We need our spiritual sympathies awakened by contact with the spirit of Christ, that the faculties of that part of our nature may be excited and made susceptible to the impression of the Divine which meets us everywhere, but is not everywhere recognisable by us for want of inner correspondence. The union of a susceptible spiritual consciousness with revived scientific earnestness can alone give us a complete view of human life and nature. Most men are sensible at present of a view that is altogether partial and inadequate to facts and unsatisfactory to the human spirit. By the union indicated we should derive from familiarity and intercourse with nature, not merely intellectual impetus, but spiritual invigoration as well, through the mutual interaction, never before in any fulness experienced by our race, of those hitherto opposing forces. Our treasured experiences and observations in both directions would then lead us to that higher truth and higher world which, call it what we will, it is our end and purpose to reach; instead of, as now, leading us through the smoke of the conflict of our twofold nature-whither we do not very well know, but each one trusting somehow that he is in the right way, and if charitable, hoping that his neighbour is similarly fortunate, although he may be advancing in what, to all appearance, is a very contrary direction.

It seems, so far as we can at present make out, natural to believe that there exist closer relations than are generally supposed between all forms of life, the spiritual and natural included. This idea is at the root of Christ's teaching by parables. When, therefore, our perceptions of these two great orders of truth are widened and deepened, each in its own sphere and by its own method, we may find some universal principle of being that binds all things to one common source and centre. At any rate let us lay our nature open to the unseen and Divine in all life as well as to the seen. We have faculties for the recognition of both elements. Goethe, who saw deeper into the scientific side of nature than many of its professed investigators, and just because of his knowledge of another side, has said,

"Wär' nicht das Auge sonnenhaft,

Die Sonne könnt' es nie erblicken;
Läg' nicht in uns des Gottes eigne Kraft
Wie könnt' uns Göttliches entzücken?"

And the rapture of the Divine was as genuine an experience in the life of Goethe, and may be in ours also, as the beholding of the sun; the former implying Divine energy in us, as the latter implies the eye "sonnenhaft."

CHAPTER V.

THE PLACE OF CONSCIENCE IN SPIRITUAL REVELATION-THE

ORIGIN OF MORAL TRUTH.

"Insofern, mag man sagen, dass die Religion über der Moral stehe, weil sie aus einer noch tieferen Quelle strömt, in einen noch ursprünglicheren Grund zurückgeht."

Ir nature by indication and sensible observation cannot reveal the spiritual, it may be, as some maintain, that it is given in the conscience of man. This is far from being true, however, if it is imagined, as is sometimes done, that the conscience in itself gives man this revelation, or is anything more than one of the conditions of it. Suppose it were a medium; no media can themselves furnish that which they mediate. The revelation must be without the mediating instrument. The conscience may be one of those indispensable conditions of the perception of the spiritual communications to be made to mankind. The mistake generally made regarding the relation of conscience to a revelation arises in a great measure from a misapprehension of what revelation really is. It seems sometimes to be understood as a law given to us, written either on the general conscience of mankind, as it is occasionally expressed, or in the special records of a nation, or part of it written in the one place and part in the other. In the words of Butler, it is concluded, that because conscience asserts its supremacy over all the other influences in our constitution, it is the voice Divine within us, and consequently a revelation of the Divine. We think we shall be able to make it clear that this is not the case-that the strictly moral feelings that even the consolidated universal natural conscience, is not in itself a revelation in the strict sense of an unveiling of the spiritual, but is as distinct from this as is the physical sphere of truth-that revelation, restricted to the manifestation of spiritual relations, is not given by the conscience in its natural state. Although the natural conscience is capable of elaborating a law or rule for the guidance of life in certain relations, and although its proper development may be a fundamental pre-requisite to a perfect spiritnal receptivity, it has these ends in common with other faculties of our nature. Knowledge of physical truth and development of the

E

faculties of sensible perception may, perhaps, be likewise included, along with a certain stage of moral advancement, in the expression 66 fulness of the time."

This part of our inquiry, viz., the origin and nature of moral ideas and processes, more than that of any other question regarding our mental nature, has been the subject of keen debate and opposite opinion, not only in relation to the matter now before us, but also as a question in pure philosophy. Even in the latter connection, however, theories have been propounded on the subject not always for scientific purposes, but sometimes for religious and other interests, and the real matter has been too frequently obscured and hidden under irrelevant or subsidiary discussions. The chief objection to Butler's theory of conscience, for example, as well as to that of many others more or less resembling his in its fundamental conception is, that he takes the existent conscience as his only authority. When he describes the faculty as "a superior principle of reflection, which distinguishes between the internal principles of man's heart as well as his external actions, which passes judgment upon himself and them, pronounces determinately some actions to be in themselves just, right, good, others to be in themselves wrong, evil, unjust; which without being consulted, without being advised with, majestically exerts itself, and approves or condemns him-the doer of them accordingly, and which, if not forcibly stopped, naturally and always of course, goes on to anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence, which shall hereafter second and affirm its own," when Butler speaks thus, we must feel that he is speaking not of what Paul thought when he said, "for when the Gentiles which have not the law do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves;" but that he speaks of what those men feel who have had a veritable revelation from God. Butler's concluding description of the process of advancing "to anticipate a higher sentence," etc., is in reality the spiritual conscience with which Paul was contrasting the unenlightened Gentile conscience, and it is the latter of which Butler is, or as a philosopher ought to be, treating in the passage quoted above. We shall not at present consider the method (so well illustrated in the above quotation) of confounding advanced states, not only of conscience, but more fully of our general consciousness with earlier states. We shall have occasion below to notice this more in detail as distinctive of a school in philosophy known as the à priori school of mental philosophers. We may safely hold that the primitive conscience,

so far as we can discover by investigation through comparative psychology, is a very different thing from that which Butler here represents it to be; and regarding it, as we do, not as an original source of revelation, but only as one among other means of perceiving that revelation when it dawned upon man, we are convinced that its development, and the characteristics distinguishing it from other mental faculties which we possess, are traceable to external and unrevealed facts. The law or laws that explain the ordinary mental life of man and his ordinary relations are held by some in a great measure to explain, and by others fully to account for, what is often supposed to be given us originally in conscience. The fact seems to be, that besides the physical relations and circumstances by which, in common with all sentient life, men are surrounded, they have other relations proceeding from the greater complexity of their nature. Among these relations are those which have received the distinctive name of moral relations, which impress men differently from the physical surroundings of their being, but have this characteristic in common with these physical and all other experiences whatever, that they are all reducible to relations affecting our sensitivity, and are, therefore, subject to the same law. In studying the facts of the moral life, it must not be imagined that an investigation into the origin of the principles of this life implies a denial of the moral sense of feelings of approbation or disapprobation following certain actions; all that we or those who pursue this method attempt, is to account for these varied phenomena; the proposed explanation of them being attained by instituting such observation and comparison of facts as we follow in our scientific treatment of intellectual phenomena, or phenomena in the various divisions of the world of nature. By a rejection of the intuitional, or what, from our present position, we might call the quasi-revelation theory of conscience, it is not meant to ignore as facts the phenomena in our moral existence which this hypothesis is intended to explain, although this sometimes appears to be alleged by the intuitionalists. As well might Ptolemy or Kepler be said to have denied the fact of a solar system because they each gave different renderings of the laws of that system. The primary objection to the quasi-revelation theory of conscience is, that it proceeds upon the assumption that moral life and its manifestations, by reason of their peculiar and special characteristics, have some special and extraordinary origin. But if life and true knowledge are only possible as they each correspond to external relations, and if it be true

that these correspondences with the external world are only learned after a varied number of experiences, the result of association conjoined with other well-known subsidiary laws, it is difficult to see why new laws, or a new hypothesis rather, should be considered necessary to account for the production of correspondences and the processes of these results, which in themselves cannot be shown to be different from the other mental processes, although the relations may be so different as to lead to a division or separate classification of them for the purpose of more strict inquiry. Our ordinary mental affections are probably in the last resort referable to two susceptibilities of our nature, pleasure and pain,* and, in the endeavour to conform to external circumstances, all sentient life is moved by certain sensibilities which are affected in a given way. These susceptibilities could only be permanently effective, either as sensations or ideas, in proportion as the organism felt them to be pleasurable or painful-the pleasurable causing attraction, the painful producing aversion, in relation to the objects that so affected it. I call these the ultimate explanations of such affections, because it must be apparent that, as life becomes more complex through multiplied relations and experiences, the pleasurable and painful will also assume greater complexity, although retaining their fundamental characteristic of being pleasurable and painful. This is repeatedly overlooked by those who object to this final analysis in any moral psychological problem, and their criticisms are, accordingly, directed against an imaginary theory which no rational psychologist could for a moment maintain, viz., that secondary, as well as primary mental and emotional states may be resolved into pleasure and pain as mere sensuous affections. As life gains in richness and variety, the causes of moral feeling become likewise richer and more varied; so that to account for the moral beliefs and feelings of Europe in the nineteenth century, an elaborate

* Dr. Lazarus, among others, has spoken severely of this theory as an easy method of bringing different phenomena under one abstract scheme. He proposes, as more in accordance with science, to emphasise the peculiarity of moral facts by laying down, as the germ of moral growth, two original moral feelings, "die Billigung und der Tadel." It is obvious, I think, that these very feelings presuppose a considerable growth in moral perception. Nor does Dr. Lazarus meet this objection by premising, as he does, that these feelings must be understood to be at the first without definite content. It would require very substantial evidence to show, that the feelings of approval and disapproval are unaccompanied, at any stage, by a more or less definite content in perception.