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a passage in the "Meditationes de primâ Philosophiâ," in which Descartes explains it. It means "I think, that is to say, I am;" "my existence means my consciousness;" "I am means I think;" so that all Mr. Arnold's ingenious reasoning founded upon the etymological interpretation of “I am" by "I grow," "I feel myself to be alive," becomes superfluous, and falls to the ground.

4. In conclusion it remains to ask whether there is anything in experience corresponding to Mr. Arnold's new religious construction "the eternal not-ourselves that makes for righteousness;" or in other words, what is it that really and experimentally makes for, or promotes, righteousness in the world as we know it? is it a not-ourselves, is it outside of ourselves? is it eternal in any exact and scientific sense of the word? The first of these is a question upon which Mr. Arnold scarcely touches. He promises to do two things: to show first what was the experience of the ancient Israelite, upon which he based his religion; and to show, in the second place, what is the experience which we have in common with the ancient Israelite, whereon we can found ours. The first of these promises he performs, and we have already examined his performance of it; but the second he never performs at all, and when in "God and the Bible," after "the God of miracles" has been dismissed, and the "God of metaphysics" has been exploded, he comes to the "God of experience," instead of telling us what are the experiences of our life of to-day upon which we may base our religion and our idea of God, he gives us little more than a recapitulation of the Biblical passages by which he endeavoured before, and as we think failed, to show that the "God of the Bible" was an inference from the profound emotion with which the ancient Israelite regarded the thought of righteousness.

But now, as to our own experience, of which Mr. Arnold, instead of considering it fully by itself, makes a problem ancillary, or, as we may say, parasitical, to the problem of Jewish experiencewhat are the data? Do we experience a force outside of us always drawing us towards good, and never towards evil? Are the righteous always happy, and the wicked never prosperous? It is said that Diagoras of Melos, when he saw the offerings of the sailors in the temple of Poseidon, remarked, "We count those who were saved: no one counts those who were drowned, who yet made their vows like the rest." So we count the good who prosper, and the wicked who are miserable; no one counts the wicked who are happy, or the good who are miserable. To Schopenhauer the vision of man's unhappiness, irrespective of his actions, was so overpowering that he drew from it the conclusion that the Supreme Will was malevolent. We must at any rate not blink this side of experience, if we would be just in our estimate. It seems doubtful if we know yet what the secret of happiness is:

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it would appear to be very much more an affair of the nervous system, of the temperament, than of conduct. It attends us unsought; and if we seek it, it flies from us. If we pursue righteousness of set purpose to obtain happiness, we miss happiness and our righteousness becomes immoral, because it ceases to be disinterested. If this were not so; if to righteousness were really annexed happiness, happiness and the pursuit of it would be that which more than anything else "makes for righteousness." But this is not the case. What is it then which bears us, like a stream upon its bosom, when we are acting in a certain way, and which buffets and baffles us, and gives us an intolerable sense of isolation, if we act in the opposite way? It is the social medium, the community of which we are organic parts: not only the opinion of our immediate circle, nor the arm of the law, nor the pen of the scribe, nor the preaching of the Churches, but a certain stress and direction in the march of events themselves, which impels us to do the things which shall be of the greatest and widest benefit, whether we find them agreeable or not. I often think, when a criminal is punished for an offence against the law, that about one-third of the penalty he suffers is his due, and that the rest ought to be set down to the account of the community, whose imperfections in past generations and in this have made him what he is. So with laudable actions, we get praise for them as if they were our own several estate, and yet but for that larger collective life of which our own is the outcome, they would not have been possible to us, we should not have been able to do them. In every action of the individual, how much is due to character, and how much to the circumstances of his position, will vary with each case: but certain it is that as societies become more complex and firmly knit together, the part played by character becomes increasingly less. And then what is character but a crystallization of social conditions round a single point? Yet man is free in his action, each in his measure, in so far as character reacts upon the social environment. That which really "makes for righteousness" in the world is the ascent of a society towards its zenith; that which makes for unrighteousness is the decline of a society towards stagnation or dissolution. In the former case all or most of the social conditions go to the nourishment and fertilization of character; and it blossoms naturally, like the trees in spring. In the latter case, character has to subsist for the most part upon its native stamina, ie., upon the transmission through individuals of hereditary qualities. In a declining community righteousness is what the anthropologists call "a survival;" such was the righteousness of such a man as Marcus Aurelius; it drew its sustenance not from the present but from the past. But yet the world progresses upon the whole ? It does, and

this is the reason-because in the intercourse of nations the principles of conduct which have characterized one society in its highest development are taken as the starting-point of an infant community. Such were Roman institutions and Jewish religion to the early development of the German barbarians. Such were English institutions and Puritanism to the American commonwealth. So that the decay of the old communities counts for little in the history of the world, although it counts for much in the life of the individual citizen. For the individual, Stoicism and Asceticism are the forms which righteousness takes in a period of social decline; and these before long, like living organisms placed under a receiver, begin in vacuo to lose their freshness, and decay too; until, when a new community has gradually grown up around them, Stoicism and Asceticism become corrupt and drop off, like an aged parasite, from the main trunk of the nascent social life, as it again expands towards its full stature.

This then, I would submit, is the history of what Mr. Arnold calls "righteousness" in the world; and this is the total fact of experience with which we have to deal. But upon this, as before upon the partial experience of the ancient Israelite, no religious tenet whatever can be founded. The only thing that we know of by experience as making for or promoting righteousness, is the healthy and normal growth of a human society; but this growth is no more a metaphysical abstraction outside of the individual, than his conscience or his actions are; and it is again no more “eternal,” in any recognized or intelligible sense of the word, than human society itself.

M.

Must we then cry with the Christ of Novalis, "Children, "ye have no father?" By no means; Renan says, "Un "monde sans Dieu est horrible." I say so too. But the "eternal not-ourselves which makes for righteousness is not what we mean by God: it is simply the disembodied ghost of the Zeit-Geist or "better self" on which Mr. Arnold enlarged so fruitfully in his earlier books; so far as it is more than an edifice of words built on the quicksands of a parallogism, it is the mirage or metaphysical double of the community. It is a metaphysical idea, or rather it is the moiety of a metaphysical idea. It is not the whole, it is not the synthesis, the Begriff; it is one of the factors of the synthesis, without its complementary factor. The synthesis embraces the tendencies which promote righteousness, combined and interwoven with the tendencies which hinder it. In any given community this is the total fact of experience, if you will face it, and this is the fact as metaphysic interprets it. But an abstraction of the understanding, crowned with a negative particle, and robed with the Eternal Name," the Eternal notourselves which makes for righteousness," does it not impose upor

us with the illusory definiteness of an empty formula from which the contents of the religious consciousness have been sedulously excluded? is it more substantial than the enunciation of Mr. Dombey's elegant and languid mother-in-law, who never could remember names:-"There is no What's-his-name but Thingummy; and What-you-may-call-it is his prophet?”

To sum up. We have seen Mr. Arnold driven to take the true metaphysical point of view by the exigencies of his polemic against the liberal Philistine in "Culture and Anarchy," and again by the exigencies of his polemic against the religious Philistine in "St. Paul and Protestantism;" we have then seen his decline and fall from this point of view in "Literature and Dogma" and in "God and the Bible," conditioned by the exigencies of his efforts to persuade the irreligious and desirous-to-be-scientific Philistine to reopen his Bible and to appreciate the importance of conduct. We have seen that he tries to "get round" the irreligious Philistine by saying, "Come now, we will give up all metaphysics, and we will go only upon the ground of experience." We have seen that by thus descending to the Philistine's level, he does not really get out of the metaphysical region, but only out of the region of good metaphysic into the region of bad metaphysic, of idols and illusions such as the Philistine knows and rejoices in; and that he thereby leaves the main high road along which the large experience of mankind travels, and of which metaphysic is the formal science, and shuts himself up in the small parcel of experience, with which the Philistine nourishes and flatters himself. But perhaps the fundamental assumption which lies at the root of all this bad metaphysic, and this frustrated appeal to experience, is to be sought in a latent tendency in Mr. Arnold himself, which appears as early as in his first book. It is the assumption that "thought and speculation is an individual matter," it is the tendency to "philosophise alone," instead of moving in the broad pathways along which knowledge is actually advancing. This assumption is at once the basis of the private judgment on which the religious Philistine builds, and of the popular empiricism upon which the irreligious Philistine relies. It is the same assumption as that of the individual as something given on the one side, and of experience as something given on the other: and this assumption is itself metaphysical, only it is bad metaphysic, it is a petrified fragment of a metaphysical synthesis, instead of the living whole of a synthesis of the Zeit-Geist. Of metaphysic, then, may one not say, as Emerson says in another connection?

"They reckon ill who leave me out,
When me they fly I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings."

Dickens' Dombey and Son, ch. xxvii.

+ Culture and Anarchy, pp. 185, 186.

Having spoken so severely of Mr. Arnold's later works in their scientific aspect, I desire to record my enjoyment of them and gratitude for them in every other. What can be more delightful than the passage in "Literature and Dogma” about the “Muse of Righteousness?" The account, too, of St. Paul's doctrine in "St. Paul and Protestantism;" and of the early witnesses and of the "method" and "secret" of Jesus in "Literature and Dogma;" and again of the Bible Canon and of the Fourth Gospel in "God and the Bible," seem to me, in spite of what the learned critics have said about their inaccuracy, to be quite admirable in their way. They surely contain with sufficient accuracy all that a man of general cultivation, as distinguished from a professional student, need know about these subjects. And then the purity and freshness of the thoughts which hide from us the angular and unlovely lineaments of the Puritan metaphysics-how charming they are! I always experience the same sensation in reading these books of Mr. Arnold as I have when reading Mr. Ruskin's later works; it is the sensation as of a breeze bringing health from sweet and sunny fields, and blowing for a moment across the exhausted atmosphere of a German lecture-room. But then to enjoy this refreshment one must turn from the thing said to the means and manner of saying it; and one must listen to these, not as to an exposition of fact, but as one listens to a nocturne of Chopin, or to the sound of wholesome rain dropping on a dry place.

C. E. APPLETON.

* P. 23.

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