his own self, and spurning the very nature of man must by such outrage severely punish himself, even if he escape that outward vengeance which men count punishment.' ^ * Seneca, Controv. 1 : ' Jura non scripta sed omnibus scriptis certiora.' ^ Cicero, De Legg. ii. 4 : ^ Legem neque liominum ingeniis excogitatum neque scitum aliquod esse populorum, sed aeternum quiddam, quod univer- sum mundum regeret imperandi prohibendique sapientia. . . . Quae vis non modo senior est quam setas populorum et civitatum sed sequalis illius coilum et terras tuentis et regentis Dei.' Add Saisset, Phil. rel. ii. 192 : ' II y a un certain nombre de Veritas qui ne meurent point. Je les trouve partout repandues, au moins en germe. Elles vont s'epanouissant, s'^purant, se fortifiant d'age en age, toujours jeunes, toujours vivantes, et dans leur evolution progressive elles maintien- nent et consacrent la fraternite religieuse des nations.' ^ Cicero, De Republ. iii. 22 : ^ Est vera lex recta ratio, naturae congruens, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna, quae vocet ad officium jubendo, a fraude deteiTeat. . . . Huic legi nee abrogare fas est, neque derogari ex liac aliquid licet, neque tota abrogari potest . . . neque est quaerendus explanator MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. ^ 53 And I beg you to note well that the existence of such moral judgments is denied by no school of moralists, what- ever their divergence of opinion as to the origin of these judgments. ' The existence of moral distinctions,' says the ' Westminster Eeview,' ' is the one fact on which utilitarianism and all other theories of morality are based ; so that to deny this existence would be equi- valent to founding a system of geometry on the assump- tion that space does not exist.' And again, they are ' the spontaneous and immediate promptings of the conscience, or the moral sense.' And again, ' The derivative mo- ralists are at one with the intuitional in their recog- nition of the existence of moral sentiments^ and in their anxiety to strengthen and refine them.' ^ So that we may well conclude with Bishop Butler concerning their verdict : ' This moral approving and disapproving faculty is certain^ from our experiencing it in ourselves, and recognising it in others.' ^ aut interpres ejus alius; nee erit alia lex Homse, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac, sed et omnes gentes et omni tempore una lex et sempitema et immutabilis continebit ; unusque erit communis quasi magister et impe- rator omnium deus, ille legis hujus inventor, disceptator, lator; cui qui non parebit ipse se fugiet, ac naturam hominis aspernatus hoc ipso luet maximaa poenas, etiamsi cetera supplicia, qua? putantur, eflfugerit.' 1 West. Rev. Oct. 1869, p. 519. 2 Compare A. Helps in Cont. Rev. Jan. 1871 : ' The utikj even when brought home to a man's self, has much less to do with peoples' opinions and desires than might be supposed. Men are prone to make light of and postpone their nearest interests to sentiment and feeling. Indeed, I would venture to maintain that no great change has ever been produced in the world hy motives of self-interest. Sentiment, that thing which many wise people aftect to despise, is the commanding thing as regards popular impulses and popular action.' Add Ibid. 237 (Oalderwood). *Mr. Wallace argues that the practice of virtues on the ground of their utility cannot account for the sanctity which attaches to them even among savage tribes.' And he adds : ^ The utilitarian hypothesis (which is the theory of natural selection applied to mind) seems inadequate to account for the development of the moral sense. It is difficult 54 EUNDAMENTALS. But then I do not mean to say that this ' certainty ' is independent of the clearness with which we perceive the objects on which the moral judgments give their verdict. There is the same variation here as in the judgments of the palate^ from which the very name of moral taste is by analogy derived. These judgments also depend for their force and purity on the way in which the objects to be tasted are brought into contact with the gustatory nerve ; and, moreover, on the refinement to which this nerve has been raised. And just so the delicacy of our moral taste depends upon its culture. As wide, for in- stance, as the difference between your vinous taste and that of the experienced wine merchant, or your taste for food and that of the refined epicure, or your dehcacy of touch and that of the tea-dealer, or the picture-dealer,^ so wide may be the interval between the moral taste of the uncultured clown and that of the well-trained con- science. But still the tastes, however different in degree^ exist in hind. The capacity for the full perception of their proper objects, and the full discrimination of these objects, is, however latent and uncultured, there. And in both classes of taste, the sensuous and the moral, the justness of the verdicts given will depend on the clearness to conceive that sucli an intense and mystical feeling of right and wrong (so intense as to overcome all ideas of personal advantage and utility) can have been developed out of accumulated ancestral experiences, of utility.' —Wallace on Theory of Nat. Sd. 352-355. ' Quae autem natio non comitatem, non benignitatem, non gratum animuni et beneficii memorem diligit ? Quae superbos, quae maleficos, quae crudeles, quae ingratos non aspernatur, non odit ? ' — Cicero, Be Legg. 1. 1 I knew a tea-dealer who gained a large fortune by the facility with which he could distinguish, by the touch, pure teas from adulterations. And Emerson (English tracts) tells of a picture-dealer who, at first glance, supposed a painting of Allston's to be an antique, but on feeling it exclaimed, * It is not two years old I ' So delicate was the man's touch. MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES, 55 of perception, and the sensitiveness of the discriminating tact. The expert in morals, like the expert in other matters of judgment, is made by exercise and use. Of Charles the Second, Macaulay says, ' Honour and shame were scarcely more to him than light and darkness to the blind.' ^ Of the mature Christian, St. Paul declares, * Strong meat belongeth to them who have come to man's estate, and by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.' ^ And Job says concerning the moral judgment, ' Cannot my taste discern perverse things ?' 3 Thus, in the sphere of truth,, the judgments which seem the most intuitive are due to a process, however latent, of ratiocination. When Newton saw at a glance the truths in Euclid, without requiring any conscious develop- ment of the proofs presented for them, the demonstration must nevertheless have gone on, as it were per saltum^ beneath his consciousness. In the sphere of heauty our discrimination of this quality, whether in forms, in tones, in colours, or in proportions, depends on the clearness with which the objects to be appreciated are disentangled from perplexing accessories, and on the extent to which the sense of beauty has been given by nature, or acquired through culture, exercise and habit. For the beauties of nature are often least appreciated by those who are most among the forms of nature, if these forms are from infancy mixed up in their minds with poverty and hardship, and discoloured by association with what is low, and sordid, and selfish in their daily life. And the beauties of art, as displayed by a Titian, a Michael Angelo, a Mendelssohn, ^ Macaulay, Hist, of England, i. 168. => Hebrews y. 14. » Job vi. 30.. 56 FUNDAMENTALS. are appreciated by those alone in whom the sense for art, in its threefold domain of colour, of form, and of tone, has been developed. Proficiency depends on culture. The sense must be ' exercised by reason of use.' But yet, in all these cases equally, the sense is there. It must be there, or it could never by any training be called forth. It must be there, in certain primitive universal principles of judgment and feeling, or when called forth its verdicts would not command such general acceptance as they do. What are concords, and what discords ? What is proportion, and what disproportion? What is harmony of colour, and what disharmony? To these questions there may be many answers from untrained ears and eyes, but with all whose tastes have been refined by culture there will be substantial unanimity. For what is this refinement but the taste being clarified from the accretions with which the pure ore of truth is to the unpractised eye overlaid and hidden ? And hence all taste, throughout all its de- partments, is in its essence discrimination. Feelings of complacency or displacency accompany its decisions, but the decisions themselves are acts of judgment^ which pro- nounces with varying rapidity and justness, according to the clearness of its perception and the delicacy of its tact^ And these decisions, in aU their spheres of nature, of art, or of human disposition and conduct, have this spe- cial characteristic, that they are based on purely objective grounds, with no admixture of personal subjective bias. They are judgments formed, as it were, in vacuo. They contemplate their objects in that ' dry light ' which belongs to an atmosphere unmixed with baser matter. And they pronounce on these objects, not from any consideration of 1 See Appendix, Note XI. MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. 57 their being pleasurable or painful to our individual sensa- tions, or their being profitable or unprofitable to our indi- vidual advantage, but solely on the ground of their being proper or improper in the relation brought before us ; whence it foUov^s that they are of universal validity, and constitute the law for all persons, at all times, in all places, who may occupy the relation which they contemplate. And I say emphatically, ' the relation which they con- template ;' for what is commendable in disposition or con- duct cannot be laid down abstractedly, without limitation by the facts of each particular case. Nor can the whole system of morals be deduced from one leading principle branching out in all directions, as some moralists have attempted to do. The proper thing must be learned, in each particular case, from the facts of this case ; whence the comprehensive rule of the Church Catechism, that we are ' to do our duty in that state of life to which God has called us.' As our relations, so are our duties ; that is, literally, the disposition and conduct due from us in those relations. As Professor Maurice says : ' We are in an order ; relations abide whether we be faithful to them or neglect them. And the conscience in each of us affirms, " I am in this order, I ought to act consistently with it, let my fancies say what they will." ' And again : ' A man asks himself if he ought to do this, if he ought not to do that. Why ? Because he fears he has been following a way of his own, not consistent with his position as lawyer, physician, clergyman ; not consistent with that which was due from him to his clients, his patients, his flock.' ^ And it is to such moral positions ; to the relations in which we stand, whether inwardly to our own mind, or ^ Maurice on tlie Conscience, 57, 91. 58 FUNDAMENTALS. outwardly to our fellow-men, that our Lord adapts those promises with which he cheers his followers in his Ser- mon on the Mount. He assumes that they are lovers of self-possession^ and therefore labouring after inward integrity (' purity of heart ') ; and of self-perfectionment^ and therefore ' hungering and thirsting after righteous- ness.' And He assumes that they are lovers of social order (' men of peace '), and therefore wounded by every kind and degree of strife ; lovers of social welfare (' mer- ciful'), and therefore desiring the good of all sentient being ; and lovers of social equity., and therefore long- ing for the triumph of retributive justice throughout the universe (' Count yourselves happy when men persecute you, for great is your reward in heaven).' ^ Observe, then, how the first thing which everyone instinctively approves in himself and others is self-posses- sion. By this I mean that mastery over all the move- ments of our mind by which there is maintained a thorough harmony between preference and perfonnance ; between what commends itself to the moral sense as right, and what comes out in purpose and act. It is that qua- lity which, by saving us from the domination of passion, brings conduct into correspondence with conviction. And the extent to which we naturally admire this quality may be appreciated by observing the extent to which we detest its opposite — self-contradiction. This all men so hate 1 Matthew v. 6-12. The object of the so-called ' Beatitudes ' is to cheer the followers of Christ, amidst their experience of personal sorrow (3-5), of moral imperfection (6-9), and of social injustice (10-12), with the promise of a state in which all these evils shall be removed. And in our Lord's assumptions as to men's moral instincts. He has remarkably anticipated just those principles of personal and social ethics at which Herbart has arrived by his own independent investigations. See Herbart's Allgemeine prac- tische Philosophie, a work to which I am deeply indebted. MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. 59 that ScMUer ventures to say, ' Self-contradiction is the only wrong.' And Milton exclaims, ' To be weak is to be miserable, doing or suffering/ And of such self-contra- diction you have the most life-like picture in St. Paul's delineation of the slavery and the misery of one who, seeing what is right, does wrong ; who, when to will is present with him, yet finds not how to perform that which is good ; who finds a law in his members warring against the law of his mind, and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin which is in his members ; and with whom therefore the result of his self-knowledge is a bitter sense of moral bondage, forcing out the despairing cry, ' Who shall emancipate me from this body of death ? ' ^ Now just the reverse of this slavery is self-possession. It is the being a cubical man ; foursquare ; a plomh\ the maintaining a harmony of the several elements of our mind ; so that they shall not thwart and thereby weaken each other, but work in perfect fulness towards one end. It constitutes the liberty on which the Stoics insist so much — the maintaining our moral preference which God has implanted in us (ttjv tJjolcov aurwu Trpoalpsa-iu xara c^Jenv).^ It is that concerning which Mr. Gladstone says, ' TO [xscrou of Aristotle is not a mean between extremes of mere quantity, but an inward equipoise of the mind and in the composition of mental qualities ; abhorring excess in any one of them, because it mars the combination as a whole and throws the rest into deficiency.' ^ It is that which Clement of Alexandria terms ' the symphony of all the parts of the soul ; ' that which Shakespeare pre- scribes attention to when he says, ' Give no unproportioned ^ Rom. yii. 14-24. ^ Epictet. Man. 13. 3 Gladstone, Juventus Mundi, 393. 60 FUNDAMENTALS. thought his act;' that which Hobbes describes as 'an absence of the lets and hindrances of motion, so that the more ways a man can move himself the more liberty- he hath ; ' and yet that which in the midst of all this liberty of movement, nay because of it, maintains and accomphshes perfect unity of purpose, and makes us whole men to whatever we undertake. And. therefore, it is just what our Lord extols when he pronounces his benediction on ' the pure in heart.' For ' purity of heart ' is unmixedness, wholeness ; the opposite of double-minded- ness, of having ' a heart and a heart,' of being false to one- self ^ It is the quality of those happy natures, or those ransomed souls, whose will, like a well-poised needle, ' traverses freely ' the whole circumference of the compass, and settles with quick fidelity to the pole ; and with whom therefore to will and to do are one and the same act. For If our souls but poise and swings Like the compass in its brazen ring, Ever level, and ever true To the toil and the task we have to do, We shall sail securely, and safely reach The fortunate isles, on whose shining beach The sights we see and the sounds we hear Will be those of joy and not of fear.^ 1 See James iv. 8: ^Purify your hearts, ye double-minded.' So that * purity of heart ' in Matt. v. 8, is synonymous with ' singleness of heart ' in Eph. vi. 5, and with * simplicity and godly sincerity ' in 2 Cor, i. 12. Com- pare Matt, vi. 22, ' If thine eye be single.'' Compare Silas Marner, * Sin- cerity clear as the new-born dew ;' and Longfellow, Voices of the Night i The star of the unconquered will, It rises on my breast, Sei'ene and resolute and still, And calm and self-possessed, * LongfelloW; ibid. 3IAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. 61 You will see, therefore, at once how for such self-pos- session there is needed an element of force in full activity — such force as, by keepifig up our purposes, shall help them on to performance, and by keeping down their contraries shall maintain the equihbrium of our mind. This force is so indispensable that, even without reference to the sort of purpose which it keeps up and makes successful, it draws from us involuntary admiration. Even where not linked with goodness it deludes us into praise. We bow down before strength for strength's sake. ' All force,' says Canon Liddon, ' whether moral or mental or physical, is of itself beautiful. It commands admiration in proportion to its intensity.' And hence Carlyle's worship of force ; and his tendency to make right identical with might. Weak vice exposes itself naked to our detestation, bold vice covers its blackness with the shining armour of valorous force. Nor can there be any virtue without such force. Virtue is not the innocence of a child, but the vigorous goodness of a man. The very word means manliness. And only where this manliness is aroused, to help our good desires against outward enemies and inward weak- ness, have we the liberty to do the things that we would. ' In whatever befalls you,' says Epictetus, ' examine what faculty you possess to meet it. If toil, for instance, be thrown upon you, bring forth against it such inward force {xapnpioLv) as you have.' Hence the Bhuddists say : ' He is a more noble warrior who subdues himself than he who conquers thousands ; ' and Solomon declares : ' He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty ; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.' ^ Such force it was which formed the ground of Hezekiah's ^ Proverbs xvi. 32. 62 FUNDAMENTALS. greatness. 'In every work that he began, he did it with all his heart ' (with the whole amount of force that was in him), ' and prospered.' ^ To the stirring up of such force we are so often called in Holy Scripture. ' Be thou strong and very courageous that thou may est observe to do all the law, and turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest.' ^ ' Quit yourselves like men. Be strong.'^ The successes of such force Wordsworth well describes in his ' Happy Warrior.' This generous spirit who, when brought Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought Upon the plan that pleased his childish thought ; Whose high endeavours are an inward light That makes the path before him always bright. And to the putting forth such force Thomson exhorts slaves of indolence, when he cries, Resolve, resolve, and to be men aspire ! Exert that noblest privilege, alone Here to mankind indulged ; control desire I Let god-like reason from her sovereign throne Speak the commanding word, I will, and it is done ! But looking at a man with respect to the internal relations of his will, you will feel that self-possession at any given moment is not sufficient to satisfy your moral sense. You look further for self -p erf ectionment The dull man, indifferent to progress, however punctilious in his little sphere, disappoints you. It is not enough that his mind be self-balanced ; you require that it be also self- expanding, ever taking in new views of duty, and 1 2 Chron. xxxi. 21. ^ Joshua i. 7. » 1 Cor. xvi. 13. MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES 63 stretching onward to new conquests over evil ; advancing steadily from one stage to another of that completeness which lies in the ideal of man. The smallest circle indeed, if fully rounded, ' satisfies ;' but in the circle of the human character no present roundness is sufficient. We look to its enlarging its dimensions. 'No man,' says Theodore Parker, ' has yet had a complete, total, and permanent enjoyment of every part of his nature. This indeed is the ideal to which we tend, but one not capable of complete attainment in a progressive being ; for if the ideal of yesterday has become the actual of to-day, to- morrow we are seized with manly disquiet and unrest, and soar upwards towards another ideal.' ^ Hence Wordsworth describes his ' Happy Warrior ' as one, Who, not content that former worth stand fast. Looks forward, persevering to the last. From well to better, daily self-surpast Hence, too, Longfellow says, Not enjoyment and not sorrow Is our destined end and wayi But to act that each to-morrow Finds us farther than to-day. Let us then be up and doing. With a heart for any fate ; Still achieving, still pursuing. Learn to labour and to wait. 1 See Herbart, Pract. Phil. 89: ^Ohne Frage, gefallt das Starkere neben dem Schwacheren, missfallt das Schwachere neben dem Starkeren. Mochte das Schwacbere gleicb geworden sein dem Starkeren ; wofern alsdann nocb eins von beyden wiichse, so erzeugte sich das Verhaltniss Yon neuem. So ins Unendliche.' See Eraser's Mag., Feb. 1871 : ' In Dryden there was nothing of that restless and unsatisfied yearning after perfection by which the loftiest souls are known. The painful process of correction, the Horatian limes labor, were unknown to him.' 64 FUNDAMENTALS. And hence the feeling of St. Paul : ' I count not myself to have apprehended, but forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth to those which are before, I press toward the mark to grasp the prize to which I have been called from on high.' ^ Hence, too, his exhortation to the Hebrews, ' Leaving the mere elements of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection.' ^ And hence the benediction of our Lord, ' Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness ' (are ever longing for a greater fulness of moral character), ' for they shall at last be filled.' ^ Now let us pass from the moral sentiments which are roused in us when we contemplate the internal relations of our will in itself, to those which are produced when we contemplate our external relations to other persons. Here we pass from moral judgments on ourselves as standing alone, to moral judgments of ourselves as members of society. We find ourselves mixed up with the rights of others as constituted by the laws of this society ; with the claims which equity makes as flowing from their character and position in relation to us ; and with the ivants under which they labour. And we instinctively pronounce ourselves blameworthy if we do not respect these rights, respond to these claims, and regard with active sympathy these wants. It is some dim feehng of the demands of moral feeling in these several respects which lies at the base of the famous formula of the French revolution, liberty, equality, fraternity ; for liberty is the conceding to all their rights, equality recognises the claims they have on us according to their social worth ( ' la carriere ouverte aux talents ' ), and fraternity 1 Philipp. iii. 13, 14. « Hebrews vi. 1. ^ Matt. v. 6. MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES, 65 sympathises with their wants. And a similar classifica- tion of the elements of all social duty is made by St. Paul when he says to the Ephesians, ' The fruit of the light (the product of an enlightened conscience) consists in perfect goodness, righteousness, and truth/ For ' righteousness ' here is respect for the rights of others, ' truth ' is responsiveness to their claims on us, and ' goodness ' is practical regard to their wants. ^ First then let me remind you how universal is the re- quirement that we should respect the rights of all with whom we have to do. All society depends on some degree of confidence and concord between man and man. To define the terms of this confidence and concord, and to secure their maintenance, law is introduced. Law assigns to each member of the society his position and rights in relation to all others. And everyone feels that violation of law, as tending to a violation of the confidence and concord on which society depends (to a ' breach of the peace,' as it is technically called), deserves censure and punishment; while he who reverences law, and * For 'truth,' in a moral sense, is 'conformity to equity 5 ' 'responsiveness to the claims which equity enforces.' See the phrase of Thucydides, iii. 56, 'Not heing true' (i.e. equitable) 'judges.' And of Josephus, 'Their judgments were not according to tj^uth ;' not in accordance with the truth of the relation and its claims, on which they pronounced. So similarly Shakespeare : — * Be to thine own self true, And then it follows, as the day the night, Thou never canst prove false to any man.' That is, respond to the claims of your own conscience, then will you never be faithless to the claims which others have on you. The same principle of equitable recompense will run through your social as your personal life. It is usual to derive a\r]Bt]q from (i and XjjOw, to conceal, q. d. open, frank. But is it not rather from Xr/Ow (\av9avo^iai), to forget, to let slip, to pass over? (Compare XT/Qr/* forgetfiilness ;) q. d. not forgetting, not letting slip, any facts that deserve our notice, but being faithful to them ; being true to all the particulars which go to make up an equitable judgment. F 66 Fundamentals. reverences the rights which are set up and protected by law, is counted righteous and just. Peace is the first indispensable condition of social life ; and to estabhsh and maintain this peace the voice of the many, expressed in law, is called in to restrain the violence of the few. Distinctions are set up of meum and tuum ; statutes are passed to enforce these distinctions ; and penalties are agreed upon to punish the breach of these statutes. And thus the voice of law is the echo of that primary principle of all social life : ' Live peaceably with all men ;' 'Be at peace among yourselves ;' ' Blessed are the peaceful.' ^ And its admonition is, Do nothing which by infraction of law will stir up strife. Hence the rule laid down by Isocrates : ' Whatever things you are angry at when in- flicted on you by others, these things abstain from in- flicting on them.' Or as the book of Tobit puts it, ' What you hate to have done to you, this do not to any- one else.* But this admonition has its positive side, as * It is this peacefulness which our Lord demands in Matt. v. 21-26, in the repression of violent words, bitter feelings, and a stubborn loill. There is word murder and JieaH murder, as well as hand murder. See Helps in Cont. Rev., Jan. 1871. * Most quarrels depend on words. These form the main substratum of all contentiousness. You may do a man a substantial injury and be easily forgiven; but utter only one injurious word, and there is a fine opening for a quan-el. Also, in the conduct of the quarrel there is nothing so much to beware of as the use of injurious words. Exaggeration is always punished, and never more speedily than when employed in the transaction of a quarrel. When in presence of your adversary understate your case to him (not your own claim but his neglect of it), and as regards the nicety of your expressions, talk as you would have talked if both of you were wearing swords.' Hence our Lord's laying so much stress on evil words as well as deeds. (Matt. xii. 37.) Hence the Spanish proverb, ^ The man who says the third thing (who makes the rejoinder) is the man on whose shoulder the quarrel rests.' (Cont. Rev. ut supra, 257.) See Pro v. xv. 1 : 'A soft answer tximeth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger.* MAN'S SPECIAL QUALITIES. 67 well as its negative. It calls on us to do to others what- ever would be grateful to ourselves, and increase our confidence in them. And so it takes the more general form of, 'Do as you would be done by;' 'Put your- self in another's place.' As Isocrates says, again, 'Be- have towards your parents as you would wish your children to behave to you.' Whence Aristotle, being asked how we should demean ourselves towards our friends, replied, ' As we would wish our friends to demean them- selves towards us.' And our Lord has set forth this principle in all its compass, negative and positive, in his golden rule : ' Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you ' (whatsoever you would consider it right for them to do to you) ' that do ye also unto them.' But besides the obligations which are bound upon us by social law — the neglect of which is odious to us, because such neglect disturbs the peace of the community — there are others, more extensive and more delicate, to which our sense of equity gives force. Beyond the rights established by written statute there are claims unwritten which result from the position in which men stand re- lated to us, the disposition which in these relations they manifest towards us, and the services which they render us. And if we do not respond to such claims, the principle of retribution or recompense is felt to be violated by us, and we become censurable in the judgment of others and in our own. We equally disapprove and condemn the defrauding others of what they may equit- ably expect from us, as the robbing others of what they legally possess. And it is allegiance to this principle of due return which Scripture enforces by the injunction, ' Eender unto all their dues ; i.e. whatever is owing to r 2 68 FUNDAMENTALS, them by you on account of the several relations, natural civil, or social, in which you stand to them. Not only, therefore, ' tribute to whom tribute is due, and custom to whom custom,' but the finer and more undetermined debts of ' fear to whom fear is due, and honour to whom honour.' Whence the all-comprehending admonition, ' Owe no man anything ; ' neglect not to pay anyone the return which he may equitably look for at your hands, for his disposition and demeanour towards you, or from his connection with you. Whence, for instance, St. Paul's requirement, in the conjugal relation, of what law cannot compel, but equity enjoins : ' Let the husband render [oLwohZoTO)) to the wife all due benevolence' (rf^v ocfjsiXrjv), the debt which from her relation to him he owes her.^ Yet neither of these spheres of obhgation takes in that wider range of duties which are bound upon us by the universal relation in which we stand to others, as partakers of the same nature and sharers in the same wants, whether material or mental, which to this nature pertain. Whatever needs of our common humanity we ourselves yearn to have supplied to us, these we cannot overlook in others without making ourselves objects, both to their judgment and our own, of moral displacency. For we show ourselves thereby deficient in that humanity^ good-will, sympathy, and love, which a common nature demands from every human being to his kindred. This good-will is what Cicero calls the ' car itas generis humani,' * And so, again, the same Apostle's deduction of the recompense owing by gentile converts to their Jewish brethren : * Their debtors they are (omXfrai avTMv fmo) ; for if the gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, that which is due from them in return (the recom- pense which the mutual relation requires, c