Chapter V: Part 5

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still. I have no instruction to give you, and you would not thank me for wasting your time with rhetorical praise of art, even if I had all the flowers of diction at my command. To me, as an outer barbarian, it seems that some of the language on these subjects is already pretty high pitched. I have thought so even in reading that one of Mr. Addington Symond's most attractive volumes about Italy which relates to Italian art. Art is the interpreter of beauty, and perhaps beauty, if we could penetrate to its essence, might reveal to us something higher than itself. But Art is not religion, nor is connoisseurship priesthood. To happiness Art lends intensity and elevation; but in affliction, in ruin, in the wreck of affection how much can Phidias and Raphael do for you? A poet makes Goethe say to a sceptical and perplexed world, "Art still has truth, take refuge there." It would be a poor refuge for most of us; it was so even for the great Goethe; for with all his intellectual splendour, his character never rose above a grandiose and statuesque self-love; he behaved ill to his country, ill to women. Instead of being religion, Art seems, for its own perfection, to need religion--not a system of dogma, but a faith. This, probably, we all feel when we look at the paintings in the Church of Assisi or in the Arena Chapel at Padua. Perhaps those paintings also gain something by being in the proper place for religious art, a Church. Since the divorce of religious art from religion, it has been common to see a Crucifixion hung over a sideboard. That age was an age of faith; and so most likely was the glorious age of Greek art in its way. Ours is an age of doubt, an age of doubt and of strange cross currents and eddies of opinion, ultra scepticism penning its books in the closet while the ecclesiastical forms of the Middle Ages stalk the streets. Art seems to feel the disturbing influence like the rest of life. Poetry feels it less than other arts, because there is a poetry of doubt and Tennyson is its poet. Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express. In the pictures at our exhibitions there may be great technical skill; I take it for granted there is; but in the subject surely there is a void, an appearance of painful seeking for something to paint, and finding very little. When you come to a great picture of an Egyptian banquet in the days of the Pharaohs, you feel that the painter must have had a long way to go for something to paint. Certainly this age is not indifferent to beauty. The art movement is in every house; everywhere you see some proof of a desire to possess not mere ornament but something really rare and beautiful. The influence transmutes children's picture books and toys. I turned up the other day a child's picture book of the days of my childhood; probably it had been thought wonderfully good in its time; and what a thing it was. Some day our doubts may be cleared up; our beliefs may be settled; faith may come again; life may recover its singleness and certainty of aim; poetry may gush forth once more as fresh as Homer, and the art of the future may appear. What is most difficult to conceive, perhaps, is the sculpture of the future; because it is hardly possible that the moderns should ever have such facilities as the ancients had for studying the human form. In presence of the overwhelming magnificence of the sculpture in the museums of Rome and Naples, one wonders how Canova and Co. can have looked with any complacency on their own productions. There seems reason by the way to think that these artists worked not each by himself, but in schools and brotherhoods with mutual aid and sympathy; and this is an advantage equally within the reach of modern art. Meantime, though the Art of the future delays to come, modern life is not all hideous. There are many things, no doubt, such as the Black Country and the suburbs of our cities, on which the eye cannot rest with pleasure. But Paris is not hideous. There may be in the long lines of buildings too much of the autocratic monotony of the Empire, but the city, as a whole, is the perfect image of a brilliant civilization. From London beauty is almost banished by smoke and fog, which deny to the poor architect ornament, colour, light and shadow, leaving him nothing but outline. No doubt besides the smoke and fog there is a fatality. There is a fatality which darkly impels us to place on our finest site, and one of the finest in Europe, the niggard facade and inverted teacup dome of the National Gallery; to temper the grandeurs of Westminster by the introduction of the Aquarium, with Mr. Hankey's Tower of Babel in the near distance; to guard against any too-imposing effect which the outline of the Houses of Parliament might have by covering them with minute ornament, sure to be blackened and corroded into one vast blotch by smoke; to collect the art wonders of Pigtail Place; to make the lions in Trafalgar Square lie like cats on a hearth-rug, instead of supporting themselves on a slope by muscular action, like the lions at Genoa; to perch a colossal equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, arrayed in his waterproof cape, and mounted on a low-shouldered hack instead of a charger, on the top of an arch, by way of perpetual atonement to France for Waterloo; and now to think of planting an obelisk of the Pharaohs on a cab-stand. An obelisk of the Pharaohs in ancient Rome was an august captive, symbolizing the university of the Roman Empire, but an obelisk of the Pharaohs in London symbolizes little more than did the Druidical ring of stones which an English squire of my acquaintance purchased in one of the Channel Islands and set up in his English park. As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper. If the house is less beautiful the home is more so. Even a house in what Tennyson calls the long unlovely street is not utterly unlovely when within it dwell cultivated intellect, depth of character and tenderness of affection. However the beauty of English life is in the country and there it may challenge that of Italian palaces. America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious. As it is in society so it is in architecture. America is best when she is content to be herself. An American city with its spacious streets all planted with avenues of trees with its blocks of buildings far from unimpeachable probably in detail yet stately in the mass with its wide spreading suburbs where each artizan has his neat looking house in his own plot of ground and light and air and foliage with its countless church towers and spires far from faultless yet varying the outline might not please a painters eye but it fills your mind with a sense of well rewarded industry of comfort and even opulence shared by the toiling man of a prosperous, law-loving, cheerful, and pious life. I cannot help fancying that Turner, whose genius got to the soul of everything, would have made something of even in American city. The cities of the Middle Ages were picturesquely huddled within walls for protection from the violence of the feudal era, the cities of the New World spread wide in the security of an age of law and a continent of peace. At Cleveland in Ohio there is a great street called Euclid Avenue, lined with villas each standing in its own grounds and separated from each other and from the street only by a light iron fencing instead of the high brick wall with which the Briton shuts out his detested kind. The villas are not vast or suggestive of over-grown plutocracy, they are suggestive of moderate wealth, pleasant summers, cheerful winters and domestic happiness. I hardly think you would call Euclid Avenue revolting. I say it with the diffidence of conscious ignorance but I should not be much afraid to show you one or two buildings that our Professor of Architecture at Cornell University has put up for us on a bluff over Cayuga Lake, on a site which you would certainly admit to be magnificent. If I could have ventured on any recommendation concerning Art, I should have pleaded before the Royal Commission for a Chair of Architecture here. It might endow us with some forms of beauty; it might at all events endow us with rules for building a room in which you can be heard, one in which you can breathe, and a chimney which would not smoke. I said that in America the most pretentious buildings were the worst. Another source of failure in buildings, in dress, and not in these alone, is servile imitation of Europe. In northern America the summer is tropical, the winter is arctic. A house ought to be regular and compact in shape, so as to be easily warmed from the centre, with a roof of simple construction, high pitched, to prevent the snow from lodging, and large eaves to throw it off,--this for the arctic winter, for the tropical summer you want ample verandas, which, in fact, are the summer sitting rooms. An American house built in this way is capable at least of the beauty which belongs to fitness. But as you see Parisian dresses under an alien sky, so you see Italian villas with excrescences which no stove can warm, and Tudor mansions with gables which hold all the snow. It is needless to say what is the result, when the New World undertakes to reproduce not only the architecture of the Old World, but that of classical Greece and Rome, or that of the Middle Ages. Jefferson, who was a classical republican, taught a number of his fellow citizens to build their homes like Doric temples, and you may imagine what a Doric temple freely adapted to domestic purposes must be. But are these attempts to revive the past very successful anywhere? We regard as a decided mistake the revived classicism of the last generation. May not our revived mediaevalism be regarded as a mistake by the generation that follows us? We could all probably point to some case in which the clashing of mediaeval beauties with modern requirements has produced sad and ludicrous results. There is our own museum; the best, I suppose, that could be done in the way of revival; the work of an architect whom the first judges deemed a man of genius. In that, ancient form and modern requirements seem everywhere at cross purposes. Nobody can deny that genius is impressed upon the upper part of the front, which reminds one of a beautiful building in an Italian city, though the structure at the side recalls the mind to Glastonbury, and the galaxy of chimneys has certainly no parallel in Italy. The front ought to stand in a street, but as it stands in a field its flanks have to be covered by devices which are inevitably weak. What is to be done with the back always seems to me one of the darkest enigmas of the future. The basement is incongruously plain and bare, in the street it would perhaps be partly hidden by the passengers. Going in, you find a beautiful mediaeval court struggling hard for its life against a railway station and a cloister, considerately offering you a shady walk or shelter from the weather round a room. Listen to the multitudinous voices of Science and you will hear that the conflict extends to practical accommodation. We all know it was not the fault of the architect, it was the fault of adverse exigencies which came into collision with his design, but this only strengthens the moral of the building against revivals. Two humble achievements, if we had chosen were certainly within our reach,--perfect adaptation to our object and inoffensive dignity. Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches. For my part I look up with admiration, as fervent as any one untrained in art can, to those divine creations of old religion which soar over the smoke and din of our cities into purity and stillness and seem to challenge us, with all our wealth and culture and science and mechanical power, to produce their peer till the age of faith shall return. Not Greek Art itself springing forth in its perfection from the dark background of primaeval history, seems to me a greater miracle than these. How poor beside the lowliest of them in religious effect in romance, in everything but size and technical skill, is any pile of neo-paganism even I will dare to say, St. Peter's. Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church. I will even own that, except where restoration rids us of the unchristian exclusiveness of pews, I prefer the unrestored churches, with something of antiquity about them, to the restored. There is a spell in mediaeval Art which has had power to bewitch some people into trying, or wishing to try, or fancying that they wish to try or making believe to fancy that they wish to try, to bring back the Middle Ages. You may hear pinings for the return of an age of force from gentle aestheticists, who, if the awe of force did return, would certainly be crushed like eggshells. There is a well-known tale by Hans Andersen, that great though child-like teacher, called the "Overshoes of Fortune." A gentleman, at an evening party, has been running down modern society and wishing he were in the heroic Middle Ages. In going away he unwittingly puts on the fairy overshoes, which have the gift of transporting the wearer at once to any place and time where he wishes to be. Stepping out he finds his own wish fulfilled--he is in the Middle Ages. There is no gas, the street is pitch dark, he is up to his ankles in mud, he is nearly knocked into the kennel by a mediaeval bishop returning from a revel with his roystering train, when he wants to cross the river there is no bridge; and after vainly inquiring his way in a tavern full of very rough customers, he wishes himself in the moon, and to the moon appropriately he goes. Mediaevalism can hardly be called anything but a rather enfeebling dream. If it were a real effort to live in the Middle Ages, your life would be one perpetual prevarication. You would be drawn by the steam engine to lecture against steam; you would send eloquent invectives against printing to the press, and you would be subsisting meanwhile on the interest of investments which the Middle Ages would have condemned as usury. If you were like some of the school, you would praise the golden silence of the Dark Ages and be talking all the time. And surely the hourly failure to act up to your principles, the hourly and conscious apostacy from your ideal, could beget nothing in the character but hollowness and weakness. No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke the mould. But the mould is broken, and it is broken for ever. Through aesthetic pining for a past age, we may become unjust to our own, and thus weaken our practical sense of duty, and lessen our power of doing good. I will call the age bad when it makes me so, is a wise saying, and worth all our visionary cynicism, be it never so eloquent. To say the same thing in other words, our age will be good enough for most of us, if there is genuine goodness in ourselves. Rousseau fancied he was soaring above his age, not into the thirteenth century, but into the state of nature, while he was falling miserably below his own age in all the common duties and relations of life; and he was a type, not of enthusiasts, for enthusiasm leads to action, but of mere social dreamers. Where there is duty, there is poetry, and tragedy too, in plenty, though it be in the most prosaic row of dingy little brick houses with clothes hanging out to dry, or rather to be wetted, behind them, in all Lancashire. We have commercial fraud now, too much of it; and the declining character of English goods is a cause of their exclusion from foreign markets, as well as hostile tariffs; so that everything South Kensington can do to uphold good and genuine work will be of the greatest advantage to the English trade. But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him. There was fraud beneath the cross of the Crusader, and there was forgery in the cell of the Monk. In comparing the general quality of work we must remember that it is the best work of those times that has survived. I think I could prove from history that mediaeval floors sometimes gave way even when there was no St. Dunstan there. You will recollect that the floor miraculously fell in at a synod, and killed all St. Dunstan's opponents; but sceptics, who did not easily believe in miracles, whispered that the Saint from his past habits, knew how to handle tools. We are told by those whose creed is embodied in "Past and Present" that this age is one vast anarchy, industrial and social; and that nothing but military discipline--that is the perpetual cry--will restore us to anything like order as workers or as men. Well, there are twenty thousand miles of railway in the three kingdoms, forming a system as complex as it is vast. I am told that at one junction, close to London, the trains pass for some hours at the rate of two in five minutes. Consider how that service is done by the myriads of men employed, and this in all seasons and weathers in overwhelming heat, in numbing cold, in blinding storm, in midnight darkness. Is not this an army pretty well disciplined, though its object is not bloodshed? If we see masses full of practical energy and good sense, but wanting in culture, let us take our culture to them, and perhaps they will give us some of their practical energy and good sense in return. Without that Black Country industry, all begrimed and sweaty, our fine culture could not exist. Everything we use, nay, our veriest toy represents lives spent for us in delving beneath the dark and perilous mine, in battling with the wintry sea, in panting before the glowing forge, in counting the weary hours over the monotonous and unresting loom, lives of little value, one could think, if there were no hereafter. Let us at least be kind. I go to Saltaire. I find a noble effort made by a rich man who kept his heart above wealth, Titus Salt-- he was a baronet, but we will spare him, as we spare Nelson, the derogatory prefix--to put away what is dark and evil in factory life. I find a little town, I should have thought not unpleasant to the eye, and certainly not unpleasant to the heart, where labour dwells in pure air, amidst beautiful scenery, with all the appliances of civilization, with everything that can help it to health, morality, and happiness. I find a man, who might, if he pleased, live idly in the lap of luxury, working like a horse in the management of this place, bearing calmly not only toil and trouble, but perverseness and ingratitude. Surely, aesthetic culture would be a doubtful blessing if it made us think or speak unsympathetically and rudely of Saltaire. Four hundred thousand people at Manchester are without pure water. They propose to get it from Thirlmere. For this they are denounced in that sort of language which is called strong, but the use of which is a sure proof of weakness, for irritability was well defined by Abernethy as debility in a state of excitement. Let us spare, whenever they can be spared, history and beauty; they are a priceless part of the heritage of a great industrial nation, and one which lost can never be restored. The only difference I ever had with my fellow-citizens in Oxford during a pretty long residence, arose out of my opposition to a measure which would have marred the historic character and the beauty of our city, while I was positively assured on the best authority that it was commercially inexpedient. If Thirlmere can be spared, spare Thirlmere; but if it is really needed to supply those masses with a necessary of life, the loveliest lake by which poet or artist ever wandered could not be put to a nobler use. I am glad in this to follow the Bishop of Manchester, who is not made of coarse clay, though he cares for the health as well as for the religion of his people. A schism between aesthetic Oxford and industrial Lancashire would be a bad thing for both; and South Kensington, which, while it teaches art, joins hands with industry, surely does well. It is needless to debate before this audience the question whether there is any essential antagonism between art or esthetic culture, and the tendencies of an age of science. An accidental antagonism there may be, an essential antagonism there cannot be. What is science but truth, and why should not truth and beauty live together? Is an artist a worse painter of the human body from being a good anatomist? Then why should he be a worse painter of nature generally, because he knows her secrets, or because they are being explored in his time? Would he render moonlight better if he believed the moon was a green cheese? Art and Science dwelt together well enough in the minds of Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. In the large creative mind there is room for both; though the smaller and merely perceptive mind being fixed on one may sometimes not have room for the other. True, the perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science, may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords will. One word more before we distribute the prizes. A system of prizes is a system of competition, and to competition some object. We can readily sympathise with their objection. Work done from love of the subject, or from a sense of duty, is better than work done for a prize, and, moreover, we cherish the hope that co-operation, not competition, will be the ultimate principle of industry, and the final state of man. But nothing hinders that, in working for a prize as in working for your bread, you may, at the same time, be working from sense of duty and love of the subject, and though co-operation may be our final state, competition is our present. Here the competition is at least fair. There can hardly be any doubt that the prize system often calls into activity powers of doing good work which would otherwise have lain dormant, and if it does this it is useful to the community, though the individual needs to be on his guard against its drawbacks in himself. In reading the Life of Lord Althorp the other day I was struck with the fact, for a fact, I think, it evidently was, that England had owed one of her worthiest and most useful statesmen to a college competition, which aroused him to a sense of his own powers, and of the duty of using them, whereas he would otherwise never have risen above making betting books and chronicling the performances of foxhounds. Perhaps about the worst consequence of the prize system, against which, I have no doubt, your Instructor guards, is undue discouragement on the part of those who do not win the prize. And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, I wish you were to receive your rewards from a hand which would lend them any additional value. But though presented by me they have been awarded by good judges; and as they have been awarded to you, I have no doubt you have deserved them well.

THE ASCENT OF MAN.

Science and criticism have raised the veil of the Mosaic cosmogony and revealed to us the physical origin of man. We see that, instead of being created out of the dust of the earth by Divine fiat, he has in all probability been evolved out of it by a process of development through a series of intermediate forms.

The discovery is, of course, unspeakably momentous. Among other things it seems to open to us a new view of morality, and one which, if it is verified by further investigation, can hardly fail to produce a great change in philosophy. Supposing that man has ascended from a lower animal form, there appears to be ground at least for surmising that vice, instead of being a diabolical inspiration or a mysterious element of human nature, is the remnant of the lower animal not yet eliminated; while virtue is the effort, individual and collective, by which that remnant is being gradually worked off. The acknowledged connection of virtue with the ascendency of the social over the selfish desires and tendencies seems to correspond with this view; the nature of the lower animals being, so far as we can see, almost entirely selfish, and admitting no regard even for the present interests of their kind, much less for its interests in the future. The doubtful qualities, and "last infirmities of noble minds," such as ambition and the love of fame, in which the selfish element is mingled with one not wholly selfish, and which commend themselves at least by their refinement, as contrasted with the coarseness of the merely animal vices, may perhaps be regarded as belonging to the class of phenomena quaintly designated by some writers as "pointer facts," and as marking the process of transition. In what morality consists, no one has yet succeeded in making clear. Mr. Sidgwick's recent criticism of the various theories leads to the conviction that not one of them affords a satisfactory basis for a practical system of ethics. If our lower nature can be traced to an animal origin, and can be shown to be in course of elimination, however slow and interrupted, this at all events will be a solid fact, and one which must be the starting-point of any future system of ethics. Light would be at once thrown by such a discovery on some parts of the subject which have hitherto been involved in impenetrable darkness. Of the vice of cruelty for example no rational account, we believe, has yet been given; it is connected with no human appetite, and seems to gratify no human object of desire; but if we can be shown to have inherited it from animal progenitors, the mystery of its existence is at least in part explained. In the event of this surmise being substantiated, moral phantasms, with their mediaeval trappings, would for ever disappear; individual responsibility would be reduced within reasonable limits; the difficulty of the question respecting free will would shrink to comparatively narrow proportions; but it does not seem likely that the love of virtue and the hatred of vice would be diminished; on the contrary, it seems likely that they would be practically intensified, while a more practical direction would certainly be given to the science of ethics as a system of moral training and a method of curing moral disease.

It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of institutions. Our general histories will apparently have to be almost rewritten from that point of view. It is only to be noted, with regard to the treatment of history, that the mere introduction of a physical nomenclature, however elaborate and apparently scientific, does not make anything physical which before was not so, or exclude from human actions, of which history is the aggregate, any element not of a physical kind. We are impressed, perhaps, at first with a sense of new knowledge when we are told that human history is "an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." But a little reflection suggests to us that such a philosophy is vitiated by the assumption involved in the word "matter," and that the philosophy of history is in fact left exactly where it was before. The superior complexity of high civilization is a familiar social fact which gains nothing in clearness by the importation of mechanical or physiological terms.

We must also be permitted to bear in mind that evolution, though it may explain everything else, cannot explain itself. What is the origin of the movement, and by what power the order of development is prescribed, are questions yet unsolved by physical science. That the solution, if it could be supplied, would involve anything arbitrary, miraculous, or at variance with the observed order of things, need not be assumed; but it might open a new view of the universe, and dissipate for ever the merely mechanical accounts of it. In the meantime we may fairly enter a caveat against the tacit insinuation of an unproved solution. Science can apparently give no reason for assuming that the first cause, and that which gives the law to development, is a blind force rather than an archetypal idea. The only origination within our experience is that of human action, where the cause is an idea. Science herself, in fact, constantly assumes an analogous cause for the movements of the universe in her use of the word "law," which necessarily conveys the notion, not merely of observed co-existence and sequence, but of the intelligent and consistent action of a higher power, on which we rely in reasoning from the past to the future, as we do upon consistency in the settled conduct of a man.

Unspeakably momentous, however, we once more admit, the discovery is, and great is the debt of gratitude due to its illustrious authors. Yet it seems not unreasonable to ask whether in some respects we are not too much under its immediate influence, and whether the revolution of thought, though destined ultimately to be vast, may not at present have somewhat overpassed its bounds. Is it not possible that the physical origin of man may be just now occupying too large a space in our minds compared with his ulterior development and his final destiny? With our eyes fixed on the "Descent," newly disclosed to us, may we not be losing sight of the _Ascent_ of man?

There seems in the first place, to be a tendency to treat the origin of a being as finally decisive of its nature and destiny. From the language sometimes used, we should almost suppose that rudiments alone were real, and that all the rest was mere illusion. An eminent writer on the antiquities of jurisprudence intimates his belief that the idea of human brotherhood is not coeval with the race, and that primitive communities were governed by sentiments of a very different kind. His words are at once pounced upon as a warrant for dismissing the idea of human brotherhood from our minds, and substituting for it some other social principles, the character of which has not yet been definitely explained, though it is beginning in some quarters pretty distinctly to appear. But surely this is not reasonable. There can be no reason why the first estate of man, which all allow to have been his lowest estate, should claim the prerogative of furnishing his only real and indefeasible principles of action. Granting that the idea of human brotherhood was not aboriginal--granting that it came into the world at a comparatively late period, still it has come, and having come, it is as real and seems as much entitled to consideration as inter-tribal hostility and domestic despotism were in their own day. That its advent has not been unattended by illusions and aberrations is a fact which does not cancel its title to real existence under the present conditions, and with the present lights of society, any more than in annuls the great effects upon the actions of men and the course of history which the idea has undeniably produced. Human brotherhood was not a part of a primaeval revelation; it may not have been an original institution; but it seems to be a real part of a development, and it may be a part of a plan. That the social principles of certain anti- philanthropic works are identical with those which governed the actions of mankind in a primaeval and rudimentary state, when man had only just emerged from the animal, and have been since worked off by the foremost races in the course of development, is surely rather an argument against the paramount and indefeasible authority of those principles than in favour of it. It tends rather to show that their real character is that of a relapse, or, as the physiologists call it, a reversion. When there is a vast increase of wealth, of sensual enjoyment, and of the selfishness which is apt to attend them, it is not marvellous that such reversions should occur.

Another eminent writer appears to think that he has put an end to metaphysical theology, and perhaps to metaphysics and theology altogether, by showing that "being," and the cognate words, originally denoted merely physical perceptions. But so, probably, did all language. So did "spirit," so did "geist," so did "power," so did even "sweet reasonableness," and "the not us which makes for righteousness." Other perceptions or ideas have gradually come, and are now denoted by the words which at first denoted physical perceptions only. Why have not these last comers as good a claim to existence as the first? Suppose the intellectual nature of man has unfolded, and been brought, as it conceivably may, into relations with something in the universe beyond the mere indications of the five bodily senses--why are we bound to mistrust the results of this unfolding? We might go still further back, and still lower, than to language denoting merely physical perceptions. We might go back to inarticulate sounds and signs; but this does not invalidate the reality of the perceptions afterwards expressed in articulate language. It seems not very easy to distinguish, in point of trustworthiness of source, between the principles of metaphysics and the first principles of mathematics, or to say, if we accept the deductions in one case, why we should not accept them in the other. It is conceivable at least, we venture to repeat, that the development of man's intellectual nature may have enabled him to perceive other things than those which he perceives by means of his five bodily senses; and metaphysics, once non-existent, may thus have come into legitimate existence. Man, if the doctrine of evolution is true, was once a creature with only bodily senses; nay, at a still earlier stage, he was matter devoid even of bodily sense; now he has arrived--through the exercise of his bodily senses it may be--at something beyond bodily sense, at such notions as _being, essence, existence_: he reasons upon these notions, and extends the scope of his once merely physical vocabulary so as to comprehend them. Why should he not? If we are to be anchored hard and fast to the signification of primaeval language, how are we to obtain an intellectual basis for "the not us which makes for righteousness?" Do not the anti-metaphysicists themselves unconsciously metaphysicize? Does not their fundamental assumption--that the knowledge received through our bodily senses alone is trustworthy--involve an appeal to a mental necessity as much as anything in metaphysics, whether the mental necessity in this case be real or not?

Again, the great author of the Evolution theory himself, in his _Descent of Man_, has given us an account of morality which suggests a remark of the same kind. He seems to have come to the conclusion that what is called our moral sense is merely an indication of the superior permanency of social compared with personal impressions. Morality, if we take his explanation as complete and final, is reduced to tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; an etiquette which, perhaps, a sceptical voluptuary, wishing to remove the obstacles to a life of enjoyment, might think himself not unreasonable in treating as an illusion. This, so far as appears, is the explanation offered of moral life, with all its beauty, its tenderness, its heroism, its self- sacrifice; to say nothing of spiritual life with its hopes and aspirations, its prayers and fanes. Such an account even of the origin of morality seems rather difficult to receive. Surely, even in their most rudimentary condition, virtue and vice must have been distinguished by some other characteristic than the relative permanency of two different sets of impressions. There is a tendency, we may venture to observe, on the part of eminent physicists, when they have carefully investigated and explained what seems to them the most important and substantial subjects of inquiry, to proffer less careful explanations of matters which to them seem secondary and less substantial, though possibly to an intelligence surveying the drama of the world from without the distinctly human portion of it might appear more important than the rest. Eminent physicists have been known, we believe, to account summarily for religion as a surviving reminiscence of the serpent which attacked the ancestral ape and the tree which sheltered him from the attack, so that Newton's religious belief would be a concomitant of his remaining trace of a tail. It was assumed that primaeval religion was universally the worship of the serpent and of the tree. This assumption was far from being correct; but, even if it had been correct, the theory based on it would surely have been a very summary account of the phenomena of religious life.

However, supposing the account of the origin of the moral sense and of moral life, given in _The Descent of Man_, to be true, it is an account of the origin only. Though profoundly significant, as well as profoundly interesting, it is not more significant, compared with the subsequent development, than is the origin of physical life compared with the subsequent history of living beings. Suppose a mineralogist or a chemist were to succeed in discovering the exact point at which inorganic matter gave birth to the organic; his discovery would be momentous and would convey to us a most distinct assurance of the method by which the governing power of the universe works: but would it qualify the mineralogist or the chemist to give a full account of all the diversities of animal life, and of the history of man? Heroism, self- sacrifice, the sense of moral beauty, the refined affections of civilized men, philanthropy, the desire of realizing a high moral ideal, whatever else they may be, are not tribal self-preservation subtilized into etiquette; nor are they adequately explained by reference to the permanent character of one set of impressions and the occasional character of another set. Between the origin of moral life and its present manifestation has intervened something so considerable as to baffle any anticipation of the destiny of humanity which could have been formed for a mere inspection of the rudiments. We may call this intervening force circumstance, if we please, provided we remember that calling it circumstance does not settle its nature, or exclude the existence of a power acting through circumstance as the method of fulfilling a design.

Whatever things may have been in their origin, they are what they are, both in themselves and in regard to their indications respecting other beings or influences the existence of which may be implied in theirs. The connection between the embryo and the adult man, with his moral sense and intelligence, and all that these imply, is manifest, as well as the gradual evolution of the one out of the other, and a conclusive argument is hence derived against certain superstitions or fantastic beliefs; but the embryo is not a man, neither is the man an embryo. A physiologist sets before us a set of plates showing the similarity between the embryo of Newton and that of his dog Diamond. The inference which he probably expects us to draw is that there is no essential difference between the philosopher and the dog. But surely it is at least as logical to infer, that the importance of the embryo and the significance of embryological similarities may not be so great as the physiologist is disposed to believe.

So with regard to human institutions. The writer on legal antiquities before mentioned finds two sets of institutions which are now directly opposed to each other, and between the respective advocates of which a controversy has been waged. He proposes to terminate that controversy by showing that though the two rival systems in their development are so different, in their origin they were the same. This seems very clearly to bring home to us the fact that, important as the results of an investigation of origins are, there is still a limit to their importance.

Again, while we allow no prejudice to stand in the way of our acceptance of Evolution, we may fairly call upon Evolution to be true to itself. We may call upon it to recognise the possibility of development in the future as well as the fact of development in the past, and not to shut up the hopes and aspirations of our race in a mundane egg because the mundane egg happens to be the special province of the physiologist. The series of developments has proceeded from the inorganic to the organic, from the organic upwards to moral and intellectual life. Why should it be arrested there? Why should it not continue its upward course and arrive at a development which might be designated as spiritual life? Surely the presumption is in favour of a continued operation of the law. Nothing can be more arbitrary than the proceeding of Comte, who, after tracing humanity, as he thinks, through the Theological and Metaphysical stages into the Positive, there closes the series and assumes that the Positive stage is absolutely final. How can he be sure that it will not be followed, for example, by one in which man will apprehend and commune with the Ruler of the Universe, not through mythology or dogma, but through Science? He may have had no experience of such a phase of human existence, nor may he be able at present distinctly to conceive it. But had he lived in the Theological or the Metaphysical era he would have been equally without experience of the Positive, and have had the same difficulty in conceiving its existence. His finality is an assumption apparently without foundation.

By Spiritual Life we do not mean the life of a disembodied spirit, or anything supernatural and anti-scientific, but a life the motives of which are beyond the world of sense, and the aim of which is an ideal, individual and collective, which may be approached but cannot be attained under our present conditions, and the conception of which involves the hope of an ulterior and better state. The Positivists themselves often use the word "spiritual," and it may be assumed that they mean by it something higher in the way of aspiration than what is denoted by the mere term moral, though they may not look forward to any other state of being than this.

We do not presume, of course, in these few pages to broach any great question, our only purpose being to point out a possible aberration or exaggeration of the prevailing school of thought. But it must surely be apparent to the moral philosopher, no less than to the student of history, that at the time of the appearance of Christianity, a crisis took place in the development of humanity which may be not unfitly described as the commencement of Spiritual Life. The change was not abrupt. It had been preceded and heralded by the increasing spirituality of the Hebrew religion, especially in the teachings of the prophets, by the spiritualization of Greek philosophy, and perhaps by the sublimation of Roman duty; but it was critical and decided. So much is admitted even by those who deplore the advent of Christianity as a fatal historical catastrophe, which turned away men's minds from the improvement of their material condition to the pursuit of a chimerical ideal. Faith, Hope, and Charity, by which the Gospel designates the triple manifestation of spiritual life, are new names for new things; for it is needless to say that in classical Greek the words have nothing like their Gospel signification. It would be difficult, we believe, to find in any Greek or Roman writer an expression of hope for the future of humanity. The nearest approach to such a sentiment, perhaps, is in the political Utopianism of Plato. The social ideal is placed in a golden age which has irretrievably passed away. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, even if it were a more serious production than it is, seems to refer to nothing more than the pacification of the Roman Empire and the restoration of its material prosperity by Augustus. But Christianity, in the Apocalypse, at once breaks forth into a confident prediction of the ultimate triumph of good over evil, and of the realization of the ideal.

The moral aspiration--the striving after an ideal of character, personal and social, the former in and through the latter--seems to be the special note of the life, institutions, literature, and art of Christendom. Christian Fiction, for example, is pervaded by an interest in the development and elevation of character for which we look in vain in the _Arabian Nights_, where there is no development of character, nothing but incident and adventure. Christian sculpture, inferior perhaps in workmanship to that of Phidias, derives its superior interest from its constant suggestion of a spiritual ideal. The Christian lives, in a manner, two lives, an outward one of necessary conformity to the fashions and ordinances of the present world; an inner one of protest against the present world and anticipation of an ideal state of things; and this duality is reproduced in the separate existence of the spiritual society or Church, submitting to existing social arrangements, yet struggling to transcend them, and to transmute society by the realization of the Christian's social ideal. With this is necessarily connected a readiness to sacrifice present to future good, and the interests of the present to future good, and the interests of the present world to those of the world of hope. Apart from this, the death of Christ (and that of Socrates also), instead of being an instance of "sweet reasonableness," would be out of the pale of reason altogether.

It is perhaps the absence of an ideal that prevents our feeling satisfied with Utilitarianism. The Utilitarian definition of morality has been so much enlarged, and made to coincide so completely with ordinary definitions in point of mere extent, that the difference between Utilitarianism and ordinary Moral Philosophy seems to have become almost verbal. Yet we feel that there is something wanting. There is no ideal of character. And where there is no ideal of character there can hardly be such a thing as a sense of moral beauty. A Utilitarian perhaps would say that perfect utility is beauty. But whatever may be the case with material beauty, moral beauty at all events seems to contain an element not identical with the satisfaction produced by the appearance of perfect utility, but suggestive of an unfulfilled ideal.

Suppose spiritual life necessarily implies the expectation of a Future State, has physical science anything to say against that expectation? Physical Science is nothing more than the perceptions of our five bodily senses registered and methodized. But what are these five senses? According to physical science itself, nerves in a certain stage of evolution. Why then should it be assumed that their account of the universe, or of our relations to it, is exhaustive and final? Why should it be assumed that these are the only possible organs of perception, and that no other faculties or means of communication with the universe can ever in the course of evolution be developed in man? Around us are animals absolutely unconscious, so far as we can discern, of that universe which Science has revealed to us. A sea anemone, if it can reflect, probably feels as confident that it perceives everything capable of being perceived as the man of science. The reasonable supposition, surely, is that though Science, so far as it goes, is real, and the guide of our present life, its relation to the sum of things is not much more considerable than that of the perceptions of the lower orders of animals. That our notions of the universe have been so vastly enlarged by the mere invention of astronomical instruments is enough in itself to suggest the possibility of further and infinitely greater enlargement. To our bodily senses, no doubt, and to physical science, which is limited by them, human existence seems to end with death; but if there is anything in our nature which tells us, with a distinctness and persistency equal to those of our sensible perceptions, that hope and responsibility extend beyond death, why is this assurance not as much to be trusted as that of the bodily sense itself? There is apparently no ultimate criterion of truth, whether physical or moral, except our inability, constituted as we are to believe otherwise; and this criterion seems to be satisfied by a universal and ineradicable moral conviction as well as by a universal and irresistible impression of sense.

We are enjoined, some times with a vehemence approaching that of ecclesiastical anathema, to refuse to consider anything which lies beyond the range of experience. By experience is meant the perceptions of our bodily senses, the absolute completeness and finality of which, we must repeat, is an assumption, the warrant for which must at all events be produced from other authority than that of the senses themselves. On this ground we are called upon to discard, as worthy of nothing but derision, the ideas of eternity and infinity. But to dislodge these ideas from our minds is impossible; just as impossible as it is to dislodge any idea that has entered through the channels of the senses; and this being so, it is surely conceivable that they may not be mere illusions, but real extensions of our intelligence beyond the domain of mere bodily sense, indicating an upward progress of our nature. Of course if these ideas correspond to reality, physical science, though true as far as it goes, cannot be the whole truth, or even bear any considerable relation to the whole truth, since it necessarily presents Being as limited by space and time.

Whither obedience to the dictates of the higher part of our nature will ultimately carry us, we may not be able, apart from Revelation, to say; but there seems no substantial reason for refusing to believe that it carries us towards a better state. Mere ignorance, arising from the imperfection of our perceptive powers, of the mode in which we shall pass into that better state, or of its precise relation to our present existence, cannot cancel an assurance, otherwise valid, of our general destiny. A transmutation of humanity, such as we can conceive to be brought about by the gradual prevalence of higher motives of action, and the gradual elimination thereby of what is base and brutish, is surely no more incredible than the actual development of humanity, as it is now, out of a lower animal form or out of inorganic matter.