to say something which gave him pain, and said, "That is the faith of half the Christian world. You have been telling me lately that the people who profess to believe the Bible don't seem to be on the whole much the better for it; so I brought you this book, just that you might see what it is they do believe, and why they are not the better for it." He added that his reason for being so desirous to do something for the advance of the science of logic was that, if it were in a right state, every one would be able to see that the historical evidence for the truth of the Bible is worth nothing; and then people would be driven to choose between having faith in God, and having no religion at all. Before proceeding further with these notes on home thoughts, I may quote a few passages from published expressions of my husband's, relative to science on the popular plane, bearing in mind. what was said by a notable thinker to the editor of a periodical a dozen years ago, respecting the exponent of the "Laws of Thought:" "He would be a bold, even a rash man, who should venture to invite readers of serials to peruse in abstract the deep issues of B's intellect." I may sketch incidentally some of his results in logic and mathematics, but as these papers are mainly on thought in private life, it may be appropriate to give my husband's notions with regard to the "Social Aspects of Intellectual Culture": 'Disapproves that care, though wise in show, That with superfluous burdens loads the day, And when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.' He does not tell his friend that he is to neglect the duties of a scholar, for that seems to have been the special vocation of the man, and of a patriot. But he reminds him that there is a time for other things than these-a time for those delights which have been annexed to the companionship of our fellow-creatures-delights the capability of feeling which makes man preeminently a social being. The words of our great poet admit of a wider application than was directly intended for them. The labours and cares of life must, perhaps always, engross our chief attention. And there may be times which add to this ordinary weight of care a special burden of their own. Milton's friend lived in such times, and we, it seems not unlikely, are entering upon a similar period. To the increased pressure upon the means of life are now added anxious solicitudes about our country, the interests of liberty in Europe, And what the Swede intends, and what the French. Cast down by such thoughts, we may need to be reminded that when we have done all that we can do to provide, as members of families, for the interests of those dependent upon us, as citizens, for the honour and welfare of the State, one business of life yet remains, and that is, to live.' include under this term the cultivation of our faculties and of our being, the delights of human fellowship, the innocent enjoyment of those good things which have been provided for us in the works of nature and of art. I I would begin by asking you what we mean when we speak of the human Is it merely so many men and women, isolated units of humanity; some dwelling in this quarter of the race. globe, and some in that; some enjoying their brief tenure of existence under one of the great planetary cycles, and some under another? You may have stood on a summer's day by some placid lake, and observed, as a light breeze swept by, raising its surface into ripples, how, in obedience to a physical law, each wavelet pursues its own course without interfering with, or in any way influencing the others. You may, in particular, have noticed how, when reflected back from the shore, they cross and override those which they meet, but still without mutual disturbance, until they are finally lost and no trace of them is left. Now, can this be taken as a just emblem of human life? Are we who are assembled here, and all who in past ages have felt the joys and sorrows of humanity, but mimic billows upon the sea of time which follow in perfect independence their several tracks, and then dying away leave its surface as if they had never been? I suppose you will agree that this would not be a true picture of our state and condition here. You will be conscious of the existence of bonds by which each age and each country stand connected with all others. You will feel that there is such a thing as humanity. I would beg most distinctly to say that I do not use this term in a sense in which it has sometimes been employed of late, and which seems designed to imply that there is nothing higher and greater than the collective race of man. Perhaps it is in the thought that there does exist an Intelligence and Will superior to our own,—that the evolutions of the destinies of our species are not solely the product either of human waywardness or of human wisdom; perhaps, I say, it is in this thought that the conception humanity attains its truest dignity. When, therefore, I use this term, I would be understood to mean by it the human race, viewed in that mutual connexion and dependence which has been established, as I firmly believe, for the accomplishment of a purpose of the Divine Mind. of And having said this, rather with a view to prevent any possible misconception, than because I think such a theme proper to be discussed upon the present occasion,-I remark that one eminent instance of that connexion and dependence to which I have referred, is to be seen in the progression of the arts and sciences. Each generation as it passes away bequeaths to its successor not only its material works in stone and marble, in brass and iron, but also the truths which it has won, and the ideas which it has learned to conceive; its art, literature, science, and, to some extent, its spirit and morality. This perpetual transmission of the light of knowledge and civilisation has been compared to those torch races of antiquity in which a lighted brand was transmitted from one runner to another until it reached the final goal. Thus it has been said do generations succeed each other, borrowing and conveying light, receiving the principles of knowledge, testing their truth, enlarging their application, adding to their number, and then transmitting them forward to coming generations Et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt. Now, this connexion between intellectual discovery and the progressive history of our race, gives to every stage of the former a deep human interest. Each new revelation, whether of the laws of the physical universe, of the principles of art, or of the great truths of morals and of politics, is a step not only in the progress of knowledge, but also in the history of our species. Could we trace back our intellectual pedigree, if you will permit me to use such an expression, we should find ourselves connected by that noblest of all lines of descent, with every nation and kindred of men that has occupied a place in history, and with many others, of whose names and deeds no record survives. We should see the picturewriting, most probably, of some forgotten Asiatic tribe, passing through successive stages, analogous to those which are still preserved in the monuments of Egypt, until among the Phoenician people it gave birth to our present system of letters. We should behold the first principles of our science, and much more than the first principles of our literature and philo sophy, emerging into light among those isles of Greece which seem to have been the chosen home of freedom and of genius in the ancient world. To the same source we should trace back whatever is most refined in the art of the sculptor, and no small portion of the science of the architect. To the Romans, above all others, we should find ourselves indebted for the principles of government and law. Theirs was even less the genius of conquest than of empire and rule; and the system of jurisprudence which they have left is still, in the opinion of some, their noblest monument. To the Arabians we owe our numerals, and through this the science of arithmetic. And beside these more distinct portions of the inheritance which has been transmitted to us from ages past, and of which the enumeration is far from being complete, how many customs, thoughts, and opinions, how many silent influences for good or for evil, do we not unconsciously owe ! As respects the larger and more definite accessions to which I have referred, it would almost seem as if the law of human progression were this that to different sections of the one great family of man, different measures of special capacity were assigned, so that each, while fulfilling its own destiny, should also add to the common stock of intellectual wealth. I conceive the Greek art to be an eminent illustration of this principle, though others, scarcely less signal, might be adduced. Thus, it has been doubted whether we could, in the present day, originate that union of wildness and romantic beauty, of grotesqueness and grandeur, which constitutes the predominant character of Gothic architecture. I can well conceive that it was only from a certain order of mind, the ground of whose character was formed amid the pine forests of the north, and whose later stamp was received from the stately but decaying monuments of Imperial Rome, that such a product could have arisen. But, having come into being, it remains, through its works and its conceptions, the parent of solemn thoughts to all succeeding times. There is, I need not remind you, one special task which these later ages seem destined to accomplish, a task of the highest importance, but which it would be a fatal error to regard as an end, and not as a means; it is the extension of man's dominion over the material world. I will not attempt to examine here the various aspects of that much-disputed question, why so subtle and inquisitive a people as the Greeks made no advance in physical science? It has been said that it is because they did not possess a proper method. But the difficulty is thus thrown back and not solved-for the question immediately arises: Why did they not possess a proper method? The principles of that method are so obvious as to be almost axiomatic, and in other departments of speculation they were understood and applied by some of the great thinkers of antiquity. I suppose that we must conclude, with an eminent writer on the history of the inductive sciences, that the time for this development was not come, that there were other problems to be solved first, more intimately connected with 'human freedom and happiness. In confirmation, however, of the fact that the extension of human sway over the material world is an actual, whether or not it is a special, business of these times, we have only to consider what is going on around us. There exists yet another and not less important view of the nature of those elements which constitute civilisation. It is that the progress of knowledge and the arts not only forms a bond which connects the different generations of men together by interests and feelings wider than those which are merely national; it serves also as a progressive manifestation of the nature of man,-it makes us acquainted with the hidden capacities of our being. I remember the profound interest with which I read, some years ago, a treatise by a German writer, written with that fulness of learning which the Germans alone possess, and also with that ripeness of judgment which they do not always display, intended to trace the development among the ancient Greeks of the idea of the chief good of man. The author shewed how that idea was associated among the earlier writers, as Homer, almost exclusively with the possession of physical qualifications, largeness of stature, strength of limb, swiftness of foot, or with such intellectual endowments as we should now term cleverness, and perhaps cunning. He shewed how at a later period it was connected with wealth and longevity, with the glory of ancestry, the exercise of a large and bountiful hospitality, the esteem of men. This is the form which it chiefly assumes in the writings of Pindar. Then he traced the idea through the Gnomic poets, under the form of prudence, self-respect, reverence for law and established religion, until in the conversations of Socrates it rises to the full measure of the conception of moral good. Now, this picture, though drawn from a source lying a little out of the general line of illustration, which I have adopted, will serve to explain the position I wish to establish. We are not to suppose that there was any moral faculty in Socrates, disputing among his friends about the true ends of life, which did not also exist, only in a less developed degree, in the heroes of the Iliad fighting before Troy, and the youth of Greece contending in the Pythian Games. But this is the lesson which I wish to draw that it is not in the rude and ignorant, or in the savage and feral state of man, that we can see what human nature is. Its inferior elements predominate there, and all its nobler and more characteristic qualities remain hidden. It is the slow but combined action of the social state which brings out the germs that would otherwise lie buried beneath a stony and a wintry soil. Science, while it is thus a revelation of the laws of the material universe, is also a manifestation of the intellectual nature of man. So too all those arts which depend upon the preception of proportion, whether it be in forms or in sounds, are at least as dependent upon the existence of certain faculties of our nature, which faculties they make known to us, as upon any relations of external things. What a world of sweet and solemn emotions, for instance, does not music awaken within us, a world of whose existence we should but for that divine art be wholly unconscious, and of whose possible limits we are still ignorant! It is not in the instrument, nor in the pulses of the air, nor in the mechanism of the human ear, that the harmony resides, but in ourselves. In the mysterious depths of the human spirit those faculties have their abode, for whose calling forth all these external movements are but a preparation. And the science of the organ-builder and the skill of the musician consist in this, that they understand, practically at least, some part of that connexion which has been established between mental and material things by Him who is both the maker of the universe, and the author of our spirits. I might take up the remaining branch of the argument, and shew that the researches of the antiquary and the scholar possess, when rightly pursued, the same kind of claim to our regard as the labours of the artist and the man of science. Undoubtedly there exists a great deal of trifling curiosity about things of no moment, and many a vain attempt has been made to reconstruct a living form out of those dry bones of antiquity from which the breath of life has fled for ever. In these pursuits, as in all others, but in these more eminently, there is need of a controlling principle. Things are not valuable because they are old and rare; but the interest which gathers about the relics of bygone ages is then only legitimate when it flows from a deeper sourceeven from the sense of the fellowship of humanity." He used often to say that men have no right to expect to be able to judge of what is true doctrine, till they have made their brains clear by some generations of observance of known moral and sanitary laws. This is a scientific version of a saying that will probably occur to most of us-"If anyone desire to do God's will, he will know concerning doctrine." CURRENT LITERATURE. Schola Academica: Some Account of the Studies at the English Universities in the 18th Century. By Christopher Wordsworth, M.A., &c., &c. Cambridge University Press. 1877. This work follows the modern historical method; it is not an argumentative romance with a few facts let in where they support a favourite view, but a careful exhumation of dead records; which are made to bring before us a live past, by being placed in due connection by a man who understands them and loves his subject. It may not be generally appreciated how far national history is now becoming modified to the same plan. Instead of the old hearsay evidence and a strong bias of the historian, we have the carefully gathered evidence of actual records, not compiled statistically, but brought to life by the investigator's faculty and appreciation. Working in limited fields, moreover, this method of history is so true, that, however special the study, it is made to afford sidelights upon the largest and most general life. In the work before us, which is strictly what it professes to be, an account of university studies, we obtain authentic information upon the course and changes of philosophical thought in this country, upon the general estimation of letters, upon the relations of doctrine and science, upon the range and thoroughness of education, and we may add, upon the cat-like tenacity of life of ancient forms. Every undergraduate, every public school-boy would do well to cut open these pages-which he could not find uninteresting-in order to realise what advantages he is possessed of at the present day. Perhaps, however, to the fashionable and precocious academic youth of the period, it would be too terrible to learn that not very long ago undergraduates wore round caps and passed under the name of 'lads'! We must repeat the ancient pun on the introduction of the trencher':Have you squared the circle, sir? No, but (pointing to his battered cap, used oft as a missile) quadratum circulavi. 6 : |