XVI.

SHORT NOTES ON LONG QUESTIONS.

NO. I.-A HINT FROM LORD BACON.

MAY 1866.

A PASSAGE in Lord Bacon's "Essay on Truth" has often afforded me a good deal of amusement. He says, speaking of a certain class of people: "There be that delight in giddinesse; and count it a bondage to fix a beleefe; affecting freewill in thinking as well as in acting." I do not know that we do very often, in these days, meet with people of this sort, an affectation, at least, of rationality having become the fashion; but the idea of them seems to haunt my fancy, and in imagination I have often made their acquaintance. Surely it would be a pleasant refreshment, after a hard day's work amidst realities, to pass an hour with a friend who thought just as he chose, and verily asserted as his sincere belief whatever pleased him best. It would be as good as a trip to fairyland; and, indeed, in fairyland (where we must be excused for transporting the reader in such haste) we might imagine ourselves confronting a being who not only assumed, but really did possess freewill in thinking. I think it is worth our while to try and conceive him- a person with all the outward form and figure of a man, called upon to fulfil life's duties, yet with a notion that two and two might make five when convenient, and that if it suited him best, to-morrow would obligingly come before to-day.

Let us conceive the man, moreover, proud of this power of thinking as he liked, and supposing it the true intellectual prerogative of manhood; drawing advantageous contrasts between himself, whose thoughts were free, and the poor creatures who could think only in one way. Imagine him feeling himself to be not wanting, but in possession of, a power. That would really be freewill in thinking. And it would be, as we see, simply the absence of the rational nature of man; it would be a seeming power coming into existence by a want. The true faculty of thought is based upon necessity, it has no freedom but in the inevitable fulfilment of law, choice is its death. Our man, endowed with a freewill in thinking and proud of it, is precisely, so far as reason is concerned, an idiot.

It is worth our while, I say, to imagine this picture, because perhaps there is another which may be put by the side of it, and that picture is ourselves. This I affirm, that man, in his seeming prerogative of freewill in acting, is the spiritual idiot of the universe, and that the power of acting rightly or wrongly, as we choose, is no other thing than the want of the true spiritual nature. It is the nature of action, as of thought, to be necessary; nor has it, nor can it have, other freedom than in a fulfilment of law, inevitable and without possibility of deviation.

Our freewill is simply the expression of a want in man. We are proud of our arbitrary power of doing, as an idiot might be proud of his arbitrary power of believing.

Two objections, however, immediately appear to rise against this view, one, that as a matter of fact, our freewill or power of moral choice is the distinction which raises us above the things around us. We are superior to things, if not exclusively, at least pre-eminently, in being called upon to take our stand for right or wrong;

The second

and if we were not, we were no longer men. objection is like unto the first, and is, that to conceive our action made necessary is to conceive it reduced to passiveness, and make our deeds truly our acts no more.

To these two objections the answer is one. Our action, although arbitrary, does elevate us above things which have no relation, not even a defective one, to action; as even an arbitrary power of thinking would elevate its possessor above things which have no relation whatever to thought. An idiot, though in the full sense he cannot be called a man, is, at least, more than a stone. We may say of him that he ought to be a man,

And so we may say of ourselves.

We are legitimately proud of our arbitrary action because the true action is not presented to us wherewith to compare our own; so might an arbitrary thinker be legitimately proud if the range of his experience presented to him no thinkers in the true sense of the word. Nor, doubtless, can our false pride cease even to be legitimate, so long as our sensuous apprehensions bound the scope of our thoughts. But it is seen in its true light when we suffer them to rise where our own best experience and our religious faith unite to call them. Of action that is necessary, and yet not passive, that is most perfect because necessary, we do know. We ascribe it to God; it is His great prerogative with whom "it is impossible to lie." It may baffle conception, but it is not hard to faith; even to the heart it is easy also, for in our own experience we almost know it too. In our best moments, when God's lovingkindness shines on us most brightly, does He not seem almost to share His own privilege with us, and show us how necessity and action are at one in Him? He makes them one in us, banishing choice,

making choice hateful to us, by a compulsion which is not bondage, a necessity we recognise as Freedom.

The standard that we take determines our feeling here; and for the standard of humanity we look in vain if we do not look to God.

Necessity and action, then, truly are one and not opposed; the type of action is God's action. The want that is in us making our action arbitrary, and the limitation of our sensible experience which presents to our eyes no action of the perfect type, have imposed on us the contrary thought, from which, surely, sincerely to reflect is to be free.

One or two thoughts may be added. The argument rests on the basis of a want in our own nature; it is enough to say, surely, that this is a known fact; we make no assumption to meet the exigencies of the case. If human life has any significance, if the human heart and conscience are not dreams, it is a "true cause "that we assign. We have said, too, that the seeming possession of a power comes by an absence; to this also manifold experience testifies; not to refer to more instances than one, how much false feeling of greatness comes by mere absence of humility.

And finally, what would come of the possession of an arbitrary power of thinking? What but just that which does come from arbitrary power of acting ?-failure, loss, grievous error, distress, ruin. And what remedy, but in learning to think as thought would be if its necessity were not wanting; and then, if it so might be, the restoration of the intellectual life?—our remedies, through God's goodness: first, learning to act as if necessity were, where alas! it is not, and in the end the raising up-how can we say it, but-to Life?

NO. II.-A FRAGMENT ON FRAGMENTS.

JUNE 1866.

KNOWLEDGE comes to us piecemeal. If we look at a child we see that it learns by the gradual accumulation of minute items of intelligence, which its little faculties must be often sorely taxed so to put together as to make any reason out of the world at all. And when men address themselves seriously to the task of understanding things in any other than a childish way, they find that they have the child's task again—to learn to interpret fragments. For may not Science be altogether thus described? And unscientific fancies, what are they but fragmentary impressions reasoned on as if they constituted wholes? The floating of a feather, for example, is but a fragment of the great phenomenon of weight; the tides are another fragment of the same; the planetary motions exhibit yet another. Fire is a fragment of chemical affinity; respiration another fragment; the rusting of our knives another; light, heat, music, are fragments again, fragments of one thing-vibration. if we went on through the entire domain of Science, we should surely find that it might all be thus described it is the interpreting of fragments. If, indeed, we consider, do we not see that it must be so ? Our perceptions must be partial, our consciousness fragmentary, by the very limits which constitute us what we are. Nor need we in the least degree complain (nor indeed do we); for if we have but fragments to begin with, these fragments yield us in the end very satisfactory results, and much pleasure in their attainment. Our faculties are precisely adapted exquisitely adjusted, indeed, it seems to us, if we had time to pursue the subject, to the work they are called upon to perform. The interpretation of fragments

So,