foundations of all knowledge, it may be said, therefore, rest upon faith or trust rather than upon perfect rational insight; " so that faith or trust is man's highest form of reason.' Reason seems to rise out of faith in the beginning, in its efforts to comprehend the physical order underlying the impressions of sense; it seems at the end obliged to return into faith, in an improved form, as theistic or religious trust. When reflectively formulated and vindicated, this trust becomes the philosophical faith' which, as we saw, Professor Fraser proposes as the human via media between nescience and omniscience, between complete scepticism and completely unmysterious insight. A few words may fitly be added on the relation of this solution by faith to the position assumed by absolute idealism, or what is somewhat vaguely known as Hegelianism or NeoHegelianism. He who is elaborating a science of what must be in thought is in danger of excluding from his regard not a little of what is in man.' In these words of an early essay, published in 1852, Professor Fraser aptly hits the weak point of all a priori systems. In like manner here, in the chapters on 'Divine Necessity' and 'Philosophical Faith,' his criticism of Hegelian thought consists substantially in pointing to two cardinal facts of experience which Hegelianism either has no room for in its necessary system of timeless reason, or, if it acknowledges their reality, leaves as mysterious as it found them. These two facts are the mystery of time and the mystery of morally responsible personality-man's personal power to create acts that ought not to be acted, which are inconsistent with the perfect reason, and for which the human person, not the Power at the heart of the universe, is responsible.' They are not explained, but explained away, if time is treated as an illusion, and moral persons as modes of the activity of a universal consciousness. If, on the other hand, the Hegelian denies these implications, and asserts that Hegel meant his thought to be interpreted consistently with the actuality of the time process, and also with the moral personality of man, is the relation between man's time-consciousness and the eternally complete divine thought, or between man's freedom and the universal activity of God, really brought by the system into the clear light of necessary knowledge? Surely no one who realizes what actual insight in such a matter would mean can honestly assert that such insight is placed within our reach by Hegel or any one else. The test is simple; show us this absolutely complete science-this intellectual analysis of experience without remainder-and the vision will suffice to strike the sceptic dumb. As this proof is not forthcoming, we are forced to con clude clude that, so far as the facts in question are not eliminated by being denied, the mysteries are merely 'articulated in a fresh form of verbal expression.' We are still at the position of a moral faith 'sustained by what one might call spiritual motive as distinguished from full intellectual insight.' 'Surely,' Professor Fraser concludes, the authority of final faith can be dispensed with only in the Omniscience which leaves no room for mystery or incomplete knowledge.' But if inadmissible claims are abated, there need be no radical divergence, he seems to say, between the Hegelian interpretation of the universe and the philosophy of faith. It may be a question of names, whether man's final attitude should be called knowledge or faith. To call it "knowledge" seems to claim too much, as long as there must be an inevitable remainder of mystery. To call it "faith may seem to mean that it is empty of objective rationality.' Phrases again which assert the 'organic unity' of the universe and man's 'identity' with universal reason, may be taken only as 'emphatic expressions of the conviction that men are not isolated psychological atoms, but members of a moral totality, in which the moral faith that is in us is sure to find sympathetic response in the incompletely comprehensible Divine Reason that is perpetually active at the centre of the Whole.' In spite, however, of such attempts at sympathetic approximation, a fundamental difference of temper is perceptible between Professor Fraser and all forms of absolutism. From the latter, the acknowledgment of an unexplained remainder of mystery is wrung, as it were unwillingly, under the pressure of controversy: to Professor Fraser, on the other hand, the fundamental mysteriousness of the universe is the thought most intimately present from the beginning to the end of his speculations. It determines his speculative mood. He sees in it the inevitable condition of our middle state; a condition, moreover, which is to be regarded not merely as intellectual defect but as the instrument of moral discipline, and as fostering the reverence and humility which are the condition of spiritual health. The final philosophy,' he concludes, 'is practically found in a life of trustful inquiry, right feeling and righteous will or purpose, not in complete vision; and perhaps the chief profit of struggling for the vision may be the moral lesson of the consequent discovery, the consciousness of the scientific inaccessibility of the vision.' This account of the general position defended in these Lectures would not be complete without reference to the two chapters, in the second volume, on 'Evil: the Enigma of Theism,' and 'Optimism.' In these, perhaps the strongest chapters in a work that is strong and helpful throughout, a really striking use is made of the conceptions of moral freedom to meet the formidable objection to theistic faith which lies in the existence of moral evil. When we contemplate what Butler calls the very strange state' of the world as we know it in its mixed evil and good, the alternative, as it has often been argued, seems to be either doubt of God's Omnipotence or doubt of His Goodness. The difficulty has never been more trenchantly and at the same time more fairly put from the sceptical side than by Hume in his 'Dialogues concerning Natural Religion,' in a passage where he has probably Butler's argument in view : 'It must, I think, be allowed,' says Philo, in the course of the discussion, that if a very limited human intelligence, whom we shall suppose utterly unacquainted with the actual universe, were assured before trial that it was the production of a very good, wise and powerful being, however finite, he would, from his conjectures, form beforehand a different notion of it from what we find it to be by experience; nor would he ever imagine, merely from these attributes of the cause, of which he is previously informed, that the effect could be so full of vice and misery and disorder as it appears in this life. Supposing now, that this person were brought into the world, still assured (on a priori grounds) that it was the workmanship of such a sublime and benevolent being, he might, perhaps, be surprised at the disappointment, but would never retract his former belief, if founded on any very solid argument; since such a limited intelligence must be sensible of his own blindness and ignorance, and must allow that there may be many solutions of those phenomena which will for ever escape his comprehension. But supposing, which is the real case with regard to man, that this creature is not antecedently convinced of a supreme intelligence, benevolent and powerful, but is left to gather such a belief from the appearance of things, this entirely alters the case; nor will he ever find any reason for such a conclusion. He may be fully convinced of the narrow limits of his understanding; but this will not help him in forming an inference concerning the goodness of superior powers, since he must form that inference from what he knows, not from what he is ignorant of. In endeavouring to meet the difficulty thus cogently put, Professor Fraser dismisses without more ado the hypotheses of Manichæan Dualism, of one Power partly good and partly evil, or of one absolutely indifferent Power, as being alike inconsistent with moral faith in the universe. He then turns to Leibnitz's Théodicée' as containing the most celebrated defence of optimism on a theistic basis, and partly in connexion, partly in contrast with that, proceeds to elaborate his own solution. The way in which the difficulty is stated, involves, he he argues, an unproved assumption which makes any solution impossible. It tacitly assumes that a necessitated absence of evil must be in itself good, or alone good, so that only impossibility of its ever making its appearance is consistent with the moral ideal of the universe.' But such a universe would be a world of non-moral things or automata, and would exclude the existence of persons, who, as moral beings, must be able to make themselves immoral. The real question, therefore, is whether the existence of individual persons is itself inconsistent with the divine goodness. A person who is under an absolute necessity of willing only what is good is not a person in the sense of possessing morally responsible freedom; and God himself cannot give existence to a contradiction. Would it enhance the perfection of the self-revelation of God in Nature that nothing supernatural should, in the form of good and evil human agency, appear in the course of Nature; or that evil should be excluded, by also making goodness in the form of morally tried personal life impossible?' When the question is put in this way, only one answer is possible: and it will be noted that the firmness with which the conception of freedom is held gives this reasoning a breadth and convincingness which does not belong to Leibnitz's more laboured argument. In the Théodicée' Leibnitz also presents evil as the means to a greater good, but he does not explain how, in the very conception of a moral person, the possibility of evil is implied. Again his argument tends to present evil as a necessity, and thus almost exonerates the evil-doer, who appears as the instrument by which the divine purpose is advanced. Moral evil seems thus transformed at a higher point of view into good. Professor Fraser's view, on the contrary, never loses sight of the fact that, whether from the human or the divine point of view, evil is that which ought not to exist.' The explanation he offers, therefore, is deeper and sounder, inasmuch as it neither minimizes the eternal distinction between right and wrong, nor weakens in any way the central fact of human responsibility. 6 ART. ART. IV.-1. Commonplace Book of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Unpublished MS. 2. A Catalogue of the Curious Collection of Pictures of George Villiers, (1st) Duke of Buckingham, with the Life of George Villiers, (2nd) Duke of Buckingham, the Celebrated Poet. Written by Brian Fairfax, Esq. London, 1758. 3. Works of his Grace George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and Memoirs of the Author. By T. Evans. Two Vols. London, 1775. 4. The Fairfax Correspondence. Civil War. Two Vols. London, 1849. 5. Ryedale and North Yorkshire Antiquities. By George Frank. 1888. 'A man so various, that he seemed to be N these words Dryden assigned to his literary foe his niche we are unprepared to concede to the satirist's Zimri,-chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon,' though he might be,—so comprehensive a title as epitome of all mankind, we cannot deny that he was the representative of a very large class of his contemporaries. The men of the Restoration found their talents, their whims, and their vices, summed up in that strange product of civil war, exile, and reaction against Puritanism, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. To write his life at length would necessitate summarizing the history of England for a quarter of a century; to dwell on his worst follies is unnecessary, for they were committed openly and are only too well-known; but a slight sketch of the man and his writings, including some hitherto unpublished fragments, may invite passing notice. If there is any limbo in which public men encounter those who have pilloried them in prose and verse, Villiers must find good cause to use the keen rapier of his wit. Hard measure has been dealt him; possibly not harder than he deserved, yet we lack proof that those resolute to nothing extenuate, were equally determined to set down naught in malice. As Walpole says, 'The portrait of this Duke has been drawn by four masterly hands; Burnet has hewn it out with his rough chisel; Count Hamilton touched it with that slight delicacy that finishes while it seems but to sketch; Dryden catched the living likeness; Pope completed the historical resemblance.' All four grant him talent, wit and beauty, all denounce him as spendthrift of mind, body and estate. Hume sums up his character |