tious literature was addressed, first of all, to unscientific people. So there have been working men's editions of Stuart Mill on "Liberty" and the kindred topics. This they account the diffusion of general enlightenment; we account it the propagation of an intellectual Black Death. Effectually to contract it within manageable limits would imply some sort of restriction on the press; but this even orthodox believers do not think a benefit. We are speaking of those who, without being Catholics, are yet adherents in more than name of some Christian Church. They cannot forsake the Lutheran principle of private judgment, nor their absolute confidence that "to try the spirits" means to be an adept in Formal Logic. What is to be done when such as the disease has attacked will not credit its powers of killing, and all the rest are daily, with express intent, perpetuating its conditions? A difficult case, truly.

One remedy has been proposed in the "Grammar of Assent," by a man who consummately understands the strength as well as the weakness of the English mind, and has watched the fluctuations of thought during a long and critical period. He would wish the new generation to improve upon, but by no means to supersede, the method of the old, to respect that inherited faculty of native sense and shrewdness which has built up and now holds together the colonial and commercial empire of Britain, but to extend its range over those subjects of religious, ethical, and philosophic knowledge hitherto neglected entirely, or left to the mercy of professors who were destitute almost of spiritual intuitions, and thought too much of the logical nexus to care for apprehending, after they had inferred, the conclusion. F. Newman appeals to the universal experience in behalf of that natural reason which eschews singularity, takes the avouchment of our faculties, because, if we will not use our nature, there is nothing else for us to use, and subdues the world in the only way possible to man-by submission to the secretly-working laws of life and thought. What we need is, not to know the mechanism of our actions, but to act rightly, to be wise for ourselves, rather than, having attempted the measurement of all things, to ask for a handful of dust from the traveller who passes by.

This, undoubtedly, is to cut up the evil by the roots, and should contribute largely towards the restoration of a moderate and human estimate of our faculties. Nor is any class excluded from its beneficial operation; for there is yet a store of healthy sense amongst the people, and, what gives a reasonable motive for hope, some ancient authority has continued to exert a portion of its sway over Englishmen. But the readers VOL. XXVII.-NO. LIV. [New Series.] 2 G

of Mr. Tyndall are less amenable to the conservative influence of F. Newman than any others. They treat such proposals with a kind of scorn, as though it were question of the ancien régime, or government by aristocracy of birth. They have lost any respect they might have had for a policy which has seen its day. And many cannot exorcise the spirit of their education; though not exactly metaphysicians, they are practised either in German reading, or in authors who have studied. abroad, they know how to follow a lecture, if they cannot put one together. Capable of reflection even in abstract subjects, they invent difficulties without seeing how a combination of problems may be an answer to the problems; and, used to brief meditations, they are content with the unfinished thoughts of Mr. Tyndall. It is these piecemeal reasoners, these believers in single syllogisms, these intellects with their "short, swallowflights "of argument, who are like the intermediate angels of the Ptolemaic system, receiving from above and communicating below. They have, we dare say, qualities worthy of admiration, and there may be fine spirits among them; assuredly, they are an increasing number. Since no persuasion will teach them to argue less, it might be worth while teaching them to argue more. Some who have gone halfway round a circle feel affronted if any one calls them to go back; it were a sort of justifiable deceit to lure them forward, and thus, under pretence of making an advance, to lead them home again. This is the remedy we have at present in mind.

The multitude will never gain conviction from mere argument; that is only too certain. Nor can they be expected to hold the meshes of a system so patiently under view as at length to know how it has all twined itself out of a few simple threads. They apprehend too keenly, passionately, and instantaneously for that. But it is otherwise when we can address those who are the select readers and reasoners amongst our English public, whose education has given them a degree of subtlety to correct the natural listlessness of much refinement, and who perceive the advantage of organized and schematic thought, though they make but little use of it. These, we are sure, might free themselves from the irritating embarrassment of details which explain nothing, if they would apply some obvious rules in their multifarious experience whether of men or books. They have a pride in setting themselves higher than the mechanically-trained; their knowledge is larger, more impartial, but we have seen it end in darkness, or, at any rate, in a depressing landscape, where sun and fog are mixed up till the paths disappear under contradictory lights. Might not

some further reflection give them a commencement of order, even in so disjointed a world as this? But, first, they must look again at their principle of Pure Thought.

That private judgment is the ultimate and only standard of Truth seems to us more than disputable. But, in any case, thee xercise of reason ought not to end in a denial of itself,--its own stultification. The matter is plain enough. Ordinary people, blest with eyesight and some mother wit, are enabled to see that things have definite relations to each other, that this imposes clear moral obligations, and that in the due observance of these all present and future good must have its origin. Life, they are conscious, is a time of trial and preparation. Now suppose Pure Reason should come in the form of a modern gentleman with his refinement and his science. He will (according to the new learning) not know how to acquiesce in the common opinion. You may see him listening half contemptuously to the honest folk around, and, directing his glass in the path of their vision, rebuke them loftily for imagining a perspective of Elysium when it is only a Fata Morgana. But what then does Pure Reason itself behold? Nothing! Then the faculty which by its very nature is intellectual sight does actually show us—that we are blind. Authority and our spontaneous judgments say that we can know a great deal, and rule our acts by what we know; but the perfect reason certifies that we can possess real knowledge simply when we have first acquired some infinite perfection of knowledge, and that, alas! is not ours. Here is reason reasonably concluding that nothing can be concluded. Surely, we have missed the track, and it is time to measure our steps back again. Scepticism is not the outcome of any real thought. It has been admirably demonstrated that if thought exists, truth must exist, and that the man who utters a word thereby concedes a language, an implicit philosophy, an agreement of intellects, not in making, but in recognizing an objective criterion of false and true. universe which is daily manifesting its organic unity, to allow so much as a particle of matter is to yield up the capricious freedom of thought on the one side, and to prove oneself capable of receiving all that can be discovered (though it were vaster than the Newtonian system) on the other. So likewise, to grant that any single mind has thought or thinks is to hold, even if it be not affirmed by the tongue, that there is a universe of truth, expanding, perhaps, beyond all that we shall conceive when our powers are at their best, but still subsisting in all and every part without contradiction. For the contradictory is that which is not, nor can be, conceived

In a

or imagined to exist,-but which, when the elements said to unite in it have been exhaustively considered, is seen and pronounced to be not. Elements are never false; combinations alleged in thought but false in fact, arise from some undetected obscurity. Let them be minutely examined, they will suggest their own refutation.

Now, if disciples of Mr. Tyndall's school were sufficiently confident of themselves or somewhat truer to their adopted principle, we would ask them to study, without passion and without their present superstitious fears, the Catholic system of thought which is a complete answer to him. And they should do that at once, for the advantage of knowing things in their proper outlines will compensate any want they may feel of larger acquaintance with the moderns. But it is useless to make request. Every day brings new books, new journals, new declarations, from the masters of contemporary thought. How many will consent to leave them for a space and go out into the wilderness of scholasticism? Evidently, we must recommend some indirect method to those who shirk the labour of reading in S. Thomas or F. Kleutgen. We wish to aid even such half-hearted reasoners. They love science, literature, politics; they read much, and may exert themselves to reflect on what they read in the columns of the Fortnightly Review, the Westminster, and the Contemporary. These are the new Vedas and Zend Avestas, which, with many, have the place of Bible and preacher. The truth is hardly to be looked for there, we say; but if men will persist in reading these sacred texts, we must bow to the necessity, and make them teach us what they can.

A thoughtful and perplexed mind, when it has spent a year or so (for we wish to be merciful) in the perusal of current literature, may hit upon a most unpretending discovery; no more than this, namely, that in human speech there is a deal of sameness. Goethe has remarked that literature is the fragment of fragments, and still, that in this fragment repetitions are endless. Suppose we extract from our observation a practical rule. Whenever we find the same thing said twice, let us note it down; the repetition as such can have little to do with our inquiry after truth. But when different things are said, we will note that also. We shall soon be on the trail of another discovery. Various journals, such as the Times, will appear to have no objection to contradict and turn round upon themselves at any moment. If we have believed in a universal love of truth amongst Britons, this may cause us some pain, as detracting from our early and beautiful faith in mankind. But by way of consolation we shall learn that

other journals (and much more, other books) endeavour not to belie themselves. These are tenacious of opinion and expression. We dismiss the writers for money, as they are necessarily cut off from the best knowledge. Comparing the others, and applying the canon of difference and identity once again, we light upon a means of shortening our labours. This is the distinction between pattern and stuff, or matter and mould, which no man denies, but many overlook. We, however, ought to make a sharp cut between the things said even by consentient authors, and the underlying reason why they came to be said. You and I may recite the creed of the Daily News or the Spectator, but we need not have the same intellectual motive, though to the ear we are one. Here is what we have called stuff and pattern. The stuff is contingent, a soft, easy, undistinguishable mass of wool, bought in any market and capable of use in all sorts of grand or mean employments. The pattern is, first, that character of a man's own temperament which serves to unite and give a living momentum to his entire experience as he relates it in thought. It is the energetic combination of forces into a whole, and whether distinctly known to exist or only suspected, has far more influence on action than the studied declarations which we make for our own and others' comfort. But next, it is the rational concept-we are not Kantians, or we could style it only an Idea of the Reason, which, however, comes to the same thing-a concept, we say, that subordinates to itself and determines the value of whatever doctrines we embrace. It furnishes an interpretation of them, and thereby affects their quality no less than their quantity. Without it doctrines are symbols imperfectly understood and appreciated. By reason of it, the mind forms to itself views, organizes facts, tends to consistency. It is, therefore, the spirit as distinct from the letter of an author, or the regulative and formal principle, as distinct from the applied assertions of a system. Wool can be got from all quarters, and under our new inexpensive tariffs is arriving by every ship out of East and West. But the pattern is what makes it valuable, the art displaying itself in forms of greater or less perfection, and telling us of unity in the design.

Our task is, now, comparatively easy. We have to search into the relation of different patterns, how they agree or disagree; we are at the beginning of a simplification which may and ought to put us in possession of a connected system for the guidance of our intellect. Though we are not metaphysicians, we can read the patterns before us, and see that in their parts and proportions signs are manifest of a constant