assumption. The reference does not warrant their assumption. The highest warranty which it yields against them is that their faculties, either through defect of original endowment, or, more probably, through lack of employment and opportunity of employment, are not generally as good as ours. In any case, although the Australian Bushman is not as strong in the Multiplication Table as a clerk in Threadneedle Street, it should never enter into anybody's head to suppose from such a disparity that he is not homogeneous with the Londoner. The great and all-important fact to be noted is that in as far as the Bushman understands the Multiplication Table, he is in absolute agreement with the Threadneedle Street man concerning it, and can count his breakfast eggs as well as anybody. In a word, the utmost disparity in mere degree or quality of the mental endowment, appears to be absolutely consonant with complete homogeneity of species. The greatest dunce is not opposed to, but is merely the intellectual inferior of, Newton. Again, we all know beyond question, that we can feel hunger, or thirst, or satiety; and that we desire, or do not desire, certain things. The jams and jellies of the world are much sought after; there is no great demand for pemmican. We know that there are odours so sweet as to seem wafted from Heaven; others that might make a cripple run. We know that we may respond to, appreciate, admire, love or adore certain persons, or properties, or things; or the contrary. 1 The Australian Bushman has been infamously slandered and libelled by superficial observers. See "The Position of the Australian Aborigines in the Scale of Human Intelligence," by the Hon. J. Mildred Creed: Nineteenth Century, January 1905, pp. 89-96. The Human Race, too, are quite homogeneous in their vices as well as in their virtues. A West-Indian negress will address her mistress thus :- "Missus, dere's a lady at de back door wants you to gib her a pair of old boots." "Dat lady hab basket of eggs to sell." Mrs. Blake: "In the Bahamas," Nineteenth Century, May 1888, p. 686-exactly as the British domestic servant of to-day may announce 66 ‘a gentleman at the back-door" selling laces or knife-polish. We know that within indefinite limits we can do, or refrain from doing, certain actions; choose, or refrain from choosing, to perform them; but we also know at the same time that outside an indefinite limit, we have no choice whatever. Will we, or nill we, we proceed from youth to middle age; from middle age to old age. We know that we were born and that we are more than likely to die, despite any wishes we may have to the contrary. Anybody knows that he may go out into the street and throw his hat up into the air, but that, on the other hand, even if he does so, he will not be able to prevent it from coming down again. "All man's diligence is idle, When against a greater power The knowledge involved herein of what we may do and not do, yields more authentic and overwhelming evidence of the freedom of the human mind than any library of dubitational, deterministic or fatalistic volumes can disturb. Indeed, all such knowledge may, I think, be regarded as quite beyond dispute; thoroughly authentic and reliable,— notwithstanding the fact that so great a multitude of philodoxers have denied it, or tried to create doubts about it. 7. The Known in Morals especially.-And from our consciousness of knowledge and freedom of choice and action, we have our knowledge of rightness or wrongness in the moral sense, with the concomitant convictions of personal credit or blame extending to our conduct. In short, we know that man is a rational and moral being potentially. That is to say, he knows that he may be rational and moral if he chooses. When a person does. not really know this, a lunatic asylum or a jail is the right receptacle for him. Apart from the possibility of morality, life would resolve itself into a mere contest between cunning and brute strength. 1 Calderon Life is a dream, 3. 13. A profound mistake made by the Historian, Gibbon.Indeed there is no end to the importance of the laws and facts which we do actually know; no end to the intrinsic significance of the laws and facts about which we have no doubt whatever. Some of the very greatest things are very easily known. "Wisdom is often nearer when we stoop We have completely subverted the truth when we run away with the too common fancy that Reason has to deal only with small things. For example, take the following sentence from Gibbon touching the early Christians:"The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their souls; and it is well known that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us with rapid violence over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes."1 The historian could scarcely have run wider of the truth. In moral questions, Reason can have no liking whatever for "cold mediocrity." Such a liking were highly irrational. Reason according to the Common-Sense method of computation, seeks for the sublimest things,—strives after perfection,-can be contented with nothing short of such striving. Brown is a dunce if he has no desire for perfection; for I take moral perfection to be nothing more nor less than an absolute harmony between thinking (ie. Reason) and living; and it is surely Brown's plain duty to live in harmony with his best thoughts. As this is a matter of boundless importance, we will view it more closely. The aim of the lover of wisdom. I take it that the aim of the true philosopher, or lover of wisdom, must be the perfecting of his whole being in all its powers and capacities; all these powers and capacities being rightly ordinated, co-ordinated, and subordinated in their relation1 Decline and Fall, vol. ii. p. 317. ship to each other. For it is to be noted that the lower senses, in themselves, are not sinful, as so many of the theologians seem to hold, neither are the passions. Take the passion of anger. How proper on many occasions! 1 Indeed the man who cannot be very angry on fit occasion, is not likely to possess a very tender faculty of love. But indubitably it is for intelligence to govern this and all other passions. Every other part of our nature should submit-even for its own advantage, to be governed by intelligence. "The people that doth not understand shall fall." Every man should toil to understand, as a matter of primary duty, and to govern himself by intelligence, even as for his chief interest. Perverse doctrines of any kind will generally be found to be distortions due to sin and ignorance. The intellect itself does not readily-if at all, consent to error. We begin life amid a complexus of ignorance, falsehood, passion, and weakness-not organically defective, but intellectually and morally confused. It is the work -the sacred work of intelligence to know, and, by knowledge, to dissipate ignorance, quell and regulate the passions, and clarify the soul from their disturbing, distorting and illegitimate influences. This is the proper task of man-to cleanse and govern himself. Until the soul be thus cleansed and governed, it cannot see clearly and act rightly. This is the chief problem of civilisation-not to develop new organs, as is implied in the jargon of the evolutionists, but to cultivate the organs which we already possess to the highest pitch of which they are capable. We may indeed invent new tools, but it would take a crazy man to suppose that he can evolve a new organ. "It is meet to let loose one's anger against a person incontinently sinful, and past all exhortation depraved. On which account we have seen that the good man ought to be conspicuous for possessing a spirit, and yet to be on each occasion, mild." Plato: The Laws, Bk. v. c. iv. Christ, the Philosopher of Philosophers. Accepting this view of the case, it appears probable that no other than Christ Himself was the Philosopher of Philosophers; for it should be noticed that the object of the Christian. Gospel was not to furnish men with new faculties nor even to save them in the sense of rescuing a dog from drowning (as so many of the theologians seem to accept it), but rather to induce us to make proper use of the faculties which we do possess; to seek after certain "unsearchable riches," and to be "filled with all the fulness of God"-that was, to attain if possible, to the utmost perfection of which our being was capable. Man stands in no need of Darwinian evolution, but in great need of intellectual education and of severe moral drill and discipline. The Darwinian faith can do nothing for a man. A moral Gospel may renovate his whole being. Morality is the very oxygen of social life. God, we have no hope but in morals. Under The value of a Philosophy or a Theology determinable by its practical worth.-Briefly, the value of a philosophy or a theology, as of anything else, may be gauged by its actual, i.e. by its practical worth. The true philosopher is mainly interested in all those questions in which Smith and Brown ought to be mainly interested, and should pay almost no attention to the specialities of pedants and philodoxers. Indeed, the only true philosopher is the man who actually does what he ought to do. It must be the very highest work of the philosopher and the theologian to ascertain, as it must be their noblest mission to teach and impress upon people, or rather to educe from their inner consciousness, the great facts and laws of human nature and human life. Unfortunately they have been too much accustomed not to observe those great facts and laws-e.g. those of our moral nature; and have too frequently made the disastrous mistake of attempting to make such facts |