Chapter 8

[1]'We hold,' says the American Declaration of Independence (1776), 'these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' &c.

[2]Louis Blanc,History of the Revolution, vol. i.

[3]Hobbes,Leviathan, Part I. chaps. 2 and 3; and elsewhere. Schopenhauer,Welt als Wille, Book I. § 6.

[4]Bacon,Novum Organum, i. 10.

[5]See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 400.

[6]See Chapter XII.

[7]Cf.Ethica,iv. 37, Schol. I. contrastingrerum externarum communis constitutiowithipsa hominis natura, in se sola considerata.

[8]See theDiscours préliminaireto theTheodicee.

This new idealism which conjures by the name of Reason is a different thing from the pseudo-idealism of Jacobi, as it is from the 'rationalism,' so-called, of the mere intellectualist. Its ideal is not a desperate refuge from the hard and bitter reality, only to be reached by the plunge of faith,—which seems rather the leap of despair: not amereother-world,—alwaysother, longed for, presaged, beheld in dreamy vision, but unperceived by the clear light of intelligence: clutched at, but elusive of every effort. It is not won by turning the back on reality and flying on the wings of morning faith to the better land and the presence of the divine: but by persistence in unfolding, expanding, adjusting, re-combining, and fortifying those partial glimpses of the unseen which occur in every vision of the seen. It is true the ideal is, in a way, always an other world: but not amereother world; it is another, and yet not another, but the same, seen, if you like to say, transfigured, idealised. But idealisation, if so applied, means not an addition here and a subtraction there made in reality, from some source outside—from some indeterminable Whence (Whence indeed should such additions come?). It does not mean a correction of faults and failures in the real, at the will of an artist who is dissatisfied with his subject-model and would mend itout of other faces and forms stored up in memory or sketch-book. This idealism does not in that sense idealise (so as to falsify). It means complete reality; absolute, systematic, unconditioned reality: nowhere fragmentary, nowhere referring outside, but completing itself in all its members. It means—to quote the Hegelian term—seeing all things in the Idea—their notion (or ideality), i. e. their unifying 'grip,' reflecting itself in their objectivity, and their reality completing itself in art, religion, and philosophy to that ideal which to the non-artistic, non-religious, non-philosophic mood is only dimly suggested and partially supposed. Still less is it an idealism which, as popularly understood, turns reality and historic fact intomereideas.

But, as perhaps may have been apparent, to call this way of thought idealism need not keep us from acknowledging that the same philosophy is also realism. If it insists, so to say, on the idealism of—what we sometimes call material—nature, it no less insists on the realism of—what is supposed immaterial—mind. The mental or spiritual world loses its unsubstantial intangibleness, its mere supposedness, its 'ideal' ormerely-ideal character. To the older, and we may say vulgar, view the mind or soul was a mere 'thought,' something of which all that could be seen were certain acts or phenomena. It was amere idea, which one could pretty well get on without—so long as he kept, as the phrase was, to the phenomena—phenomena without reality. How vague and aery again was the subject-matter of morals! A few virtues and vices, confessedly general descriptive titles, a talk about will and conscience,—all of them merely several predicates of an unknown, spoken of, postulated, but unproducible. Compared with this mere supposedness the spiritual world in Schelling and Hegel acquires the reality of aquasi-organism (really supra-organic), growing and constituting itself, and making room in it for a host of human relationships. The abstract faculties of mind get reality (not indeed sensible): the intangible notions of morals become almost palpable: the kingdom of mind becomes a real pendant to the kingdom of nature. And, on the other hand, the kingdom of nature gets its ideality recognised: its unity and continuity made effective in an Idea which embraces, co-ordinated and systematised, its disparate and unconnected portions.

This new Idealism, if it led men back from the historical world to nature, was yet hardly in all respects a pupil of Rousseau. Not 'Back from civilisation and artificiality to nature and the freedom of the woodland,' was its cry: but rather 'Remember that man always rests on and grows out of nature, always has his ideals made directly or indirectly visible in physical (sensible) structures; and that, when culture turns away from sense and nature to some supposed higher, it is really entering on a path which leads to abysses,' Its voice, in fact, was much like the longing expressed in Schiller'sGods of Greece;it wished man more godlike and the divine more human. But instead of backward,—its motto was forward: or back to nature, only to resume the true starting-point, and retreat from a path of civilisation whose end is perdition. Man also was nature[1]—if he is nevermerenature, i. e. the nature unexalted to its truth—but he brought to expression, and might bring to ever clearer and fuller expression, a something which was in infra-human nature, but which nature elsewhere had failed adequately to present.Thus the relation of Man to Nature was apparently twofold. On one hand, the physical world was essentially a world of reason and intelligence—though of intelligence petrified[2]. So far Hegel agreed with Schelling. But, on the other hand (and here Hegel took up the great paradox of Fichte), man's place in the universe is to fulfil the promise and implication of Nature to the full reality of Spirit, to fulfil it by law and morality; but (here he completes Fichte by the help of Schelling) also in higher measure, by art, religion, and science. The world of intelligence and reason which man constructs as an ethical, artistic, and religious being, is the full truth of the natural world,—the higher meaning, and fuller, more consistent, and complete reality of the sensible: and it is so, because the lord of Nature is one with the lord of the human soul. The new way of philosophy therefore, if it could be ever charged with saying that the so-called real things of ordinary life were only ideas, or mental images, meant that, as taken by the unthinking or imperfectly thinking perception, they were something of which all that could be said was to describe their relations to something else, of which in turn the same remark might be made; so that—as far as they went—reality was never with us, but only an assurance (soon to be proved vain) that it was next door[3]. On the contrary—initsuse of the term Idea—what this idealism asserted rather was that the objects of Nature in theirprima facieapprehension were not yet an Idea: if, i.e., an Idea is a mental or spiritual reality which explains and completes itself, instead of sending us on endless fool's errands elsewhere—,is a concept which is exactly adequate to reality, and has gathered in it the power of reality.

The new idealism is not subversive of realism, but includes it and makes it the reality it professed to be. It may therefore, as Schelling proposed[4], be called an ideal-realism, or a real-idealism. If any body likes, he may even, if he is no Greek scholar, call it Monism; but in that case he had better begin by admitting to himself that any Monism, which can stand its ground and serve for an explanation of the universe, will not exclude Dualism. All is indeed one life, one being, one thought; but a life, a being, a thought, which only exists as it opposes itself within itself, sets itself apart from itself, projects its meaning and relations outwards and upwards, and yet retains and carries out the power of reuniting itself. The Absolute may be called One: but it is also the All; it is a One which makes and overcomes difference: it is, and it essentially is, in the antithesis of Nature and Spirit, Object and Subject, Matter and Mind; but under and over the antithesis it is fundamental and completed unity. Monism, literally understood, is absurd—for it ignores, what cannot be ignored, the many: and Dualism, which is offered sometimes as a competitive scheme, is not much better; unless we understand the Dualism to be no fixed bisection, but an ever-appearing and ever-superseded antithesis which is the witness to the power and the freedom of the One,—which is not alone, but One and All, One in All, and All in One.

The central or cardinal point of Idealism is its refusal to be kept standing at a fixed disruption between Subject and Object, between Spirit and Nature. ItsIdeais the identity or unity (not without the difference) ofboth. In its purely logical or epistemological aspect one can easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond of repeating, There is no Object without a Subject and no Subject without an Object[5]. The difficulty arises in remembering these excellent truisms when one of the correlatives is out of sight, and the other seems to be independent and to come before us with a title to recognition apparently all its own. When the Subject figures as the individual consciousness, encased, it may perhaps be added, in an individual body, and the Object as a thing apparently out there in a world beyond all by itself, then the lapse from this rudimentary idealism becomes easy. In the practice of life and business, each of us, self-conscious and autonomoussubjectas he may be, comes to rank in the estimate of others, and ere long to some extent in his own, as also a part of the aggregate of objects. All reality and substance seem as it were to slide over into the object-side. The conscious subject counts as a mere onlooker or the passive spectator of a performance that goes on in an outside field of event,—yet that outside is his own object-mind; his mind counts as a mere idea, or rather as a succession of ideas, i. e. of mental pictures with a certain meaning in them. A little step more and the very subject-mind itself is turned into an object. There stands indeed—according to the ordinary introspective psychology—as it were in one corner, or at one loop-hole of vision, a mind looking on, observing and criticising another thing which is also called a mind; but the mind observing can only reflect or register, and the mind which is observed is very much thing-like, apparently acted upon by other things, and acting upon them in turn. This object-mind, a real among otherreals, in relations of cause and effect with them, does not, if we can trust thewordsof those who tell about it, see itself, but lies open to the inspection of this other mind, represented by the psychological observer, who is good enough to report to us something of its blind and dark estate. Its re-actions, he informs us, exhibit a remarkable peculiarity. They are equivalent to states of consciousness: and even to acts of will and knowledge. As when a violin is touched in certain ways by the bow, you get a musical note, so when certain agents come in contact with this peculiar real, they elicit a re-action, termed sense or idea.

To distinguish in this manner between mental passivity and activity is natural and right. The basis of all consciousness and mental activity is an original division, a 'judgment' or dijudication of self from self. But, once the dijudication made for such ends, it is a mistake to forget its initiation and lose sight entirely of the fact that the observing mind is also the active, and that the object-self is not merely in relation to the subject-self, but in a higher unity is identifiable therewith. Still the thing is done, habitually done. We all profess this faith of ordinary realism in our first reflections upon ourselves. And the effect of the oblivion is that we seek elsewhere for the initial activity, which we have abstracted from and lost sight of. The receptive passive mind,—called subject still, but now become a subject in the sense of the anatomist,—has to be set in motion, to be impinged upon or impressed. The psychical event which youcallknowledge, and which no doubtmeansknowledge,—the mental 'state' which you observe—or, it may even, if your authority is a particularly obstinate andintransigcantrealist, be the molecular change in brain cells,—requires an antecedent event to account for it. The origin of themovement which issued in the given psychical or molecular change is sought in a self-subsistent thing whichout theregives rise to a series of movements whichin hereresult in a sensation. Or, a thing somehow produces an attenuated image of itself in the brain, or in the mind; for, in this mythological tale of psychical occurrence, accuracy is unattainable, and one must not seek to be too precise. In any case the relationship between thing and idea is conceived after the analogy of the nexus of cause and effect, or original and copy; and the verbal imagination of the analogical reasoner is satisfied. What Hegel, after Schelling, teaches, on the other side, is that the process of sense-impression and the manipulations to which it is subjected by intellect presuppose, for their existence and their objective truth, a Reason which is the unity of subject and object, an original identity uniting knowledge to being.

But the same defect of unphilosophic consciousness has another phase which philosophy has to remember. Popular language speaks ofthings,—of things here and things there, which act upon each other and upon the so-called mind: i. e. on this imagined and supposed passive mind. For things, a more 'scientific' conception has been substituted—that offorces; which, whether attached to atoms or not, are asserted to be the real sources of the change and event which fill the world of our experience. And as, according to some psychologists, the mind is only a vacant ground or space with more or less narrow limits of room, on which the entities called ideas are for that reason forced into more or less close relationships, without any nearer or more essential tie; so, too, the mind is apt to be treated by others only as a battle-field or wrestling-ground of opposing forces. Here the atom-forces,as in the other case the atom-ideas, are, it is assumed, merely and purely independent: and yet such is the force of a limited environment—shall we say, in more popular language, the force of space and time?—that they must meet with one another, must, as it were, form associations, connexions, relationships. Great, verily, is the force of juxtaposition. Space and time, because they are essentially limiting, correlating, defining, weld links which the great prophet of this empirical school has not scrupled to call insoluble, ineradicable, inseparable. Space and time, says his great successor, are infinite. But they are infinite only in the sense that they can never be exhausted: they are everywhere, and for ever: but as real they are only here and now. Time can precede time, and space fade away into remoter space: but every space and every time is finite, defining, limiting, relative, and synthetic. And, if we look closer, space and time may come to seem the visible, ghostly, abstract outline—on one hand stiffening and bodying-out the ideal synthesis of thought and intelligence, on the other, faintly reproducing or fore-casting the real synthesis of organisation and living nature.

In saying this we give the reasonable interpretation of 'association':—so far at least as association is supposed to be brought about by juxtaposition in time and space. Time and space, as Kant might say, give the schema—the sensible and visible reflex of the eternal and universal thought-relation: they area prioribecause they are in the physical world theprimitive, the first phase and the lowest manifestation of that unity which as we know it in nature and mind always blends with sense, or displays itself in sensible forms. They are the first stamp of reality, of real Nature: with them we are in Nature, but it is an abstract shadowy nature. They markthe ascent (which only from the mere logician's standpoint shall we call the descent) of the abstract (pure) idea into the element of multiplicity, of opposition, of life and consciousness. In the psychical and intellectual world, again, as it rises to more perfect ideality (as it elicits moremeaningfrom crudefact) they lose their prominence; they sink into the powers of memory and imagination, which build up past and future into the unity of the ever present, until in their consummation they leave as their residual product the abstract element of pure thought: a thought which claims the attributes of universality and eternity, which claims, i. e., to merge or submerge in it all space and all time[6].

It is evident therefore that if an associationist theory, like that of Hume, proposes to explain the actual field of mental life by elements given in it, and by no other, it can only do so on certain assumptions, which may be summed up in the proposition that the mind—the real mental space and time even (and not its supposed 'image')—is at once subjective and objective, at once real and ideal, at once the field of operation, the force which directs operations, and the mind which is aware of itself and its acts. To say, as Hume appears to do, that an unintermittent long-established custom breedsin uscertain irresistible and essential habits of thought, can only refer to an unexplained and unnoticed duplication of the self. There is here, one self, which is only a bundle of fragments, of ideas intrinsically separate and only incidentally connected by outside pressure, which enter into ties, peradventure necessary or indissoluble, though not due to inner affinity. And there is another self which is a self-same unity, dividing and growing, or assimilating, acted upon but only because it solicits action, and in a way controlling the processgoing on within it. The difficulty for the investigator is to realise that these two selves are one. No amount of ingenuity will ever succeed in honestly showing unity to be the mere resultant—even should it be a fictitious or phenomenal unity—of the collisions and fortuitous attachments or detachments of different and independent reals. The reals which behave in such a way as to engender unities, to cause syntheses, are reals in a mind; and the mind must not merely, as it were, flow around them, but have them fluid members of itself. If they are reals, they are ideal-reals. You must begin with an ideal-unity which is also a real-unity, in which variety can play and by which it is controlled.

'Forces,' no less than 'things,' are terms of thought, names of reality indeed, but inadequate because due to an abstraction and leaving their correlatives out of sight—names of momentary elements seized in the flux, and made with more or less success to indicate 'moments' and 'factors' or 'aspects' in the total sum and power of reality. Explanation by permanent and separate forces labours under the same disadvantages as that by things. Science, grown more self-critical, begins to see that in forces, &c., it has names and formulae which are not the full reality, but only useful (ifuseful) abstractions. Neither things nor forces, though called real, are so in the full sense. Hume said,—and said not untruly, though with some relish of paradox,—that we never had any real impression or idea of power and force. The statement should be taken along with another that what we mistake for power in things is only our own want of power to overcome a suggested association, or to break a customary train of ideas. Lotze, again, has remarked that the supposed consciousness of power exerted in voluntary movement is confused with a feelingof work done, or inertia overcome. Whatever may be the truth about the psychological experience, there can be no doubt for the epistemologist that the so-called perception of force is an interpretation of one aspect of experience which, with a certain amount of arbitrary arrest and simplification, renders it intelligible and real by means of an antithesis and correlation. Force in fact only exists, or arises, in relation or opposition to a counter-force: action and re-action are always equal and opposite, says the mathematical formula. Two forces are as little independent as an up and a down, or as a west and a north; force solicits force, and force onlyisin so far as it is solicited. The soliciting can only solicit because it is solicited. In other words, it is not enough to say that the forces which thus confront each other are correlatives. The relationship must be carried up a stage higher: the forces themselves get their pseudo-real character, only so long as they are kept apart forcibly or by inertia. Carry out their implications: and they re-unite (not however to the loss of all distinction) in a higher idea, an intelligible unity which, by its division and return to unity, makes possible and real their contention. It is this carrying-out of implications to their explicit truth which is at the root of Schopenhauer's playing fast and loose with the distinction between force and will. But with him the two terms are taken up vague and indefinite, in the haze of popular conception or want of conception, and are without effort or justification identified: whereas in Hegel, there is, on the lowest estimate, anattemptmade to trace the somewhat intricate steps which mediate the metamorphosis.

The new idealism thus maintains the organic and even supra-organic nature of thought and being. The world of experience, when taken in its reality andfullness, is an organism which lives and knows and wills, and which is life, action, knowledge; its own means and its own end. The subject acting, living, knowing is action, knowledge, life. In the ordinary organism there is a subject of functions, a being in relation to an inorganic world. In the world-organism (if the inadequate name is still to be retained) there is no outside world, no inorganic or extra-organic thing. In the world-organism the organ and its environment is combined in one, re-united: the plant or animal is not without its place, and its place is not without plant or animal. They are not merely in correlation, but essentially and actually one.Quid prosunt leges sine moribus?asks the moralist: but in the Absolute or the supra-organic Idea, law and morality are not apart: the necessity is also freedom: the law is not severed from its phenomenon. Such an organism which is life, thinking, will, is what Hegel calls the Idea: an organism which is completely organic, with no mere matter: and that Idea is the foundation of his Idealism. Conceived under its conditions, the forces which are sometimes represented as struggling with each other on the field of man's life, are no longer independent; still less completely separable forces. They are the inner division by which the spirit re-establishes and makes secure its unity: their antagonisms are the breath of life. And they have their relations in their common service, building up one life. They form a certain hierarchy of organisation; in which however the higher or more developed does not merely supervene upon the cruder, but in a way supersedes it, and yet contrives to retain its worth and its real truth.

[1]Cf. Spinoza's remark on Body,Eth.III. pr. 2 Schol.: 'Etenim quod corpus possit, nemo hucusque determinavit; hoc est neminem hucusque experientia docuit quid corpus ex solis legibus naturae quatenus corporea tantum consideratur possit agere,' &c.

[2]See vol. ii, notes and illustrations, p. 392.

[3]Schopenhauers well-known description of this recurrent throwing back of the responsibility of reality on something else is here suggested ('World as Will and Idea,' § 17).

[4]See p. 157 (chap. xiii).

[5]Satz vom Grunde,§ 16:Welt als Wille und Vorstellung: Ergänzungen.Cap. i.

[6]See later, chapter xxvi.

When modern philosophy took its first steps, it was disdainful and depreciatory to the past, both Medieval and Old-Greek. Bacon and Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza,—be their other differences what they may—all echo the same disparagement. Like Wordsworth'sRob Roy, they cry—

'What need of books?Burn all the statutes and their shelves.We'll show that we can help to frameA world of other stuff.'

On this iconoclastic age supervenes the attempt of Leibniz to combine in one all that was good in the new corpuscular philosophy with all that was precious in the old Platonic idealism as expanded by Aristotle. So, at the later philosophic crisis towards the close of the eighteenth century, the somewhat destructive and revolutionary tendencies of Kant and Fichte lead up by a natural revulsion and complement to the reconstructive systems of Schelling and Hegel. In them the conservative instinct comes to supplement the defects of the radical go-ahead. Instead of tossing the past away to the winds, and crying outÉcrasez l'infâme,—instead of throwing medievalism behind, breaking all the restrictions on individual liberty which feudal Europe had created to secure and safeguard the communities that housed itsearly freedom, the new spirit of the time saw that the problems of modern life were not solved by merely throwing overboard as encumbrances and refuse all checks and forms. On the contrary, the reflective mind saw that forms and checks so-called there must be, and that the art of statesmanship, though it could not entirely consist in copying the old, had still to work in some way after the analogy of the old methods: i. e. to do under new circumstances what would solve the same requisites, as the old constitution had done for its time. The change is well illustrated by the attitude towards state organisation shown by William von Humboldt at different epochs of his life.

People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and what it has done for us. To hear what is sometimes said it might be supposed that this was the method that had been always habitual in history, but which in these latter days had been applied to other topics, and had proved its value on the new ground by achieving results that had hitherto been mere desiderata. This however is pretty nearly to reverse the true state of the case. It was long till history came to have any method worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as great historians the object had been to tell a good tale, to keep the thread of events distinct, to subordinate incidents to the main issue, to portray personal and public character and its influence on events. History was practised—we may even say—more as an art than as a science. If it dealt with causes, it dealt with individual, concrete, living causes, not with cold, dead abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it did not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for principles to be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it was much more enamoured of the art of Livy and Tacitus, or even of the naïveté of Herodotus. Of suchhistory who has not felt the power; who has not admired the genius that reconstructs the men and circumstances of the past, and makes them live over again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm to inevitable fate! But it was not from such history that the historical method arose.

The historical method was the product of the new conception of nature and mind in their mutual relations which has been already noted. To estimate the labours of thinkers towards this view of history would be an interesting but complex inquiry. Leibniz in particular by his principles of development, of continuity, of general analogy, should have made two things for ever clear. And these two results that might have been supposed secure were, first, that the present existence (which at first seems to be alone real) is only a narrow transition line between a past and a future,—a line of points intersecting a complex movement or development; and secondly, that all development is of something which is essentially infinite, which requires nothing external, no fillip from circumstances or from an external providence, to set it going, but is in itself a synthesis of active and passive force in a something at least analogous to an Ego. The first principle is embalmed in Leibniz's maxim: 'The present is laden with the past, and full of the future': and the second, in the maxim 'the Monads have no doors or windows.' In virtue of the first, the existent (of this instant) is only a stage or grade, rooted in what has been, and insignificant unless in reference to what is to come. In virtue of the second, all development is from within, and presupposes therefore that the developing individual includes within it a great deal which a cursory view would at first sight assume to be without it, and only accidentally in contact with it. It might indeed be wellto add a third principle—what Leibniz has sometimes called the Law of Continuity—the law that, as he says, distinct and noticeable perceptions are the resultants of an infinite number of insensible or little perceptions. But continuity proper is not this: continuity proper or identity is a pure idea. The visible or sensible discontinuity reposes on, and is to be explained by, an invisible or ideal continuity. Each body, for instance, in nature, appearing to have a separate existence of its own, is only a stage isolated or insulated in a continuing process: and that process, binding, as it does, past to future, is the process of a Mind.Omne Corpus, wrote Leibniz in 1671,est mens momentanea seu carens recordatione.Every physical and material object is an intelligence, but an intelligence which neither looks before nor after, but is limitedfor itselfto the mere instant: an intelligence which has no history. Yet to the intelligent observer it has a past,—it has a memory, it bears in it the traces of its antecedent. Yet to read that book of memory, to decipher the 'insensible perceptions' which are buried beneath the momentary present, beneath its unspiritual reality, and to knit present with past and future, is the work of an intelligence, in and to whom the material discloses its store of meaning, or in whom it is re-spiritualised. In other words, the presupposition of this historical method is the ideal continuity of being, transcending and absorbing the differences of time.

But the teaching of Leibniz—even more perhaps than that of Spinoza—fell on an evil age: if it was not actually choked with thorns, it found a soil with little depth, and its brief verdure was soon followed by a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to commend his theories to all men,—and not least perhaps to win the suffrages of some illustrious and intelligentwomen—he was led to present them under forms and phrases which were to each correspondent specially familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent. The forms of accommodation were what told: they stuck, and the truth they were meant to convey slipped away: the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted into the doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with Spinoza, so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his meaning came first to the thinkers on the borderland of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and Herder, and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic systems first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all, this theory of 'petites perceptions' so closely bound up (as was to be expected) with his mathematical discoveries in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a finer ear for the secret harmonies and principles of existence than the coarser organs of popular philosophy could catch up or appreciate.

'In order,' says Leibniz, 'to get a clearer idea of the little perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the crowd, I am accustomed to employ the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes us upon the shore. To hear this sound, as we do hear it, we must hear the parts which compose this total, i. e. the sounds of each wave, though each of these little sounds only makes itself perceptible in the confused assemblage of all the others together, (that is to say, in that same roar,) and would not be noticed if this wave which causes it were alone. For we must be a little affected by the movement of that wave, and we must have some perception of each of these sounds, however small they may be; otherwise we should never have the perception of a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand zeros would never make anything.... These little perceptions are of greater efficiency by theirconsequences than we suppose. It is they which form thatJe ne sais quoi, those tastes, those images of sensible qualities, clear in the assemblage, but confused in the parts; those impressions made upon us by surrounding bodies which envelop the infinite, thatnexuswhich each being has with all the rest of the universe. It may even be said that in virtue of these little perceptions the present is big with the future and laden with the past, that everything conspires together: and that in the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole sequel of the things of the universe.

'These insensible perceptions, further, mark and constitute the same individual, who is characterised by the traces or expressions which they preserve of the preceding states of that individual, thus forming the connexion with his present state. These may be known by a superior spirit, though that individual himself should not feel them, i. e. though express memory should no longer be there. But these perceptions also supply the means of rediscovering that memory, at need, by periodic developments, which may one day happen.... It is also by these insensible perceptions that I explain that admirable pre-established harmony of mind and body, and even of all monads or simple substances,—which takes the place of the impossible influence of one upon another.... After this, I should add but little if I said that it is these small perceptions whichdetermineus in many conjunctures without our thinking of it, and which deceive the vulgar by the appearance of anindifference of equilibrium, as if we were entirely indifferent whether we turned, e. g., to right or to left.

'I have remarked also that in virtue of insensible variations two individual things could never beperfectly alike, and that they ought always to differ more thannumero.And with this we have done once for all with the empty tablets of the mind, a soul without thought, a substance without action, the void of space, the atoms, and even parcels not actually divided in matter; we have done with pure repose, entire uniformity in a portion of time, of place or of matter,... and a thousand other fictions of philosophers which come from their incomplete notions, fictions which the nature of things does not suffer, and which our ignorance and the little attention we have for the insensible lets pass, but which could never be rendered tolerable, unless we confine them to abstractions of the mind which protests that it does not deny what it puts aside and considers out of place in any present consideration. Otherwise, if we took it quite in earnest, to mean that things which we do not perceive do not exist in the soul or body, we should fail in philosophy as in politics by neglecting τὀ μικρόν, insensible steps of progress:—whereas an abstraction is not an error provided we know that what we put out of sight is still there.'

This was the conception which Bacon had shadowed out, which Leibniz had presented under many names and with many applications, as the olive-branch between Plato and Democritus; it now became through philosophical and extra-philosophic acceptance a current maxim in the general field of knowledge. Nature assimilated to history, and history assimilated to nature: freedom built upon necessity, and efficient causes rounded off, though not entirely merged, in final. It is the recognition of law, order, causality in the psychical world, yet not ofmereso-called natural law; and therefore without reducing it to a merely physical and material world. It is in fact the new method which is inevitable and necessary, as soon as it is manifestthat life, organisation, development is the underlying truth and central notion of things. You look at the world at first, let us say, as a mere collection of separate things in varying degrees of juxtaposition: and all that you think of doing to them, either by way of theory or practice, is to put them together, to link them closer, or separate them more widely. You do so from outside by an arranging force; for they are assumed to be purely passive, waiting to be touched, each set in its place—from which it can only be moved by a push or a pull. This is the method of mathematics or mechanics. It shows the dexterity of the agent or of the expositor: but you feel that it is artificial, and arbitrary. It is analytic or synthetic—but not auto-analysis or auto-synthesis. The director of the movement (we may call it 'construction') may no doubt have the real secret: he may work the things well and fairly, and unite or divide them according to inner affinities; but we cannot, as matters stand, be sure of this. The things, in fact, he deals with have been already emptied of all life and peculiarity of their own: they are alike in quality, only differing by a more or less,—a difference which at any moment may be altered by an act of subtraction or addition. No doubt you can build up what arecalledsystems—compounds of a kind—in this way: but they do not really hang and grow together; they are only prevented from breaking up by the absence of any empty place to which the parts may withdraw. Bit holds up bit; but how all the bits have found themselves so caged up without exit is a mystery. Absolute neutrality or indifference of each part to others, and yet absolute equilibrium[1]in the total composite,—such is the situation.

The chemical method (taking chemistry as a type of the sciences like optics, electricity, &c.) is a revelation of a different state of affairs. The elements of things are here seen to be unique and incomparable; yet in each there is a latent sympathy ready to break out when the proper occasion arrives. Bring two things together, and their affinity suddenly, in the proper circumstances, leads to their complete fusion: a product arises which, when formed, hardly betrays its origin and composition. In a way this is the converse of the mechanical or mathematical method. In it was no fusion, no inner mixture: each part after composition lay beside the other, and their union was only in the ideas of the onlooker. It was mere juxtaposition still,—though now closer: an abnormally keen eye would still have been able to descry the dividing lines and measure the gaps. At least mere mechanical physics tends so to conceive it. Here, on the contrary, there is union—but only at the moment of fusion: once that is accomplished, the result is apparently simple, and bears no suggestion of being a compound. In the mechanical union the result is exactly equal to the sum of the elements which go to make it: in the chemical there is something positively new, something, i. e., of which the premises gave no indication and made no promise.

Either of these methods,—of these conceptions of existence—works well in a certain region. But both of them only do their work on a certain hypothesis, or with a certain abstraction. The mechanical method supposes that objects are all qualitatively alike, differing only in quantity or weight: all therefore entirely comparable with each other, and capable of being substitutedfor each other in an equation. Where this assumption holds good, the method of addition and division, the method of the calculus does its work[2]. The chemical method works on another assumption,—the assumption of a number of qualitatively-differenced elements, of elements which also are, so to speak, set on edge against some, and ready to leap into the arms of others. If the observer in the first case had the game entirely in his own hand,—could build up and separate at his pleasure, could determine resultsa priori: he is here baffled by the unexpected, and can only wait and watch to learna posteriorithe behaviour of the bodies possessed of this occult and non-predictable affinity. At the best he can only formulate what he observes, try to classify it, ascertain any common principles running through it, any serial recurrences, or the like: and that is all that chemical philosophy can achieve. Chemical affinity—the fact that certain elements combine in certain ways, and refuse to enter into certain alliances—is a great fact: but toa priorireasoning or abstract syllogising it is an entire inexplicability, one of the accidents in the universe which must be reckoned with, but cannot be understood.

It is probably evident that, if we want to get a comprehension of the life and concrete reality of things, neither of these methods will quite answer the purpose. With the first alone, if it could be universally carried out, the universe would be thoroughly explained:everything would be exactly equivalent to some sum or multiple of every other: there would be no mystery, nothing unique, and strictly individual. Given time, we could find a formula for every reality, and a predicate exactly fitted to any subject. Yet even mathematics has to confess the existence of irrationals, surds, infinite series, and the like. For our unities and standards are always arbitrary, artificial, and one-sided, and fall short of the subtlety of nature. Even our simpler types of surfaces—the circle and the square—remain irreducible to each other: and we only avoid the collision by the remark that practically and with any required amount of exactness the discrepancy between the two can be adjusted. If we turn to the chemical method, again, there is a nearer approach to actuality in the recognition of the presence of something more than mere composition and juxtaposition. It is not that there is something which isnotjuxtaposition: but rather it is muchmore than merejuxtaposition. There may be degrees of this something more: but it is only to a gross or abstract view that it is not present at all. Mere cohesion even shows a unity in things juxta-posed. Mere contact is contagious: it infects. 'When a violin has been played on frequently by a tyro,' says G. H. Lewes, 'its tone deteriorates, its molecules become re-arranged, so that one mode of vibration is more ready than another[3].' 'Toute impression,' he quotes from Delboeuf, 'laisse une certaine trace ineffaçable.' So-called chemical composition is only a conspicuous instance, with peculiarities, of this alteration in state produced by what, from the mechanical standpoint, are called inner molecular displacements. But to recognise a fact is one thing: to give its explanation is another. Yet, on the other hand, to recognise the fact is to notean important point which had been omitted by the mechanical construction of things. There the result could hardly be called new: it was exactly equal to its constituent elements: and the equation was transparent. And it was transparent because the whole process, analysis and synthesis, was not a work or process of the observed thing, but the work of the observing mind: it makes the (artificial) unities, numbers them, and adds them or subtracts. But with the chemical result, though it also is equal to its elements, there is something new. Water, no doubt, is oxygen and hydrogen, but here, at least, there is no doubt that theplussign unduly simplifies the relationship, and rather indicates or represents a nexus than accurately defines it. And yet, there is nothing in water which was not, in some—shall we say mysterious?—way, in the oxygen and the hydrogen. Chemical physics, therefore, brings out clearly, or comparatively clearly, something which the ordinary and coarser simplicity-loving theory is obliged and is able to neglect: it realises the virtue that lies in juxtaposition, and shows that the mere outer change of quantity goes with a deeper inward and qualitative one. The result does more than sum up and condense what was spread out in extension and dispersed in parts before: it brings out or reveals something which previously was unsurmised. Always, in a liberal interpretation of the maxim, it is true thatEx nihilo nihil fit:but here, especially, the effect actually discloses what was—but was latent or unperceived—in the premises. The maxim, to be fairly treated, must be read backwards as well as forwards.

But we must go a step further if we wish the full explanation. If the premises are to be adequate to support the conclusion, they must be restated in terms which hint at the conclusion—which in a way containit, but contain it in potentiality and promise, not in act. This is the method of development, which is the method that is applicable to full concrete reality, not like the others to parts abstracted from or insulated in reality. So long as you deal with these selected bits of fact—abstracted from their surroundings, subject to strict observation or strict experiment, you can apply a comparatively simple and straightforward method. You are dealing with abstracted, mutilated, prepared fact. You are guided in these cases by the canons of identity and difference: you add and subtract, or subtract and add; and that is all. You use what are called the rules of experimental method. But these canons do not directly apply—except by happy accident—to the real world, where antecedent and consequents are not separate and tabulated, as the logical canons, the rules of formal logic, require. In dealing with this concrete reality, a much more complex method is needed, a method which has to blend induction with deduction, and to start from both ends in the series of causation at once. You can apply observation or experiment, only when the issues have already been extremely simplified and narrowed down: when the question has been rendered so definite that it is next-door to the answer, and the removal of a slight partition-wall will as it were make the two one clear space. Where observation and experiment are available, indeed, is where the general outlines and principles of the subject are settled, where the scheme of reality is defined in large, but a variety of minor issues still remains to be settled. Unless this general framework is fixed, neither observation nor experiment, with their canon of identity and difference, are of any avail. These methods, therefore, only apply in sciences which are in principle or substantially complete, though admittingof possibly infinite extension in details and particulars. Where the science is yet to constitute, i. e. in dealing with the kinds of real things in their completeness, and not as viewed in some definite aspect, induction and deduction must go hand in hand and help each other at every step: and if they, as they must, have recourse to experiment and observation, it will be at first in a very unsatisfactory and tentative way.

Such is the way the contrast between the simplicity belonging to an artificial method dealing with picked instances, and the complexity that real concrete organic nature demands, presented itself to J. S. Mill as he advanced in his inquiry. The only complete method for the investigation of unsophisticated nature, not yet mapped out and defined in general departments, is the deductive-inductive method in which induction and deduction separately have a subordinate place,—using induction in the narrow sense the term has been hitherto allowed to bear. And that sense, it may be added, is, as in some passages of Aristotle, little else than a reverse of syllogism, or to speak more accurately, it is a syllogism which goes up to generals instead of descending from them. It is like the syllogistic deduction formal and abstract in character. The (deductive) syllogism assumes the existence of major premises—of general propositions which in the last resort, if they are real bases, must be primary and true, or self-evident facts. But a critic, like Mill, had little difficulty in showing that a general truth rests upon and presupposes the very particular conclusions which it is used to establish. Unless every singular is true, the universal which embraces or unifies them cannot really be true. Therefore the conclusion is really implied and presupposed in the principles of its premises. But, unfortunately for the application and supposedsequel of this not unjust remark, a similar remark may be made on the ordinary exposition of the inductive method. Induction, it is said, infers from or on a basis of single facts. But if a single truth is really, i. e. unconditionally true, it is indistinguishable from the universal. If it is really true once, it is true for ever. The assertion of the individual proposition as true, if it can be supported—(and unless it be true, what basis can it afford for the general conclusion?)—implies the truth of the universal it is sometimes used to establish. The inductive logician tells us to build on singular and definite facts, on truths of definite and individual experience: but a definite or determinate truth rests upon universality (indeed is a universal), and cannot be found unless we have already found the special total or organism of truth in which it forms a part. Individuals and universals presuppose each other, and do not, as the first impression leads us to think, stand apart as two unconnected termini, from either of which, if we happen to be so located, we can without road or railway make a legitimate passage to the other.

If it be urged, as it may naturally be, that on this showing there is no solid or 'absolute' starting-point at all, the contention may be conceded. The only fixed and steady points in knowledge are points hypothetically fixed,—certified, that is, for the time and in the circumstances we employ them. But in the open field—or rather in the wilderness—of knowledge, where the ground of fact is not staked off, and the unexpected may always turn up, the only test of truth is the corroboration given by the consilience of paths initiated from different points: it is only by an undesigned coincidence in the results of independent operations that you can succeed in orienting yourself. You begin your road at two ends, and you meet: you locate orfix your point by drawing its co-ordinates to two direction-lines taken anyhow at first, and only in formed science diverging at a fixed angle. And in the absolute your direction-lines cannot be supposed fixed: you can only gradually adjust them to each other as you proceed. Intelligence, says Aristotle, is a principle, a beginning; and intelligence, he says again, supplies beginnings[4]. Science, in the technical sense, only comes into operation,—or, in other words, deduction and (in the narrower sense used by Mill, and proceeding bypureobservation and experiment) induction only find a way,—where beginnings and principles have been set up, where an approximate order or provisional system has been established. And if logic, in its stricter sense, is the method of sciences already made and in their essentials constituted, then logic can be asked to do no more than to provide a theory of such formal processes. If it traces the path which leads 'from the known to the unknown,' if it always proceeds on the hypothesis of a given knowledge, then such induction or deduction (from certain and approved singular facts, or from certain and approved general truths) fully satisfies the practical need of the scientific reasoner. But if Logic be, as it sometimes is, and may very reasonably be, taken in the wider sense of an epistemology,—a theory of the nature and origin of knowledge as a whole, and not of mere inference or syllogism;—if it does not merely ask how we can satisfactorily get from one piece of knowledge (we are supposed to have) to another (not yet supposed to be), but how we come to have knowledge at all; then its problem must go behind the rudiments of vulgar induction and deduction. It must ask—what, so far as one can see, Mill and his mere followers have never seriouslyasked at all—what induction is, what are its relations with deduction, and what is the place of either in the process of knowledge. And as the process of knowledge is the path to reality, it must also ask about the nature of this goal,—reality and truth. It is all very well for the narrower Logic to formulate in terms the methods actually employed in sciences: to state in abstract canons what is there seen in life and action. But aScience of Logic—an epistemology—(and a genuine epistemology cannot claim to be anything short of an ontology) must face the fact of science itself—must ask how the ideas of the knower must—or otherwise they are not knowledge—embrace and contain the reality of the known. The other and narrower Logic is and will remain a theory of forms of reasoning-a transcript in fainter terms of the procedure of science in any given step it takes upward to generals or downward to particulars: but the logic which deals with knowledge as such, in its systematic entirety,—the transcendental Logic, in short, must have a real value, an invincible relation to reality. The formal Logic—the logic of Mill and Hamilton—must be carried back to its principles, to its first step: and that first step which will also be the last step, and the inspiring principle of every intermediate step, is that of Intelligence (Aristotle's Νοῡς), of which the products or manifestations are λόγοι, i. e. definite conceptions, categories, formulations of rules and principles of definite range,—determinations or special types of unity.

Mill really faced the problem of method to better effect when he came to deal with a class of questions in which he was really interested, and which moreover have for epistemological purposes the advantage of being as yet unreduced into the rank and file of disciplined science. These questions are those dealingwith man, his mental and moral nature, and history. Even its advocates or patrons occasionally admit that there is no accepted idea of what Sociology is or does. Its name at least expresses a longing towards a unity, or a presentiment that there is some underlying unity and common method in the group of what are loosely called the moral, or the historical, or the social and political sciences. But sociology is, as most people will allow, the name of a science unrealised—the felt and consciously-apprehended need of a science, and the dissatisfaction with the existing state of knowledge in certain departments. And undoubtedly it was with problems of social science,—problems of politico-economic and socio-ethical or socio-religious matters, that Mill's interests were mainly engaged. Like his master in this department, Auguste Comte, he wanted to carry into the topics which he was chiefly bent upon that 'scientific' precision which they by pretty general admission lacked, and which revolutionary movements had shown they greatly needed. But he could not help seeing that the 'induction' of dynamics and physics was not exactly the instrument he was in search of. Theory and hypothesis here demanded a much larger share in the process than in the more mathematical sciences. Causes and effects in reality here rolled round into each other, instead of remaining calmly fixed, one set here, and the other there. Of course even here—i. e. in organic and concrete sciences—it is possible to introduce observation and experiment,—no doubt, with greater effort and constraint, but still not altogether impracticable. But the artificial and mutilative character of such experimentation is felt here in a way different from its pressure in other cases. And what is more important, to institute an experiment or set on foot a scientific observation (andto observe means towatcha definitely restricted natural process with a view to answer some question about it), presupposes—as we have already seen—a tolerably definite provisional theory as to the general lie of the country to be investigated. Only when the country has been reasonably well mapped out in provinces and provided with some system of roads, can these problems of detail—questions to be answered Yes or No—be profitably put. And it is—in some parts of the historical sciences at least—somewhat premature to put questions requiring a categorical reply. There is only the vaguemalaiseof felt difficulty to guide us. We do not, in many cases, know what it is that we want to know; for, it demands a good deal of wisdom and trained art to put the proper or reasonable question,—so much so, indeed, that to succeed in formulating your question fully is equivalent or nearly equivalent to being able to answer it. The value of observations and experiments—which are ways of putting nature to the question and it may be to the torture—depends entirely upon the knowledge and the command of general ideas possessed by the observer and experimenter. And the same may be said of the reduced and tabulated conspectuses of the results of many observations and experiments which are called Statistics. Their value depends on the truth and breadth of view which presided at their collection and arrangement[5].

The historical or genetic method is the method ofScience in general, but considered and employed under a limited aspect. And under its more comprehensive aspect it may be called—though no name is unimpeachable—the method of development. Now the essence of the idea of development—as was clearly shown by Leibniz—is the refusal to admit external interference, and the resolve to let a thing explain itself by itself. It does not, like the mechanical method, manipulate the thing from outside—try to add it up out of factors or items fashioned and fabricated after some external standard. Nor does it, like the chemical, look at the result as an inexplicable alteration, due apparently to a mere stroke of combination or disintegration—yet not obviously reducible to a mere equivalent of its elements. On the contrary, it recognises in the object a certain independence or originality, yet also the presence of an immanent law which does not wait for the outsider to put it together, but constructs itself, as it were, after a plan of its own. There is in the so-called object, though we do not at first sight recognise it, the same originative principle both analytic and synthetic, as we own in thought. The object is—in a true logic—a process, a self-completing process, and not merely an object, mechanical, or other object. It changes, grows or decays, while we observe, unless for brief instants we cut it off from its connexions and arrest its development. And our observation, if truly scientific, must be sympathetic with its process of change. It is neither a mere thing to be explained and construedab extra: nor a mystery of sudden transformation to be passively accepted; but a growth, a history, to be sympathetically watched and understood,—understood, because it follows the same orderas the movement of our own thought in the process of knowledge.Similia similibus cognoscuntur[6].

One sometimes hears it asked by paradoxical critics at which end a history should begin. And to ordinary dogmatic recklessness, paradoxical the question may well seem. Begin at the beginning, no doubt, is the vulgar reply; which in this case is understood to mean from the earliest point in date (that, of course, being easily ascertained, and a thing known to all men). But,—so Plato long ago well raised the difficulty which will always confront us,—are we to go from the beginnings, or towards the beginnings? And it does not quite solve the question to say that we are to begin with what is known: for under that word the same difficulty re-appears. Can you really know one end without the other? To the vulgar partisan of historical method, its precept means Go to the earlier, if you wish to understand the meaning, the value, and the elements constitutive of the later and subsequent. Begin with origins, with the earliest elements, the phases that first appear; and thus you will get light to see the later as they really stand. That this is a common interpretation of the historical method is notorious. To explainHomo sapiens, one is told to study the ape,—the nearest analogue of his lost or missing progenitor: to understand the contemporary horse, go to eohippus, or hipparion, or however his early prototype may beat present named and recognised. And in all this there is a truth—or least a half-truth. But let us equally recognise the other half of the truth. If past throws light on present, present throws not less light on past. You propose, let us say, to write a history of Greece. A wordy philosophy, wise in its own conceit and in fine phrases, will advise you to approach the subject without prepossession or prejudice. So far, good. But what is meant by the absence of prepossession or prejudice? Not a blank openness to impression, not a mere passivity; but if passivity at all, a wise passivity: if openness, the openness of the trained judge.

The advice, so often associated with Francis Bacon, to get rid of all false pre-conceptions, of allidola,is one which it is easy to mistake in an over-zeal to follow it. That mere negation of prejudices which we call childish innocence is no match for the craft by which Nature seeks to keep or disguise her secrets. The free consciousness, the unbiassed mind, is not the easy result of one great act of renunciation, but the work of continued self-discipline, self-conquest, self-realisation. If you are not to impose upon the thing a pre-conception alien to it, neither must you rashly give yourself away to the thing, or to the first whims which accident puts upon you as the thing. What seems a fact or thing is only a candidate for the post of thing or fact: and its credentials need to be examined, and compared with other evidences. To detect a fact, therefore, is only possible for a tried and tested consciousness which by patience and self-mastery has won the key of interpretation. What Bacon apparently meant—though, as often happens, in his eagerness to combat a prevailing folly, he sometimes overshot himself in statement—was to insist on the eternal wedlock of the mind and things, of things and the mind, as the sole and sufficientcondition for the reality of knowledge and truth. The mind may not presume to do without things, or things to domineer the mind;—or the result is a windy and frothy vanity. And the wedlock is eternal: in his own eloquent words, 'the mind itself is but an accident to knowledge[7],' and he might have added, so also are things: for, as he says, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all one': only in the bond of knowledge are things true and real,—being otherwise only 'permanent possibilities,' or possibilities barely even permanent—or not even possibilities. Yet he scarcely realised that his 'due rejections and exclusions' and negations were a fundamentalconstitutiveelement in those facts of which he habitually emphasises only the positive side.

He therefore who would understand—or would write—the history of Greece must really in his studies begin at both ends—both at the Greece of to-day, and at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period may be taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the least qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will begin with the Greece of to-day; or if he deals solely with Ancient Greece he will begin with the full blaze of Hellenic civilisation which still has a pale reflection in the modern world, and gradually work back to the beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek history, say, with the Homeric Age, and work downwards, as it is customary to begin a formal treatise on geography with the general features of the earth's shape and surface. But that beginning represents really the temporarily accredited and accepted result of a process which, starting from the other end, has worked backwards to commencements or origins.And the teacher, in particular, will do well not to imitate too slavishly the method of the formal treatise. A day may come—or may have come—for example, for Greek history to start from periods long anterior to the supposed or traditional date of the wars around the wall of Troy. But when it does so, it will have done so by more thoroughly ransacking the Greece of to-day: and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern diggings on Greek soil reveal the features of an earlier than what was erewhile to older historians its earliest past, the reconstruction of that early people's life reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations of its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the reality of Homer, and even of Demosthenes—into their ideal glory and their historical limitations, when we explore the cradle in which their race's life was erst fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature hewed them. And this is no peculiarity of Greece. The deepest research into the social institutions which control the England of to-day is the best propaedeutic for the study of Anglo-Saxon times; and the same is truevice versa.

Nor, again, is the truth of the proposition confined to what we ordinarily mean by history. The Greek poet has said 'Art had to wait on and welcome chance, and chance to wait on Art': or as we may paraphrase it, if every invention and discovery is in a measure a lucky chance, it is a luck that only falls to the wisely prepared head and hand. The casual event falls as a germ of new construction or theory only on an intelligence ready to welcome it,—prepared with its complement in the spirit of an idea, eager to take shape. The means again, in the arts and crafts, is not only a means to something else; it is also a means to its own end,to realise or perfect itself. The rude tool of the savage, for instance, is not merely a means to supply his wants: it is also a means towards completing and improving itself, and towards perfecting itself by constructing an ampler tool, which supersedes it, because it can do all and more than all the work of the earlier, or can do it more economically. All progress that deserves the name is an incessant and continuous revision of a first step: a re-adaptation of an old instrument: a repeated and unending self-correction. It is only a partially-true symbol of human advance to speak of it as a line: unless we add, by another piece of symbolism, that the line is only the protracted or extended phase in which the form of time drags out for us the magnified and organised point-nucleus. It is a truth—which we are only too ready to forget or discount—that the savage (and he bears with justice both epithets, 'the noble savage,' and 'the brute barbarian') is not something left happily behind us, in the onward march of civilisation; but that he is, however much we may fancy him suppressed and superseded, still present, at least 'ideally' in the finest products of humanity, and may hap only too likely—as the Russian is said, when scratched, to betray his original Tartar breed—to burst put on provocation into a grim reality. The Pullman car of to-day retains within it for the archaeologically-trained eye the rudiments of the primitive wain of the primitive nomade: and the careful study of either end of the scale will not merely throw a marvellous light on the excellencies or the defects of the other, but will probably also tend in the impartial observer to moderate the self-gratulations of modern advance. For it is only those whose view ranges within narrow limits that are over-impressed by the magnitude of the advance made in the 'last new thing.'

If progress were but the addition of bit to bit, of new bits to what is already there, or if we could changethis,and leavethatunchanged,—as the word perhaps verbally means, and as many people at any rate seem to understand it, progress might indeed seem an easy thing, and to be undertaken with a light heart. For, it would appear as if we could lose nothing, and might probably (indeed, as enthusiasm and forgetfulness of the merits of the past are in certain periods ready to urge, must certainly) gain. But it is a more serious matter when we realise that we must move altogether, if we really are to move at all; i. e. really are to make progress, and not merely change, so to speak, from one foot to rest on another. For progress,—if it be what it is expected to be, and what it must be if it does what it is expected to do—is an organic, and not merely a mechanical or chemical change. A mechanical change is only a nominal or formal change: a chemical is more than change; but in organic change, that which changes also abides, and the new is not merely other than the old, and not merely a re-arrangement of the old, but the old transmuted,—the same yet not themeresame[8]. Progress in short is always the unity of differentiation and integration. It must not be an externality, nor a mere dead product of a transformation scene, but a continuous growth, inwardly digested, made part and parcel of the collective life, which it has thereby rendered more full, real, and not merely made less intense at the cost of some extension. In true progress, which is only another name for true growth, nothing is quite lost, but only changed, retained in a richer shape and a fuller reality. How far such progress is possible,except in limited and finite spheres: how far progress in one involves necessarily deterioration in another and how, therefore, progress is not attributable to the Absolute, are questions we need not here discuss. But so far at least we may go as to say that a progress which does not follow the natural law of development and carry on into the future the worth and substance of the past, is not a progress which any general enthusiasm ought to be spent upon.

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