REVIEW.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1249, 8 March 1878, Page 3

REVIEW.

THE GRAVER MONTHLIES.* Mr Herbert Spencer's writings are always marked by fulness of detail and boldness of generalisation.. Indeed, as to the latter quality he has no equal. Twenty years ago, Grote discerned his wonderful grasp, and called him, young as he then was, the keenest and the most daring speculative thinker of the age. In many respects we may regard him as the modern Plato, for, like Plato, he is a faithful expounder of previous thought, and a creator of thought himself. He has this immense advantage over Plato—his data are more extensive and trustworthy. Careful observation, and equally caretul experiment, have placed an abundance of facts at the service of the modern, which were not even guessed at by the ancient, thinker. It is in collecting and manipulating these varied and numerous facts that Spencer shines. Though he soars so high, he rarely leaves, and never loses sight of, mother earth. His inferences from this vast collection of fact may be, and sometimes are certainly wrong; his theories may startle us by their wide sweeps and destructive tendencies. But everyone must admit his prodigious industry in accumulating his materials, and still more his wonderful ingenuity in explaining their sources, their meaning, and their bearing on the evolution of life.

In this month's " Fortnightly" Mr Spencer begins a series of papers on ceremonia 1 . government. By this he means the control of our public conduct when in the presence of superiors, whether judge, or priest, or king. This opens a fine theme for the writer. His main points are that this kind of government is the earliest, the most general, and the most influential. Social, political, and religious are the divisions of the subject. The deference in any case is shown to be due to the unroot* able instincts in the soul of man, which instincts in their earliest forms are deemed to be akin to those displayed by the next highest animals, " the sub-human portion of organic life." It is a favourite theory with Spencer that most of our modern elaborate ceremonies can be traced to simple and spontaneous acts, prompted by personal needs and performed for personal ends. Instead of arising by dictation, or by agreement, which would imply preestablished organisation, they appear to have arisen unconsciously and to have been suggested by circumstances only. They seem to have grown out of individual conduct, before that conduct was in any way controlled by deliberate arrangement. It is well to point out that all this is adduced to confirm the Darwinian theory of evolution. Indeed Spencer takes up this theory where Darwin left it. Darwin evolved man from the anthropoid ape. Spencer takes man so found and tries to show that the highest refined society is but an evolution of qualities already found in the primitive savage. Man as a gregarious animal everywhere carries with him positive proofs of his lowly, and, according to Spencer, even earthly origin. A very firm and unmistakable protest must be made against this sweeping assertion. It is not warranted by the evidence. Up to a certain point only can the doctrine of evolution be really proved. The conviction is becoming Btronger and wider every day that tho philosopher and the theologian must split their differences between them. The philosopher stands on unassailable ground when he maintains that the body of man has been evolved from the highest of the lower animals. The theologian stands on equally unassailable ground when he says that nothing can account for the spiritual factor in man but the direct creation of the Almighty. Why does not each recognise the truth of each other's position and bury the hatchet at once ? Professor Huxley's address to the Working Mon's Club, is corrected and enlarged from tho newspaper report. As we should have expected, it is characteristic—manly, straightforward, and thoroughly practical. Technical education is explained to be "the teaching of handicrafts." What is the sort of education

that handicraftsmen require is the question most effectively answered. The preparatory education which such men require, says the Profeßaor, consists mainly in an accurate knowledge of English and Latin, and either French or German, a fair knowledge of drawing, and a thorough acquaintance with the elements of physical science, especially physics and chemistry. In another part of the paper ciphering is insisted on. There is nothing very new in all this. But there is something new in urging that in the case of boys intended for trade these things are enough. There is real danger, he thinks, that from the extreme of no education we may run to the other extreme of over education. The mistake is being made of giving to all what is really beneficial only to a few. Hence selection is required. "To the lad of genius, the one in a million, I would make accessible the highest and most complete training the country could afford. Whatever that might cost, the'investment, depend upon it, would be a good one. I weigh my words when I say if a nation could buy a potential Watt, or a Davey, or a Faraday, at the cost of a hundred thousand pounds down he would be dirt cheap at the money. It is a mere commonplace and every day piece of knowledge, that what these three men did has produced untold wealth, in the narrowest economical sense of the word." The article ia very valuable for announcing that the wealthy city companies are at last bestirring themselves in the education of handicraftsmen. This surely is now their only reason for existing. What is being done so well at South Kensington is to be done also in other parts of London. Classes aro to be formed, and workshops built, in which persons intended for workshops and factories can acquire, extend, and improve, their knowledge of the theory and practice of their particular avocations. As a politician Guizot was a failure. As a writer, especially on civilisation, he was a decided success. His books on Christianity also are treasures, for their breadth of view and sound reasoning. It is therefore a pleasure to read his opinions on other matters, presented in the late Mr Senior's paper on " Guizot at Val Richer." Here is one paragraph worth transcribing : "' I am a great novel reader," Guizot continued, "but I seldom read German or French novels. The characters are too artificial, there are too many forced situations, and the morality is generally detestable. My delight is in English novels, particularly those written by women. Miss Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, and many others almost as remarkable, form a school which in the excellence, the profusion, and the contemporaneousness of their productions, resembles the cloud of dramatic poets of the great Athenian age.'" The " Contemporary" begins the new year with a very bulky number. Compared with earlier days its pages are nearly doubled. But its worth is not equal to its bulk. However, three of the articles alone are worth the money. Professor W. Stanley Jevons returns to his attack on John Stuart Mill. The main charge brought against Mill ia that his mind was essentially illogical—that he frequently contradicted himself. In a former article Jevons clearly showed this was the case in Mill's statements on the axioms'and theorems of geometry. In this number a similar charge is substantiated as to Mill's doctrine concerning the nature and importance of resemblance. As is well known, this plays a moßt prominent part in all books on Formal Logic. Here is a crucial instance. Having quoted Mill's assertion that all reasoning is resolvable into a case of resemblance, the Professor proceeds:—"lt seems then that the universal type of the reasoning process wholly turns upon the pivot of resemblance. The stone which was despised and slightingly treated in the twentyfourth chapter, has become the corner stone of Mill's logical edifice. It would almost seem as though Mill were one of those persons who are said to think independently with the two halves of their brain. On the one side of the great longitudinal fissure must be held the doctrine that resemblance is seldom a subject of science j on the other side, Mill must have thought out the important place which resemblance holds as the universal type of reasoning and inductive processes. Doublemindedness, or the law of obliviscence, must be called in ; for it is absurd to contemplate the possibility of reconciling Mills's statement of the universal type of all reasoning with his remark upon the doctrine of Locke. i * * Mill has made that into a species which is really the summvm genus of knowledge." An it is hardly possible to exaggerate the mischief caused by a false philosophy, Professor Jevons rightly feels that he is doing good servieo to the world by exposing the fundamental errors into which Stuart Mill has clearly fallen. It is fair to add that Dr. Ward, of Dublin, and Dr. McCosh, of Princeton, had led the way, and partly traversed the ground of the London University Professor. "An Examination of Mills's Philosophy," by Dr. McCosh, published (en years ago, is a book which once to read is never to forget. There are too many digressions in Prof ossor Tint's, paper " On the teaching of Natural Philosophy " to make it either readable or really useful. He is like a bad extempore speaker—too ready to fly off at a tangent. The paper, instead of being extended from notes, might well have been condensed. Certainly it should have been written with less abruptness in its style and with truer sequence in its thought. With these drawbacks, however, there aro some valuable thoughts in the paper. Almost at random, the following statement is selected : —" The physiologists have quite recently seized, for their own inquiries, a great part of the natural philosopher's apparatus, and with it his methods of experimenting. But to say that even the very lowest form of life, not to speak of higher forms, still less of volition and consciousness, can be fully explained on physical principles alone— l.e., by the mere relative motions and interactions of portions of inanimate mattor, however refined and sublimated —is simply unscientific. There is absolutely nothing known in physical science which can lend the slightest support to such an idea." A critic in the " Academy" has been very severe ,on some of Dr. Schliemann's opinions as to treasures' he has discovered both at Hissarlik (?Troy) and at Mycena). Mr S. Poole's exhaustive contribution on this subject is opportune, and very valuable. The enthusiasm of the explorer has undoubtedly led him to make some mistakes. But this should not be used to detract from his true merit. Dr. Schliemann's patience, energy, and truthfulness, as well as his dignified reticence under unmerited attack, are deserving of all praise. The most remarkable paper in the " Nineteenth Century" is Mr Mullock's concluding one, "Is Life Worth Living." The question is examined from the atheistic, the testhetio, and the humanitarian points of view. None of these can give a consistent and satisfactory answer. The Christian belief is the only one that actually meets the conditions of life, and gives it any value. It is the only one, moreover, that gives a rational basis for morality. The style all along has been disjointed, and the argument difficult to follow ; but these sentences express the gist of it all—" If we look at. life as it is, wc shall see how the supernatural is ever present with us. We shall see it at the bottom equally of two sets of pleasures. The source ol the one is an impassioned struggle after the supernatural right, or an impassioned sense of rest on attaining it; the sense of the other is a sense of revolt against it, which Hatters us in various ways. In both cases equally the primary sense appealed to is the supernatural moral judgment. Why I call this judgment supernatural is this. Because natural science cannot supply it; because no interrogation of nature can either support or verify it; because, tested by the scientific tests of reality, it at once melts into air like the vainest of vain dreams. To see that this is so we have but to consider two of its essential characteristics. In the first place, this judgment is absolute. It discriminates between right, and with a menacing and imperious dogmatism from which there is no appoal; and it applies the same standard to all men. In the second place, the difference it asserts between right and wrong is one, not of degree, but of kind. * * * These two characteristics, our non-theistic moralists are, on their own showing, utterly to supply." | ;