"among the throngs of men," and the daily ways and doings of life.

Here the gravity and state of the diction is much modified. It descends into more or less of colloquial and familiar-falling to its lowest on the tongue of Vivien, and rising when Lancelot, or Arthur, or Merlin speaks, but preserving a general level below that which tells of the coming and passing of the soul.

Another point is the consummate art with which the irregularities of the versification, while they break up or prevent all monotony, are almost invariably introduced where they help the meaning as much as the music.

They recur at frequent intervals with a little waver or ripple which relieves all deadness of surface, and changes the shining tracts of verse from standing waters into flowing streams. But though the author seems to be dealing with his words simply as with musical notes-and with especial love for a certain subtle demi-semiquaver-yet in fact occasion is almost always taken from the action of the passage, and where a sense of quickened or altered movement, whether of event or feeling, is to be given.

Thus, to quote at random from a page or two of the last published idyll, Sir Gareth:

"Then would he whistle rapid as any lark

*

*

*

*

*

In all such cases-and they abound in every idyll the sense of the passage gains as much as the sound, and the result is as refreshing as the analysis of the process is interesting.

As the pages are turned over for instances of this treatment, and as name after name again catches the eye, one is newly struck by the abundant and dramatic variety of the men and women moving to and fro. All, as before said, are alive and recognizable at a glance, at the sound, as it were, of their voices.

Lancelot in the splendor of his double nature (a double star with just such complicated orbit) moves, and must always move, upon a level with the King himself,

in interest, and even closer to ordinary sympathy. The ceaseless inner war which tears him before our eyes, breeds in us a sense of nearer kinship than we dare to claim with the Royal calm. But through it all how lofty and how great he is: no wonder that he "knew not he should die a holy man," and no wonder also that he did so die.

Tristram comes next-with half of Lancelot left out of him-a second Esau-as bold, as careless, as attractive, and as animal-and when he dies how fitting is the swift, dark death that seems to abolish both him and his works.

Then Gawain-man of this world essentially-(" man about town" would perhaps be his nearest modern equivalent)-flashing into transient fits of nobleness and tumbling over into pits of selfish meanness

"too blind to have desire to see," yet fired with eager zeal to help the weak against the strong when the occasion comes before his eyes; the slave altogether, in short, of what he sees.

Then comes Sir Percivale, with ready pure and fervid heart and tongue-whose warm and natural love "being rudely blunted"-has made of his impressible temperament—as of his sister's a proper soil for asceticism. He turns finally to the holy vision at the cost of a mean treason impossible to such a nature save under the hardening impulse of fanaticism, and shuts himself away from a world which he finds himself unequal either to combat or to help.

How different from Sir Bors, his fellowenthusiast-who never could have told the story of the Grail-nor desecrated by any speech the things which belonged to God and his own heart. His tender, true, and loyal spirit had its roots down so deep, that none but such love as the King's could pierce to where they fed on hidden and perennial springs of faith and prayer.

And both of these again how different from Galahad-the wild, unearthly cometary knight; the monk in armor; slave of his own illusions; deaf and blind to everything besides; as ignorant of the world as Gawain of the soul; a pseudo-Curtius who makes the gulf he leaps into, and draws down after him those who might else have "fulfilled the boundless purpose of the King," and served and saved the common weal with "crowning common sense."

And so we might go on from man to man, and from woman to woman throughout-from the garrulous old Leodegran at the beginning, full of his little sayings and proverbs, to little Dagonet at the end, with his pathetic many-sided ironies and touching loyal faith-a "converted" fool who has by no means lost his wit with his wickedness, and puts the fool's cap on his questioner.

And withal it is no study of Vivisection

with the Poet turned into a demonstrator of anatomy-nor a string of instances of morbid introspection, but above all things a Poem. The limits and conditions of Art are observed and respected profoundly, and with all its fulness and multitude there is never loss of Form, or confusion, or contradiction. Everywhere "the spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet." -Contemporary Review.

If we want to understand the history of the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the French Revolution, or any other great crisis in the political, religious, and social state of the world, we know that we must study the history of the times immediately preceding those momentous changes. Nor shall we ever understand the real character of a great philosophical crisis unless we have made ourselves thoroughly familiar with its antecedents. Without going so far as Hegel, who saw in the whole history of philosophy an unbroken dialectic evolution, it is easy to see that there certainly is a greater continuity in the history of philosophic thought than in the history of politics, and it therefore seemed to me essential to dwell in my first Lecture on the exact stage which the philosophical struggle of our century had reached before Mr. Darwin's publications appeared, in order to enable us to appreciate fully his historical position, not only as an eminent physiologist, but as the restorer of that great empire in the world of thought which claims as its founders the glorious names of Locke and Hume. It might indeed be said of Mr. Darwin what was once said of the restorer of another empire, Il n'est pas parvenu, il est arrivé.' The philosophical empire of Locke and Hume had fallen under the blows of Kant's Criticism of Pure Reason. But the successors of Kant-Fichte, Schelling, and Hegeldisregarding the checks by which Kant had so carefully defined the legitimate exercise of the rights of Pure Reason, indulged in such flights of transcendent fancy, that a reaction became inevitable.

First came the violent protest of Schopenhauer, and his exhortation to return to the old fundamental principles of Kant's philosophy. These, owing to their very violence, passed unheeded. Then followed a complete disorganisation of philosophic thought, and this led in the end to a desperate attempt to restore the old dynasty of Locke and Hume. During the years immediately preceding the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1860) and his Descent of Man, the old problems which had been discussed in the days of Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, turned up again in full force. We had to read again that sensuous impressions were the sole constituent elements of the human intellect; that general ideas were all developed spontaneously from single impressions; that the only difference between sensations and ideas was the faintness of the latter; that what we mean by substance is only a collection of particular ideas, united by imagination, and comprehended by a particular name; and that what we are pleased to call our mind, is but a delusion, though who the deluder is and who the deluded, would seem to be a question too indiscreet to ask.

But the principal assault in this struggle came from a new quarter. It was not to be the old battle over again, we were told; but the fight was to be carried on with modern and irresistible weapons. The new philosophy, priding itself, as all philosophies have done, on its positive character, professed to despise the endless argu

Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, book i. sec. i. p. 33.

mentations of the schools, and to appeal for evidence to matter of fact only. mind, whether consisting of material impressions or intellectual concepts, was now to be submitted to the dissecting knife and the microscope. We were shown the nervous tubes, afferent and efferent, through which the shocks from without pass on to the sensitve and motive cells; the commissural tubes holding these cells together were laid bare before us; the exact place in the brain was pointed out where the messages from without were delivered; and it seemed as if nothing were wanting but a more powerful lens to enable us to see with our own eyes how in the workshop of the brain, as in a photographic apparatus, the pictures of the senses and the ideas of the intellect were being turned out in endless variety.

And this was not all. The old stories about the reasoning of animals, so powerfully handled in the school of Hume, were brought out again. Innumerable anecdotes that had been told from the time of Aelian to the days of Reimarus, were told once more, in order to show that the intellect of animals did not only match, but but that in many cases it transcended the powers of the human intellect. One might have imagined oneself living again in the days of La Mettrie, who, after having published his work, Man, a Machine, followed it up by another work, Brutes, more than Machines. It is true there were some philosophers who protested energetically against reopening that question, which had been closed by common consent, and which certainly ought not to have been reopened by positive philosophers. For if there is a terra incognita which excludes all positive knowledge, it is the mind of animals. We may imagine anything we please about the inner life, the motives, the foresight, the feelings and aspirations of animals we can know absolutely nothing. How little analogy can help us in interpreting their acts is best proved by the fact, that a philosopher like Descartes could bring himself to consider animals as mere machines, while Leibniz was unwilling to deny to them the possession of immortal souls. We need not wonder at such discrepancies, considering the nature of the evidence. What can we know of the inner life of a mollusc? We may imagine that it lives in total darkness, that it is hardly more than a mass of pulp; but we may equally well

imagine that, being free from all the disturbances produced by the impressions of the senses and out of the reach of all those causes of error to which man is liable, it may possess a much truer and deeper insight into the essence of the Absolute, a much fuller apprehension of eternal truths than the human soul. It may be so, or it may not be so, for there is no limit to an anthropomorphic interpretation of the life of animals. But the tacit understanding, or rather the clear compromise, established among the philosophers of the last century, and declaring the old battle-field, on which so much useless ink had been shed over the question of the intellect of animals, to be for ever neutralised, ought hardly to have been disturbed, least of all by those who profess to trust in nothing but positive fact.

Nor do I think that philosophers would have allowed the reopening of the floodgates of animal anthropomorphism, if it had not been for the simultaneous rise of Mr. Darwin's theories. If it can be proved that man derives his origin genealogically, and, in the widest sense of the word, historically, from some lower animal, it is useless to say another word on the mind of man being different from the mind of animals. The two are identical, and no argument would be required any longer to support Hume's opinions; they would henceforth rest on positive facts. This shows the immense importance of Mr. Darwin's speculations in solving, once for all, by evidence that admits of no demurrer, the long-pending questions between man and animal, and, in its further consequences, between mind and matter, between spiritualism and materialism, between Berkeley and Hume; and it shows at the same time that the final verdict on his philosophy must be signed, not by zoologists and physiologists only, but by psychologists also, nay, it may be, by German metaphysicians.

Few men who are not zoologists and physiologists by profession can have read Mr. Darwin's books On the Origin of Species and On the Descent of Man with deeper interest than I have, and with a more intense admiration of his originality, independence, and honesty of thought. I know of few books so useful to the student of the Science of Language, in teaching him the true method for discovering similarity beneath diversity, the general

behind the individual, the essential hidden by the accidental; and helping him to understand the possibility of change by natural means. There may be gaps and flaws in the genealogical pedigree of organic life, as drawn by Mr. Darwin and his followers; there may be or there may not be a possibility of resisting their arguments when, beginning with a group of animals, boldly called organisms without organs,'* such as the Bathybius Haeckelii, they advance step by step to the crown and summit of the animal kingdom, and to the primus inter primates, man.

This is a point to be settled by physiologists; and if Carl Vogt may be accepted as their recognised representative and spokesman, the question would seem to be settled, at least so far as the savants of Europe are concerned. 'No one,' he says, 'at least in Europe, dares any longer to maintain the independent and complete creation of species.'t The reservation, at least in Europe,' is meant, as is well known, for Agassiz in America, who still holds out, and is bold enough to teach, 'that the different species of the animal kingdom furnish an unexpected proof that the whole plan of creation was maturely weighed and fixed, long before it was carried out.' Professor Haeckel, however, the fiery apostle of Darwinism in Germany, speaks more diffidently on the subject. In his last work on Kalkschwämme (p. xii.), just published, he writes: The majority, and among it some famous biologists of the first class, are still of opinion that the problem of the origin of species has only been reopened by Darwin, but by no means solved.'

But, however that may be, and whatever modification Mr. Darwin's system may receive at the hands of professed physiologists, the honor of having cleared the Augean stable of endless species, of having explained many things which for merly seemed to require the interference of direct creation, by the slow action of natural causes, of having made us see the influence exercised by the individual on the family, and by the family on the in

*Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, p. 165.

Personne, en Europe au moins, n'ose plus soutenir la création indépendante et de toutes pièces des espèces.' Quoted by Darwin, in his Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 1.

See Durand, Origines, pp. 77, 78.

dividual, of having given us, in fact, a few really new and fresh ideas, will always remain his own.

In saying this, however, I do not wish to imply assent to Mr. Darwin's views on the development of all species; I only wish to say that, in the presence of such high authorities, one ought to refrain from expressing an opinion, and be satisfied to wait. wait. I am old enough to remember the equally authoritative statements of the most eminent naturalists with regard to the races of man. When my own researches on language and the intellectual development of man led me to the conclusion that, if we had only sufficient time (some hundreds of thousands of years) allowed us, there would be no difficulty in giving an intelligible account of the common origin of all languages, I was met with the assurance that, even hypothetically, such a view was impossible, because the merest tyro in anatomy knew that the different races of man constituted so many species, that species were the result of independent creative acts, and that the black, brown, red, yellow, and white races could not possibly be conceived as descended from one source. Men like Prichard and Humboldt, who maintained the possibility of a common origin, were accused of being influenced by extraneous motives. I myself was charged with a superstitious belief in the Mosaic ethnology. And why? Simply because, in the Science of Language, I was a Darwinian before Darwin; simply because I had protested against scientific as strongly as against theological dogmatism; simply because I wished to see the question of the possibility of a common origin of languages treated, at least, as an open question.* And what has happened now? All the arguments about hybridity, infertility, local centres, permanent types, are swept away under the powerful broom of development, and we are told that not only the different varieties of man, but monkeys, horses, cats, and dogs, have all one, or at the utmost four progenitors; nay, that no living creature, in Europe at least, dares to affirm the independent creation of species.' Under these circumstances it seems but fair to follow the old Greek rule of abstain

*See The Possibility of a Common Origin of Language,' in my letter to Bunsen On the Turanian Languages,' published in Bunsen's Christianity and Mankind, 1854.

ing, and to wait whether in the progress of physical research the arguments of the evolutionists will really remain unanswerable and unanswered.

The two points where the system of Mr. Darwin, and more particularly of his followers, seems most vulnerable to the general student, are the beginning and the end. With regard to the beginning of organic life, Mr. Darwin himself has exercised a wise discretion. He does not, as we saw, postulate one primordial form, nor has he ever attempted to explain the first beginnings of organic life. He is not responsible, therefore, for the theories of his disciples, who either try to bridge over the chasm between inorganic and organic bodies by mere 'Who knows?' or who fall back on scientific mythology; for to speak of self-generation is to speak mythologically.

Mr. Herbert Spencer writes thus in answer to Mr. Martineau, who had dwelt on the existence of this chasm between the living and the not-living as a fatal difficulty in the way of the general doctrine of evolution: Here, again, our ignorance is employed to play the part of knowledge: the fact that we do not know distinctly how an alleged transition has taken place, is transformed into the fact that no transition has taken place.'

The answer to this is clear. Why allege a transition, if we do not know anything about it? It is in alleging such a transition that we raise our ignorance to the rank of knowledge. We need not say that a transition is impossible, if impossible means inconceivable; but we ought not to say either that it is possible, unless we mean by possible no more than conceivable.

Mr. Spencer then continues: Merely noting this, however, I go on to remark that scientific discovery is day by day narrowing the chasm. Not many years since it was held as certain that chemical compounds distinguished as organic could not be formed artificially. Now, more than a thousand organic compounds have been formed artificially. Chemists have discoChemists have discovered the art of building them up from the simpler to the more complex; and do not doubt that they will eventually produce the most complex. Moreover, the phenomena attending isomeric change give a clue to those movements which are the only indications we have of life in its

lowest forms. In various colloidal substances, including the albumenoid, isomeric change is accompanied by contraction or expansion, and consequent motion; and in such primordial types as the Protogenes of Haeckel, which do not differ in appearance from minute portions of albumen, the observed motions are comprehensible as accompanying isomeric changes caused by variations in surrounding physical actions. The probability of this interpretation will be seen on remembering the evidence we have, that in the higher organisms the functions are essentially effected by isomeric changes from one another of the multitudinous forms which protein assumes.'

to

This is, no doubt, very able pleading on the part of an advocate, but I doubt whether it would convince Mr. Spencer himself, as a judge. I see no narrowing of the chasm between inorganic and organic bodies, because certain substances, called organic, have lately been built up in the laboratory. These so-called organic substances are not living bodies, but simply the secretions of living bodies. The question was not, whether we can imitate some of the productions turned out of the laboratory of a living body, but whether we can build up a living body.

Secondly, unless Mr. Spencer is prepared to maintain that life is nothing but isomeric change, the mere fact that there is an apparent similarity between the movements of the lowest of living bodies and the expansion and contraction produced in notliving substances by isomeric change, carries no weight. Even though the movements of the Protogenes Haeckelii were in appearance the same as those produced in chemical substances by isomeric change, no one knows better than Mr. Spencer, that life is not merely movement, but that it involves assimilation, oxidation, and reproduction, at least reproduction by fission. No chemist has yet produced albumen, much less a moneres; and till that is done we have as much right to protest against the hypothetical admission of a transition from no-life into life as Mr. Spencer would have to protest against the assertion that such a transition is impossible.

By the frequent repetition of such words as generatio spontanea, autogony, plasmogony, Urzeugung, and all the rest, we get accustomed to the sound of these words, and at last imagine that they can be translated