scientific inquiry may be severe; but it is, for this reason, all the more healthy and beneficial. Like a skillful surgeon, it inflicts pain merely to cure disease.

The advancement of science means necessarily a clearer insight into the laws of nature; a better acquaintance with nature means necessarily the promotion of our welfare and happiness, and the ultimate dominion of mind over matter. It is, therefore, a fallacious mode of reasoning which would seek to restrict the sphere of scientific influences, or, in any sense, impede the progress of scientific ideas. To understand ourselves we must understand the conditions which surround us. It is needless to say that this is impossible without the aid of science.

SKEPTICISM: ITS FUNCTION AND IMPORTANCE.

Phædrus.-Do you see that tallest plane-tree in the distance?

Socrates.-Yes.

Phædrus.-There are shade and gentle breezes, and grass on which we may either sit or lie down.

Socrates.-Move on.

Phædrus.-I should like to know, Socrates, whether the place is not somewhere here at which Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia from the banks of the Ilissus.

Phædrus. And is this the exact spot? The little stream is delightfully clear and bright; I can fancy that there might be maidens playing near.

Socrates. I believe that the spot is not exactly here, but about a quarter of a mile lower down, where you cross to the Temple of Agra, and I think that there is some sort of Altar of Boreas at the place.

Phædrus. I don't recollect; but I wish that you would tell me whether you believe this tale.

Socrates. The wise are doubtful, and if, like them, I also doubted, there would be nothing very strange in that.*

Such is the dialogue, as Plato represents it, between the two friends, as they enter into a shady retreat for the purpose of discussing the merits of Lysias' speech.

The conditions are truly inviting: the country is beautiful, the air exquisitely pure and full of sweet scents, as they pass on to their goal, and to the consideration of their subject. For us, however, it is only the passing remark that "the wise are doubtful, etc," which at present concerns us; and which we have selected because it in a measure forms an introduction to the subject embraced in the present chapter: viz., that spirit of doubt, and disposition to investigate, which, having become synonymous with the spirit of the age, are at once the terror of extreme conservatism, and the hope and promise of liberal and progressive thought. Tradition says the latter is well; but rational and clearsighted investigation is better. And thus we pass into a habit of thought in many respects hostile to that of the past, and which, when viewed from an ecclesiastical standpoint, is thus described: "Doubt is everywhere. Skeptical suggestions are wrapped in narrative; they bristle in short, shallow, self-asserting essays, in which men who really show their ignorance, think they show their depth; they color our physical philosophy; they mingle themselves with our commonplace theology itself." Thus, according to orthodoxy, in addition to

* 66 Dialogues of Plato," Phædrus. Translated by B. JOWETT, M.A., Master of Baliol College, Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Oxford. +"Faith and Free Thought," Preface. By SAMUEL WILBERFORCE, D.D., Bishop of Winchester.

the frightful ignorance which modern skepticism rests upon for its support, its mere existence constitutes a sort of descensus averni from which we ought to shrink with all the instinct of self-preservation, accompanied by a due preponderance of pious horror and intensified repugnance. According to modern thought, on the other hand, the idea is rapidly gaining ground that as the discovery of all truth is necessarily progressive, so there is not, and cannot be, any such thing as a divorce, or even alienation, between skepticism and progress.

"Who never doubted never half believed,

Where doubt there truth is 'tis her shadow."

Indeed, so rapidly is this feeling spreading, and so powerfully is it disseminating its influences, that we scarcely meet with a person of any intellectual caliber who has not in some way become touched by the skeptical tendency; and who, if he does not evince a spirit of bold and candid skepticism, at least so far qualifies his opinions that they amount virtually to the same thing. "We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases." So said Goethe; and so says the nineteenth century, at least so far as a powerful and daily increasing number of its representatives is concerned. †

Just here, however, it may perhaps be as well to observe that, although modern skepticism partakes necessarily to some extent of the character of Pyrrhonism, it at the same time differs from it in one important particular: viz., that whereas the skepticism of Pyrrho leads to the conclusion that nothing truly is, the modern skeptic merely doubts and questions the existing order of things the more fully to arrive at the fundamental bases of truth.

"He that says nothing can be known, o'erthrows

His own opinion, for he nothing knows,

So knows not that."

LUCRETIUS.

Passing over from the earlier and more rudimentary state of our intellectual development, we have entered on that condition when the mind refuses to rest satisfied with the dicta of a hundred years ago, and when, even admitting that we have lost in some directions through the change from credulity to incredulity, it surely will not be denied that we have gained considerably in the cultivation of a spirit of earnest and fearless criticism. The change has been gradual, but it is for this reason no less potent or real. However much, therefore, the attempt may be made in some quarters to denounce and suppress the spirit of inquiry which is abroad at the present day, it is of no avail. When once the human mind has been as thoroughly shaken as it has been within the last century, there is no way out of the difficulty but by meeting the subject in a manly, straightforward manner.

True it may be that we may often wish we had, like Theseus, an Ariadne to help us through the labyrinth; but even in these moments of temporary depression, there is no reason why we should give up the problem in despair, or even sigh for a return to the simpler faith of the world's childhood. Born as we are under a

sharper and more invigorating atmosphere than that of preceding ages, it is well for us to remember that even if we are deprived of much of the calm and sweet serenity consequent on an abiding faith and childlike acceptance of traditional beliefs, we are, from the activity of the forces around us, more likely to develop into a full and perfect manhood. And, then again, there is certainly some encouragement in the fact that an intelligent skepticism is decidedly better than an ignorant superstition. In the latter, we grow into a sort of abnormal condition, in which, through the exaggerated cultivation of our sen