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 con ception 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

physical danger, which Europeans can scarcely understandassume with their new faith a hardihood which would make them dangerous enemies and priceless allies." Singular exemplification, at this present day, of that wonderfully energizing influence which made the first followers of Muhammad the conquerors of the world! From Africa, too, come reports, as stated by Palgrave, "of whole Negro tribes abandoning their hereditary fetish for the religion called of Abraham; and, after all due allowance made for distance and exaggeration, the cur rent idea that the Libyan Peninsula will soon be what its best portions in North and East already are, a land of Islâm, seems by no means destitute of probability."*

The faith of Islâm, then, is no longer a theme for closet-speculation alone, but one which has to do with present interests of humanity, and those hopes, authorized by the past history of mankind, which are bound up in the widening spread of Christian civilization; and so we hope it may not be deemed untimely to direct attention to some views of Islâm in its relations to Christianity, and to some suggestions bearing upon a possible conflict between the two, in the near future, to be waged by other than material weapons. An oriental by birth, and a Muslim in faith, Syed Ameer Ali, concludes, indeed, a "Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mohammed," published in London in 1874, with these note-worthy words: "Let us hope that the time is approaching when Islâm, freed from the blind idolatry of letters and apotheosis of dead men, will regain her true character, and, joining hands with the Christianity of the devoted Prophet of Nazareth, will march on together in the work of civilization. Islâm and Christianity both aim at the same results-the elevation of mankind. The gain of the one is the gain of the other. Why, then, should the two be hostile to each other? Why should not the two harmonize? Islâm has done no evil to the world, nor has Christianity. Both have conferred the greatest benefits on mankind. Why, then, should not the two, mixing the waters

* For facts respecting the propagation of Islâm in the interior of Africa at the present day, see, further, R. Bosworth Smith's Mohammed and Mohammedanism, a work published since most of this article was written, the candid spirit of which we take this opportunity heartily to commend.