things done. It is the faculty by which, consciously or unconsciously, we go through the mental process expressed in the word "therefore." It is the faculty which confers on us a true gift of prophecy-the power of foreseeing that which "must shortly come to pass." In its practical application to conduct, and to the affairs of life, it is the gift by which we see the means which will secure for us certain ends, whether these ends be the getting of that which we desire, or the avoiding of that which we dread. But in its root, and in its essence, as well as in its application to the abstract reasoning of mathematics, it is simply the faculty by which we see one proposition as involving, or as following from another. The power of such a faculty obviously must be, as it actually is, immeasurable and inexhaustible, because there is no limit to this kind of following. That is to say, there is no end to the number of things which are the consequence of each other. Whatever happens in the world is the result of causes, moral or material, which have gone before, and this result again becomes the cause of other consequences, moral or material, which must follow in their turn. It is a necessary result of the unity of nature, and of the continuity of things, that the links of consequence are the links of an endless chain. It is the business of reason to see these links as they come one by one gradually into view; and it is in the nature of a reasoning creature to be drawn along by them in the line, whatever it may be, which is the line of their direction. The distance which may be traversed in following that direction even for a short time, and by a single mind, is often very great so great that a man may be, and often is, a different being from himself, both in opinions and in conduct, at two different epochs of his life. There are, indeed, individuals, and there are times and conditions of society, in which thought is comparatively stagnant, when it travels nowhere, or when its movements are so slow and gradual as to be imperceptible. But, on the other hand, there are times when mind is on the march. And then it travels fast and far. The journey is immense indeed, which may be accomplished by a few successive generations of men following,

one after the other, the links of consequence. At the end of such a journey, the children may be separated from their fathers by more than the breadth of ocean's. They may have passed into new regions of thought and of opinion, of habit and of worship. If the movement has been slow, and if the time occupied has been long, it will be all the more difficult to retrace the steps by which the change has been brought about. It will appear more absolute and complete than it really is the new regions of thought being in truth connected with the old by a well-beaten and continuous track.

In

But these endless processes of development arising out of the operation of the reasoning faculty, are consistent with any result-good or bad. Whether the great changes they produce have been for the better or for the worse, must depend, not on the length of the journey, but on the original direction in which it was begun. It depends on whether that direction has been right or wrong-on whether the road taken has been the logical development of a truth, or the logical development of a lie. The one has a train of consequences as long and as endless as the other. It is the nature of the reasoning faculty that it works from data. But these data are supplied to it from many different sources. the processes of reasoning on which the abstract sciences depend, the fundamental data are axioms or self-evident propositions. These may, in a sense, be said to be supplied by the reasoning faculty itself, because the recognition of a truth as self-evident is in itself an exercise of the reasoning faculty. But in all branches of knowledge, other than the abstract sciences, that is to say, in every department of thought which most nearly concerns our conduct and our beliefs, the data on which reason has to work are supplied to it from sources external to itself. In matters of belief, they come, for the most part, from authority, in some one or other of its many forms, or from imagination working according to its own laws upon impressions received from the external world. In matters of conduct, the data supplied to reason come from all the innumerable motives which are founded on the desires. But in all these differ

ent provinces of thought it is the tendency and the work of reason to follow the proposition, or the belief, or the motive, to all its consequences. Unless, therefore, the proposition is really as true as it seems to be; unless the belief is really according to the fact; unless the motive is really legitimate and good, it is the necessary effect of the logical faculty to carry men farther and farther into the paths of error, until it lands them in depths of degradation and corruption of which unreasoning creatures are incapable. It is astonishing how reasonable-that is to say, how logical-are even the most revolting practices connected, for example, with religious worship or religious customs, provided we accept as true some fundamental conception of which they are the natural result. If it be true that the God we worship is a Being who delights in suffering and takes pleasure, as it were, in the very smell of blood, then it is not irrational to appease Him with hecatombs of human victims. This is an extreme case. There are, however, such cases, as we know, actually existing in the world. But, short of this, the same principle is illustrated in innumerable cases, where cruel and apparently irrational customs are in reality nothing but the logical consequences of some fundamental belief respecting the nature, the character, and the commands of God. In like manner, in the region of morals and of conduct not directly connected with religious beliefs, reason may be nothing but the servant of desire, and in this service may have no other work to do than that of devising means to the most wicked ends. If the doctrine given to reason be the doctrine that pleasure and self-indulgence, at whatever sacrifice to others, are the great aims and ends of life, then reason will be busy in seeking out "many inventions" for the attainment of them, each invention being more advanced than another in its defiance of all obligation and in its abandonment of all sense of duty. Thus the development of selfishness under the guidance of faculties which place at its command the great powers of foresight and contrivance, is a kind of development quite as natural and quite as common as that which constitutes the growth of knowl

edge and of virtue. It is indeed a development which, under the condition supposed-that is to say, the condition of false or erroneous data supplied to the reasoning faculty-is not an accident or a contingency, but a necessary and inevitable result.

And here there is one very curious circumstance to be observed, which brings us still closer to the real seat of the anomaly which makes man in so many ways the one great exception to the order of nature. That circumstance is the helplessness of mere reason to correct the kind of error which is most powerful in vitiating conduct. In those processes of abstract reason which are the great instruments of work in the exact sciences, the reasoning faculty has the power of very soon detecting any element of error in the data from which it starts. That any given proposition leads to an absurd result is one of the familiar methods of disproof in mathematics. That one of only two alternatives is proved to be absurd is conclusive demonstration that the other must be true. In this way reason corrects her own operations, for the faculty which recognizes one proposition as evidently absurd, is the same faculty which recognizes another proposition as evidently true. It is, indeed, because of its contradicting something evidently true, or something which has been already proved to be true, that the absurd result is seen to be absurd. It is in this way that, in the exact sciences, erroneous data are being perpetually detected, and the sources of error are being perpetually eliminated. But reason seems to have no similar power of detecting errors in the data which are supplied to it from other departments of thought. In the developments, for example, of social habits, and of the moral sentiments on which these principally depend, no results, however extravagant or revolting, are at all certain of being rejected because of their absurdity. No practice however cruel, no custom however destructive, is sure on account of its cruelty or of its destructiveness to be at once detected and rejected as selfevidently wrong. Reason works upon the data supplied to it by superstition, or by selfish passions and desires, apparently without any power of question

ing the validity of those data, or, at all events, without any power of immediately recognizing even their most extreme results as evidently false. In religion, at least, it would almost seem as if there were no axiomatic truths which are universally, constantly, and instinctively present to the mind--none at least, which are incapable of being obscured and which, therefore, inevitably compel it to revolt against every course or every belief inconsistent with them. It is through this agency of erroneous belief that the very highest of our faculties, the sense of obligation, may and does become itself the most powerful of all agents in the development of evil. It consecrates what is worst in our own nature, or whatever of bad has come to be sown in the multitudinous elements which that nature contains. The consequence is, that the gift of reason is the very gift by means of which error in belief, and vice in character, are carried from one stage of development to another, until at last they may, and they often do, result in conditions of life and conduct removed by an immeasurable distance from those which are in accordance with the order and with the analogies of nature.

These are the conditions of life, very much lower, as we have seen, than those which prevail among the brutes, which it is now the fashion to assume to be the nearest type of the conditions from which the human race began its course. They are, in reality and on the contrary, conditions which could not possibly have been reached except after a very long journey. They are the goal at which men have arrived after running for many generations in a wrong direction. They are the result of evolution-they are the product of development. But it is the evolution of germs whose growth is noxious. It is the development of passions and desires, some of which man possesses in common with the brutes, others of which are peculiar to himself, but all of which are in him freed from the guiding limitations which in every other department of nature prevail

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXIII., No. 6

among the motive forces of the world, and by means of which alone they work to order.

It is in the absence of these limitations that what is called the free will of man consists. It is not a freedom which is absolute and unconditional. It is not a freedom which is without limitations of its own. It is not a freedom which confers on man the power of acting except on some one or other of the motives which it is in his nature to entertain. But that nature is so infinitely complex, so many-sided, is open to so many influences, and is capable of so many movements, that practically their combinations are almost infinite. His freedom is a freedom to choose among these motives, and to choose what he knows to be the worse instead of the better part. This is the freedom without which there could be no action attaining to the rank of virtue, and this also is the freedom in the wrong exercise of which all vice consists. There is no theoretical necessity that along with this freedom there should be a propensity to use it wrongly. It is perfectly conceivable that such freedom should exist, and that all the desires and dispositions of men should be to use it rightly. Not only is this conceivable, but it is a wonder that it should be otherwise. That a being with powers of mind and capacities of enjoyment rising high above those which belong to any other creature, should, alone of all these creatures, have an innate tendency to use his powers, not only to his own detriment, but even to his own self torture and destruction, is such an exception to all rule, such a departure from all order, and such a violation of all the reasonableness of nature, that we cannot think too much of the mystery it involves. It is possible that some light may be thrown upon this mystery by following the facts connected with it into one of the principal fields of their display-namely, the history of religion. But this must form the subject of another chapter.-Contemporary Review.

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"Sole star of all that place and time, I saw him in his golden prime, The good Haroun Alraschid."—Tennyson.

How many of us when we read Tennyson's lines take the trouble to think whether Haroun Alrashid is anything more than a name? We recognize him, of course, as a friend of our childhood, along with Aladdin and Sinbad and divers fishermen and genii, sultans and viziers but these we know are people of Fableland, though none the less good fellows for that. Was Haroun also fabulous? He is not quite so worthy of a place in the country of myths as the great heroes of the Arabian Nights." He mingles in their society in a subordinate character so far as the story goes, and acts the part of listener and general good providence to the principal actors. We all remember the story of the "Three Ladies of Baghdad "and the wonderful séance at which Haroun assisted, in company with the Porter, the Three Calenders or royal mendicants, and Jaafer the vizier and Mesroor the executioner. Haroun nearly came to an untimely end, but he did nothing to merit it, having, indeed, neither said nor done anything remarkable during the whole evening. It is always the same: Haroun has about as much personality as a Greek chorus, only he does not say anything smart or sagacious; he makes a setting to the picture, provides scene and time for the play, but in himself he is "nothing, and less than nothing and vanity." We care for him because of his friends, we are grateful to him for his performance of the good fairy's part to the deserving hero and heroine; but our affection is interested and relative. We do not love him for himself. He is hardly good enough for the Eastern fairyland; let us depose him and see if he has not a place in that ordinary earthly history, to which indeed great people like the Young King of the Black Islands, or Nooreddeen, or even Azeez and Azeezeh, would not condescend to belong, but which will do well enough for Haroun Alrashid.

It is a great thing for Haroun that he has his colleagues in the "Arabian Nights" to introduce him, for otherwise

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no one certainly would care to ask who he was, unless perhaps those misguided persons who, in days of consummate culture and the precious poetry of passion, still believe in the Laureate. So much in Oriental history begins and ends in darkness, so little has been lightened up for us by the initiated, that it needs some courage to plunge into the dreary waste and seek for the bright places-of which, indeed, there are not a few, if we were only told where to find them. Of Haroun Alrashid, however, we do know something. We know his name, though the chances are we mispronounce it; and we know something of his habits-his nightly rambles and hare-brained adventures in company with Jaafer the Barmecide, whose name too is not unknown to a few readers of Lord Houghton's "Palm Leaves," and who has, at least, furnished the expression a Barmecide feast" to our own language. Let us then start from the little we do know, and see what sort of a man Haroun really was. If any one doubts that the good Caliph was a reality, let him go to the British Museum, or look in the window of a curiosity shop in Oxford Street, and he will see plenty of silver coins bearing, not, indeed, the image, but certainly the superscription of the good Haroun Alrashid. It is true that the coins being in Arabic the force of their evidence will not be immediately apparent to the casual observer, but a translation of the inscriptions will inform him that besides bearing the famous Moslem dogma, "There is no god but God: He is One; He has no equal," and the statement that "In the name of God this piece of silver was struck at such and such a town in such and such a year," the coin presents the "prophetic mission,”. Mohammed is the Apostle of God,"-and underneath it the name of the caliph, Alrashid, and sometimes that of Jaafer the Barmecide as well. Some of these coins, which are as much Haroun's as our shilling of to-day is Queen Victoria's, may have been once in the caliph's own hand, and, who knows, may have passed through the slim henna-dyed fingers of the fair Portress? At all events they