reflection on our feelings, or we may direct our attention on ourselves or our own thoughts. We may follow a chain of reasoning put before us in some book, slowly and gradually apprehending its bearings, or we may experience sudden shocks of assent to or dissent from propositions seen at a glance to be either true or false. We may consciously or unconsciously profit by associations of ideas and images which have become established in our minds, or we may, by their aid, draw explicit inferences. We unreflectively guide ourselves throughout the day concerning the simplest affairs of life by our ordinary common sense, and we accord a certain deference to the opinions of our fellows according to our estimate of their characters, the unanimity of their testimony, and their special knowledge of this or that particular subject.

Now we have seen that in all the forms of human activity before passed in review, perfection (beauty, goodness, and truth) consists in the establishment of a harmony, and we may therefore be prepared to expect that the most perfect mental action. will likewise be attained by the harmonious exercise of all its various powers and faculties. But thought is not carried on for the mere sake of thinking; it has an end beyond itself-the attainment of truth-and this end is also attained by the establishment of harmony. The daily experience of all of us in small things, and the secular experience of science in great things, make the truth of this plain. Our perceptions are more clearly seen to be true according as senseimpressions of one order harmonise with those of another order, and as freshly made observations or.

inferences agree with anterior observations and inferences. We may therefore anticipate that as the goodness, truth, and beauty of our mental life consists in a due balance and proportion between its activities, so the undue development of any one faculty must tend to impair its beauty, diminish its goodness, and make it more or less false to its aim. An exaggerated stress laid upon any one or any partial group of our mental powers must create a discord, and so far conflict with truth: and widespread mental discord is a sign of the times in which we live. Whatever be our belief as to what is true, we must all admit that much of English mental life is an intellectual chaos. Some teachers tell us that our intellect contradicts and must correct what our senses seem to declare to us, and yet that thought itself is but a modification of and must be tested by our sensations. Others tell us that all around us is but a modification of self, that our feelings and the realities of being are one, so that we are the unconscious creators of that universe which is in fact ourselves. On the one hand we hear that the most seemingly solid properties of matter are but the formation of mind, and on the other that all acts of mind are but the secretion of our brain-substance. Many thinkers, not destitute of intellectual eminence, deem that reason justifies them in raising their eyes towards a Being infinite in power and knowledge and absolute in goodness, while others not less intellectually distinguished regard the former thinkers as men who delude themselves by mistaking for a reality what is in fact but a magnified and distorted reflection of themselves. While some acute reasoners

proclaim that all the beliefs which men have most venerated are false because essentially anthropomorphic, others certainly not less acute contend that the beliefs of physical science, as no less necessarily anthropomorphic, are open to the very same objections, rest on unfounded and gratuitous assumptions, and lead to conclusions which are incoherent and inconsistent.1

Many men still defend what they regard as the solemn monitions of a divinely implanted conscience, and reverence-as essentially distinct in kind from the feelings of brutes-the sweet pathos of tender human affection and the deep heart-stirrings of unutterable aspirations after an infinite ideal. Others, on the contrary, assert that as all our thoughts and emotions are the unconscious reproductions of ancestral feelings and desires-these seemingly lofty sentiments and aspirations are really nothing more than the physical desires of ancestral animals, so modified by altered circumstances that they come to be mistaken for something higher than the merely animal excitations they essentially are.

On the one hand we are told that all older beliefs must succumb to the further progress of the great process of evolution, while on the other it is ably argued that the same fate must attend our belief in that very process itself, since such belief must have been due to the very same irrational necessity which has produced all our previously accepted prejudices and errors.2

Various eminent writers proclaim that no human

See Mr. Arthur Balfour's Defence of Philosophic Doubt, p. 304. 2 L. c., chap. xiii.

knowledge can be really true, and yet show a certain confidence in human intellect and reasoning, by making use of their intellect and by employing reasoning to show that both are untrustworthy.

A great change has indeed taken place in England during the last half-century. Even thirty years ago questions of philosophy were not the popular subjects they have now become. These questions, which have ever occupied the highest minds, but which were long confined to a select few, are now 'in the air,' as we say. There is scarcely a popular lecture or monthly magazine in which they are not referred to. Men are now daily called upon to treat as open questions what many consider to be the first principles of all reasoning and primary truths upon which, as they believe, the whole fabric

of science reposes. 'Can we know anything?'

What do we know for certain?' 'How is knowledge possible?' Such are the questions which we are again and again called upon to answer.

This change, like the other changes which progress brings about, has its unquestionable advantages, but it has also its disadvantages. If the effect of the wide diffusion of metaphysical questions is to make men really sound the depths of their own knowledge, and so really 'know their own minds,' the effect will be one to be altogether rejoiced over; but in not a few cases the result would seem to be the very opposite of this. Many men seem to know their own minds less than ever, and to have exchanged a mere absence of knowledge for an active state of helpless and hopeless puzzledom as to the declarations of their own reason. The practical

importance of the matter is obvious. In the business of life, prompt and decisive action has again and again to be taken upon a nice estimate of probabilities. But wise action of the kind will be less likely with those who have acquired a habit of trifling and dallying with certainty, who are habitually in a state of not knowing their own minds, unable to say whether they are or are not certain of the facts before them. Energy of will is scarcely to be expected where such an intellectual enfeeblement exists.

We are continually warned against the obvious danger of concluding too hastily from insufficient data. There is, however, an opposite, more insidious and less obvious danger, and it is one which our very conscientiousness may help to increase. This is the danger of not concluding when the data are sufficient-the danger of acquiring such a habit of indecision as to run the risk of being still occupied in balancing probabilities when the time for action has arrived or has even passed. An excellent remedy for this evil is to acquire the habit of exploring to its foundations, as thoroughly and exhaustively as we can, any problem to which we may direct our attention; but to do this it is necessary to have clear ideas as to what certainty is, what its criterion, and what its grounds.

Now authority is of little avail in Philosophy. Nothing is there to be accepted which is not clearly proved to the individual reason; though wise men profit by the experience of others, and men of modest minds gladly seek for instruction from distinguished predecessors. Unfortunately, however, men the

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