no better now than the great majority did then, and that beliefs are cherished now which have no better foundations than many extinct pre-scientific beliefs; and it is pretty certain that in years to come some cherished beliefs of to-day shall serve to those who are then alive as curious and instructive examples of states of imperfect mental evolution. As in the past and now, so then, wiser descendants shall wonder to think that rational beings could ever have been so very irrational as their forefathers.

Does it not seem strange, when we consider it, that the race of man on earth should have gone forward as well and far as it has gone, when all the while most of that which it was thinking and believing was not true? Let any one read and quietly reflect on the appalling histories of the numerous absurd beliefs and practices that have prevailed among mankind in the past, and prevail still in the dark places of the earth especially, considering by the light of them what the human race has been from the beginning until now, and he can hardly fail to be seriously perplexed what to think of it. He may well think that to go wrong is as natural to the human mind as to go right. Certainly it would be a thing incredibly strange were we to suppose that the faiths which inspired actual conduct were as badly based as those which filled the abstract regions of specula

tion, the implicit in conduct as ungrounded as the explicit in thought. But men have never fed their bodies on fictions. The reasonings of the savage respecting the habits of the game which he pursued and the fish which he caught for his food; the wily precautions taken by him to hide his trail from his enemies and to foil their stealthy pursuit; and his careful observations of the scarcely perceptible signs by which to guide himself through the trackless forest and across the pathless prairie-these were as sound as the reasoning and observation of the astronomer of the present day, who, noting the track of a comet, predicts the exact moment a thousand years to come when it will be at the same spot in the heavens, or, from an unexplained deviation of a planet's orbit, proclaims the presence of an undiscovered planet at a place where it is afterwards found to be. In the one case, as in the other, the rules of right seeing and thinking are the same, and in the one case, as in the other, the same fallacies are apt to infect seeing and thinking.

To the vulgar it seems a marvellous thing when the astronomer makes predictions that embrace such vast lengths of time and such immensity of space; but the wonderful science which enables him to do such things is not at all different in kind from the common knowledge by which the dullest rustic

foretells with certainty that one sort of seed, when put into the earth, will grow into a mustard plant, and another sort of seed into a turnip. The science of the astronomer is of the same kind as the knowledge of the vulgar; it is the inevitably ensuing intelligence common to those who, being normally constituted mentally, have the opportunities, appliances, and training necessary to the study of a class of phenomena requiring special means of observation; it is the common sense appertaining to an uncommon class of phenomena. And the errors of such knowledge have no prerogative of birth or dignity over other errors; they are errors simply, of the same kind and illustrating the same mental tendencies

as common error.

We are apt nowadays, perhaps, to think too much of theories of knowledge and too little of the knowledge which is implicit in wise action. No nation ever yet made itself by theories of social contract or by any other explicit theories; the work was done first, and the theories came afterwards; the reason was latent in the fact before it was patent in the explanation. It was not by fictions of thought, but by realities of feeling and doing, that savages grew into powerful tribes or nations; and the inquirer must look beneath their superstitions and other notional absurdities of the intellect who would find out how

that was done, and how far their wrong theories of the universe were of practical worth in the use made of them to guide and sanction the real forces at work in social development. Even discoverers of a law

of gravitation, however high their just pretensions, cannot properly afford to despise the condensed and, so to speak, silent knowledge which is implicit in the social growth from scattered tribes of wandering savages to a strong and settled barbarous nation.

There is always a fund of wisdom in the common sense and practical instincts of the common people, the instruction of which philosophy misses when it neglects or disdains to take sufficient account of it. Having to deal with the stern realities of life, working men are compelled to have working beliefs in order to act; feeling instinctively that the best test of the value of a belief is-Will it work? they turn their backs impatiently upon empty abstractions and demand beliefs with real contents. For example, persons of culture who make for themselves the dismaying discovery that they cannot go on believing in a personal God, are happy to take refuge in more general terms and abstractions, such as Deism and Pantheism, and make mighty use of them; but the labouring classes, repudiating such barren/metaphysical abstractions, either repudiate God altogether or demand that, if there be a God who ruleth the

earth, He shall be a real living God, working in the events of the world as they do themselves; not an abstract absolute, emptied of contents and living only in the misty regions of speculative thought, but " a literal, personal, and eternal God." Thus they, by their practical instincts, escape those self-deceiving effects of abstractions by which philosophers sometimes seek and discover the explanation of a concrete fact in what is no more than the abstract statement of the very same fact: the sleep-producing effects of opium in the soporific virtues of that drug; the evolution of the universe from the like to the unlike in a self-determining instability of the homogeneous, whereby it starts on heterogeneous tracks of stabler being; the determination of self in an abstract will; the moral sanction of individual conduct in the authority of an abstract morality, which thereupon becomes a metaphysical entity or a spiritual inspiration from without; and the like verbal sophisms.

§ Uniformities of Experience.

If it be asked of the rustic how he is sure that from one sort of seed will spring one sort of plant after he has buried it in the earth, and from another sort of seed another sort of plant, he will be likely to answer that any fool knows as much, because even a fool can