have comparatively little influence while over 142,000* publicans and beer-sellers compete, by holding out every species of allurement, to attract the young and unwary to their bars and counters, and many of whom would be ruined but that they subsist on the ruin of their customers. Meantime the disease of intemperance is rapidly spreading; women have taken to it,† and drunken parents are not only daily poisoning the blood of their children, but, by their example, introducing them to the vice.

Surely it is time that every sober man should exert himself to abate this evil, since indifference, in such a case, can only be justified on the plea of Cain, "Am I my brother's keeper?" It is quite possible for the respectable to shut their eyes to ills about them, while the police keep the leading thoroughfares clear, and the daily list of crime and misery in the columns of the press is passed over unread, but not the less will the blood of our brothers and sisters cry to us from the ground, if, from apathy or selfishness, we make no effort to fence the gulf into which such multitudes are ignorantly or madly rushing. A short time ago, a tale was published called "The Devil's Chain," which a portion of the press condemned as sensational nonsense. The linking of the various incidents into one connected tale may, perhaps, be open to criticism; but every incident brought forward is constantly illustrated in real life by the newspaper reports. Every few weeks coroners' juries are engaged in investigating the suicides of wretched girls, ruined through drink. Reports of the Divorce Court are constantly recording the destruction of homes through one or other of the parties having fallen into habits of intemperance. There are few cases of murder or manslaughter but are proved, by the evidence, to arise from this cause; while every species of cruelty and misery, even to the maiming and wounding of helpless infants by the drunken fury of their own parents, besides numberless accidents, are daily recorded as arising from the same fearful cause. In the criminality of these horrors every member of the community must take his share, for the majority of them may be prevented. They are the legitimate outcome of many of our national customs, and of the legal permission given to unlimited beguilement of the weak; and no sophistry, or profession of ignorance, will relieve one individual from the heavy responsibility of these crimes till his utmost influence has been exerted in the cause of temperance.

It is strange that while the causes of infinitely lesser evils have been thought worthy of the investigation of Royal Commissions and Joint Committees of the Houses of Parliament, this, the greatest curse to the country, has excited comparatively little in

*Parliamentary Return, 1874.

† 10,000 women, and 12,000 men were apprehended in Liverpool last year for drunken

ness.

vestigation. The motion made last session by the Archbishop of Canterbury for a parliamentary inquiry, is, however, a hopeful sign that this apathy is yielding, and all friends of temperance should endeavour to make the investigation as complete as possible, so that the extent and malignancy of the evil may be thoroughly brought to light.

That any fair and impartial report will greatly strengthen their hands is unquestionable, for it is indeed very doubtful whether the horrors which have been recently perpetrated in Bulgaria, and which have so excited the public mind, have produced an amount of suffering and misery equal to that which is each year endured by the weak and helpless, the women and the children, of our own country, as the terrible result of our national intemperance.

FRANCIS PEEK.

A

N attentive reader of my former paper on this subject will at least have drawn from it one conclusion. He will have understood that metaphysical ideas, when regarded from the point of view of development, become something quite different from what they are usually held to be. He will have seen that the idea of evolution has indeed transformed the whole aspect of Metaphysic, as it has transformed, or is transforming, all the other departments of human knowledge. It is instructive to look back upon what Metaphysic was before it thus transformed itself in the light of its latest synthesis. Here is Auguste Comte's description of it:

"In the theological stage, the human mind, seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final causes (the origin and purpose) of all effects -in short absolute knowledge-supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings.

"In the metaphysical stage, which is only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities (that is, personified abstractions), inherent in all beings, and capable of producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its proper entity."*

It is clearly this old metaphysic, untransformed by the principle of evolution, that Mr. Matthew Arnold also has in his mind when,

The Positive Philosophy: freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau (Trübner, 1875), vol. i. p. 2.

in the second chapter of "God and the Bible," he treats metaphysicians to the following smart little fusillade :

"Continuo auditæ voces vagitus et ingens.'

At the mention of that name metaphysics, essence, existence, substance, finite and infinite, cause and succession, something and nothing, begin to weave their eternal dance before us! with the confused murmur of their combinations filling all the region governed by her, who, far more indisputably than her late-born rival, political economy, has earned the title of the dismal science."

"

What I complain of in these words is not that they are too strong, but that they are not half strong enough. Let me recommend to Mr. Arnold's attention the terms in which another great religious reformer, Luther, speaks of the philosophical synthesis of the epoch in his time just about to expire. The Schoolmen are, for Luther, "locusts, caterpillars, frogs, lice." And of Aristotle, the father of Scholasticism, says Luther, as recently quoted by Mr. J. W. Draper :—

"Truly a devil, a horrid calumniator, a wicked sycophant, a prince of darkness, a real Apollyon, a beast, a most horrid impostor on mankind, one in whom there is scarcely any philosophy, a public and professed liar, a goat, a complete epicure, this twice execrable Aristotle."

Looked at critically, these two forms of words, Mr. Arnold's and Luther's, are only "a deeply moved way of saying"-the synthesis of the immediate past has become insufficient for the present expansion of experience. This ardour of denunciation in fact occupies in the minds of religious reformers the place which we have seen that humour occupies in a philosopher like Plato; it is an imaginative way of detaching oneself from ideas by which one feels oneself to be dominated. Luther, as we know, was dominated, notably in his doctrine of consubstantiation, by the ideas of the "twice execrable Aristotle ;" and we shall find in the sequel, I think, that Mr. Arnold is himself also, like St. Anthony in the desert, dominated by a whole swarm of detached and insubordinate metaphysical entities, buzzing about his head, and keeping him a stranger to "that serenity which," he tells us, "comes from having made order among ideas."

But there is another point of view from which his denunciation of metaphysic may be regarded. In "Culture and Anarchy," as we have seen, he is remonstrating with the liberal Philistine, and in "St. Paul and Protestantism" with the religious Philistine, and he is driven in each case by the exigences of his argument upon the standpoint of modern metaphysic, of the Zeit-Geist and the "better self"—i.e., upon the historical evolution of the collective

God and the Bible, p. 58.

†The Conflict between Religion and Science (King, 1875), p. 215.

"In the the of beings, th -in short al the immedi "In the the mind

the up the t-Geist, and

State, which he chy" and in "St. maintain himself there thod, his desultoriness:

ature and Dogma"*"had a famous a contrary fashion we sometimes we may be of use by the very absence very want of a philosophy based on dinate, and coherent;' because we are thus tions in such a simple way that any one can

forgets what he said in "St. Paul and Prothe scientific sense "which seeks exact knownever asserted its claims so strongly" as now; entities (tensity of religion to neglect those claims, and of producin and loss to it from neglecting them, never were so and that whatever hinders the filtering of philosophy

is, in t

religious doctrine "hinders truth and the natural It would seem, at least, that if the convergious Philistine is only to be accomplished by a