GOOD AND EVIL SUBJECTIVE.

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the play of forces on the nervous centres of each being. This creates a thousand worlds adapted to the different wants of each, and is so much better, therefore, than if it had objective reality; and man stupidly thinks it was all made for him, and that the way these forces affect him is the absolute measure of truth: whereas a very few only of the forces around him reach, him through his five senses or otherwise, and produce those impressions and ideas which are sufficient to guide him towards the objects of his being, towards his real world—that of his pleasures and pains, and which he calls his moral world. In reality he knows very little indeed of all that is going on without him, as he is cognisant only of the influences that can penetrate through his thick skin; and whole worlds of beings may exist without his intellectual ken. If our faculties, then, are few and limited, and not designed to penetrate into the inward essence and constitution of things, they are yet sufficient for our purpose, the use of our intellectual consciousness being not to teach absolute truth, but to guide us towards our wants, which in their fulfilment are always pleasurable, and thus contribute towards the stock of happiness in the world.

"Good and evil are purely subjective, and the moral world is as entire a creation of the mind as the physical world. It is merely a record of man's pleasures and pains, of his likes and antipathies, and of the various fine names by which he distinguishes the different varieties of feeling as he wishes to promote the one and to prevent the other. As our thoughts and ideas compel a reference to objects out of self, so do our feelings, aud we talk of the eternal aud immutable distinctions between right and wrong, whereas these distinctions have no existence out of ourselves, and one action is as good as another in itself, and is good, pure, holy, &c., in proportion as it tends to carry out the purpose of creation, which is not man's happiness alone, but that of all of sensitive existence. Morality is the science of living together in the most happy.

manner possible; at present it is confined to men alone, but we must widen its sphere of action so as ultimately to take in all living creatures. Do not let us be be alarmed, then, for the interests of morality, for as J. S. Mill says, 66 "'a volition is a moral effect, which follows the corresponding moral causes as certainly and invariably as physical effects follow their physical causes."

Physical science has made rapid progress since the introduction of the inductive method, while mental science, to which it is supposed not to apply, is little further advanced than it was two thousand years ago; but on the recognition of this great truth, that causation is as constant, and that law reigns as much in the realm of mind as of matter, our future progress in this department must depend. This truth occupies, in the present day, much the same position in mental science, as the earth's position with respect to the sun in the days of Copernicus did in physics. Men saw that the sun went round the earth, and the Bible said it did, and Galileo was imprisoned for saying it did not. Men say they now feel that they are free, as they before saw that the sun went round the earth; and theologians say that responsibility, which, according to them, is the right to take revenge for past misconduct, depends upon this freedom, and that morality depends upon this kind of responsibility; and when our philosophers are appealed to as to whether man is free, or subject to law, like everything else, they say, "Sometimes one, and sometimes the other." To give an instance in each class: Froude, the philosopher, says: "The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the idea of contingency, and expect to escape the just issue of their actions; the wise man will know that each action brings with it its inevitable consequences, which even God cannot change without ceasing to be himself.' Praise and blame "involve that somewhere or other the influence of causes ceases to operate, and that *Froude's Essays, "Spinoza," vol. ii, p. 48.

THE ABSOLUTE EXISTENCE.

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some degree of power there is in man of self-determination, by the amount of which, and not by their specific actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured." * How "inevitable consequences are to be expected where " causes cease to operate," he does not tell us ; but no doubt the earth goes round the sun in physics, and the sun round the earth where man's volition is concerned. Huxley, the man of science, says: "Theology in her purer forms, has ceased to be anthropomorphic, however she may talk. Anthropomorphism has taken her stand in its last fortress-man himself. But science closely invests the walls; and philosophers gird themselves for battle upon the last and greatest of all speculative problems. Does human nature possess any free volitional or truly anthropomorphic element, or is it only the cunningest of all nature's clocks? Some, among whom I count myself, think that the battle will for ever remain a drawn one, and that, for all practical purposes, this result is as good as anthropomorphism winning the day."†

Notwithstanding, we are slowly, but surely, coming to the conviction that in nature there is no beginning, merely pre-existent and persistent force and its correlates-that is, "that each manifestation of force can be interpreted only as the effect of some antecedent force, no matter whether it be an inorganic action, an animal movement, a thought or feeling"; that all force, or power, or ability is derived and inseparable from that of which it is the force-the Supreme Cause of all. If we have lost matter, we have found force; if we have lost mind-a suppositious, capricious existence, governed by nothing-we have found universal law, and " supreme and infinite and everlasting Mind in synthesis with all things." In the correlation of force, we have one great heart-beat of the Absolute Existence. 66 Being underlies all

*Froude's Essays, "Spinoza," vol. ii., p. 59.

+ Fortnightly Review, June, p. 664.

"First Principles," by Herbert Spencer.

a

modes and forms of being."* "Nature is an infinitely divided God. The Divine One has dispersed itself into innumerable sensible substances, as a white beam of light is decomposed by the prism with seven coloured rays. And a divine being would be evolved from the union of all these substances, as the seven coloured rays dissolve again into the clear-light beam. The existing form of nature is the optic glass, and all the activities of spirit are only an infinite colour-play of that simple divine ray."†

CHAPTER V.

RELIGION.

WE have seen how the physical and moral worlds have been created within us by our forms of thought, and by out likes and antipathies; the latter constituting a World based on the Chemistry of Sensibility. We have now to consider in what way and by what faculties the Religious World is created. Morality defines our relation to our fellow-man, religion our relation to God. The properties of matter, regarded as separate and distinct forces acting upon our organisation, give rise to our "forms of thought.". The mental faculty of Individuality gives unity to these properties of matter, creating what we call substance; the same faculty gives unity to our separate thoughts and feelings, and to that unity we give the name of Mind; but the process does not stop here; for every change or effect we see that there is a cause which is always equal, under like circumstances, to produce the same effect. This force, or this power or ability to produce change, is unseen and unknown to us、 except in its effect, but we necessarily conclude that it is the, force of something, and Individuality again gives unity to all these separate powers or causes of effects, and to this unity we give the name of God. Examination into the nature of this Force shows that it is Persistent,-that is, is the effect, or correlate, or equivalent of some antecedent force, and that what we call matter and mind are known to us only from the changes that take place in it, its mode of action or phenomena: "in other words, matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of groups of natural phenomena."* These changes or phenomena do not persist, but

* Huxley.