But the presumption is the other way; and if such a process ever took place, it took place long before history began. The Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic races come before us as groups of mankind marked out by the test of language. Within those races we find nations marked out again by a stricter application of the test of language. Within the race we may have languages which are clearly akin to each other, but which need not be mutually intelligible. Within the nation we have only dialects which are mutually intelligible, or which at all events gather round some one central dialect which is intelligible to all. We take this standard of races and nations, fully aware that it will not stand a physiological test, but holding that for all practical purposes adoption must pass as equivalent to natural descent. And, among the practical purposes which are affected by the facts of race and nationality, we must, as long as man is what he is, as long as he has not been created afresh according to some new scientific pattern, not shrink from reckoning those generous emotions which, in the present state of European feeling, are beginning to bind together the greater as well as the lesser groups of mankind. The sympathies of men are beginning to reach wider than could have been dreamed of a century ago. The feeling which was once confined to the mere household extended itself to the tribe or the city. From the tribe or city it extended itself to the nation; from the nation it is beginning to extend itself to the whole race. In some cases it can extend itself to the whole race far more easily than in others. In some cases historical causes have made nations of the same race bitter enemies, while they have made nations of different races friendly allies. The same thing happened in earlier days between tribes and cities of the same nation. But, when hindrances of this kind do not exist, the feeling of race, as something beyond the narrower feeling of nationality, is beginning to be a powerful agent in the feelings and actions of men and of nations. A long series of mutual wrongs, conquest and oppression on one side avenged by conquest and oppression on the other side, have made the Slave of Poland and the Slave of Russia the bitterest of enemies. No such hindrance exists to stop the flow of natural and generous feeling between the Slave of Russia and the Slave of the South-Eastern lands. Those whose statesmanship consists in some hand-to-mouth shift for the moment, whose wisdom consists in refusing to look either back to the past or onwards to the future, cannot understand this great fact of our times; and what they cannot understand they mock at. But the fact exists and does its work in spite of them. And it does its work none the less because in some cases the feeling of sympathy is awakened by a claim of kindred, where, in the sense of the physiologist or the genealogist, there is no kindred at all. The

practical view, historical or political, will accept as members of this or that race or nation many members whom the physiologist would shut out, whom the English lawyer would shut out, but whom the Roman lawyer would gladly welcome to every privilege of the stock on which they were grafted. The line of the Scipios, of the Cæsars, and of the Antonines, was continued by adoption: and for all practical purposes the nations of the earth have agreed to follow the examples set them by their masters.

EDWARD A. FREEMAN.

ESSAYS AND NOTICES.

IN

PROFESSOR CLIFFORD AND HIS CRITICS ON "THE
ETHICS OF BELIEF."

N the January number of the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW appeared a very compact and also very comprehensive article on the "Ethics of Belief." It consisted of three connected essays, entitled respectively:

1. " The Duty of Inquiry."

2. "The Weight of Authority."

3. "The Limits of Inference."

In opening his case Professor Clifford made use of illustrations which had the effect of putting some of his readers and reviewers on a wrong track; though it does not seem to the writer of these paragraphs that there was anything oblique or illegitimate about the case of the doubtful ship-owner and the doubtful ship. A different judgment must, we think, be passed upon the Professor's occasional use of the word "credulous." This was eminently calculated to raise false issues, and did in fact raise them-or, at least, it raised issues which were, in bare logic, irrelevant to Professor Clifford's purpose. As it happens, however, this accident (for as an accident we shall treat it) may perhaps lead us to a side-path of inquiry which shall not be wholly a cul-de-sac.

It is obvious that an exhaustive treatment of the main topics of Professor Clifford's paper would be neither more nor less than a Novum Organum. And the treatment might be made as purely formal, and as destitute of moral assumptions or motives, as Mr. Mill's "Logic." But the Professor has not chosen that methodnor can he claim its immunities—nor, we profoundly hope, will he in his cause reap its advantages. The title of the first essay or section is "The Duty of Inquiry,” and it derives all its force from moral assumptions which indirectly the Professor sets himself to define, and put in their places, if not to justify, in the later sections of the article. Much, if not most, of the attention which the paper excited was caused by its evident drift or bearing-some of the propositions, taken in themselves, being both obvious and harmless; nay, useful and profitable. In fact, as not seldom occurs in these matters, the argument of the opponents may be said to have taken this shape:-Admitting the " duty" you lay down in your first essay, Professor Clifford, we find that the moral and religious assumptions necessary to support it must have a better basis than you provide for them in your second and third

essays.

The doctrine of the first essay is, perhaps, hardly well expressed by its title. The meaning is not so much, "It is your duty to examine your beliefs and test their grounds," as, "It is your duty not to allow yourself in false beliefs or to work yourself up to them." In fact, the substance of this section might be stated in some such words as the following::

"Belief and action should always correspond, and in case of doubt or suspended belief, there should be a corresponding suspense of action. It is spiritual death to go on trying to believe things because they are useful to be believed, when you

think they are, at the same time, untrue. And it ends in spiritual cachexy to flinch from looking into apparent contradictions of heart and head, for fear of meeting evil creatures in the long, dark corridors of the soul's remoter places.

"All this applies to the notion so commonly urged in certain discussions, that a thing may be proved to be true because it meets our needs. But a proof of this kind can never go beyond the induction of instances on which it is founded.

"But nobody can really believe a proposition because it agrees with him, or with other people. Thus, again, the famous solvitur ambulando principle, with which the names of Dr. Arnold and some Broad Church teachers have been connected, never did, never could, make anything but sceptics. To tell a man who doubts to go on acting as if he did not doubt at all must corrupt or weaken, or both, the intellect or the morale, or both. When a man doubts, he is called upon to suspend action. He must get his breakfast of course, meet his friends, and buy an umbrella if he wants one. But if he suspect a flaw in the Athanasian Creed, he is bound not to read it to the people next Sunday, whatever consequences may follow."

Now, these are not the words of Professor Clifford-they are the words of the present writer in a book published fourteen years ago; so that we at least are not disposed to question the duty of intellectual honesty. And this has nothing to do with the question of credulity or incredulity. The most credulous person in the world may be morally innocent, however absurd his belief; he may be so constituted that it would be nonsense to talk to him of "the duty of inquiry," or of "suspended belief and suspended action." On the other hand, incredulity may proceed from a moral defect. A bad man may be blind to evidence of honesty in a good man, and the reason of the blindness may be the bad man's badness. This point underlies some of the perfectly just, but not plainly relevant, criticisms of the Spectator of 3rd January, 1877. But Professor Clifford did not contemplate this case when he employed the word credulous. His remarks were aimed at more or less deliberate trying to believe, more or less conscious acquiescence in a pretence of belief. The case of Columbus, involving the general question of the intuitions or passionate forecasts of great or indeed little if earnest minds, was also put by the same very thoughtful critic. He did not use a passage in Miss Smedley's fine comedy of "Lady Grace" by way of illustration, though he might have done :

"What could he do ?"

Fitzerse.

Cranston.

"Unanswerable question!

Limit your risks by their foreseen results,
And so be safe. But never walk by faith
Into the danger of the vast unknown.

A man who did so once found a new world,
And was, not safe, but famous for all time.
'Twas hardly worth the pains."

But again it must be said that this case is not plainly relevant, at all events under the first section, and it is met by Professor Clifford's express admission in the second, that there are many cases in which it is our duty to act upon present probability (or very partial conviction) when the evidence is slight. In fact, what Columbus did was, we may say, mere experiment. He had a perfect right, it is clear, to make his voyage, but he would have done wrong if he had tried to persuade himself, or others, against evidence, or in conscious, deliberate, exaggeration of fancied evidence, that there was a north-west passage to the Indies.

Professor Clifford has, of course, to admit under both his second and third heads, that "every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions." When a burnt child dreads the fire it assumes, or infers, that the untried fire of to-day will burn it as the tried fire of

yesterday did. In a similar way, says Professor Clifford, when we act or refrain from acting upon the dictates of a "moral tradition "—we use Professor Clifford's phrase with a reserve-that it is wrong to lie or to steal, we assume something; for whatever our experience or that of others may tell us of the lie or theft of yesterday, or of other years, we have to make an inference before we can apply the tradition to any given case of temptation now before us. Even as they stand these are important admissions; they were inevitable, of course, and it would have been of no use for the Professor to dodge the necessity for them, even if he had been so disposed. But to us and all others who regard conscience as something other than tradition, and the law of duty (we of course do not say every particular law that takes the name) as something other than a generalization from experience-to us. there is here a glaring chink in the armour. Nor is the Professor's tone at this point at all what the case requires, or in harmony with that of the rest of his paper. He is confident enough in the first essay, and definite enough; he writes like a man who knows he has axioms behind him (we do not say he would, or can consistently think so), but now, all of a sudden, his grasp relaxes. He puts an inevitable question: What is the ground of moral certainty as to what we shall do next? To the deed yet undone no test of our own experience, no law of verification, can possibly avail. This is obvious; and Professor Clifford falls back at once on what he calls "the weight of authority." But his handling, we repeat, is not so confident as it might be; and he seems to us, quite clearly, to have some half-latent sense that his material will not yield just what he is manipulating it for. "There is no practical danger" that such and such consequences will ensue. This is not a bad sort of eloquence for an engineer planning a tunnel or a tramway; but it is hardly precise enough for a philosopher who is dictating the ethics of belief. It was not to practical probabilities that the appeal was made in the first instance. We were told with a prophetic fervour which no intuitionist could outdo, that it was our duty to be true. Whence the fervour, and whence the confidence and definiteness of the appeal? It came from a feeling in the author, and relied upon a feeling in the reader, which has a much surer basis than any tradition of the race of "Man." Mr. John Morley having recently taken to spelling God with a small g, Professor Clifford, by way of makeweight, spells man with a capital. Our duties to "Man" are, it seems, of the most strenuous order. "There are," says the author, "many cases, in which it is our duty to act upon probabilities, although the evidence is not such as to justify present belief; because it is precisely by such action, and by observation of its fruits, that evidence is got which may justify future belief." Now this is our serious admission; and it is not easy at a glance to see the end of it. Let us try. We begin by assuming absolute duties to " Man," duties of truthfulness and "beneficence." To the laws which impose these duties there are no exceptions; at least we presume not, or the door is open for very serious "practical difficulties "-such as might even bring us down from Professor Clifford to Machiavelli or Borgia. However, these duties, like all others, have their roots in the past. But, when did the first moral action take place-when was the first moral dictum leading to action pronounced? Had that its roots in the past, or when? Clearly, we must at last come back to a case where the evidence was not such as to justify present belief," and where action had to be taken "upon probability, because it is precisely by such action and by observation of its fruits, that evidence is got which may justify future belief." But we must surely require to know where was the footspring of the first end of the bridge that is to carry us safe over the centuries. 66 'Act upon probability"—but probability of what? and why act upon probability? The fact is, there is no sense in the story, unless a distinctly moral datum be presupposed. The case to-day is the same as the case of the yesterday a million ages behind us. In every judgment of moral "probability" there is something to start from, over and above the elements to be "observed" and the "fruits" which result; or why make the judgment? How is it that we find in the last term