discoveries in science have been made by men of devout faith in God. And the reason of this is evident; for science in its highest range is communion with God; and its truest motto would be, "In thy light shall we see light." If there is mind in nature, which it is the object of science to reach and interpret, it is an infinite mind, whose thoughts as revealed in things are inexhaustible. "Thy thoughts, O God! are very deep," says David; and what student of nature has not found them so? Where, then, is the limit of science, if there be any, in searching out these thoughts of God? Shall we restrict our exploration to what are called material causes,(which if in the sphere of phenomena are not causes at all), and ignore any deeper or final causes? So the modern scientist asserts, but not so thought the great Sir Isaac Newton. "The principal object of natural philosophy, says this great man, is to ascend from effects to causes, even till one arrives at the first cause of all, which certainly is not mechanical, and not only to explain the mechanism of the world, but above all to resolve questions such as these: whence comes it that nature does nothing in vain; and whence springs this order and this beauty in the animal creation, which are made with so much art, and for what ends have their different parts been disposed? Has the eye been formed without any knowledge of optics, and the ear without the knowledge of acoustics? "*-questions which we refer to Mr. Tyndall to answer. * La Philosophie Anglais. See Revue des Deux Mondes for March, 1875. We append the following continuation of the above extract: "A ces questions profondes, Newton rèpondait qu'il existe un être incorporel, vivant, intelligent, omniprésent, qui dans l'espace infini, comme dans son sensorium, voit les choses en elles-mêmes, les perçoit dans leur intégrité, les comprend pleinement parce qu'elles lui sont immédiament présentes, tandisque les images seulement en sont transmises à nos sens par la perception. Dieu pour lui était non pas seulement l'âme du monde, mais le seigneur universel, яаνтократwр. La domination de l'être spirituel constitue Dieu, et Dieu à son tour, en tant qu'il dure et existe partout et toujours, constitue l'espace et la durée. L'unité de la personne humaine n'est qu'une image de l'unité de Dieu. Dieu est tout entier semblable a lui-même, et en quelque sorte tout œil, tout cerveau, tout bras, dans un sens incorporel; de même que l'aveugle n'a pas idée des couleurs, nous n'avons aucune idée de la manière dont le Seigneur souverainement sage, sent et comprend tout. Nous ne le connaissons que par sa sagesse et par l'admirable structure des choses per optimas rerum structuras. Telle est dans ses traits généraux la théologie de Newton, et nous pensons avec M. de Remusat que jamais plus grand autorité n'aura été donneé a la preuve que Kant appelait physico-theologique." Such being the nature and legitimate object of science, its affinity with religion must be manifest. For religion is also communion with God; only this communion is not limited to the thoughts of God in the physical creation, but comprehends also other and more spiritual revelations, especially those made in the Scriptures and in the human soul. To restrict religion to the region of emotion, and deny to it that of knowledge, as belonging exclusively to science, according to Mr. Tyndall, evinces a most inadequate idea of the nature of religion. Divorced from reason and knowledge religion becomes superstition. Religious faith is, in fact, the highest kind of knowledge, the knowledge of God; only this knowledge is not that of the understanding considered as a sense-faculty conversant only with things of sense or phenomena, but is that of the higher intuitional and spiritual nature, which includes the will and emotions as well as the reason. A conflict or antagonism between science and religion is only possible through a false conception of one or both, and their harmony will be brought about by holding a higher and truer idea of their essential unity, and will result in exalting and quickening the spirit of science and in broadening and enlightening that of religion. When religion shall enlarge her faith to the reception of all truth as divine, and as needful to her complete and harmonious growth and stature; and when science shall cease to be dogmatic, and be content to learn as a little child; and when it can recognize realities other than what the senses can detect or the understanding conceive and measure, and has learned the true meaning of the word cause;-in short, when it can discern a divine mind in nature, as the ground and substance of all phenomena and the constituent of all its laws and forces,-the dawn of a new Instanratio will have come. "Science then will be a precious visitant, And then, and only then, be worthy of her name." ARTICLE III.-EMPIRICAL DISSENT FROM MR. SPENCER'S PHILOSOPHY. Problems of Life and Mind. By GEORGE HENRY LEWES. First Series. The Foundation of a Creed. 2 vols. London, 1874-75. MR. GEORGE HENRY LEWES is the author of a "Biographical History of Philosophy," published in 1847, and republished afterwards under the title of "A History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte;" of special disquisitions on Comte and Aristotle; of a Life of Robespierre, the standard biography of Goethe, an essay on the Spanish Drama, a novel or two, a tragedy or two, and papers too numerous to mention on Psychology, Physiology, the Positive Philosophy, and things in general. These works have given the author a somewhat exceptional position among philosophical writers of the day, not unlike that of George Eliot the novelist, a name always mentioned by the British reviewer with bated breath, as of one whose utterances are wholly beyond the range of ordinary criticism. Not, of course, but what there are critics in plenty who venture to differ from Mr. Lewes, but that no critic is capable of the impropriety of forgetting that it is Mr. Lewes from whom he differs. Nor are we; on the contrary we record an impression derived from some acquaintance with the documents themselves that Mr. Lewes's biographies of other great men are chiefly remarkable from the instructive light they throw on the biographer-the life and works of Goethe for example serving as a kind of translucent screen through which the action of Mr. Lewes's mind glows upon us; and the History of Philosophy for its impressive disclosure of the way in which philosophic thought has ever tended, with the imperturbable gravity of natural law, from the clouds and quicksands of primeval Metempirics to the solid ground of Mr. Lewes's opinions. What those opinions are and how they have arisen we now learn in a direct and compendious manner from the latest product of Mr. Lewes's genius, the Problems of Life and Mind. It appears that so long ago as 1836 Mr. Lewes had planned a treatise on the Philosophy of Mind in which the doctrines of Reid, Stewart, and Brown were to be physiologically interpreted.* It turned out upon trial, however, that the doctrines of those misguided men were incapable of physiological interpretation, and very properly, therefore, Mr. Lewes abandoned the Scotch Philosophy to its fate. Other studies and labors intervened until 1860, when Mr. Lewes, believing that his researches into the nervous system had given him a clue through the labyrinth of mental phenomena (where the clueless Scotchmen had been lost), turned for their better interpretation to the simpler phenomena of Animal Psychology. But here, in spite of the filum labyrinthi, he was thwarted by that Minotaur which has been so fatal to theologians, to wit: Anthropomorphism; an inevitable catastrophe, "since, obviously, it is only through our knowledge of the processes in ourselves that we can interpret the manifestations of similar processes in animals"—or in gods; and hence "we are hampered by the anthropomorphic tendency which leads us to assign exclusively human motives to animal actions." Let us pause here a moment to observe that Anthropomorphism-our propensity to read ourselves into the phenomena we study has some good points about it too, although of course the kind of anthropomorphism that man has will depend very largely on the kind of man. It is this, for example, as we suggested before, which lends such charm to Mr. Lewes's biographies of Plato and Goethe. Returning from these unfortunate excursions into the Scotch Philosophy and Animal Psychology, Mr. Lewes at last began * Preface. man. The kind of philosophy a man chooses, says Fichte, depends on the kind of This is true too, although quoted by Mr. Lewes to show what a whimsical thing Metempiricism is. Fancy, says Mr. Lewes, an Evangelical Geology or a High Church Chemistry! It is to be feared that both these absurdities are on the cards; that is, each of the special sciences ends in certain generalizations, and the kind of interpretation put upon these will depend upon the kind of man. So we have what we may call the Evangelical Physics of Prof. Clerk Maxwell, and the Ultramontane Anatomy of Mr. St. Geo. Mivart, and so on. in 1862, where, perhaps it is a little surprising that he did not begin in 1836. with an investigation of the physiological mechanism of Thought and Feeling in Man, an investigation which involved a wide range of research into Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, Insanity, and the Science of Language. The immediate result of this research was the conviction that "Psychology is still without the fundamental data necessary to its constitution as a science is very much in the condition of chemistry before Lavoisier, or of Biology before Bichat." Perhaps the first impulse of the reader on hearing this confession will be to say that Mr. Lewes has come to grief again; that his investigation of the physiological mechanism of Feeling and Thought begun in 1862 has borne no better fruit than his physiological interpretation of the Scotch Philosophy in 1836, or his investigation of Animal Pyschology in 1860. But a little reflection will suggest that if researches into Physiology at last authorize Mr. Lewes to affirm that Psychology lacks the necessary data for its constitution as a science, it must be that Physiology is in possession of the data itself. If as yet we have no Science of Mind it is for the sufficient reason that we have gone on looking for the data of the science where they are not to be found. From Socrates to the year of grace 1862 Psychologists have been groping among the phenomena of consciousness, its sensations, perceptions, memories, ideas, intuitions, for the wherewithal to interpret consciousness. mind is only a special form of life, and "life" is only our comprehensive abstract term for the functions of an organism. Now functions are determined by structure, and he who would constitute a Science of Biology, or of Psychology, must go for his fundamental data, not to Vitality, or Life, as biologists did before Bichat, or to Mind, as Psychologists did before Mr. Lewes, but to the organism itself, whose various reactions under stimulus on the surrounding universe are what we call in our abstract, comprehensive way, "life," and "mind." This is a momentous discovery on either side of it. If Psychology must draw on Physiology for its data and if Physiology is able to honor the draft; if it be really true that "function" knows how to interpret "structure," or, conversely, that structure has among other functions this one of self-consciousness and self But |