Now we desire to treat the processes and products of Mr. Lewes's interior consciousness with entire respect. As purely ideal constructions there are none of our time better entitled to those immunities and privileges which Kant proclaimed a hundred years ago for all exercises of Pure Reason. Let each thinker, he exclaims, pursue his own path. If you attempt to coerce reason, if you raise the cry of treason to humanity, if you excite the feelings of the crowd which can neither understand nor sympathize with such subtle speculations-you will only make yourselves ridiculous. For the question does not concern the advantage or disadvantage we are expected to reap from such inquiries; the question is merely how far reason can advance in the field of speculation apart from all kinds of interest, and whether we may depend upon the exercise of speculative reason or must renounce all reliance upon it? His conclusion is, that the renunciation must be made, and that any exposure of the impotence of reason is not only to be admitted but to be welcomed. If you were to ask the dispassionate David Hume: What motive induced you to spend so much labor in undermining the persuasion that Reason is capable of assuring us of the existence of a Supreme Being? His answer would be: Nothing but the desire of teaching Reason to know its own powers better, and the internal weaknesses which it cannot but feel upon a rigid self-examination." So what remains for us is real life and the practical interests of humanity, which “are never imperilled in a purely speculative debate. For it is permissible to employ, in the presence of reason, the language of a firmly rooted faith, even after we have been obliged to renounce all pretensions to knowledge." Unquestionably Mr. Lewes's speculations are as much entitled to shelter behind the shield of the Königsberg Achilles as Hume's were. As showing "how far reason can advance in the field of speculation," and whether we must renounce all reliance upon it, there is no fault to be found with Mr. Lewes's idealism and nihilism. But Mr. Lewes's "reasoned realism" is a totally different thing; for its fundamental assumption is not the impotence but the sufficiency of reason, and its demand is for admission into and sovereignty over that very domain of real life from which Kant excluded it. Mr. Lewes is Hume

with a propaganda; his speculations upon the problems of Life and Mind are the "foundations of a creed;" we are to fashion our characters, regulate our lives, organize societies, and erect the civilization of the future upon them. It is a far cry indeed from the dispassionate speculator of the 18th century to the fervent apostle of the last quarter of the 19th, and we are hardly raising the cry of treason to humanity when we ask what sort of thing Mr. Lewes's creed is. Does his cosmological theory answer or not to the actual cosmos? Will it do for us to accept the very remarkable Phantasy which has got itself constructed in the interior chambers of Mr. Lewes's consciousness as a representation of the universe which surrounds Mr. Lewes ?

Yes, Mr. Lewes replies, it will do; for the constructions of science and philosophy, however ideal, have this saving character, that they are not formed at random like the fictions of Fairyland and Metempirics; "they are constructed in obedience to rigorous canons and moulded by the pressures of Reality." To verify them we have but to reduce them back again to the elements of sensible experience out of which they are raised, when it will be found that they constitute a science "which is rigorously exact in itself and which harmonizes with that very experience it appears to contradict." This has a most suspicious likeness to the vicious circle Mr. Spencer has been revolving in so many years, and which we had hoped to be delivered from by the virtues of the identical proposition. Given, the pressures of Reality we get the ideal constructions of science: but what is it we seek in the constructions of science? Why the pressures of Reality, for the only realism Mr. Lewes will have anything to do with is "reasoned realism." We verify our theory of the universe by reducing it to sensible experience; but that sensation which includes experience of the universe is the very thing to be verified by the theory. It was to escape this see-saw, as we supposed, that we gave up the antithesis of subject and object and fell back upon the intuition of identity, resolving mind and the world into different aspects of the same Plenum. But if the elements out of which we construct are the elements to which we resort for verification, then we are no better off than before. Here is an ex

tremely subtle and complex notion, including the constituent notions of space, time, infinity, infinite divisibility, the denial of substance and force, and others of the sort. We reduce the conception to its sensible elements. What do we gain thereby? A verification? Certainly not; we simply get the materials of construction. Where the conception has originated and how it has grown up we know; but that it is true, that the Kosmos is a Plenum we know no more than before. Having reduced the conception to its constituent sensations, there remains the task of reducing the sensations to their constituent motions, the subjective states to their objective elements; a task we have seen Mr. Lewes renounce as hopeless. A concept may be identified as a mode of feeling, but a mode of feeling can never be identified as a mode of motion. It remains, therefore, to identify motion as a mode of feeling; in which case we must recognize certain mysterious motions of Mr. Lewes's brain as the objective aspects of Mr. Lewes's conception of the Plenum; and the question then is, can such motions represent in any truthful manner at all the real world which surrounds Mr. Lewes.

It is hardly worth while to pursue any farther a discussion which threatens every moment to pass into pure burlesque. The whole truth is, that starting from Mr. Lewes's conception of the Plenum you can never reach the universe outside; or starting from the universe you can never reach the conception within, by any process of identification along the line of sensible experience. And this is so manifest that Mr. Lewes does not attempt to reduce his theory to sensible experience at all. The Plenum is simply "the unavoidable conclusion from the conception of Existence as continuous," and the continuity of Existence is "necessarily postulated" on the strength of the identical proposition that a body can act only where it is, and never where it is not. To this it is enough to reply, that the proposition is not identical; that it is not true; that if it were true it is not derived from experience; and that if it were identical Mr. Lewes as a Nihilist has no right to the use of it.

ARTICLE VIII.-ON SOME OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN ISLÂM AND CHRISTIANITY.

THE faith of Islâm, when not viewed with rancorous hatean inheritance, in part, from the times of the Crusades, and partly due to confounding the spirit of the religion itself with characteristics belonging to races which have adopted it—has been, for the most part, regarded as of only speculative interest; and inquiry has been chiefly directed to the character of Muhammad himself, as to his motives and claims. During the general darkness of the Middle Ages, the light of science and refined culture which shone forth from the seats of Muslim power, both in the West and in the East, drew to itself the attention of only a few rarely illuminated spirits of the Christian world, such as Abelard in France, and Frederick II. of Germany, who themselves, indeed, were largely indebted to Islâm for their attainments; while, so far as we know, no curiosity seems to have been directed to the investigation and explanation of that wonderful phenomenon of such brilliant light amid an otherwise universal eclipse of knowledge and refinement. Nor until within a few years has this subject been investigated with candor, and freedom from the old prejudices inherited from times of deadly conflict. But, at length, a fresh studying of the Kurân, with the opening of the mines of Muslim tradition, a more philosophical view of history, and, connected with this, an increasing appreciation of the obligations of later ages to the civilization of which Muhammad laid the foundations, have liberalized the minds of studious men; so that now Muhammad and Islâm are studied, to a good degree at least, with a simple desire to know the truth.

Meanwhile, however, the subject is assuming a more practical interest. Not only in the Turkish Empire, but in India, and even in the interior of Africa, Islâm is again becoming a living power: not that it is now rising to new importance in a political respect; in that respect it is evidently declining. European jealousies, were there no other hindrances, would

seem to preclude the possibility of the working out by the Turkish Empire, within itself, of those reforms which might secure to it renewed strength as a political power; and any reforms under European protection appear, for the same reason, equally impossible. Nor will European Powers tolerate any outburst of religious enthusiasm, among the followers of the Prophet, which seems to tend to an increase of political power. But for these very reasons the bonds of Islâm must be tightened, and the fire of religious feeling burn the more intensely in secret; so that, as, with the decline of the temporal power of the Pope, a fresh spiritual energy seems to be infused into the system of which he is the visible head, Islâm may avenge itself for its political insignificance by a revival of its power as a system of belief and practice. That this has begun to be the fact in Turkey, is fully established by observations of Mr. W. G. Palgrave, author of "Central and Eastern Arabia," in Fraser's Magazine for the year 1872-showing that schools, which were originally established for the express purpose of introducing Western ideas into the empire, bave become strictly Islâmic in their course of instruction and intent; while school-buildings of former times, made ruinous by age, as well as dilapidated mosques, are restored and reconsecrated to their objects; that a stricter temperance and observance of the rites of Islâm is practiced; and that differences of doctrine which once separated Muslims into rival schools and sects, are now subordinated to a higher unity. Nor are there wanting conversions to Islâm in Turkey, from among the various forms of Christianity there recognized, to testify yet further to the revived power of the system. The same result, from the same cause, appears also in India, where, as a number of the London Times informs us, "year after year Islâm is converting hundreds of thousands of our [the British] Indian subjects, and especially the natives of Bengal, to the faith of the Kurân. This conversion, too, not now accomplished," the writer goes on to say, "at the sword's point, but in the peaceful shadow of British rule, works a marvellous transformation in the very inmost nature of the converted. It is said that the converts to Mohammedanism who are enlisted from among the unwarlike population of Bengal-a people with a constitutional dread of