the sensual school and the materialism which it has produced, have arisen in periods when the standard of motives was low, and when heroism and pure enthusiasm had but little influence. In our present absolute ignorance of the immediate causes of life, and of the nature and limits of mind and matter, this consideration furnishes perhaps the most satisfactory arguments in favour of spiritualism; and it is as an index of the moral condition of the age that the prevalence of either spiritualism or materialism is especially important. At present, the tendency towards the latter is too manifest to escape the notice of any attentive observer. That great reaction against the materialism of the last century, which was represented by the ascendency of German and Scotch philosophies in England, and by the revival of Cartesianism in France, which produced in art a renewed admiration for Gothic architecture; in literature, the substitution of a school of poetry appealing powerfully to the passions and the imagination, for the frigid intellectualism of Pope or of Voltaire; and in religion, the deep sense of sin, displayed in different forms both by the early Evangelicals and by the early Tractarians, is everywhere disappearing. In England, the philosophy of experience, pushed to the extremes of Hume, and represented by the ablest living philosopher in Europe, has been rising with startling rapidity to authority, and has now almost acquired an ascendency in speculation. In France, the reaction against spiritualism and the tendency towards avowed materialism, as

represented by the writings of Comte,' of Renan, and of Taine, are scarcely less powerful than at the close of the last century; while, under the guidance of Schoppenhauer and of Buchner, even Germany itself, so long the chosen seat of metaphysics, is advancing with no faltering steps in the same career.

This is the shadow resting upon the otherwise brilliant picture the history of Rationalism presents. The destruction of the belief in witchcraft and of religious persecution, the decay of those ghastly notions concerning future punishments, which for centuries diseased the imaginations and embittered the character of mankind, the emancipation of suffering nationalities, the abolition of the belief in the guilt of error, which paralysed the intellectual, and of the asceticism, which paralysed the material, progress of mankind, may be justly regarded as among the greatest triumphs of civilisation; but when we look

1 It is indeed true, that a first principle of the Positive school is the assertion that the limit of human faculties is the study of the successions of phenomena, and that we are therefore incapable of ascertaining their causes; and M. Littré, in his preface to the recent edition of Comte's works, has adduced this principle to show that Positivism is unaffected by arguments against materialism. matter of fact, however, the leading Positivists have been avowed materialists; the negation of the existence of metaphysics as a science distinct from physiology, which is one of their cardinal doctrines, implies, or all but implies, materialism; and the tendency of their school has, I think, of late years been steadily to substitute direct negations for scepticism. There are some good remarks on this in a very clear and able little book, called Le Matérialisme Contemporaine, by Paul Janet, a writer on whom (since Saisset died) the defence of Spiritualism in France seems to have mainly devolved.

back to the cheerful alacrity with which, in some former ages, men sacrificed all their material and intellectual interests to what they believed to be right, and when we realise the unclouded assurance that was their reward, it is impossible to deny that we have lost something in our progress.

INDEX.