too great in the cause of science, an hour after he would make preparations for a new series of experiments.

We may say that the man had two brides, his wife and his science. A more coldly intellectual man, on the passing away of a wife who had been ailing so long, and had hindered his work so much, might, after the days of mourning were over, have turned with a more passionate zest to study.

His work, though it had not given him any exalted position as yet, promised an abundant harvest.

An important appointment was just accepted, and he impatiently expected to assume its duties, when his wife had a relapse. He seemed stunned, he was deaf to all surrounding things, his letters remained unanswered, he thought only of the parting, he brooded for hours in dumb despair, or sought for rest in the excitement of unusual activity; but even work, which had been the truest companion of his sorrow, could afford him no relief. He brought his wife to England in hope of cure: she rallied, and then sank again and died.

His letters, clear and concise in matters scientific, shew the unbounded love he felt for the companion of his life. Existence without her seemed incomprehensible to him, life after her death a perpetual torment.

The concluding words of his last recorded speech are significant of his loving nature, and might be circulated among bickering students with advantage:-"I believe that to the dead whom we esteem something especially is due-peace over their graves."

A man of these attainments, character, age, temper, and position is not the one from whom we should anticipate deliberate suicide.

Religion would claim that the act was a wicked one, unless, indeed, according to science it were proved to have been a crazed one. The verdict of the jury was temporary insanity; and the watching over a dear wife's last illness might well be enough to upset a man's nervous forces, and render him not to the full responsible for his acts, while we might hazard a speculation that in that paralysed hour his nerves renewed the effect of a shock once given by the explosion, in the hands of the experimentalist, of a glass vessel containing chemicals. All things considered, we may cease from blame, and yield a poetic pity as for Romeo and Juliet, or for Orpheus and Eurydice, with the words in mind that Professor Hofmann cites in the memoir from which we have drawn our facts.*

Quoniam concordes egimus annos, Auferat hora duos eadem, nec conjugis

unquam

Busta meae videam neu sim tumulandus ab illa.

If now we were to suggest that such a man as this tender husband and honoured scientific worker flung life away, not more on account of the nervous and mental shock of bereavement than because an affectionate instinct led him to follow in hope his other half; and that such an instinct might possibly not be without foundation, we should be met by the noisy voices of the day crying out "Moonshine, superstition, mania; and let us put away such an unprofitable theme." We fully allow that an example of

morbid and feverish impatience, of impulse without self-control; an instance of that raw haste that is more than sister, nay, is mother of delay is not of the nature to make such a theme acceptable, but why so curious a question should not be so summarily disposed of, we will endeavour to shew. That is to say, if the wisdom of the sagest of our forefathers be wisdom.

un

A school of thought has re-arisen of late years which views with contemptuous impatience many of the most cherished records of the past, as appertaining to developed races, whose childish ways we have now outgrown. When the historian repeats anything out of the common, the habit has lately been to cry scornfully, It is Fable! When anything has been culled from the relics of ancient

prophet or priest of a mystical nature, foreign to our every-day round of buying and selling, eating and drinking, being clothed and housed, governed or amused, taught exact science or practical knowledge, the damning modern word has been Superstition. Fable and Superstition; in these words has been found a short and easy way of deriding the messages handed down from our forefathers, whose wisdom is disallowed from standing upright in the presence of our own, simply because they lived one, three, or five thousand years ago, when sages, we fondly, imagine, were babes compared with our wondrous selves, and prophets fools.

But theories nihilistic, calling themselves science, are subject to the same law as theories constructive. They must bide the test of time, must find constantly renewed support in world-wide and historical experience, must receive infinite help from analogies. To style themselves modern and superior is not a voucher authoritative

enough for independent reason to accept.

Patient labour, during very recent years, has been supporting faiths, upsetting assumptions, and helping truth. Egyptian and Greek historians, long condemned as fabulists, nay, even ancient poets, have been discovered to be not altogether baseless in their narratives. Thebes, Nineveh, Mycenæ, Ephesus, Cyprus, and other ancient sites, withmummy-writings, monuments, and works of art, varied speech of papyrus, of marble and of gold, have of late been authenticating fables long held up to ridicule. And faith in something real underlying the fables has been the moving cause of these fruitful labours.

We need have no less respect for the parable of Adam and Eve because the chronology that has been set up made them wander out of Paradise into a desolate world at a date when an Egyptian prince could have found them shelter in a palace. The true Adam and Eve are wandering into the world of thorns and briars still, heedless of chronology, save as regards their own coming, meeting, and going.

Now that fables, histories, and chronologies are being explored and cleared, we should be glad to see some good spade-work done about the word Superstition. It requires excavation. According to some that would call themselves scientific, the term is merely one of condemnation for an evil shadow that frightens weak people into a mistaken or even deleterious kind of goodness. Some examination seems to be required to ascertain whether it is but a hollow and empty phrase, or whether, if it be, as it would sometimes seem, a harmful scare, that is not its proper self, but a treacherous spirit of fear. An earth-bound ghost

hiding in a hovel whose false floor is built over and obscures a buried temple of eternal beauty and pure religion.

But such examination, according to the Sadducean oracles, whose votaries seem as afraid of losing their unbelief as the most "fearful saints" of letting slip their faith, should be prohibited. "Whatever," says no less a man than Mr. Lewes, "is inaccessible to reason, should be strictly interdicted to research." Ought we to add, with the Inquisition for such as dare to disregard the Interdict? And what mortal should presume to set a bound to the orbit of the spirit of man, which, so long as its relation to its Divine centre be maintained, may storm the inaccessible with the truest force of reason?

In the pursuit of matters " inaccessible to reason"-or rather to that so-called reason whose wings are clipped by the materialistic shears-it is fair to allow that the evidence obtainable may be rare and hard to find. But where anything may be found lingering in the minds of men of the illustrious order, men isolated from one another by ages of time and impassable distance; where anything can be found proclaimed in harmonious concurrence by men of rare attainments, revered position, and benevolent life, there is a presumption that it is no phantom, wholly baseless and unreal. Even though, like buried cities, it may not stand out clear before our experience or eyesight ere the spade of some awakening moment has reached it, or the heavy soil of prejudice, ignorance, or crassitude has been removed.

Just as the marble sculpture, that in its vivid perfection of life was its own vindicator, may be rendered almost unrecognisable by injuries, so it is also with truth.

Disfigured traditions have led to the establishment of false ideals, and to the hopelessness of a really superstitious despair.

Returning, then, to the German Professor, who murdered himself for loss of his love, we find ourselves engaged upon a question of much difficulty, in investigating the traditional consciousness of the spiritual existence of "the other half."

At however luminous a spiritual truth we may arrive, and however strong a consciousness of such truth may have been arrived at before a man could commit suicide to follow his wife to the regions of the unseen, we may boldly state that such conduct (unless prompted by a delirium that might result from shock and overstrain of the nerves) deserves the name of superstition, used in its lower sense, and not that of faith. When a man has got so far as to feel that his conjugal union may endure beyond the veil, it is incredible that he should not also realise that the best disposition with regard to it rests with the Divine Love from which it proceeds, and that the concealment for a time of one from the other might be designed rather to perfect the ultimate balance of that mutual relation than to infringe it. The process of patient waiting for that intervening veil to be lifted may be the ripening of a consummation that were otherwise premature and incomplete.

The earliest tradition, so far as we know, shewing any reference to the conception of the essential nature of man as bi-sexual, is to be found in the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead:-"I, Ra, appeared before the sun. When the circumference darkness was opened, I was as one among you (the gods). I know how the woman was made from the

man.'

of

In the Book of Genesis, which in its earlier chapters shews trace of different schools of thought, we find (i. 26, 27)- Elohim said, 'Let us make man in image, after our likeness.' So Elohim created man in his own image, in the image of Elohim

our

created he him; male and female created he them." The Jehovistic account (ii. 7, 18, 21-25) is rather different::-"Jehovah formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the

breath of life; and man became a living soul. . . . And Jehovah said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.' . . . And Jehovah caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept. And he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib which Jehovah had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.' For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed." According to the Kabbalists, Adam and Eve, or the typical man and woman, were at the earliest stage of creation spiritual beings, not yet clothed in shame and garments of skins.

Among the Greek pantheistic poets the conception of God included that of double sex, but rather by reason of universality than as representing an ideal of all-fatherliness, all-motherliness, or of the perfect bi-unity of Wisdom and Love. Zeus, in the Orphic poems, who is "one force, one spiritual being, great rector of all things," is portrayed in a

or to modernise Virgil's reading Procul O procul este profani! into an expression of hope that none will approach this difficult subject with

the mind in its lower moods. From these modern days when everything is open, as is fondly supposed, to the accurate brain, before which mysteries dissolve and flee like smoke, when irreverence storms the ancient heights and reports them barren, how far away seem the old days, when the cry of the hierophant was heard by the Eleusinian initiates, άλαδε μύσται, and students-at least in uncorrupted epochs-strove at once to purify their bodies and their minds before even attempting to meditate on high themes. The idea of a preparation of the mind, a care for its reverent attitude, being necessary, for its own sake, before certain thoughts can be fitly approached, would be mostly ridiculed to-day.

Let us begin now by tracing the footsteps of our idea in the field of the best Greek philosophy; how it got there, who can tell? From whatever primeval legend drawn, there it meets us luminous.

In "The Symposium" Plato is leading us among "worlds not realised;" we are taught more than we can know, save by instinct and the support of analogies. There must be two patron deities of love, he tells us, or one of his friends. does, in a dialogue within a dialogue; there is the heavenly goddess, daughter of Heaven, and.

another who must have the name of common, being of the body rather than of the soul.

The vice of the present age being the false doctrine that mundane intellect represents this immortal part, and that love, whether of God, man, or woman, is an amiable weakness, a kind of juvenile or senile prettiness, by the side of the matured existence of scientific worldliness and power; we must enter upon Plato's lore relating to the theory of perfect marriage, through the door of the pure thought of love, as declared at that marvellous symposium.

This book of Plato has been so nobly rendered into our English tongue by Jowett that it would be time wasted to attempt a new version, and we shall mainly follow his; but in this instance we may turn to Shelley, whose power of sympathetic language makes up for any other lack on his part. According to his version, Phædrus says:

"Neither birth, nor wealth, nor honours, can awaken in the minds of men the principles which should guide those who from their youth aspire to an honourable and excellent life, as Love awakens them.'

The first entry into the occult depth of our subject is made by the great satirist, Aristophanes, in whose mouth are placed by Plato, under the crust of a comic manner, what are evidently the vestiges of an old half-ruined spiritual philosophy. In his parable, wherein the seriousness of the sage mingles with the humour of a dinner-party, we learn of "the original human nature, that was not like the present, but different."

"In the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature.

This

once had a real existence, but is now lost, and the name only is preserved as a term of reproach."

Then, still under the veil of comedy, is presented a very materialistic notion of such a composite being, possessed of a fine plenty of limbs. Presumption is humorously represented as the vice of this nondescript, and, after some reflection, Zeus discovers a way to restrain his insolence. "They shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two, and then they will be diminished in strength, and increased in numbers. . . they shall walk upright on two legs; and if they continue insolent, and won't be quiet, I will split them again, and they shall hop about on a single leg." This is the touch of the irrepressible comedian; he is making a burlesque of the ancient legend.

Omitting some physiological absurdities, we render a few lines more. "After the nature was cut in twain, each half perceived, with a longing, the part of itself; and throwing their arms around each other with mutual entanglement, from great desire to grow together they were dying off of famine and other consequences of listlessness, through their desire each to do nothing without the other." After some more absurdity and supposed further change of relation, we come to the following, in which we take Shelley's version:

"From this period, mutual love has naturally existed between human beings; that reconciler and bond of union of their original nature, which seeks to make two, one, and to heal the divided nature of man. Every one of us is thus the half of what may be properly termed a man. . . the imperfect portion of an entire whole, perpetually necessitated to seek the half belonging to him." The Greek word used for half is strictly