little distance from the plant, and watering the stick. Would that make the plant grow?

Here, then, is the answer to the question. No end can be attained without means to that end; and the greater the end, the wider, the more numerous the means to it. To sow, to build, to manufacture, require labour both in their accomplishment and in the process of acquiring them. If you wish to become a musician, the means widen almost to infinity; they vary for every individual; they cannot be stated in words. Musicianship is rather a state of the soul which grows from employing all the means that a life can lay hold of. And love also is a condition of the soul. We might say, 'Love your neighbour; and, as a means to loving him, try to act as if you did." But even that would be imperfect, for the means to loving are infinite. What are they then? Everything—all that surrounds our existence, whether within us or without. Acting as if you loved your neighbour, in so far as that is possible, is at least one of the means to loving him,-invaluable, but not to be laid an undue stress upon, lest men should mistake it for an end-invaluable in a moral point of view, if we use it as a means only, remembering that it is one amidst very many.

And one more question suggests itself. Is it possible for men to love? On the other hand, Is it possible for men not to love?

Look what experience teaches. Of old, men's love for God lay crushed beneath the pressure of ceremonial duties which they thought they owed to Him. Because and inasmuch as we (through Christ) have swept all these away and given back to love its rightful throne, our hearts, which they had usurped-in so far as we have done this (if the rest is equal) our love exceeds the love of bygone ages.

Let man lay hold upon the moral law-the moral law we call it, because there is no other, because all others lie beyond the domain of morals altogether; and let every individual find the means to obey it in all the facts that surround his existence.

XXI.

WHAT WE CAN KNOW.1

1868.

Ir is a common fact of experience that our senses give us only appearances of things, which appearances differ from the things themselves in many important points. Our impressions are determined or modified by subjective elements which may be either positive or negative. For instance, we see light and colour which have no existence apart from the eye that sees, because it is the nature of our vision to be thus affected by certain vibrations of an ethereal fluid; here our impressions are positively modified.

Again, we see objects smaller as they recede into the distance; here our perceptions undergo a negative modification. Or again, a morbid condition of the subject may introduce a further subjective element into his consciousness, and cause the world to appear other than it is. Thus to the blind man the world is dark. If all men were blind they would probably never discover that there was anything amiss in their condition.

It is necessary for those so affected that their condition and the truth of things which it conceals from them should be "revealed" by some being not suffering from the same defect.

The following are notes of the lecture referred to p. 229 of "Life and Letters of James Hinton."

The word "appearance" is not to be limited to the impressions made upon sight. All our senses present objects to us under similar subjective modifications. We are naturally inclined to conceive of the sense of touch as presenting to us a truer idea of Nature than the others, but the fact is that in none of the senses is there a larger admixture of subjective elements, for in touch we are conscious of putting forth activity, and it is the resistance to this pushing and pulling of ours which gives us the notion of solidity. It is easy to see that touch, no more than sight, gives us the true nature of objects. Water, for instance, is constantly evaporating into air, and thus becoming impalpable to touch. Touch would thus tell us that water had ceased to exist when it was really there under a changed form. If man had no faculties but the senses, these "appearances" of the physical world would be to him the sole realities, and he would probably be haunted by no misgivings respecting their actual existence. But he has another power-intellect by means of which he can derive accurate knowledge from the inaccurate testimony of the senses. It is the function of the intellect to interpret the appearance of things, though it is true that man did not at first put his intellect to this use.

The Greek philosophers, who of all men might be supposed most capable of discovering the province of the intellect (if the world had been ripe for the discovery), distinctly taught that the physical world was not according to reason; it was, in fact, an absurd world; and Socrates dissuaded his disciples from the study of material phenomena on this ground, bidding them turn their attention rather to Ethics and the improvement of social life. The beginning and ending of things was the great puzzle to them. Reason refused to justify such an existence: it

demanded the alávios, the Eternal. Plato and others therefore imagined their "intelligible world" to satisfy the demands of the reason, using their intellect to speculate instead of to judge. The application of intellect to its true function of interpreting appearances has been the work of Science. When once it became accepted as a truth that the fact of Nature was according to reason, the dicta of Reason came to have an objective validity, and if any phenomenon seemed to contradict them, it was set down therefore as an appearance merely. The appearance might be unreasonable, the fact could not be. But observe, the intellect did not go forth ready-made to its work-it was, as it were, created in doing this very work. (This has its parallel in the animal structure, the organs do not precede the functions, but are made, so to speak, in the discharge of those functions.) The work of Science has in our day obtained a completeness which is attested by the convergence of its various branches of investigation in the doctrine of the "Correlation of the forces." And now, in its maturity, Science repeats on a higher octave of experience the truth with which it set out, “We do not yet know the true existence." To the last residuum of scientific analyses, there still remain subjective elements which have reduced the whole physical world—the cause of such manifold sensations-to mere matter and motion. But in these there are the subjective constituents of space and time, which have been proved to have no objective existence.

Again, force is a conception altogether based upon our sensation of exertion, and can no more be proved to exist in Nature apart from ourselves than luminousness could. The conception of nature as matter and force is in fact but an indorsement by the intellect of the sensuous impressions of touch which (ut supra) of all the