with our fellows, with reverence for law and order. In the world of thought there is the same compatibility. The free working of the mind under self-imposed discipline, with regard to the claims of religion and social duty, is the goal to be aimed at by those who have taken the burden upon themselves of endeavouring to live according to reason.

I have tried to lay down the general lines which, as it seems to me, we have to follow in trying to get to a sound understanding of the whole subject. It may seem as if long serious consideration were needed in order to make these general principles of any practical utility. It is obvious, however, that only general suggestions are possible, since the mind of no human being is exactly like that of any one else, and the individual conscience, though capable of training under religious and social influence, must be the final judge in questions of practical duty. I do not hold that every one is bound to think in equal measure, but it is certainly true that in so far as we must think, we should think as thoroughly as we can, and that we should never delude ourselves into the belief that we have dug to the bottom of a subject when we have only grazed its surface.

The main result to which I have been trying to lead you is that to think freely is good; that freedom in thought generally means emancipation from authority that is not recognized as lawful; that lawful authority in all departments of

thought is the accumulated experience of the wise; that such authority must be recognized by thought itself, the individual mind acting independently but reverently, and under a sense of responsibility; that even the authority of the wise may fail us sometimes, in which case the mind can only fall back on the light within, and follow where it leads. Furthermore, we see that to appreciate the wisdom of the past and to reach towards the highest truth we may ever reach in the future, we need constant self-discipline with much self-distrust. To be a thinker requires faculties only to be attained by much labour. But for those who can think, and think reverently, patiently, and faithfully, there is never any danger lest thought should become too free.

II

REASON AND FEELING ON SOCIAL

QUESTIONS

(Address Delivered to Former Pupils of the Ipswich High School) FOR all of us to-day, the air is thick with social questions. Even those who live "far from the madding crowd" are obliged to read the newspapers, and those who lead the quietest domestic life have come to regard their troubles with their servants or with their children's schooling not as due to their own evil fate or to the depravity of mankind in general, but as forming part of "the domestic servant question" or "the education question," which civilized society as a whole is bound to try to solve. With women of active interests-among whom all who have been through the course of a good public school are likely to be included-the pressure of the unsettled questions of industrial, domestic, and political relations among the members of modern society is often very acutely felt, always more or less present to the mind, sometimes inspiring to efforts after reform, sometimes appalling with a sense of general disunion, deterioration, and hopeless unsettlement. So that in what I have to say to you I am at least free from the necessity

of arousing your attention to matters which do not interest you.

I used just now the word political, but I need hardly say that I have not come here with any political propaganda. I do not myself believe in the possibility or the desirability of drawing a hard-and-fast line between political and social matters. Such a distinction would have been incomprehensible to the Greek philosophers, who thought, on the whole, more reasonably and fundamentally on the subject than most writers and speakers of the present day. Nor is the distinction likely to be understood by the people of the twenty-first century. It is even now becoming unmeaning in the large field of local government. It springs partly from an utterly debased use of the word politics as concerned with party politics only, partly from the difficulty which, especially in England, has always been experienced in the way of co-operation between voluntary and compulsory effort in the public service. That difficulty has by no means been as yet overcome. Still, though there are some ways of helping good work in connection with public authorities and others which have their origin and direction in voluntary combinations only, the unity of aim and-to a certain extent-similarity of method among such workers is tending to lessen if not to obliterate the distinction between so-called "philanthropy " and active citizenship.

Now the main thought that I wished to bring before you to-day is that the solution of social

difficulties and the betterment of human life in all its relations requires three main things: right feeling, right reason, and the combination and co-operation of the two. This sounds a truism— and perhaps it is. But I often think that the recognition of the truth of truisms might bring more light sometimes on the path of thought and action than a good many sensational new ideas. At any rate, I should like you to consider feeling and reason as applied to some of the problems which agitate us at the present day, and to notice how great hindrance we suffer from either too much or too little feeling, or from feeling apart from reason, or from a pseudo-reason either in alliance with certain kinds of feeling or wrongly supposing itself to be outside feeling altogether. But first for a few words-I shall not go into any abstruse philosophy-as to the functions of feeling and reason respectively and the relative importance assigned to each in the conduct of life.

Now it seems to me that a history of human culture-as reflected either in literature or in popular ethics-might be written on the plan of marking the ups and downs of reason or feeling respectively in the estimate of dominant teachers or popular leaders. The eighteenth century was the heyday of intellectualism all over Europe. The Romantic Reaction gave the dominant place to feeling. Feeling in very extreme forms (as in those of the French Revolutionists, who formulated the Rights of Man) sometimes tried to get into the clothes properly belonging to reason; but they