recreation. Imaginative reading in no wise loosened those habits of intellectual accuracy which, as Coleridge says, 'are so greatly favourable to and akin to habits of veracity and moral truth.' Nor did it vitiate 'a taste born of and nurtured in simplicity.' The story or satire which disregards the apostolic injunction, 'Let it not be once named amongst you, as becometh saints,' he rejected utterly.

As has been intimated, Alfred's manner often gave, at first, the impression of shyness and stiffness. To strangers and even to slight acquaintances he sometimes seemed restrained and reserved. He lacked, in his boyhood at least, what Wesley instances as one of 'the best gifts' to be coveted earnestly: an easy, graceful 'address.' John Fletcher rightly regarded this lack as a serious disadvantage to any one who has the care of souls. He writes to the schoolmaster at Madeley :

'If I were not a minister, I would be a schoolmaster.

Have you mastered the stiffness and shyness of your temper ? Charity gives an affability and openness which nature has denied you.'

Certainly Alfred's seeming shyness was neither a fault 'of temper,' nor for want of 'charity.' It was rather the result of modesty and absorption in his thinkings.

What he was as schoolboy, tutor, friend, pastor, colleague, the foregoing pages sufficiently suggest; what he was as son and brother it is impossible to tell.

'Though the righteous may seem to be forestalled by death, yet shall he be at rest. For honourable age is not that which standeth in length of time nor that is measured by number of years. But discernment is grey hair unto men, and an unspotted life old age. He pleased God, and was beloved ..therefore He hasted to take him away' (Wisdom of Solomon iv. 7-11).

d;

LITERARY PROJECTS AND BEGINNINGS.

A YOUNG STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY.

IT will be seen that the bent of Alfred's mind was decidedly analytic, ratiocinative, and keenly dialectic. Mental science was his favourite study. Yet his cast of mind was thoroughly English. The vague, the hazy, and the transcendental had no charms for him. Precision and clearness of thought and language, tautness of reasoning, cleanness of workmanship, sharpness of outline seemed to be to him intellectual necessities.

His mind was English in its cautious courage. Though subtle, penetrant, eagerly enquiring, and addicted to exploratory science, he would not stir a step further than he had made good his ground. You might as easily persuade a mule upon a mountain track to trust itself and its burden to a slippery or shingly slant as induce him to commit himself in reasoning to an insecure position. He felt self-limitation and self-restraint to be virtues as essential to the philosophical explorer as to the Christian, who is striving for the mastery over the world, the flesh, and the devil.

His mind was also English in its practicality. He states as the aim of philosophy: 'Primarily, light, truth; secondarily, power and results.'

He brought his fearless open-mindedness into his reading, his studies, his criticisms, and his systematizations. His MS. remains prove that he not only studied closely and candidly such writers as Hobbes, Mill, Spencer, Bain, Carpenter, and Maudsley, but he sat at their feet and looked at facts and generalizations from their points of view, and approached the great problems of mental and moral science from their starting-point, and along their lines, as far as he

found them practicable. He was very angry with writers and talkers who fancied they discharged their duty to truth, and utterly discomfited error, by simply meeting scientific investigators point-blank from the opposite direction. He not only claimed for them the rights and courtesies of belligerents, but also the cordialities due to collaborators in the search after truth, so long and so far as they strove lawfully and abstained from aggressive dogmatism on matters that lie beyond their own legitimate acquisitions. He held that they had much to teach; he knew that he himself had learnt much from them; he hoped and trusted that they would still further extend and enrich the domain of human thought, and develop the resources, by tracking the processes and conditions of human thought.

His own position with regard to these investigations is strikingly shown in two of his College Essays, which I overlooked in the multiplicity of his MSS., and thus omitted from the list given on pp. 123, 124.* * The first is dated 'Lent Term, January 28,1871,' and headed Physiology as the Ally of Psychology. The second is Can Moral Science become a Science of Observation ? The following is an extract from his essay on Physiology as the Ally of Psychology:

'That psychological science is at present in a very unsatisfactory state can scarcely be doubted. Intellects of the highest order have been employed upon it almost from the beginning of the history of philosophy, yet with so little result that hardly anything concerning it can be regarded as definitely established. Its vocabulary has been brought to a perplexing pitch of refinement, but little substantial advance has been made. Every successive writer has to argue the elementary questions from the very beginning, and cannot take any part of the labours of his predecessors as a foundation upon which he may rear his own superstructure. In fact, psychology

* Other overlooked essays are: Theories of the Origin of Mythology (two essays); Greek Religion; The Philosophy of Heraclitus; The Stoical Tradition in Philosophy; Abelard and the Scholastic Philosophy; Patriotism, Truthfulness, Toleration: their Rational Bases.