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to attach to all men impartially. Mr. Herbert Spencer has already in his Data of Ethics' declared that the sense of duty is transitory and will disappear as fast as moralisation advances. Now listen to Mr. Cotter Morison :

'The sooner the idea of moral responsibility is got rid of, the better it will be for society and moral education. The sooner it is perceived that bad men will be bad, do what we will-though, of course, they may be made less bad-the sooner shall we come to the conclusion that the welfare of society demands the suppression or elimination of bad men, and the careful cultivation of the good only. . . . What do we gain by this fine language as to moral responsibility? The right to blame, and so forth. Bad men are not touched by it. The bad man has no conscience; he acts after his malignant nature. Nothing is gained by disguising the fact that there is no remedy for a bad heart, and no substitute for a good one.'*

This is plain language, at all events, perhaps somewhat truculent and even repulsive, but written so clearly that he who runs may read. The following sentence is still more characteristic: Remorse is the note of tender and passionate, 'but ill-governed natures.'t Ill-governed? Yes, for he who feels it knows that he has let his lower nature override his higher. But not, in Mr. Morison's sense, because conscience is a figment and duty a name; for remorse is the cloud which testifies to the reality of the sun, the darkness which would not be felt, did not we know that there was light.

When these modern philosophers have arrived at a direct denial of moral responsibility, conscience, and duty, they have reached the utmost limit of impiety, and we must add of nonsense. They begin by rejecting the idea of a God, they end by degrading human nature itself. Man is reduced. to a being absolutely governed by his animal instincts and surrounding circumstances, and incapable of rising above the physical impulses which govern his actions. Thought, freedom, virtue, honour, duty, and the fundamental idea of divine and human law, are blasted by this atrocious theory; and those men who profess to bring down heaven to earth, would in reality convert this earth into hell. Mr. Morison is so anxious to show what Christianity is not, that he has not obtained the remotest conception of what it is. The fundamental ideas of the Christian faith, which are gratitude to the Creator of all things, love to man, self-sacrifice at the call of duty, and the promise of immortal life, have found no entrance to his mind, in the shape in which they are taught by the Gospel.

Service of Man, pp. 293–5.

+ Ibid. p. 302.

What, after all, is it that Mr. Morison is attacking? Is it Christianity, that is, a system of authoritative dogmas formulated by councils, systematised and hardened during the Middle Ages, and lasting to the present day as a survival of a barbaric era? or is it Christ Himself, the incarnation of the religious principle, the example of a divine life? If the former is the object of the onslaught, then we may understand the critic's position to mean that a vast superstructure has been reared on the simple ground-plan traced by Christ and His apostles, which has been so little a fulfilment of the original design that it has effectually obscured and vitiated it. In that case, every effort to detach what is human and misleading, every attack on outlying buttress and offending bastion, but serves to bring out in purer outline the simple form of original and primitive Christianity. In that case, too, when Mr. Morison takes us back to the so-called 'ages of 'faith,' it would be better to take us back still further, not to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but to the first. But if this is not a true statement of Mr. Morison's position, and if the real objective is not Christianity but Christ, then we open a far graver question. For now the point is whether religion itself is a necessity for man-whether the figure of Christ is not a travesty of man's highest nature, for which the modern age ought to substitute the economist and the enlightened politician.

Is religion a necessity or not? This is to some extent a question of ethics, to a still larger extent a question of mental philosophy. Metaphysical, undoubtedly, the enquiry must be; it must depend on certain broad postulates and suppositions which Mr. Morison would hardly be prepared to grant. Mr. Morison does not often handle metaphysics in the 'Service of Man,' and when he does, the attempt is disastrous. Here is the way in which with light hand he destroys the philosophy of the late Professor Green.

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"Can the knowledge of nature," asks Professor Green, "be itself a part of nature, in that sense of nature in which it is said to be an "object of knowledge?" It is not easy to see why the subject which cognizes the object should be less nature than the object cognized. The image of an object in the mirror which reflects is as much Nature as the object reflected.' *

To which the answer is that the consciousness of which Professor Green is speaking is not regarded by him as a mirror. Mr. Morison must have read Green to very little

* Service of Man, p. 278.

VOL. CLXV. NO. CCCXXXVIII.

M M

purpose, if he thinks that the notion of a passive register of impressions suits the philosopher's idea of self. When a metaphysician says that the consciousness which makes us men makes us also independent of time and developement, he is speaking of a mind which actively transforms its fleeting impressions into a concatenated body of knowledge. It is just because no intelligible theory of knowledge can be constructed on the supposition that the mind is a passive mirror that Professor Green and those who think with him are strenuous in asserting the activity and independence of the consciousness. The human mind even as interpreted by Mr. Herbert Spencer is not merely a mirror. Biology asserts just as strongly as metaphysics that by means of inherited aptitudes and transmitted intelligence a man's mind does not passively reflect but actively transforms the impressions it receives. The further question remains whether the mind is, in its essential activity, sui generis and independent, or only a part of nature in the widest sense. Idealism asserts the first, and materialism the second.

But, says Mr. Morison, it is not necessary for the purpose ' in hand to make a flight into the fine æther of Kantian meta'physics.' Yet, if we are arguing on the essential nature of the human intelligence, whether we like it or no, that is exactly what we must do. In dealing with the highest forms which the mind of man assumes, in asking ourselves if there is within the human capacity a determined effort to win the infinite-whether we seek to prove or disprove-in either case our arguments must be metaphysical. But within the limits of the present essay it is obviously impossible to do more than indicate the lines of such an enquiry.

When we seek to determine whether religion is a necessity or no, we must attempt to see how far the nature of knowledge on the one hand, and the nature of morality on the other, inevitably lead to some such culmination as that which religion suggests and satisfies. An analysis of knowledge reveals the truth that, except on the assumption of an active intelligence, we can neither understand nature nor ourselves. The understanding makes nature, says Kant. The world arises in consciousness, is the admission even of Mr. G. H. Lewes. If thought, then, is the one indispensable element, if nothing exists except to thought, and without consciousness there is no world, then it is equally clear that thought itself leads us from the finite to the infinite. Is this denied? Then how do we know ourselves to be finite, unless, in some real sense, we are also infinite? We cannot be conscious of

limitations, if we could not somehow overpass the limitations. The man who has always been a slave knows not freedom; the animal who lives at the mercy of successive impressions knows neither regret nor heart-hunger. Even the consciousness that knowledge is relative, being dependent on an interaction between subject and object, just because it can hold equally both terms of the antithesis, must in itself be able to transcend and unite them. Thus from the finite and the relative, from the opposition between subject and object, we rise to the meeting-point between being and thinking-we rise, in other words, to the infinite, which is at once subject and object, the identity of being and thinking. And this, phrase it as we may, is God.

So too if we start from the side of morality. Here the essential antithesis and conflict is between will and desires, between a higher and a lower nature, between reason and the blind unthinking passions. The whole meaning of morality is the effort to overcome this opposition, to make life a harmony instead of a discord. And the problem here is, as it also is in the intellectual department, to give equal weight to both members of the antithesis, and finally to transcend them. We have, for instance, to see that the emotional elements in human nature receive their due satisfaction, but at the same time we must seek to raise them. We have to elevate the partial and limited ends of the desires into universal ones, to rationalise the whole nature by bringing every part of it into direct relation with some central unity. On the one hand the will, on the other the desires, must be equally rationalised, unified, lifted into an atmosphere which is above the scene of their partial and endless conflicts. This morality by itself can never do. It can only be done by religion. Religion is the perfect solution of that problem, which morality only partially solves. For the effort of mind by which the human being feels himself ' at one with God,' and lifts himself into a sort of potential infinity, is already religion. Is such a mental effort denounced as vague and mystical? It is rather the essence and final term of the moral life. By whatever name known, whether as an act of faith, or grace, or self-surrender, it is that which the theologians mean when they speak of con' version.' He who has striven thus upwards is the spiritual character, the religious man. He at all events comprehends what to Mr. Morison is too hard a saying. It becomes not an impossible ideal, but the only moral ideal, to be perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.'

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ART. IX.-Scotland as it was and as it is. By the Duke of ARGYLL. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh: 1887.

A FEW years ago it would have seemed a superfluous labour to undertake among Englishmen the defence of the existence of private property in land. A few generations ago it would have seemed even stranger to any educated Scotchman that the superiority of a system of fixed laws of individual ownership and of contract rights in land to the uncertain exactions and semi-barbarous usages of Celtic times should require to be elaborately demonstrated. Times, however, have changed. People have forgotten what Celtic usages were. Mr. Henry George and his followers have preached their strange doctrines, and have partly beguiled and wholly confused a not inconsiderable number of wellmeaning persons whose unacquaintance with everything connected with the profitable employment of land in the present is only equalled by their absolute ignorance of the Îand tenures and institutions of the past. Not merely in the columns of third-rate newspapers, or in the speeches of irresponsible and self-interested agitators, do we find doctrines advocated which would, could they be carried out, inflict a deadly blow on any profitable employment or occupation of the land; but in the House of Commons itself men make speeches, and introduce and get printed bills, which ought to destroy the character of their authors for common sense, and would be laughed out of court by any educated audience less patient than that assembly. The landed interest has for the last few years been suffering greatly, and in bad times it is more than ever natural that men should dream of a past when everything went well, when all classes were thriving alike, and all were alike strangers to hardships and to want. According to Lord Macaulay, writing thirty years ago, men placed the

'golden age of this country in the days of Charles II., in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when men died in the purest country air faster than they now do in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and faster in the lanes of our towns than they now do in Guiana.'

It would be interesting to discover at what precise period the admirer of Celtic customs and primitive institutions places the golden age of the Scottish Highlands; and the Duke of

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