evil." In this last, then-in this habit of mind, the beauty consists. But will the Professor say that the man got himself into this state without previous acts of conscious will? Can a man love justice without being able to distinguish between the just and unjust? if he loves moral beauty, must he not know it?

Professor Huxley does not, I believe, mean what he says when he asserts that acts may be moral which are not directed to a good end. Were it so, such words as "virtue" and "goodness" would have no rational and logical place in his vocabulary.

Similarly, I do not believe him when he says he "utterly rejects" the distinction between "material" and "formal" morality. I do not, because he has elsewhere asserted that "our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events." If, however, he rejects the distinction he says he rejects, he thereby absolutely denies every element of freedom and spontaneity to the human will, and reduces our volition to a rank in the " course of events," which counts for no more than the freedom of a match as to ignition, when placed within the flame of a candle. With the enunciation of this view, "formal morality" most certainly falls, and together with it every word denoting "virtue," which thus becomes a superfluous synonym for pleasure and expediency.

Adverting now to the question of "reason," according to Professor Huxley (p. 463), "ratiocination is resolvable into predication, and predication consists in marking, in some way, the succession, the likeness and unlikeness, of things or their ideas. Whatever does this, reasons; and if a machine produces these effects of reason, I see no more ground for denying to it the reasoning power, because it is unconscious, than I see for refusing to Mr. Babbage's engine the title of a calculating machine on the same grounds.”

"Thus it seems to me that a gamekeeper reasons, whether he is conscious or unconscious, whether his reasoning is carried on by neurosis alone, or whether it involves more or less psychosis.'

According to my idea of the matter, predication essentially consists not in marking "succession, likeness and unlikeness," but in recognising these relations as true.

To this extent I may shelter myself under the authority of Mr. John Stuart Mill. Mr. Mill, in criticising Sir William Hamilton's definition of judgment, makes the following remarks ("Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy," p. 346):

...

"The first objection which, I think, must occur to anyone, on the contemplation of this definition, is that it omits the main and characteristic element of a judgment and of a proposition. . . . When we judge or assert, there is introduced a new element, that of objective reality, and a new mental fact, belief. Our judgments, and the assertions which express them, do not enunciate our mere mode of mentally conceiving things, but

our conviction or persuasion that the facts as conceived actually exist; and a theory of judgments and propositions which does not take account of this, cannot be a true theory. In the words of Reid I give the name of judgment to every determination of the mind concerning what is true or what is false. This, I think, is what logicians, from the days of Aristotle, have called judgment.' And this is the very element which Sir Wm. Hamilton's definition" [and I may now add Professor Huxley's also] "omits from it."

Further on Mr. Mill says:

Belief is an essential element in a judgment. . . . The recognition of it as true is not only an essential part, but the essential element of it as a judgment; leave that out, and there remains a mere play of thought, in which no judgment is passed. It is impossible to separate the idea of judgment from the idea of the truth of a judgment; for every judgment consists in judging something to be true. The element belief, instead of being an accident which can be passed in silence, and admitted only by implication, constitutes the very difference between a judgment and any other intellectual fact, and it is contrary to all the laws of definition to define judgment by anything else. The very meaning of a judgment or a proposition is something which is capable of being believed or disbelieved; which can be true or false; to which it is possible to say yes or no."

In addition to this, Mr. Mill, in his notes on his father's, Mr. James Mill's, "Analysis of the Human Mind," ably shows, against Mr. Herbert Spencer, that rational belief cannot be explained as being identical with indissoluble association (vol. i. p. 402).

In denying, then, reason to brutes-in denying that their acts are rational, I do not, of course, deny for a moment that they are rational in the sense in which Mr Babbage's machine is calculating, but what I do maintain is, that brutes have not the power of forming judgments in the sense above explained. And I still more emphatically deny that brutes have any, even the very dimmest, consciousness of such ideas as "ought" and moral excellence. And because I further believe that no amount of sensible experiences can generate these conceptions, I deny that any brute is eren potentially a moral agent. Those who credit brutes with "morality," do so by first eliminating from that idea all its essential characteristics.

One word now of explanation. Professor Huxley seems much disturbed at my speaking of virtue as, in his view, a kind of retrieving, and accuses me of imposing an "injurious nickname," and making a "joke." Nothing could have been further from my intention than either one or the other. As it happens the expression was not my own, but was picked up in conversation with as thorough a Darwinian even as Professor Huxley himself, who used it, as I understood, not as a nickname, but as a handy mode of bringing home his conceptions to my mind. I made use of it in all innocence, and I still think it singularly apt and appropriate, not certainly to express the conception

of virtue, but to bring home the utilitarian notion of it. Professor Huxley says, "What if it is? Does that make it less virtue ?" I answer, unhesitatingly, that it not only makes it "less virtue," but prevents its being virtue at all, unless it springs as a habit acquired from self-conscious acts directed towards an end recognised as good. Professor Huxley regrets that I should "eke out" my arguments against the views he patronises, by ascribing to them" logical consequences which have been over and over again proved not to flow from them." But it was to be expected that a disciple of Mill,* such as Professor Huxley, would know that in matters of this kind it is impossible to reason à posteriori, on account of the complexity of the conditions; and that the à priori argument, by deductions from inevitable tendencies, can be alone employed. If Professor Huxley is persuaded of the evil consequences of Christianity, I am equally persuaded of the evil consequences of his system.

No one has a greater esteem for Professor Huxley than I have, and no one is more convinced than I am of the uprightness of his intentions and his hearty sympathy with self-denying virtue. Nevertheless, the principles he unhappily advocates cannot but tend, by a fatal necessity, in one direction, and to produce results socially, politically, and morally, which he would be the first to deplore. They tend in the intellectual order to the degradation of the mind, by the essential identification of thought with sensation, and in the political order to the evolution of horrors worse than those of the Parisian Commune. I refrain from characterizing their tendency in the moral order.

Before concluding, I must make one observation with regard to Mr. Wallace. I emphatically disclaim having had any intention of depreciating obliquely Mr. Darwin, though I desired to do justice to Mr. Wallace. It is an undoubted fact that there are many men who, if they had thought out natural selection simultaneously with Mr. Darwin, would have clamorously sought a recognition of the fact,

* In speaking of the application of the experimental method to social science, Mr. Mill remarks:-" This mode of thinking is not only general with practitioners in politics, and with that very numerous class who (on a subject which no one, however ignorant, thinks himself incompetent to discuss) profess to guide themselves by common sense rather than by science; but is often countenanced by persons with greater pretensions to instruction As, however, the notion of applicability of experimental methods to political philosophy cannot co-exist with any just conception of these methods themselves, the kind of arguments from experience which the chemical theory brings forth as its fruits (and which form the staple, in this country especially, of parliamentary and hustings oratory), are such as, at no time since Bacon, would have been admitted to be valid in chemistry itself, or in any other branch of experimental science.” (Mill's "Logic," vol. ii. p. 454.) "It is evident that Sociology, considered as a system of deductions à priori, cannot be a science of positive predictions, but only of tendencies." (Op. cit. p. 477.)

and have lost no opportunity of asserting simultaneity. No one can affirm that Mr. Wallace has shown the faintest inclination of the kind, while no one can deny that if he had followed the clamorous path, his name would have been more widely known and more popularly associated with natural selection than has been, in fact, the case.

It is a gratuitous assertion on the part of Professor Huxley to say I have suggested that Mr. Darwin's eminence is due to Mr. Wallace's modesty, in any other sense than what I have now explained— namely, that had Mr. Wallace put himself more prominently forward, he would have been seen more distinctly by the popular eye, an assertion no one can question.

As a fact, I believe that Mr. Wallace, in the passage quoted by Professor Huxley, allows his modesty to deceive him. From what I know of Mr. Wallace, I venture to affirm he underrates his powers, and I am convinced he could have written as good a defence of natural selection as even the "Origin of Species." There are not wanting those who, though they have carefully studied Mr. Darwin's work, only fully understood his theory when presented to their mind in the clear, lucid, and admirable writings of Mr. Wallace.

ST. GEORGE MIVART.

THE

HE critic who would find some single expression which resumes the tendency of each of an artist's works, or an expression which resumes the tendency of all his works taken together, is commonly engaged in falsifying the truth of criticism, and in all cases runs a risk of losing the faithfulness of sympathy, the disengagedness of intelligence, the capacity for assuming various spiritual attitudes which should belong to him. A man will not be comprehended in a formula, nor will the work of a man. But in the case of Milton, and those who resemble him in his method as an artist, this doctrinaire style of criticism is at least not illegitimate. No poem, of course, is reducible to an abstract statement or idea; yet the statement, the idea, may be the germ from which the poem has sprung. A tree glorious with all its leaves and blossoming is much more than the seed in which it lay concealed; yet from the seed, with favourable earth and skies, it grew. Milton never sang as the bird sings, with spontaneous pleasure, through an impulse unobserved and unmodified by the intellect. The intention of each poem is clearly conceived by himself; the form is elaborated with a conscious study of effects. There is in him none of the delicious imprévu of Shakspeare. Milton's nature never reacted simply and directly, finding utterance in a lyrical cry, when impressions from the world of nature or of society aroused the faculty of song. The reaction was