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FIFTY-SEVENTH YEAR.

J A N U ARY — J TEN E

ct>

NEW YORK.
1881.

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2016 with funding from
Princeton Theological Seminary Library

https://archive.org/details/princetonreview5718unse_1

JANUARY.

PAGE

GROUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE AND RULES FOR BELIEF . . i

Mark Hopkins, Ex-President of Williams College

THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF ENGLAND 19

Prof. William M. Sloane, Ph.D., Princeton College

THE HISTORICAL PROOFS OF CHRISTIANITY. Second Arti-
cle: The Miracles 35

George P. Fisher, D.D., LL.D., Yale College

CHRISTIAN MORALITY, EXPEDIENCY AND LIBERTY . 61

Prof. Lyman H. Atwater, Princeton College

LEGAL PROHIBITION OF THE LIQUOR TRAFFIC ... S3

Henry Wade Rogers

IS THOUGHT POSSIBLE WITHOUT LANGUAGE? . . 104

Prof. Samuel Porter, Nat’l Deaf Mute College, Washington

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS AND CIVIL SERVICE REFORM 129
Prof. William G. Sumner, Yale College

MARCH.

EVOLUTION IN RELATION TO MATERIALISM . . .149

Joseph Le Conte, LL.D., University of California

A MORAL ARGUMENT 175

John P. Coyle

THE HISTORICAL PROOFS OF CHRISTIANITY. Third Arti-
cle: The Gospels 191

George P. Fisher, D.D., LL.D., Yale College

THE STUDY OF ANGLO-SAXON 221

Prof. Theodore W. Hunt, Princeton College '

PAGE

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST PROTECTIVE TAXES . . .241

Prof. William G. Sumner, Yale College

THE REASONABLENESS OF FAITH 260

Principal Shairp, D.C.L., University of St. Andrews

MAY.

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY 293

Charles A. Young, Ph.D., Princeton College

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS 315

Prof. Francis Bowen, Harvard University

THE SILVER QUESTION AND THE INTERNATIONAL MONE-
TARY CONFERENCE OF 1881 342

President Barnard, LL.D., L.H.D., Columbia College

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT 369

President McCosh, D.D., LL.D.

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART 390

John F. Weir, N.A., Yale School of the Fine Arts

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS . ... 406

Prof. Lyman H. Atwater, D.D., LL.D., Princeton College

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION ... 429

William D. Whitney, Ph.D., LL.D., Yale University

JULY,

CONTINENTAL AND ISLAND LIFE

John W. Dawson, LL.D., Montreal

ENGLISH POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY .

Principal John C. Shairp, D.C.L., University of St. Andrews

THE HISTORICAL PROOFS OF CHRISTIANITY. Fourth Arti-
cle : The Fourth Gospel

Prof. George P. Fisher, D.D., LL.D., Yale College

PHILOSOPHICAL RESULTS OF A DENIAL OF MIRACLES

President John Bascom, University of Wisconsin

LATE AMERICAN STATESMEN

Francis Wharton, D.D., LL.D., Cambridge

ANTHROPOMORPHISM

M. Stuart Phelps, Ph. D., Smith College

page

SEPTEMBER.

ASSASSINATION AND THE SPOILS SYSTEM .

Dorman B. Eaton, Esq., New York

THE PROSPECTIVE CIVILIZATION OF AFRICA

Canon George Rawlinson, University of Oxford

THE SUBJECTIVE THEORY OF INSPIRATION .

Prof. Charles Elliott, D.D., Chicago Theological Seminary

145

171

192

PAGE

OUR PUBLIC DEBTS 205

Robert P. Porter, Esq., Census Bureau, Washington

THE HISTORICAL PROOFS OF CHRISTIANITY. Fifth Arti-
cle : The Evangelists 223

George P. Fisher, D.D., LL.D., Yale College

ON CERTAIN ABUSES IN LANGUAGE 248

Edward A. Freeman, D.C.L., England

NOVEMBER.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND PERSONALITY 273

Andrew P. Peabody, D.D., LL.D.

THE RELATIONS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY TO SPECULA-
TION CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF MAN ... 288

Prof. Henry Calderwood, University of Edinburgh

SOCIOLOGY 303

William G. Sumner, Yale College

THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF MUSICAL SCALES . 324

Waldo S. Pratt

SOME DIFFICULTIES OF MODERN MATERIALISM ... 344

Prof. Borden P. Bowne, Boston University

ILLUSTRATIONS OF A LAW OF EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT 373.

Joseph LeConte, LL.D., University of California

THE KANTIAN CENTENNIAL .

President Noah Porter, D.D., LL.D.

394

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY.

THE introduction of electricity into the business of life is
probably to be the most noteworthy feature in the history
of economic civilization during the last half of the nineteenth
century. The latter part of the eighteenth was characterized,
speaking broadly, by the invention of the steam-engine, the sub-
stitution of machinery for hand-work, and the development of
the factory system of manufacture; the first half of our own
century, by the introduction of the railway and the steamship,
and the commercial phenomena which necessarily resulted from
such improvements in the means of transportation: similarly,
unless all signs fail, the present half-century will hereafter be
memorable as the period when man subdued to his service
the mysterious power of electricity. It is true that before
1850 science had discovered nearly all the facts and principles
upon which the present industrial applications of electricity de-
pend. The galvanic battery, the magneto-electric machine, the
telegraph, and the electroplating bath already existed, and the
two latter were beginning to be used commercially. But at that
time the world would hardly have felt the difference if by some
strange accident it had suddenly lost the use and knowledge of
them all. Thirty years have changed all that. Imagine that
this morning every telegraph-wire had disappeared, every gal-
vanic battery had lost its virtue, every dynamo-machine was
stopped — that all communication and operation by means of
electricity had come to an end ; how profoundly the whole com-
munity would be affected before nightfall ! When a storm, a
few months ago, prostrated many of the telegraph-lines around
New York City, business came almost to a standstill for the time.
And while electricity is already so important a .factor in our

294

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

business life, it is impossible to doubt that by 1900 it will hold
a far more dominant position. Every year, almost every day,
brings to light some new application of this agent, and its use
develops with continually increasing rapidity.

We propose in the present article to discuss the subject in a
general and, so far as may be, untechnical manner, for the pur-
pose of giving our readers an idea of the extent and variety of
the existing applications of electricity to the arts of life, and the
reasons for expecting their rapid multiplication in the near
future. We do not aim at scientific completeness, and we shall
not scruple to treat with disproportionate brevity those matters
with which intelligent people are already familiar, in order to
gain space for other topics at present less generally understood.

And first, by way of introduction, a few words as to the
nature of electricity — a confession of ignorance. All that science
can do at present is to define it as the unknown cause of certain
effects which are observed when a piece of amber ( electron ) is
rubbed — an observation dating back two thousand years. It is
now known, of course, that not only those phenomena, but a
whole multitude of others, depend upon the same cause. As to
the real nature of the cause we have no certain light as yet :
we cannot tell whether electricity is some peculiar kind of sub-
stance, or some modification or motion of ordinary matter. In
the case of heat, which for a long time was thought to be a sub-
stance and called caloric, experiment has settled the question,
and proved it to be merely a mode of motion. In reference to
electricity no such decision has yet been reached. No phenom-
ena have thus far been discovered which absolutely negative
the notion that it may be a subtle, imponderable fluid or fluids,
endowed with certain peculiar faculties of attraction and repul-
sion, and more or less freely circulating among the particles of
bodies. According to this view an electrical charge consists in
the collection of some abnormal quantity of this substance in the
charged body; an electrical discharge is, then, the actual trans-
ferrcnce of a quantity of the fluid from one body to another,
and an electric current is such a transfer continuously pro-
gressing.

Another view, however, seems to carry, at present, a greater
weight of opinion in its favor — that, namely, of Maxwell. Ac-

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY.

295

cepting the idea of a medium filling all space (the luminiferous
ether of optics), he regards an electric charge as the establish-
ment of a peculiar state of strain among the atoms of the
charged bodies, and in the medium between them. A discharge
consists in the sudden relief of this strain by a giving way of the
intervening medium, without necessarily implying any transfer
of substance through it; and an electric current is a rapid suc-
cession of such discharges. In its application the theory is
mathematically difficult, but it explains many facts which the
fluid theories fail to touch, and opens the way for the establish-
ment of relations between electricity and the other physical
agents, especially light and heat. It is to be expected that the
progress of science and mathematics will in due time furnish
some experimentum crucis which will discriminate between the
two hypotheses, or not impossibly upset them both. There
is certainly great probability that some hypothesis will yet be
found which will include in one general theory all the physical
agents — light, heat, gravity, and chemical affinity, as well as
electricity and magnetism. But the hour and the man have not
yet come.

We have confessed ignorance as to the absolute nature of
electricity; but the reader must not suppose, therefore, that
there is any corresponding obscurity and uncertainty as to the
phenomena it produces, and the laws which govern them. We
may not know what electricity is, but we can measure it in
“farads” and “webers” as accurately as water can be meas-
ured in “ quarts” and “ inches.” We can express electrical
pressure in “ volts” as precisely as water-pressure in feet of
“head;” and we can describe the resistance of an electrical con-
ductor in “ ohms” as definitely as the frictional resistance of a
pipe of given size and length upon a stream of water flowing
through it can be expressed. It is no more necessary to know
the nature of electricity in order to deal with and utilize it, than
it is to know the nature of water in order to make it drive our
mills ; altho, of course, the more we learn about either the bet-
ter we can manage it.

Unquestionably the most important of the practical uses of
electricity hitherto developed is the communication of intelli-
gence between distant points ; not only in the telegraph proper,

296

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

and the telephone, but in all the various signalling arrangements
where electricity is made to serve as the nervous system of a
complicated organization, co-ordinating the action of the dif-
ferent portions and bringing them under central control.

The history and operation of the telegraph is so familiar to
all intelligent persons that we need not spend much time in its
discussion. Tho not yet forty years old, it has already become
such an essential part of our civilization that its loss, as has been
said, would instantly paralyze the life of the world. All the great
operations of business depend upon its use. Our railways are
run by its aid, and without the.wire the carrying capacity of any
important road would practically be reduced at least one half,
because trains could no longer be moved at small intervals with-
out constant danger of collision.

There may be a question whether there is really any advan-
tage to mankind in the rapidity with which “ news” now makes
its way in the world ; but there can be none that the fact is a
most important, even a controlling, element in determining the
differences between the characters of the men of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. The only reasonable expectation that
our people, spread over so vast and various a country, will remain
permanently one nation, hangs upon the hope that our modern
means of communication will so intermingle us and our ideas
that we shall measurably be freed from provincialism and sec-
tional dissensions by becoming personally acquainted with each
other, and having presented to us from day to day the same
material for thought and feeling. Thus boundary-lines vir-
tually contract and a continent becomes a county.

The magnitude and extent of the telegraphic system in the
United States alone is something amazing; New York City
itself has about 6000 miles of telegraph-wire, and there are
nearly 300,000 miles in the whole country — enough to reach
from the earth to the moon and a long distance beyond, since
our satellite is only 240,000 miles away. Many of these, too,
count for two or four apiece, being worked “duplex” or “ quadru-
plex ;” i.e., in the language of the electrician, they have associ- ’
ated with each of them several “ phantom” wires, which, having
no actual existence, yet answer all the telegraphic conditions of
metallic conductors. We know of nothing more ingenious or

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY. 297

surprising than the methods (for they are various) by which a
single wire is thus made to serve the purpose of many, in trans-
mitting, without confusion or interference, several messages at
once, some in one direction and others in the opposite.

We have not before us the exact statistics of the subject, but
the whole length of telegraph-wire on the earth’s surface and
beneath its oceans cannot be far from a million and a quarter of
miles. Five years ago it was reported at 978,000, and since then
the erection of new lines has been going on faster than ever
before.

And not only has the length of the lines been growing, but
their efficiency also. We have spoken of the contrivances by
which one wire is made to answer the purpose of three or four,
but besides this the instruments and methods of telegraphy
have been improving, so that a quadruplex wire of to-day,
worked with some of the “ rapid telegraph” apparatus, is capa-
ble of doing at least ten times as much business as one wire
could have carried ten years ago.

How far the telegraphic system of the world will be ex-
tended in the future it is impossible to predict. Wherever
civilization goes the wire will go, of course ; and, so far as can
be judged, in lands which now have the telegraph the lines
will be greatly multiplied, tho the competition of the telephone
will necessarily be felt. It is quite within the range of possibility
that, so far as epistolary correspondence is concerned, the mail-
bag may some time be entirely superseded by the wire. Perhaps
it is hardly likely, however, since the newspaper and other
printed matter will always demand a postal system, and so
long as that exists letters will probably continue to be'written
and sent.

We have alluded to the competition of the telephone. It is
very difficult, however, to draw the line between the telegraph
and telephone, and in England the government, which has
bought out the private companies and works the telegraph-lines
as a part of its postal system, refuses to recognize the distinc-
tion. If there is a distinction to be maintained at all, it would
probably lie in this: In telegraphing, the sender and receiver of
the message employ a third person, and perhaps several persons,
to transmit the message between them ; the process is analogous

2g8

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

to that of sending a package or letter by a conveyance. In
telephoning proper, on the contrary, the sender and receiver
converse directly, without the intervention of any one. The
apparatus is virtually only a speaking-trumpet, and the opera-
tion is analogous to shouting across an interval of space. Of
course in this view of the matter the peculiarity of the instru-
ment itself drops out of sight. Should the telephone be so far
improved that it will work easily over distances of hundreds of
miles — as it probably will1— then it is likely to displace most
of the present telegraph-instruments at the minor stations, sim-
ply because it can be operated by any person, without requiring
the peculiar skill now necessary to send and read a telegraphic
message. In railway telegraphy especially its satisfactory intro-
duction would be a great gain. For through business, however,
it is probable that some form of rapid-telegraph instrument,
more or less analogous to those now in use, will be retained,
because such instruments can be operated with multiplex wires,
and are capable of transmitting in an hour many times the num-
ber of words which could be uttered by the most rapid speaker.

It is not easy to form an idea how much the direct use of the
telephone is likely to extend. In our cities and large towns it
must, of course, find its principal use, and it is very probable
that the time will come when, as a matter of municipal organiza-
tion, every house in every considerable city will have its tele-
phonic connection with some central station. The number of
purely private lines for purposes of business and friendship is
sure also to be very great: it is already large, and would by this
time have become vastly larger but for the heavy royalty. Five
or ten dollars a year is more than most people are willing to
pay for the mere use of an instrument which can be constructed
for one or two dollars.

It is perhaps not impossible that some forms of the telephone
may be used for other purposes than the mere transmission of con-

1 Since this was written it has been announced that Herz, in Germany, has
made an improvement in the telephone by means of which, without using bat-
teries of any' inordinate strength, he has been able to converse satisfactorily over
circuits exceeding three hundred miles in length, and that, too, when part of the
circuit was a submarine cable. We have not yet seen any authentic description
of his invention.

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY.

299

versation. Mr. Edison’s “loud speaking” telephone is certainly
a most extraordinary instrument: we shall never forget the sen-
sation of hearing it for the first time. Several of us were listen-
ing intently, with telephones of the usual pattern, to the voice
of the person who at the other end of the line was reading some-
thing to us from a newspaper. We could hear him well enough
when everything was perfectly quiet, but it required close atten-
tion. Suddenly the little chalk cylinder of the new machine was
put in motion, and at once the whole room was filled with the
voice of the reader, as distinct as if he were in our midst, and
much louder and more resonant ; the tones were perfectly clear,
but a little strange, just enough so to heighten the sensation.
With an instrument of this kind a speaker of feeble voice could
address an audience of any size, and at a distance of many
miles, far more effectively than if he were before them, at least
so far as the mere utterance of his ideas is concerned ; and he
could speak not only to one audience, but to several at the same
time if the occasion demanded.

The use of electricity for the communication of various kinds
of signals which can hardly be considered as telegraphic is very
important and extensive. Take for instance our burglar-alarms,
and the electric annunciators which in our hotels and steamboats
have superseded the old system of bell-wires. In many kinds of
textile machinery also, where it is important that the breaking
of a thread or any derangement of the machine should at once
arrest the movement, electricity is found to furnish the most
prompt and reliable means for effecting the purpose. Fontaine
mentions an instance where the application of such a device has
reduced the necessary number of operatives from one for. each
knitting-frame to one for ten ; four operatives aided by electricity
taking the place of the forty previously needed.

In general, it may be said that wherever the nature of an
organization or machine is such that something analogous to a
nervous system is required to make it efficient, electricity sup-
plies the want better than anything else, at least if the distances
to be covered are at all considerable. The organist sits at his
keyboard, and by the help of electricity manipulates pipes
placed at any distance and in any position determined by the
architect. The astronomer, without moving his eye from the

300

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

instrument, communicates his observation to the chronograph
by a tap of the finger, and secures a permanent record of the
moment.

The clock of the observatory at Washington sends out its
beats each noon over many thousand lines of telegraph-wire,
and drops the ball which furnishes our principal seaport with its
standard time. Several other observatories in this country do
the same thing to a more or less limited extent, and in Great
Britain the system is far more complete and thoroughly or-
ganized than here. The Greenwich signals go to almost every
important city in the kingdom, and all the railroads are run by
Greenwich time. In other parts of Europe, in Germany and
France especially, the system is almost equally prevalent, and is
gaining ground continually. In many cases it is not considered
enough to send such time-signals once or twice a day merely.
The beats of the standard clock of the Cambridge observatory
are transmitted continuously to some twenty different stations
in Boston, and there is a similar time-service in New York, which
furnishes to the subscribers the beats of a standard clock.
Many systems of electric clocks are also established in our rail-
road-stations and elsewhere, the clock-face being controlled by
the action of a distant timepiece, moving its hands either con-
tinuously or at stated intervals. In Paris a similar system has
been introduced on an extensive scale within the last few
months, at the expense of the municipal authorities. The
standard clock of the national observatory is connected by spe-
cial lines with about thirty “ horary centres.” At these points
are placed clocks the pendulums of which are continuously con-
trolled by impulses sent every second from the observatory, and
they in their turn distribute their beats to numerous stations in
the vicinity. The whole city is thus supplied with time uniform
and correct to the second.

It would take us too far from our immediate purpose to dis-
cuss here the feasibility and advantages of a uniform time over
the whole extent of our country — uniform, that is, as to its
minutes and seconds , the hours being varied where necessary, so
that the standard railroad and business time should nowhere
differ more than half an hour from the true local time. There
are some obvious objections, of course, but there is little doubt

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY

301

that they will ultimately be overruled in view of the importance
of an authoritative standard, a necessity hich will be felt more
and more imperatively as the means of communication multiply
and grow more swift. It is not unlikely that the system may
even reach beyond the limits of a nation, so that all the English-
speaking world at least will come to live by Greenwich time — by
telegraph, of course, if at all.

It would be impossible, and it is not necessary, to enumerate
all the different forms of signalling apparatus — fire-alarms,
watchman-inspectors, and such — which depend upon the use of
electricity for their efficiency. It is enough to say that con-
trivances of this kind are multitudinous, and many of them are
of great importance and in extensive use already.

And as to future inventions we may lay down the fundamental
principle that by means of electricity it is always possible for a
person to effect at any distance any mechanical operation which
he could perform if he were on the spot. It is a mere question of
expense: the number of telegraph-wires needed maybe so great,
and the cost of the apparatus so high, that the operation would not
pay; but so far as possibilities are concerned the human arm is
now virtually as long as the electric wire. I can sit in my study
and steer a torpedo-boat in New York harbor, or ring the bells
of Boston, or play the organ in St. Peter’s, or explode a mine in
China, or write a letter on the desk of my correspondent in Con-
stantinople. Just such things are done now every day, and will
be done more frequently and easily hereafter.

We ought not to pass, with a bare allusion, the use of
electricity in the management of explosives, for it has greatly
increased their efficacy in military and mining operations. We
all remember, of course, how, a few years ago, the touch of a
little child’s finger blew up the reef in Hell Gate. Any other
known method of firing the mine would have deprived it of
much of its power, because it would have been impossible to
secure the simultaneity upon which the efficiency of the blast
depended. At present nearly all the powerful explosives now
in vogue are used only in connection with electric fuses of some
kind or other. For safety, convenience, and certainty of action
they are as immensely superior to their predecessors as are the
new explosives themselves.

3 02

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

Electricity finds another extremely important practical appli-
cation in a widely different range of uses — by means of its effect
upon chemical reactions. As typical may be mentioned the
electroplating industry, the electrotype, and the use of electricity
in certain metallurgical and chemical operations.

We are not sufficiently familiar with the subject to be able
to give statistics in respect to these matters, or even to enumer-
ate all the different applications of electricity in this branch of
technology. Every one knows, however, that the business of
electroplating alone is something •enormous. The great firms
of Elkington. in England; Christofle & Co., in France; and the
Meriden and Providence companies, in this country, not to men-
tion others nearly if not quite as important, employ operatives
by the hundred and deposit silver and gold literally by the ton.
In the magic bath the precious metal is torn off, atom by atom,
from the shapeless lump, and transferred to the surface it is to
clothe and beautify as if by invisible gnomes, working with in-
imitable speed, deftness, and docility.

The same agent is employed, and the same principles are in-
volved, in the processes by which wood-cuts and engravings are
copied and the pages prepared for printing. The plate or block
upon which the artist has expended his skill is not subjected to
the wear and tear of the press, but fac-similes are made in any
necessary number by means of the electrotype. These endure
the rough service, while the original is kept in reserve ready to
be recopied whenever Wanted.

One curious application of the process is in the manufacture
of the so-called compound telegraph-wire, which consists of a
central wire of steel covered with a coating of copper. This
coating is deposited upon the steel by galvanic action, while the
wire is drawn continuously through a long trough containing
the necessary solution.

Electricity is used also in certain processes for the reduction
of copper and other metals from their ores, and in the manu-
facture of certain chemicals extensively employed in the arts.

A few years ago the only generator of the electric current in
ordinary use was the galvanic battery in some form or other.
For all telegraphic purposes it answered very well, and fairly for
the processes of electro-chemistry. But it was always a costly

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY.

303

and troublesome affair when currents of any great strength were
needed, and is now practically superseded in all such cases by
mechanical generators, which depend for their efficiency upon the
rapid motion of coils of wire in a magnetic field. The machines
of twenty years ago were cumbrous and inefficient; but in 1866
Wilde, in England, constructed one involving several new prin-
ciples and possessing a power before undreamed of : it is the
type and original of many of the best machines now in use,
altho it has, in the development, received from Varley, Wheat-
stone, Siemens, and others numerous alterations and improve-
ments which have greatly increased its efficiency. In 1871
Gramme, in France, introduced another machine of peculiar
construction, which was at once recognized as superior to any-
thing then known ; and it still keeps its place, hardly surpassed
by any even among the newest.

The machines best known in this country at present are
those of Gramme, Siemens, Brush, Weston, Maxim, and Edison,
tho they have many rivals, some of them perhaps their equals.
Any of those named, when driven under the conditions for
which they were designed, are most effective converters of horse-
power into electricity, the best of them having been shown by
careful experiment to realize an efficiency of nearly 90 per cent ;
that is to say, if the electric current produced by the machine is
made to heat a coil of wire immersed in water, it is found that
the quantity of heat developed is 90 per cent of that which
would be theoretically equivalent to the energy expended in
driving the machine.

A word as to the expression “ efficiency,” so variously used
as to have led to much ambiguity. As we have just employed
it, the term denotes simply the ratio between the power ex-
pended in turning the machine and the useful effect produced.
In this sense of the term that machine is most “ efficient ” which
gives the greatest amount of electric work in return for each
horse-power of propulsion, without regard to the magnitude or
expense of the machine itself. Sometimes, however, the matter
is discussed with reference to the cost of the machine required
to produce a given current, and in that case, tho only loosely
speaking, the most “ efficient ” machine is the one which is
capable of giving the most powerful current for the money ex-

304

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

pended in building the apparatus, without regard to the expense
of driving it. Again, since the strength of the current produced
depends upon the arrangement and size of the wires through
which it circulates, it has been inquired what arrangement of the
circuit would enable us to get the greatest amount of electric
work from a given machine ; or, vice versa , what machine will pro-
duce in a given circuit the maximum effect: and in this sense the
most “efficient” machine is the one which will do the most
work under the circumstances of the case, and that is the most
“efficient” circuit which will realize the most work from a given
machine ; the expenditure of driving energy being lost sight of
in this case also, as in the preceding.

Of course the most efficient machine in a commercial sense
is the one which will give the greatest effect at the least cost ;
the cost being made up of two items — one, the expense of the
driving power; the other, the interest on capital and the allow-
ance for wear and replacement. In these days of low interest it
will evidently pay to aim at durability and economy of power,
even at a considerable first cost. Generally speaking, it may
also be said that it is much cheaper to generate electricity in
large quantities than in small. A machine which consumes
directly the whole energy of a hundred horse-power steam-
engine will produce its current for considerably less than it
would cost to run twenty machines each using five horse-power,
provided always that profitable employment can be found for
such a tremendous current; for it is possible to conceive of a
Great-Eastern among dynamo-machines, one too large to pay.

The ability to produce by means of such machines currents
of any desired power, and at a reasonable expense, has opened
for electricity an enormous range of uses which were out of the
question in the days of galvanic batteries. It is quite within
bounds to say that to produce the current which operates one
of the electric-light circuits on Broadway by means of a battery
would cost from ten to twenty times as much as it does to gen-
erate it in the present manner by means of a steam-engine; and
not only would it cost more, but it would be quite impractica-
ble, except by most extreme precautions, to keep the current
running without interruption as much as twenty-four hours at a
time.

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY.

305

It need hardly be said here, for every one’s thoughts are
more or less fuli of the matter at present, that already one of
the most important applications of electricity is to the produc-
tion of light. So far as regards the illumination of large spaces
by lights of high intensity the problem may be considered as
solved by a number of inventors whose different systems are
already in successful operation. As to the lighting of houses
and limited areas more perhaps remains to be done; but even
as things stand to-day it is beyond question that the thing is
entirely feasible, and at a cost considerably lower than that of gas.

The lights employed are of two kinds — the “ arc” lights so
called, which are produced by a current of electricity playing
between two slightly separated pencils of carbon, and the
“ incandescent” lights, which are produced by a current passing
through a continuous filament or slender rod of some refractory
substance, which is also usually carbon. There are other possi-
ble forms of the electric light, but none of them appear likely to
find much use in competition with the two we have named, tho
in some cases the light produced by passing a rapid succession
of discharges from an induction-coil through a tube filled with
gas at a low pressure is utilized for scientific purposes.

The “ arc” light dates back to the experiments of Davy in 1 8 1 3,
who first produced it by touching together two pieces of charcoal
attached to the poles of his historic battery. On one occasion
he employed a battery of two thousand pairs of plates (probably
equivalent to about a thousand of those now used), and produced
an arc nearly five inches in length; i.e., the current continued to
pass even after the charcoal pencils were separated by that
space. It is very seldom even now that such effects are ex-
ceeded. The experiment remained, however, a rare and costly
one for thirty years. About 1844 Foucault, in Paris, hit upon
the happy idea of substituting for the pencils of willow char-
coal, used up to that time, rods of the dense hard carbon cut
from the deposits which line the insides of old gas-retorts.
These new carbons last much longer, and are more manageable.
This improvement, the introduction of the powerful batteries of
Grove and Bunsen, and the invention of effective lamps or regu-
lators soon made the use of the electric arc much more common
than before, tho still sufficiently rare.

306

THE PRINCETON RE PIE IK

In 1858 an electric lamp was established at the South Fore-
land light-house, on the English Channel, driven, not by a bat-
tery, but by a machine constructed by Holmes; a machine
presenting no new features of importance, but simply a magnifi-
cation of the smaller machines then found in every cabinet of
physical apparatus. In 1863 a similar light, driven by a machine
of slightly different construction, was established on the French
side at La Heve. These lights have been running ever since,
and several others have been added at different points upon the
coasts of France and England. The machine invented by Wilde
in 1866 (already spoken of) quite changed the aspect of affairs,
and since then progress has been rapid and continuous.

At present the carbon rods employed are usually manufac-
tured for the purpose by some one of many different processes
of alternate compression and baking. They are rather expen-
sive, so that their cost, according to the estimates of Fontaine
and others, generally exceeds by a considerable amount that of
the fuel burned in the engine which drives the current-generator.
They are usually burned in “lamps” so constructed as to regu-
late for themselves the distance between the points; in some of
them a new pair of carbons is automatically substituted for one
that has been consumed, and in nearly all an arrangement is
provided by which, in case of the failure of the lamp for any
reason, the circuit will be closed so as not to affect other lamps
which may be connected with the delinquent.

The number of these different electric lamps is already very
great, and is continually increasing. Every bulletin of the
patent-offices is sure to contain several inventions of this kind,
some of them comically worthless, but many of them exceed-
ingly ingenious and well thought out. Between the better lamps
there is not much to choose, the steadiness and general good
behavior of the light depending mainly on the excellence of the
carbons and the uniform action of the generator.

At present “arc” lights are run both by continuous and by
alternating currents ; i.e., in some cases the current is steadily in
the same direction, while in others the current consists of pulses
alternately positive and negative, succeeding each other at the
rate of from 10 to 100 per second.

In a lamp actuated by a continuous current the positive car-

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY.

30 7

bon, for reasons as yet undiscovered, becomes much hotter than
the negative, and is consumed about twice as rapidly. This
requires a special mechanism for keeping the light at the same
point, and demands attention to make certain that the wires are
properly connected to the two terminals of the lamp. Where
alternate currents are used this difficulty is, of course, obviated ;
the lamp becomes simpler, and it is entirely indifferent in what
order its terminals are connected with the circuit. Nor is the
generator any more difficult to construct, tho probably it is
slightly less economical of power.

There is, however, one literally fatal objection to the use
of alternating currents which ought to prohibit their use.
The wires from a continuous-current machine can be handled
without danger to life; the shock obtained, tho disagreeable
enough, is not fatal: with the alternating current it is different;
the shattering power of the intermittent shocks is tremendous,
and several persons have already been killed by accidents from
them. Probably all recollect the recent case upon the Livadia.

The amount of light which can be produced by an “arc”
lamp is enormous, depending, of course, upon the size and ex-
cellency of the carbons and the power of the current ; and the
larger the light the more economical it is; i.e., a great light
costs less for each candle-power than a small one. With the
small lamps it is usual to get from 500 to 1200 candles1 for each
horse-power consumed by the engine; large burners do better,
running as high as 2000 or 2500. Probably the most powerful
lamp ever yet constructed is one recently made and tested in
Cleveland by the Brush Electric Light Company under a special
order from the British Admiralty. It is estimated at 100,000
candle-power, using carbons two inches and a half in didmeter,
and consuming forty horse-power. The ordinary arc-lights, of
which there are now so many in our different cities, consume
from one and a half to two horse-power, and give lights varying
from 800 to 2500 candles.

For a long time it was found very difficult to run more than

1 The unit of illumination ordinarily used in this country for photometric pur-
poses is the light given by a sperm-candle of such size that six weigh a pound,
and burning 120 grains an hour. An ordinary gas-burner is from twelve to fifteen
times as bright.

3°S

THE PRINCE TON REVIEW.

one or two lamps in a single circuit, and machines were con-
structed which supplied each lamp with its own separate current
through its own conductors. Of course this added greatly to
the expense, especially in the matter of conductors. The diffi-
culty has, however, been overcome in great measure, and at
present Mr. Brush with some of his more powerful machines
drives as many as forty lamps in one circuit, the remoter ones
being as far as five miles from the engine, and that without any
inordinate expense for the conducting cable.

As to the economy of the system, there can be no question
that even in rather unfavorable situations, as, for instance, in
the ligh ing of streets where the lamps are pretty widely sepa-
rated, the electric light is at least as cheap as gas at one dollar a
thousand feet. Under the most favorable circumstances, as in
the lighting of mills and factories, where no separate plant is
required to furnish the driving power, the saving is very great.

The total number of such lamps already in use is enormous.
The Brush Company alone reported last January more than
6000 in operation — 1200 of them in foreign countries. In this
country 4860 were distributed, as follows :

800 lamps in metal-working establishments.

1240

cotton and woollen mills.

425

stores, hotels, churches, etc.

250

parks, gardens, docks, etc.

2 77

railway-stations.

1500

streets of cities.

380

unclassified.

Probably the lamps of Siemens and the so-called candles of
Jablochkoff are still more numerous in Europe, while those of
other systems are not greatly behind.

Lights of this kind, however, are not suited for all purposes,
as, for instance, for household illumination. What is wanted
here is a lamp which will furnish somewhat more light than an
ordinary gas-burner and will require no skilled attention to
maintain it. To compete with gas it must be at least as cheap,
and must not subject the user to any greater inconveniences.

What are called incandescent lamps best answer these condi-
tions. When a current is passed through a conductor it heats it

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY. }Og

more or less, and if the conductor is of such a nature as to op-
pose considerable resistance, its temperature may rise far above
the incandescent point, so that it will become luminous and
shine, without consuming , as long as the current passes. At first
it was attempted to use metal filaments, but it was soon found
that the temperature required to make them give off much light
is perilously near that of fusion, even with the most refractory.
Slender rods of carbon were then tried, and so far as principles
are concerned the lamp invented by Starr and King in 1845
embodies pretty much everything of value in the newest. They
employed carbon and enclosed it in the most perfect vacuum then
known to science, in order to prevent the wasting action of the air.
But at that time rods of carbon could not be made sufficiently
slender and compact, nor were the present means of producing a
perfect vacuum available, and, above all, the dynamo-electric
machine existed then only in embryo. It would take us beyond
our reasonable limits to trace the history of lamps of this class
(tho that of Lodyguine, invented in 1873, must not be passed
quite unmentioned), but we have at present one which seems
likely to meet all the requirements of the problem. We say
one , because the finished thing is essentially the same as made
by either of the three different inventors who claim it — Swan in
England, and Edison and Maxim in this country. There are,
however, more or less important practical differences in the
methods by which the carbon filament, which is the essential
feature and light-producing agent in all of their lamps, is pre-
pared and connected to the conductors, as well as in the opera-
tions by which the glass vessel enclosing the filament is exhaust-
ed and sealed.

Of course this is not the place to discuss the questions of
priority and patent rights involved in their respective claims.

These lamps use up nothing, in shining, except the current
which excites them; they possess no complicated mechanism to
be kept in order; they are small — not larger than an ordinary
lamp-chimney ; and they cost very little to construct in a large
way, certainly not half a dollar apiece. On the other hand, they
do not rival the arc-lights in brilliance (at least as a general
thing, for Maxim has constructed a few of several hundred
candle-power), and their luminous duty, if we may coin the
21

3io

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

expression, is as yet only between one and two hundred candles
per horse-power, or about one sixth that of the arc-lights. The
arc-light is not, however, anything like six times as cheap as
the other per candle-power, because its consumption of carbon
pencils, as has already been said, costs more than the engine-
power itself, while the incandescent light escapes this charge.
Still the incandescent lamp cannot be regarded as absolutely
imperishable, and as a matter of fact is seldom so perfect in all
particulars as to last in practice more than two or three months;
but the cost of replacement is trifling.

Besides these forms of the incandescent lamp there are others
which, like that of Sawyer, more resemble the original lamp of
the Starr-King patent. Instead of a slender carbon filament
with an electric resistance of from fifty to two hundred ohms,
they employ a small pencil of carbon some half an inch long,
and about one twentieth of an inch in diameter, enclosed in
a case which can be taken to pieces to replace the pencil when
consumed. The resistance of these lamps is generally only
from five to ten ohms, so that they are used, several of them
consecutively in the same circuit, like arc-lamps. The lamps of
the Edison type, on the other hand, have resistances ranging
from fifty to two hundred ohms, and are inserted into the cir-
cuit side by side (technically “ in multiple arc”) : the portion of
the current which flows through one lamp passes through no
other.

There are also lamps, like that of Werdermann, which are
intermediate between the purely incandescent and the arc. The
thin pencil of carbon from which the light emanates touches
lightly a larger block of carbon, and produces at the point of
contact a brilliant star of light, without, however, forming an
actual arc. But the carbon pencil wastes away pretty rapidly,
and on the whole the apparatus is probably inferior to either of
the two between which it is a cross.

We shall not undertake to discuss at length the economical
question as to the lighting of houses by electricity. As against
gas, advantages and disadvantages are both obvious : on the
one side, a whiter light, freedom from heat and vitiation of the
air, from foul smells and tarnish; on the other, the inability to
store the supply against the time of need, the rather greater

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY.

31 1

liability to interruption by accident, and the difficulty of gradu-
ating the brightness of a given lamp in an economical manner.
One can turn down a gas-flame and burn it low. No effective
arrangement is yet known for doing the same thing with an
electric lamp, at least in a satisfactory and easy manner.

As to comparative expense it is yet too early to decide with
much confidence. The necessary conductors and current-meters
on the electric system will probably about offset the service of
gas-pipes and gas-meters, but they may turn out more costly
than has been anticipated. The actual expense of producing
the light, apart from all questions of interest on plant, will cer-
tainly be in favor of electricity.

But here another consideration comes up of great impor-
tance. The electric plant once being established and electricity
“laid on” in the streets of a city as gas is now, it may be used
very profitably for other purposes than that of lighting, espe-
cially for the transmission of power. The electric plant may
thus be made to earn revenue by day as well as by night. Un-
less we are much mistaken, electricity will be more used in the
near future as a means of transmitting power than for any other
purpose.

Many attempts were made in the early days of electro-mag-
netism to construct electro-magnetic engines ; i.e., to drive ma-
chinery by means of a galvanic current. There was no difficulty
in making the machines go, but there was difficulty in making
them pay. The simple fact is this : at current prices of min-
ing, manufacture, and materials, every horse-power of energy
developed in the current of a galvanic battery costs more than
twenty times as much as a horse-power generated by a, good
steam-engine, and no ingenious contrivances for using the cur-
rent can evade the fundamental difficulty. To put it differ-
ently: the mere coal consumed in extracting a ton of zinc from
its ore would produce as much power in the boiler of a steam-
engine as could be got from the use of the zinc itself in a gal-
vanic battery.

If, however, a method is ever found by which electricity can
be developed directly, economically, and manageably by the con-
sumption of fuel, without the intervention of steam or other
engines, the case will be altered. To a certain extent the

312

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

thermo-electric battery now does this very thing, but very im-
perfectly and wastefully.

For the present, then, we cannot profitably use battery cur-
rents to produce power; but we may use currents developed by
a mechanical generator of electricity as a means of transferring
power from one point to another; and apparently this is a far
more economical method than any known system of mechanical
transmission by wire ropes, water-pipes, or compressed air. All
that is needed is a suitable conductor from the electric generator
to the electric motor which is in construction identical with the
generator itself, either being capable of driving the other. The
conductor once laid remains without wear and tear, costing
nothing but the interest. It would take us too far to discuss
the conditions for the most profitable use of electricity in
this way. We may say in general that currents of small quan-
tity but high electro-motive force (like water streams of small
velocity and high pressure in hydraulic pipes) are theoretically
most economical ; but then such currents are harder to manage
on account of difficulties of insulation, so that a compromise
must be effected. In practice it is found that many of the ma-
chines in use will transmit from one to ten horse-power a dis-
tance of a mile with a loss of less than twenty per cent.

One of the earliest applications of this principle was in some
experiments by MM. Chretien and Felix in France in 1878.
They ploughed fields by electricity, substituting for the engine
which had been used to pull the gang of ploughs a Gramme
machine. They also used the same sort of machine upon a
crane employed for the unloading of boats in the harbor of
Sermaize, at an estimated economy over steam of nearly thirty
per cent, after several months of trial.

In the electric railways of Siemens and of Edison the rails are
used as the conductors, and the locomotive is replaced by a car
on which is an electric motor deriving its current from the rails.
By this arrangement it is possible to concentrate the motive
power at central stations, and to substitute for the wasteful loco-
motives engines of a much more economical type. It is prob-
able that for city tramways, elevated railroads, and other roads
of similar description, the system will come into extensive use.

We have seen recent accounts of various machines driven by

PRACTICAL USES OF ELECTRICITY.

313

electricity. One is a pile-driver, in which the steam-engine is
replaced by an electric motor. Another is an electric elevator,
in which an electric motor carried in the car is driven by a ca-
ble brought to it from the basement, and by means of an end-
less screw works the gearing which carries the car up or down.
This contrivance is absolutely safe; in case of the failure of the
current for any reason the car does not fall, but simply stops,
and can be worked up or down by hand from the inside so as
to release its inmates. Another ingenious machine is an elec-
tric hammer by Siemens, designed to replace the steam-hammer
for not too heavy work. All of these appear to be entirely suc-
cessful.

Indeed, as Professor Ayrton has pointed out, it seems very
possible, perhaps even probable, that our whole industrial sys-
tem is to be profoundly modified by this new possibility of
economically transmitting the energy generated in large quan-
tities and under the most favorable conditions, and so distribut-
ing it that it can be utilized a little at a time wherever needed.
Instead of bringing operatives to thei-r work and herding them
in mills and factories, it may be possible to send the work to
their homes, and thus to avoid many of the most serious evils of
our present methods.

Our limits forbid more than a mere mention of certain other
uses of the electric current. Siemens has experimented upon
the effect of powerful electric lights upon the growth of plants,
and has clearly shown the possibility of forcing vegetation and
fruitage in this manner to an almost unlimited extent. The
same gentleman and Jamin, in France, have shown how to em-
ploy the electric arc in blowpipe and crucible so as to produce
for industrial purposes intensities of temperature never before
attained ; and others have proposed to use the current as a
means of ordinary heating and cooking in the household. As
to this latter proposition it is enough, however, to say that the
method cannot be economical, tho it may be convenient in some
cases. The steam-engine which produces the current never util-
izes quite twenty per cent of the heat produced by the com-
bustion of its fuel, to say nothing of the subsequent loss in
transmission.

Of the uses of electricity in medicine and surgery we add

314

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

nothing here, nor of its applications in strictly scientific research,
these subjects lying one side of our purpose.

We must not close without an allusion to the International
Exhibition of Electricity which is to be opened at Paris next
autumn under government auspices. It is sure to be one of the
most interesting and important exhibitions ever held. One will
be able to see in action nearly every form of electric generator, all
sorts of electric lights and motors, all kinds of telegraphic and
telephonic apparatus, all the different appliances by which elec-
tricity is used in chemical and metallurgic operations, and the
instruments for measuring and determining all kinds of electrical
constants.

It will gather together the most magical and incredible of
facts, some things completed, the beginnings of more, the seeds
and embryos of almost a new civilization.

Charles A. Young.

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

u T F a man die, shall he live again ? ” The Christian Scrip-

J- tures assure us that he will, and that his future life will
■be, in some manner, a state of retribution for the life that now is.
More distinctly still we have, from the Master’s own lips, the
solemn announcement of a fixed period of Final Judgment.
“ For the hour is coming in the which all that are in the grave
shall hear his voice, and shall come forth ; they that have done
good, unto the resurrection of life ; and they that have done
evil, unto the resurrection of judgment.”1 Beyond these gen-
eral assurances, however, fio definite information is given respect-
ing the period, nature, or circumstances of our future stage of
existence. Enough is said to furnish a mighty sanction for the
practical teachings of the Gospel, and thus to supply a strong
motive for the purification of our life and character while here ;
but nothing is vouchsafed to gratify an idle curiosity. Hence
a wide field is left for conjecture and speculation, which, if prop-
erly conducted in a reverent spirit, and with due reserves, may
serve to enlighten and confirm our faith without disturbing its
foundations, or pretending to be wise beyond what is written.
Along the outer lines of what is explicitly revealed, and without
trespassing at all upon the inclosed region of positive belief,
there is abundant room for the legitimate and profitable exer-
cise of a devout imagination.

This was certainly the opinion of an eloquent writer and
earnest advocate of the strictest orthodoxy of Christian belief,
the Count Joseph de Maistre. From his “ Evenings at St. Pe-
tersburg” (vol. ii. p. 1 9 1 ) I translate the following passage:
“ Under this head [of legitimate conjecture] I class all those
opinions not directly supported by revelation, but useful for

1 I have translated literally si? avddra6iv xpidecoi, instead of adopting
from our Common Version what seems to me the harsh and unauthorized inter-
pretation, “unto the resurrection of damnation.”

316

THE PRINCETON RE VIE W.

explaining more or less plausibly what is expressly revealed.
Take, if you will, the theory of the pre-existence of the soul,
through which we can explain the doctrine of inherited sin.
You see at once all that can be said against the opposite opin-
ion— that of the successive creation of souls — and the advantage
of the theory of pre-existence for a multitude of interesting ex-
planations. Now, I do not adopt this theory as a portion of
accredited belief ; but it may reasonably be asked, that if I, poor
weak mortal, can thus find a hypothesis not at all absurd, which
solves perfectly an otherwise embarrassing problem, may I not
suppose, even if this theory" be not true, that there is some other
solution of the difficulty, which we now know nothing of be-
cause God has refused it to our idle curiosity? As much might
be said of Leibnitz’s ingenious hypothesis respecting the crime
of Sextus Tarquinius, which he has so ably developed in his
Theodicy ; and one might reason in like manner concerning a
hundred other systems. Provided they are modestly proposed
only to tranquillize the mind, and are not regarded as demon
strated truths, they will not conduce to pride or tempt us to
undervalue the authority of revelation.”

Foremost among these open questions, as they may be
termed, is that which concerns what is called the intermediate
state. What becomes of the soul, we naturally inquire, during
the indefinite interval between the dissolution of the body and
the Final Judgment? We turn away with aversion, almost with
terror, from the doctrine of the sleep of the soul during this
long period, maintained tho it be by Archdeacon Blackburn,
Bishop Law, and a few other authorities in the English Church.
Interpreting literally the saying of St. Paul, “ As by man came
death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead,” Dr. Law
held, “that Jesus Christ at his second coming will, by an act of
his power, restore to life and consciousness the dead of the hu-
man species, who, by their own nature and without this interpo-
sition, would remain in the state of insensibility to which the
death brought upon mankind by the sin of Adam had reduced
them.” But an immortality the entrance upon which is to be
so long deferred seems terribly like annihilation. If retribution
can be thus postponed, if the dreamless sleep can be thus con-
tinued through indefinite ages without infringing the claims of

CHRIS TIA N ME TEMPS YCHOSIS.

31/

justice, it would seem almost a gratuitous act to waken the soul
again to consciousness.

But the prevailing opinion in the English Church, as well as
in most denominations of Protestant Christians, is that the soul
at death enters immediately upon the state of reward or pun-
ishment awarded to it as its due by infinite justice, wisdom, and
love combined. There is a Hades, an under-world, the invisi-
ble place of departed spirits, Christ’s descent into it after his
crucifixion being affirmed in that venerable symbol of the Chris-
tian church, the Apostles’ Creed. One of its divisions is para-
dise, the region of the blessed, and the other is a place of pun-
ishment for the impenitent sinner; and the doctrine that the
soul enters at once upon this new stage of its existence is held
to be taught by our Saviour in his assurance to the penitent
thief on the cross, “ To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.”
The same immediacy of retribution is thought to be shadowed
forth in the parable of Dives and Lazarus; but this impressive
apologue, as we shall see, lends itself far more plausibly to a
different interpretation.

The obvious objection to this theory of the intermediate
state is, that it either does away altogether with our belief in a
solemn day of final judgmeht at once for all mankind, or reduces
it in our conception to a needless ceremony, all the consequences
of which have been anticipated. The Romanist doctrine of
purgatory avoids this objection, since it gives a meaning and a
purpose to the limited expiatory pains endured in the interme-
diate period, as they are held to purify the soul from the effects
of sin, and thus to fit it for unbroken and unlimited happiness
thereafter. The duration of these penalties, moreover, may be
shortened through the intercession of the saints and the church
militant, and thus an encouragement is afforded to the bereaved
to make known their longings and their hopes through prayers
for the dead. Sternly to forbid such prayers, as Protestants
generally do, seems harsh, since it rebukes what we must admit
to be a natural tendency of the sorrowing, and makes divine
justice appear dark and forbidding, because inexorable. Of
course, the Protestant argument is, that this doctrine of purga-
tory rests only on tradition and the authority of the church,
having little or no support from Scripture.

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE IV.

3'*

Still another theory is conceivable, which I venture to pro-
pose only with great diffidence, because it has no weight of au-
thority in its favor, tho it has long seemed to me an obvious
and justifiable hypothesis, supported by some intimations in the
New Testament, and better than any other to reconcile the con-
flicting claims of perfect justice and infinite mercy, and thus to
vindicate the ways of God with man. The doctrine of metemp-
sychosis, or the transmigration of souls, may almost claim to
be a natural or innate belief in the human mind, if we may judge'
from its wide diffusion among the nations of the earth and its
prevalence throughout the historical ages. It has been held by
the Brahmans and the Bouddhists as far back as we can trace
their history. It formed a part of the religion of ancient Egypt.
It was expressly taught by Pythagoras and Plato, and was adopted
from them by most of the philosophical sects who built upon
their foundations. We find a simple and pleasing exposition
of the doctrine, unexceptionable in its moral tone and clothed
in magnificent diction, in the sixth book of the yEneid. A be-
lief so widely diffused may not unreasonably be held, like the
gift of language and of fire, to have formed part of a primitive
revelation from God to man.

Our life upon earth is rightly held to be a discipline and a
preparation for a higher and eternal life hereafter. But if limi-
ted to the duration of a single mortal body, it is so brief as to
seem hardly sufficient for so grand a purpose. Threescore years
and ten must surely be an inadequate preparation for eternity.
But what assurance have we that the probation of the soul is
confined within so narrow limits? Why may it not be con-
tinued, or repeated, through a long series of successive genera-
tions, the same personality animating one after another an in-
definite number of tenements of flesh, and carrying forward into
each the training it has received, the character it has formed, the
temper and dispositions it has indulged, in the stage of exis-
tence immediately preceding? It need not remember its past
history, even while bearing the fruits and the consequences of
that history deeply ingrained into its present nature. How
many long passages of any one life are now completely lost to
memory, tho they may have contributed largely to build up
the heart and the intellect which distinguish one man from an-

CHRIS TIA N ME TEMPS YCHOSIS.

319

other! Our responsibility surely is not lessened by such for-
getfulness. We are still accountable for the misuse of time,
tho we have forgotten how or on what we wasted it. We
are even now reaping the bitter fruits, through enfeebled health
and vitiated desires and capacities, of many forgotten acts of
self-indulgence, wilfulness, and sin — forgotten just because they
were so numerous. Then a future life even in another frail body
upon this earth may well be a state of just and fearful retribu-
tion.

Why should it be thought incredible that the same soul
should inhabit in succession an indefinite number of mortal
bodies, and thus prolong its experience and its probation till it
has become in every sense ripe for heaven or the final judg-
ment? Even during this one life, our bodies are perpetually
changing, tho by a process of decay and restoration which is
so gradual that it escapes our notice. Every human being thus
dwells successively in many bodies, even during one short life.
This physiological fact seems to have been known by Plato, as
in a well-known passage of the Phaedo, a clear statement of it is
put into the mouth of Cebes, who argues, however, that this
fact affords no sufficient proof of the immortality of the soul.
“ You may say with reason,” Cebes is made to argue, “that the
soul is lasting, and the body weak and short-lived in comparison.
And every soul may be said to wear out many bodies, especially
in the course of a long life. For if, while the man is alive, the
body deliquesces and decays, and yet the soul always weaves
her garment anew and repairs the waste, then of course, when
the soul perishes, she must have on her last garment, and this
only will survive her; but then, again, when the soul is dead,, the
body will at last show its native weakness and soon pass into
decay.” And again : “ Suppose we admit also that, after death,
the souls of some are existing still, and will exist, and will be
born and die again and again, and that there is a natural strength
in the soul which will hold out and be born many times — for all
this, we may still be inclined to think that she will be weary in
the labors of successive births, and may at last succumb in one
of her deaths and utterly perish.” 1

Jowett’s translation, Am. ed., vol. i. p. 416.

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

In the Dialogue, Socrates admits, with Cebes, that this one
fact, taken alone, does not sufficiently prove that the soul will
never die ; and he proceeds to argue in defence of immortality
on other grounds. But what we are here especially concerned
to notice is the assertion, made in the passage cited, that “ the
soul always weaves her garment anew and repairs the waste.”
This is a distinct statement by anticipation of the modern phy-
siological doctrine taught by Stahl, Bouillier, Hartmann, and
other animists, that the soul has a plastic power, and is thus an
unconscious agent of Deity in constructing its own corporeal
organism. As bees and birds instinctively fashion their own
curiously wrought cells and nests with an art which is not their
own, since they know nothing of the admirable adaptations of
the parts to each other, or of the uses which the whole structure
is to subserve, we may well believe that they also blindly put
together, from the earliest embryonic stage upwards, the whole
fabric of their own bodies. The animal’s own will is the opera-
tive agent, the purpose and the guidance are divine. This is
the essential purport of Dr. Cudworth’s noted hypothesis of “ a
plastic nature.” The primal germ of all animal life, from the
animalcule up to man, is a minute speck too small to be dis-
cerned except by the highest power of the microscope. And
yet this is all which is directly inherited from the parent ; all the
other portions of the completed structure are subsequently
brought from without and superinduced upon this speck by
epigenesis. Now which is the more probable hypothesis ? That
of the materialist, that within this infinitesimal germ is lodged
a most complex and elaborate apparatus, which blindly and
mechanically builds up, step by step, the whole animal organism
with all its artistic arrangement of parts and capacities of action?
Or that of the spiritualist, who holds that a principle of life — in
the case of man, a living soul — is attached to that speck by a
divine hand, and then this vital principle, God-guided, weaves
for itself its own future habitation ? The unconscious action of
mind or instinct in keeping up the organism through repairing
its waste, healing its wounds, and remedying its hurts, is recog-
nized by most scientific observers. Then we may well believe
with Plato, that as “ the soul always weaves her garment anew,”
and thus reconstructs the body many times during one short

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

321

life, it also has “ a natural strength which will hold out and be
born many times,” at each successive birth fashioning for itself
anew its future home.

If every birth were an act of absolute creation, the introduc-
tion to life of an entirely new creature, we might reasonably ask
why different souls are so variously constituted at the outset.
We do not all start fair in the race that is set before us, and
therefore all cannot be expected, at the close of one brief mortal
pilgrimage, to reach the same goal and to be equally well fitted
for the blessings or the penalties of a fixed state hereafter. The
commonest observation assures us that one child is born with
limited capacities and perhaps a wayward disposition, strong
passions, and a sullen temper ; that he has tendencies to evil
which are almost sure to be soon developed. Another, on the
contrary, seems happily endowed from the start ; he is not only
amiable, tractable, and kind, but quick-witted and precocious, a
child of many hopes. The one seems a perverse goblin, while
the other has the early promise of a Cowley or a Pascal. The
differences of external condition also are so vast and obvious
that they seem to detract much from the merit of a well-spent
life and from the guilt of vice and crime. One is so happily
nurtured in a Christian home, and under so many protecting
influences, that the path of virtue lies straight and open before
him — so plain, indeed, that even the blind could safely walk
therein ; while another seems born to a heritage of misery, ex-
posure, and crime. The birthplace of one is in Central Africa,
and of another in the heart of civilized and Christian Europe.
Where lingers eternal justice then? How can such frightful
inequalities be made to appear consistent with the infinite wis-
dom and goodness of God ?

If metempsychosis is included in the scheme of the divine
government of the world, this difficulty disappears altogether.
Considered from this point of view, every one is born into the
state which he has fairly earned by his own previous history.
He carries with him from one stage of existence to another the
habits or tendencies which he has formed, the dispositions which
he has indulged, the passions which he has not chastised, but
has voluntarily allowed to lead him into vice and crime. No
active interference of retributive justice is needed, except in

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selecting for the place of his new birth a home with appropriate
surroundings — perhaps such a home as through his evil passions
he has made for others. The doctrine of inherited sin and its
consequences is a hard lesson to be learned. We submit with
enforced resignation to the stern decree, corroborated as it is by
every day’s observation of the ordinary course of this world’s
affairs, that the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited upon the
children even to the third and fourth generation. But no one
can complain of the dispositions and endowments which he has
inherited, so to speak, from himself ; that is, from his former self
in a previous stage of existence. If, for instance, he has neg-
lected his opportunities and fostered his lower appetites in his
childhood, if he was then wayward and self-indulgent, indolent,
deceitful, and vicious, it is right and just that, in his manhood
and old age, he should experience the bitter consequences of his
youthful follies. If he has voluntarily made himself a brute, a
brute he must remain. The child is father of the man, who
often inherits from him a sad patrimony. There is an awful
meaning, if we will but take it to heart, in the solemn announce-
ment of the angel in the apocalyptic vision : “ He that is unjust,
let him be unjust still ; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy
still ; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still ; and he
that is holy, let him be holy still.” And it matters not, so far
as the justice of the sentence is concerned, whether the former
self, from whom we receive this heritage, was the child who, not
many years ago, bore the same name with our present self, or
one who bore a different name, who was born in another age
and perhaps another hemisphere, and of whose sad history we
have not now the faintest remembrance. We know that our
personal identity actually extends farther back, and links to-
gether more passages of our life, than what is now present to
consciousness; tho it is true that we have no direct evidence
of this continuity and sameness of being beyond what is attested
by memory. But we may have indirect evidence of it from the
testimony of others in the case of our own infancy, or from
revelation, or through reasoning from analogy and from the
similarity of cases and characters. The soul, said the Hindoos,
is in the body like a bird in a cage, or like a pilot who steers a
ship and seeks a new vessel when the old one is worn out.

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

323

Who shall say, then, that the doctrine of original sin is neces-
sarily an impeachment of God’s justice? If the theory which I
am now setting forth is well founded, such sin is an immediate
and grand manifestation of such justice.

This ethical significance, as it may be called, of the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls, this aspect of it in which it ap-
pears as holding the balance even, immediately and inseparably
uniting holiness with its reward and sin with its punishment, is
its essential feature according to the Brahmans and the Boud-
dhists, and one upon which they place the greatest stress, tho
they carry out the retribution, as might be expected, into need-
less and whimsical details. They teach that whatever sufferings
we wrongly inflict upon others in this life must be expiated in a
future state by enduring precisely similar sufferings in our own
person ; even he who wantonly maims or kills a brute animal
will, at some day in the infinite future, be born again as such an
animal, and will suffer the same mutilation or death. If we are
pitiless in beholding the hunger and nakedness of others while
here, our own cry for compassion will not be heard when we
shall be called to endure the like evils hereafter. The parts will
be interchanged; the oppressor and his victim, the tyrant and
his slave, will change places with each other. All this may
seem fanciful enough ; but it is an apologue which involves a
great truth, for it is essentially the same lesson which is so im-
pressively taught in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. The
time of expiation is there represented as continuous and parallel
with the life that now is ; for the rich man, after the agonized
cry wrested from him by his own sufferings, “ Have mercy on
me !” prays that a message may be sent to those who are still
living, to his five brethren, that they may be called to repent-
ance. We need not fix any arbitrary limit here between imagi-
native illustration and literal truth ; for we are only concerned
with the moral of the story, which is all contained in the solemn
monition, “ Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst
thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things ; but now he
is comforted, and thou art tormented.” Considered either as
parable or prophecy, it is an accurate picture of the immediacy
and the even measure of God’s justice. The Latin poet who
seems to have imbibed most of the spirit of Christianity, while

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

ignorant of its letter, teaches essentially the same truth : “ Quisqiu
suos patimur manes" — each one of us suffers his own appropriate
punishment.

The pantheists also, or rather those who teach the absolute
unity of all things without admitting any form of theism, draw
a similar picture of the immediacy and the essential nature of
eternal justice, while seeking only to interpret the voice of con-
science in conformity with their peculiar doctrine. Temporal
justice, as it is administered by man through the institutions of
society, through its apparatus of judicial tribunals and prisons
and scaffolds, always admits delay between the criminal act and
its retributive consequences ; for, as its name imports, it takes
place under the forna of time, and needs time in order to be car-
ried out. Hence the arm of such justice is slow to strike and
uncertain in its aim, so that it often fails altogether. Not so
with eternal justice, which is above or beyond time, so that the
offence and its punishment are inseparably connected as one
and the same event, because there is no real or absolute dis-
tinction, but only a phenomenal one, between the offender and
the offended. He who injures another in fact wrongs himself ;
to adopt Schopenhauer’s striking figure, he is only a wild beast
who fastens his fangs in his own flesh. We cannot accept this
theory, as it is founded upon a denial of the self-evident truth
attested by every one’s consciousness, that, at any one moment;
he is a distinct personality separate from that of every other
human being. The difference between you and me is more than
phenomenal ; conscience as well as consciousness declares that
it is complete and absolute.

Nothing prevents us, however, from believing that the pro-
bation of any one soul extends continuously through a long
series of successive existences upon earth, each successive act in
the whole life-history being retributive for what went before.
For this is the universal law of being, whether of matter or
mind ; everything changes, nothing dies in the sense of being
annihilated. What we call death is only the resolution of a
complex body into its constituent parts, nothing that is truly
one and indivisible being lost or destroyed in the process. In
combustion or any other rapid chemical change, according to the

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS. 325

admission of the materialists themselves, not an atom of matter
is ever generated or ever ceases to be ; it only escapes from one
combination to enter upon another. Then the human soul,
which, as we know from consciousness, is absolutely one and in-
divisible, only passes on after the dissolution of what was once
its home to animate another body. In this sense we can easily
accept the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Our future
life is not, at any rate not while the present administration of
this world’s affairs continues, to be some inconceivable form of
merely spiritual being. It will be clothed again with a body,
which may or may not be in part the same with the one which
it has just left. Leibnitz held that the soul is never entirely
divorced from matter, but carries on some portion of what was
its earthly covering into a subsequent stage of existence.
Hence, while we cannot admit the dream of the Eleatic and the
pantheist that all is one, that there is no separate individual
being, that the distinction between you and me and all other
beings who even now walk the earth is only phenomenal or ap-
parent, like the difference between the many images of the moon
in countless pools of water, all of which are mere representa-
tions of the one moon up there among the clouds — I say, while
we cannot admit this senseless and inconceivable doctrine, for
it is contradicted by the clearest dictates of consciousness, we
can easily imagine and believe that every person now living is a
representation of some one who lived perhaps centuries ago
under another name, in another country, it may be not with the
same line of ancestry, and yet one and the same with him in his
inmost being and essential character. His surroundings are
changed ; the old house of flesh has been torn down and re-
built ; but the tenant is still the same. He has come down
from some former generation, bringing with him what may be
either a help or a hindrance ; namely, the character and tenden-
cies which he there formed and nurtured. And herein is retri-
bution ; he has entered upon a new stage of probation, and in
it he has now to learn what the character which he there formed
naturally leads to when tried upon a new and perhaps broader
theatre. If this be not so, tell me why men are born with char-
acters so unlike and with tendencies so depraved. In a sense
22

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THE PRINCE TON REVIEW.

far more literal than was intended by the poet, it may be true
of every country church-yard, that

“Some mute inglorious Milton there may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.”

They bring with them no recollection of the incidents of their
former life, as such memory would unfit them for the new part
which they have to play.

“ Animae, quibus altera fato
Corpora debentur, Lethaei ad fluminis undam
Securos latices et longa oblivia potant.

Scilicet immemores supera ut convexa revisant."

But they are still the same in the principles and modes of con-
duct, in the inmost springs of action, which the forgotten inci-
dents of their former life have developed and strengthened.
They are the same in all the essential points which made them
formerly a blessing or a curse to all with whom they came im-
mediately in contact, and through which they will again become
sources of weal or woe to their environment. Of course, these
inborn tendencies may be either exaggerated or chastised by
the lessons of a new experience, by the exercise of reflection,
and by habitually heeding or neglecting the monitions of con-
science. But they still exist as original tendencies, and as such
they must make either the upward or the downward path more
easy, more natural, and more likely to reach a goal so remote
that it would otherwise be unattainable.

To make this more clear, let me refer to the pregnant dis-
tinction so admirably illustrated by Kant between what he
calls the Intelligible Character and the Empirical or acquired
Character. The former is the primitive foundation on which
the latter, which directly determines our conduct for the time
being, is built. To a great extent, tho not entirely, we are
what we arc through the influence of what have been our sur-
roundings— through our education, our companions, our habits,
and our associations. But these influences must have had a
primitive basis to work upon, and can only modify the opera-
tion of the native germs, not change their nature ; and they will
modify these more or less profoundly according as they are

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

327

more or less amenable to outside influences and manifest more
or less decidedly a bias in one direction or another. What the
future plant will be depends much more on the specific nature
of the seed which is sown than on the fertility or barrenness of
the soil into which it is cast. The latter only determine whether
it shall be a vigorous plant or a weak one, whether in fact it
shall grow at all or only rot in the ground ; but they do not de-
termine the specific direction of its development, whether it shall
be an oak, a willow, or an ivy bush. The empirical or acquired
character, as it is open to observation, is a phenomenon ; it is
what the man appears to be, or what he has become under the
shaping influence of the circumstances to which he has been ex-
posed. But the Intelligible Character, the inmost kernel of his
real being, is a noumenon, and escapes external observation ;
we can judge of its nature only indirectly from its effects; that
is to say, from the conduct which it has co-operated to produce.
A change taking place in any substance must be the joint result
of two factors; namely, its proper cause operating upon it from
without, and the thing’s own nature or internal constitution.
Thus the same degree of heat acts very differently upon differ-
ent substances, say, on wax, iron, water, clay, or powder. In like
manner, a given motive, say, the desire of wealth, when acting on
different persons, tho with the same strength or intensity,
may lead to very dissimilar results ; it makes one man a thief
and another a miser, renders one envious and another energetic
and industrious. If frequently indulged, it forms a fixed habit,
and thus becomes an element in the acquired or empirical char-
acter.

Now Kant, with the bias of a necessitarian, places our free-
dom and our responsibility in the realm of noumena, attributing
them exclusively to our Intelligible Character. As to the ac-
quired character when once formed, he says we must act in ac-
cordance with it, and therefore we are not accountable for the
particular act to which it led, since that we could not help.
After I have once formed a habit of lying or stealing, should an
opportunity and temptation recur, I must repeat the offence.
But our inborn character, which expresses what we really are,
as a noumenon, lies outside of time, space, and causality, and
therefore cannot be led astray by temptation or external cir-

*■»

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

cumstances, but is entirely free. Herein solely consists our
merit or our guilt. Hence Kant would make us responsible
not for the particular crime, which we could not help commit-
ting, but for being such a person as to be capable of that crime.
W e are accountable not for what we do, but for what we are.
We are to be punished not for stealing this horse, but for being
a rogue or thief in grain, for being naturally inclined to stealing.

It would seem, however, that this theory completely reverses
the verdict of natural justice, which declares that we might have
resisted the force of habit and special temptation, and conse-
quently that we are punishable for the particular act ; while on
the other hand, we could not help being born with a feeble or
depraved character, but in so far, we are objects rather of com-
passion than of censure. And yet Kant is right in the latter
half of his theory, since conscience unmistakably testifies that
we are responsible for our inmost nature ; that is, for our innate
tendencies to wrong-doing or its opposite. We do not esteem
a truthful person any the less because he is so happily consti-
tuted that he cannot help telling the truth; rather this fact en-
hances our respect for his character. And we detest a falsehood
all the more if he who utters it has been a liar from the begin-
ning. Now it seems to me that this instinctive action of con-
science in awarding merit or guilt rather to the primitive and
inborn character of the man, to “ the one permanent individu-
ality which continues unchanged through all the various modes
of consciousness,” than to any particular act in which that char-
acter and individuality happen to be manifested, can be ex-
plained only by accepting that paradoxical portion of Kant’s
theory, which declares that we were free to make our own in-
most nature, our permanent individuality, other than it is, and
we are therefore responsible for its perversion. That the man
was thoroughly bad, bad from the beginning, surely makes him
more hateful than if he had been merely tempted into a single
act of sin which marred the uniformity of a character otherwise
pure and blameless. But this strange fact, that we are even
more responsible for what we are than for what we do, can be
accounted for only by supposing that we freely made ourselves
what we are in a previous stage of probationary being. Only
■ through voluntary persistence in wrong-doing at some former

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

329

period, only through frequently yielding then to temptation,
could we have formed the depraved habits and tendencies which
appeared ingrained into our inmost nature from the very begin-
ning of our present life. And conversely, a nature happily en-
dowed from the start must be the reward, as it is the necessary
consequence, of virtuous habits and a steadfast adherence to
the right through a former state of existence.

I know not how it may seem to others, but to me there is
something inexpressibly consolatory and inspiring in the thought
that the great and good of other days have not finally accom-
plished their earthly career, have not left us desolate, but that
they are still with us, in the flesh, tho we know them not,
and tho in one sense they do not really know' themselves,
because they have no remembrance of a former life in which
they were trained for the work which they are now doing. But
they are essentially the same beings, for they have the same in-
tellect and character as before, and sameness in these two re-
spects is all that constitutes our notion of personal identity.
We are unwilling to believe that their beneficent activity was
limited to one short life on earth, at the close of which there
opened to them an eternity without change, without farther
trial or action, and seemingly having no other purpose than un-
limited enjoyment. Such a conception of immortality is exposed
to Schopenhauer’s sarcasm, that if effort and progress are possi-
ble only in the present life, and no want or suffering can be en-
dured except as the penalties of sin, there remains for heaven
only the weariness of nothing to do. An eternity either of re-
ward or punishment would seem to be inadequately earned by
one brief period of probation. It is far more reasonable to be-
lieve that the future life which we are taught to expect will be
similar to the present one, and will be spent in this world, tho
we shall carry forward to it the burden or the blessing entailed
upon us by our past career. Besides the spiritual meaning of
the doctrine of regeneration, besides the new birth which is “ of
water and of the Spirit,” there may be a literal meaning in the
solemn words of the Saviour, “ Except a man be born again, he
cannot see the kingdom of God.”

It would be a fanciful and bootless task for us to attempt,
even in a single instance, to trace the same person through a

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The PRINCETON REVIEW.

succession of earthly lives. When the body and all its sur-
roundings are altered, when the modes of action are new and
the results different, it needs more than human sagacity to per-
ceive that the character is still the same. Only he who reads
the heart can know, after the whole environment of outward
circumstances is changed, that the personality still endures and
has suffered no break in the essence of its life’s history. When
even our Lord, after his resurrection, first appeared to Mary
Magdalene and to the two disciples at Emmaus, familiar as they
had been with his external appearance, we read that “ their eyes
were holden that they should not know him.” Then we can
have a more lively faith in the truth of the last promise which
he made to them, “ And lo, I am with you alway, even unto the
end of the world.” Even in this earthly life, at the various
stages of its history, there is room for a richly varied experience ;
there are countless fields for distinct effort in it, and we may
not measure the importance of the work to be done in any one
of them by what the world thinks of its dignity or the large-
ness of its results. The saintly Carlo Borromeo was a cardinal
and a prince, and therefore found the whole north of Italy but
a narrow theatre for the incessant warfare which he waged, often
at the peril of his life, against all forms of sickness, sorrowing,
and sin. He was canonized not long after his death, and the
gigantic statue of him which crowns a height near Arona is
appropriately visible for many leagues around, tho by no means
so far as his philanthropic influence extended. If, after the dis-
solution of his body, his beneficent spirit was still allowed to
walk the earth in a mortal form, it might perhaps be found, not
in any lofty and conspicuous station, but in the seclusion of a
remote Alpine valley, where an Oberlin taught, loved, and helped
his brother-man. Luther was born in an age when a great crisis
was imminent in the world’s affairs, and his indomitable spirit,
his fervent convictions, and his restless energy had full scope
and play in the opening scenes of the Reformation. If a mind
and character the same as his could anywhere be traced in the
subsequent history of the world, perhaps it might be detected
within the fold of the very church which he strove to over-
throw, in him who was called “the great Arnauld,” who, perse-
cuted and in exile during the greater part of his long life, still

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

33i

bated not a jot of heart or hope, but fought on and prayed on
in defence of a sinking cause, and whose collected works in phi-
losophy and theology occupy fifty folio volumes. Late in life,
when his friend and coadjutor Nicole besought him to lay down
the pen and take some repose, he exclaimed, “ Rest ! Shall we
not have all eternity to rest in ?” “ Probably not,” I should an-

swer; for surely a heaven in which there was nothing to do
would be no heaven to him. Jansenism as a distinctive sect and
creed hardly survived the death of its founders, and has now
long been entirely extinct. But I should be sorry to believe
that that remarkable group of excellent scholars, thinkers, and
divines, the Port-Royalists, who upheld the cause of Jansenism
for three quarters of a century, have finally passed away from
earth. On the contrary, if anywhere in these later times the
model of a Christian scholar and historian could be found, we
might well say that the spirit of Tillemont lives again in him.
If we could find one who united in himself all the best qualities
of a Christian teacher stainless in heart and life, we might well
believe that it was Lancelot in another earthly form. For either
Pascal or Arnauld, it must be admitted that we should not know
where to look ; if their spirits are yet in this world, they must
be in the obscurity of some lowly station.

All this speculation, I repeat, is completely fanciful, and can
serve no other purpose than to show, even if the doctrine of
metempsychosis were true, that we should not be able to iden-
tify one person in any two of his successive appearances upon
earth. We surely could not know of him in this respect any
more than he knows of himself ; and as already said, the total
break in memory at the beginning of every successive life must
prevent the newly born from recognizing the oneness of his own
being with any former existence in an earthly shape.

Curiously enough this want of self-knowledge is confessed
in the only case in which we have a direct assertion in Scripture,
(if language is to be interpreted in its ordinary literal meaning,
and not strained into a figurative sense), that one of the heroes
of the olden time had reappeared upon earth under a new name,
as the forerunner of a new dispensation. At the time of the
Saviour, there appears to have been a general expectation among
the Jews, that the coming of the Messiah was to be heralded by

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THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

the reappearance upon earth of the prophet Elijah, this expec-
tation being founded upon the text in Malachi, “ Behold, I will
send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and
dreadful day of the Lord.” Early in the public ministry of
John the Baptist, we read that the belief prevailed among his
hearers that this prophecy was fulfilled in him. But when
directly asked, “Art thou Elias?” he replied, “ I am not. Art
thou that prophet? And he answered, No.” He had no
memory of his former life under that name ; and tho he
must have been aware of the popular belief upon the subject,
and of the many points of similarity between his own career
and that of the great restorer of the worship of the true God at
an earlier period, he was too honest to claim an authority which
he did not positively know to' belong to him.

Yet we learn that our Lord subsequently twice declared, in
very distinct language, that Elijah and John the Baptist were
really one and the same person. Once, while John was still
alive but in prison, Jesus told the multitude who thronged
around him, “ Among them that are born of women there hath
not risen a greater than John the Baptist and he directly goes
on to assert, “ if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to
come” (Matt. xi. 14). And again, after John was beheaded,
Jesus said to his disciples, “ Elias is come already and they knew
him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed.”
“ Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of
John the Baptist.” (Matt. xvii. 12, 13.) Still again, in the scene
on the mount of Transfiguration, “ behold there talked with him
two men, which were Moses and Elias;” and it is said of the
three disciples who were then in company with Jesus that,
“ when they were awake, they saw his glory and the two men
that stood with him.” (Luke ix. 30, 32.) That the commenta-
tors have not been willing to receive, in their obvious and literal
meaning, assertions so direct and so frequently repeated as
these, but have attempted to explain them away in a non-natu-
ral and metaphorical sense, is a fact which proves nothing but
the existence of an invincible prejudice against the doctrine of
the transmigration of souls.

This prejudice is largely attributable, as it seems to me, to a
corrupt admixture of the proper doctrine with oriental fables

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

333

respecting the interchange of souls between human beings and
the brute creation. But in the sixth book of Virgil, where the
dogma is probably stated in the form in which it was accepted,
if at all, by cultivated minds among the Greeks and Romans
about the time of our Lord’s ministry, this idle and offensive
corruption of it does not appear. Certainly I do not accept the
hypothesis of the transmigration of souls between men and the
lower animals, because I do not believe that these animals have
any souls to migrate. This wild Indian fable may be left to the
credulity of our modern evolutionists, who can believe that birds
are generated from fishes, and that man was born of a monkey.
The gulf between the mental constitution of the highest brutes
— anthropoid apes, for instance — and a human soul, capable even
in its lowest state of progress, language, free will, morality, and
religion, is so broad and deep that those who believe it can be
bridged over had better not talk about the incredibility of mir-
acles. The only high endowment of merely animal life, that of
instinct, is, as I have elsewhere argued, not a free and conscious
power of the subject in which it appears and works. It is, so to
speak, a foreign agency, which enters not into the individuality
of the brute. The animal appears subject to it, controlled and
guided by it, but not to possess and apply it for its own chosen
purposes. In its highest functions the brute appears only as the
blind and passive instrument of a will which is not its own.

“ And Reason raise o’er Instinct as you can,

In this ’tis God directs, in that ’tis man.”

The power thus granted to it for a time cannot be improved by
practice, is invariably applied in the same way and with perfect
success, and disappears when it is no longer needed. No moral
character is attributable to a faculty which is thus unconsciously
exerted, and no moral aim can exist where progress or change
is impossible. When deprived of this extraneous power, or
viewed apart from it, the brute appears in its true light as the
creature of a day, born for purposes not connected with its own
being, but as an humble instrument or means in the great circle
of animated nature, which, as a whole, is subservient to higher
ends. In the General Scholium to his “ Optics,” Sir Isaac New-
ton rightly says, “ The instinct of brutes and insects can be

334

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living
Agent, who, being in all places, is more able by his will to move
all bodies, and thereby to form and reform the parts of the uni-
verse, than we are by our will to move the parts of our bodies.”
There is ample room and verge enough for the action of
metempsychosis within the limits of the human race, excluding
the brute animal kingdom altogether. The interval between a
Newton and an Australian savage, between a St. Louis and an
Attila or a Genkhis Khan, is vast enough to afford scope for
indefinite moral advancement or degradation, even if the history
of the world thus far showed all that either holiness or wicked-
ness in a human- shape is capable of ; and, always excepting on
the former side Him who was both human and divine, there is
not the least reason to believe that the limits of what is possi-
ble for human nature either way have yet been reached. Assum-
ing the doctrine to be well founded, it is for every person to
determine with what character he will leave the world at the
close of one stage of his earthly being, believing that with this
same character thus trained for weal or woe he is inevitably at
once to begin a new life, and thus either to rise or fall farther
than ever. It seems to me that the dogma of a future life, so
prolonged through a countless succession of other lives on earth
until it becomes an immortality, is thus brought home to one
with a force, a vividness and certainty, of which in no other form
is it susceptible. It has been said that no prudent man, if the
election were offered to him, would chocse to live his present life
over again ; and as he whom the world calls prudent does not
usually cherish any lofty aspirations, the saying is probably true.
We are all so conscious of the many errors and sins that we
have committed that the retrospect is a saddening one; and
worldly wisdom would probably whisper, “It is best to stop
here, and not try such a career over again.” But every one
would ardently desire a renewal of his earthly experience if as-
sured that he could enter upon it under better auspices, if he
believed that what we call death is not the end of all things even
here below, but that the soul is then standing upon the thresh-
old of a new stage of earthly existence, which is to be brighter
or darker than the one it is just quitting according as there is
carried forward into it a higher or lower purpose, a purer or

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

335

more corrupt nature, than the one it began with perhaps half or
three quarters of a century ago. As applied to describe our
condition in a future life thus understood, the much-abused
words, heaven and hell, would have a more obvious and intelli-
gible sense, a meaning less exposed to captious objections and
scoffs, than could be given to them on any other interpretation.
We should thus understand the full purport of our Saviour’s
solemn declaration that they do not mean any particular place,
but only a state of mind : “ They shall not say, Lo here ! or, lo
there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” We
could then apply to the whole succession of lives of any indi-
vidual soul what Lacordaire finely says of any one life, that it
may be made a series of metempsychoses or transfigurations
which constantly lead the soul nearer to God.

This doctrine also suggests, as it seems to me, a clearer and
more satisfactory explanation than would otherwise be possible
of the fall of man through disobedience and its consequences,
as narrated in Genesis and interpreted by St. Paul. Certainly
the primeval man, the Adam of each one of us, when he first
through the inspiration of Deity “ became a living soul,” was
born into a paradise, an Eden, of entire purity and innocence,
and in that state he talked directly with God. There was also
given to him through his conscience the revelation of a divine
law, an absolute command, to preserve this blessed state through
restraining his appetites and lower impulses to action, and mak-
ing the love of holiness superior even to the love of knowledge.
But man was tempted by his appetites to transgress this law ;
he aspired after a knowledge of good and evil, which can be at-
tained only through experience of evil, and he thereby fell from
innocence into a state of sin, which necessarily corrupted his
whole future being. The habit of disobedience once formed,
sin in the same person has a self-continuing and self-multiplying
power. The stain carried down from a former life becomes
darker and more inveterate in the life that follows. We have
no reason to complain of the corruption of human nature, for
the world is what we have made it to be by our own act. The
burden has not been transmitted to us by others, but has been
inherited from ourselves ; that is, from our former selves. Re-
demption from it by man’s own effort thus became impossible.

336

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

This is death, moral death, the only death of which a human
soul is capable. It is so called in the parable, where the father,
speaking of the prodigal son’s return, says of him, “ For this thy
brother was dead, and is alive again ; was lost, and is found.”
Salvation became possible only through the Incarnation, by a
new creation, by the appearance of a sinless and divine nature
in a human form, reconciling the world unto God. And this
appears to be the full meaning of St. Paul’s language: “For
since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of
the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be
made alive.”

Thus far we have considered metempsychosis as a means of
retribution ; that is, of awarding to each soul in the next future
life upon which it is entering that compensation either of weal
or woe which it has earned for itself — has in fact necessarily
entailed upon itself by its conduct in the life which it has just
completed. But the transmigration of souls may be regarded
also in another light, as that portion of the divine government
of this world’s affairs which maintains distributive justice, since,
through its agency, in the long-run, all inequalities of condition
and favoring or unfavoring circumstances may be compensated,
and each person may have his or her equitable share of oppor-
tunities for good and of the requisite means for discipline and
improvement. If our view be confined within the limits of a
single earthly life, it must be confessed that the inequality is glar-
ing enough, so that it seems to justify the honest doubts of the
trembling inquirer, while it has offered a broad mark for the
scoffs and declamation of the confirmed unbeliever. Dives and
Lazarus form a contrast that is almost constantly before our
eyes. It is a long way from a poor laborer’s hut to a throne,
and a still longer one from a birthplace in one of the sinks of
misery and crime which pollute our great cities to the affection-
ate nurture of a comfortable Christian household. One saint
must encounter martyrdom, while another, in a different age
and country, seems to find the road to heaven comparatively
straight and easy. There are some situations so degraded and
miserable that they seem almost to take away the guilt of trans-
gression by rendering goodness practically unattainable, while
those who occupy them are hardly fit subjects either of praise

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

33 7

or censure. An Australian savage or a native New Zealander,
as he u'as a century ago, could not have become by death a
proper candidate for either the happiness or the misery of a
spiritual immortality begun then and there. And yet one is re-
luctant to classify him with the brutes that perish ; for, savage as
he was, he was still man, having in him the germs of a moral and
religious nature, which proper Christian culture could develop.

Now the parable gives us a simple and effective solution of
these difficulties by merely suggesting that the immediately
future life is also, like the present one, to be spent on this earth,
only the position of the two characters in it being reversed ; and
a belief in such transposition would be always a desirable warn-
ing for Dives and a needed comfort for Lazarus. In this way,
as it seems to me, a firm and well-grounded faith in the doctrine
of Christian metempsychosis might help to regenerate the world.
For it would be a faith not hedged round with many of the diffi-
culties and objections which beset other forms of doctrine, and
it offers distinct and pungent motives for trying to lead a more
Christian life, and for loving and helping our brother-man.
“ And this also shall pass away’ was the motto which a wise
king had engraved on his signet, to temper alike his grief in
adverse fortune and his exultation in prosperity. Even the old
heathen poet, an avowed Epicurean, gives the same advice.

“ j^quam memento rebus in arduis
Servare mentem, non secus in bonis
Ab insolenti temperatam
Lsetitia, vioriture Delli.”

But no hog from Epicurus’ sty ever put such counsel into the
impressive form in which it is enforced in the parable. Nothing
can teach so forcibly the essential brotherhood of all men as a
belief that we are soon to experience in our own person all the
varieties of condition to which human nature is subject ; that
the rich and the poor, the savage and the civilized man, the
monarch and the peasant, are soon to change places with each
other. We should thus learn to repeat with more earnestness
than ever the Christian prayer,

. “ The mercy I to others show,

That mercy show to me.”

338

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

For the probation which is to fit us for eternity must be com-
prehensive enough to leave no form of being untried, no tempta-
tion that has not been resisted, no trial that has not been borne,
no opportunity for the exercise of pity, trust, and love left un-
improved. Herein is no distinction of persons, and no one has
any advantage over another, since all must complete the same
long journey, and each must have essentially the same experi-
ence while on the road.

The doctrine is full of solemn warning then, but it is also
full of consolation. For it teaches that the friends who have
been separated from us by what we call death have only passed
out of our limited field of sight, but are still in the body and
really near us, are still tenanting the earth like ourselves, tho
in forms which we cannot recognize. Intercession for the so-
called dead, therefore, ceases to appear out of place or in any
way objectionable; for they are not only still living, but living
in a probationary state, exposed to trial, temptation, and suf-
fering just as we are, and therefore as proper subjects for inter-
cessory prayer as they were before they changed their name and
dwelling-place. The intermediate state, considered as a series
of existences of the same soul in a succession of earthly bodies,
is a sort of purgatory, by passing through which the soul may,
if it will , be purified from the stains of sin and regain its primi-
tive Eden, its state of purity and innocence. If the fervent
prayer of a righteous man availeth much, I cannot see why it
should not aid in completing this happy work.

This hypothesis — and I do not claim for it any other charac-
ter than that of a highly probable and consolatory hypothesis —
also throws a new and welcome light upon the deep and dark
problem of the origin of evil. In the first place, according to
the views which have now been taken, the sufferings which are
the immediate consequence and punishment of sin are properly
left out of the account, since these evince the goodness of God
no less than the happiness resulting from virtue, the purpose in
both cases being to advance man’s highest interests by the im-
provement of his moral character; just as the affectionate parent
rewards the obedience and punishes the faults of his child, love
equally constraining him to adopt either course. And how many
of the evils borne both by individuals and by communities are

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

339

attributable directly to their own misconduct, to their wilful dis-
regard of the monitions of conscience! The body which is now
languid from inaction through sloth, and enfeebled or racked by
disease, might have been active, vigorous, and sound, prompt to
second every wish of its owner, and ministering to his enjoy-
ment through every sense and limb. And could we know all,
could we extend our vision over the whole history of our former
self, how would our estimate of this purely retributive character
of our present suffering be enlarged and confirmed ! It would
then be evident that no portion of it is gratuitous or purpose-
less. And the community which is now torn with civil dissen-
sion, desolated by war, or prostrated in an unequal strife with
its rivals, might have* been peaceful, affluent, and flourishing, if
rulers and ruled had heeded the stern calls of duty, instead of
blindly following their own tumultuous passions. And as na-
tions, too, have a continuous life, like that of a river, through a
constant change of their constituent parts, many of their woes
are clearly attributable to the misdeeds of their former selves.
Once admit the great truth, that virtue, not happiness, is man’s
highest interest, and most of the pains of this life indicate the
goodness and justice of God quite as much as its pleasures.

But according to the theory which we are now considering, a
still larger deduction must be made from the amount of apparent
evil at any one time visible in the world. All the inequalities in
the lot of mankind, which have prompted what are perhaps the
bitterest of all complaints, and have served sceptics like Hume
and J. S. Mill as a reason for the darkest imputations upon
divine justice in the government of the world, disappear from
the picture altogether. Excepting only, what we have just con-
sidered, the retributive consequences of more or less sin, there
are no inequalities. All start from the same point, and journey
through the same vicissitudes of existence, exhausting sooner or
later all varieties of condition. Prince and peasant, bond and
free, barbarian and cultured, all share alike whatever weal or
woe there is in the world, because all must at some future time
change places with each other. But after these two large de-
ductions from the amount complained of, what remains? Very
little, certainly, which we cannot even now see through; that
is, which we cannot assign an adequate reason for; and to the

340

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

eye of faith nothing remains. The world becomes a mirror
which reflects without blot or shadow the infinite goodness of
its Creator and Governor. Death remains ; but that is no evil,
for what v/e call death is only the introduction to another life
on earth, and if this be not a higher and better life than the one
just ended, it is our own fault. Our life is really continuous, and
the fact that the subsequent stages of it lie beyond our present
range of immediate vision is of no more importance, and no
more an evil, than the corresponding fact that we do not now
remember our previous existence in antecedent ages. Death
alone, or in itself considered, apart from the antecedent dread
of it, which is irrational, and apart from the injury to the feelings
of the survivors, which is a necessary consequence of that attach-
ment to each other from which so much of our happiness
springs, is not even an apparent evil; it is mere change and
development, like the passage from the embryonic to the adult
condition, from the blossom to the fruit.

Only one question remains, and it may be very briefly men-
tioned, as a full discussion of it evidently transcends the limited
powers of a finite mind. This series of successive lives on earth,
is it to be endless, or will it culminate at last in some grand
manifestation of infinite justice and mercy combined? The
answer in general terms cannot be a matter of doubt ; for the
scientific reason confirms what revelation also teaches, that this
world had a beginning, and that it must also have an end. It is
not more certain that “ in the beginning, God created the heavens
and the earth,” than it is that the period will come when the
present succession of days and nights will cease, and, the grand
term assigned for probation being closed, all mankind must
appear to meet their Judge. This is what John foresaw in the
apocalyptic vision, when he beheld the angel stand upon the sea
and upon the earth, who “ lifted up his hand to heaven, and
sware by Him that liveth for ever and ever that there should be
time no longer.”

We may even reverently conjecture what the nature of the
account will be which each one must then render of all that he
has thought or done during the whole period of his probation in
the body. Most persons -are acquainted with the facts, for they
are numerous and well authenticated, which go to prove that the

CHRISTIAN METEMPSYCHOSIS.

341

latent and undeveloped powers of memory are vastly greater
than those which are consciously under our control at any one
time under ordinary circumstances ; and that abnormal mental
excitement, such as often results from high fever, delirium, or
the passion and ecstasy of imminent and sudden death, may
bring out into luminous consciousness all those stores of recol-
lection which had thus been buried for many years. Leibnitz
first directed attention to these singular phenomena; Coleridge
cited from the German a remarkable case in point ; and Sir W.
Hamilton has collected a number of instances of such wonderful
revival of memory. Whole languages, acquired in early child-
hood, but wholly forgotten in maturer years, have thus been
recovered. Most old men, I suppose, have been perplexed at
times by flashes and gleams from the memory thus occasionally
stimulated into new life and vigor. The conclusion to be drawn
from such phenomena is obvious enough, and cannot be better
stated than by Coleridge, in his “ Biographia Literaria,” chap, vi.:

“ As we cannot rationally suppose the feverish state of the brain to act
in any other way than as a stimulus, this fact (and it would not be difficult
to adduce several of the same kind) contributes to make it even probable
that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and that, if the intelli-
gent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only
a different and apportioned organization, the body celestial instead of the
body terrestrial, to bring before every human soul the collective experience
of its whole past existence. And this — this, perchance, is the dread Book
of Judgment, in whose mysterious hieroglyphics every idle word is re-
corded ! Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible
that heaven and earth should pass away than that a single act, a single
thought, should be loosened or lost from that living chain of causes to all
whose links, conscious or unconscious, the free will, our only absolute Self,
is coextensive and co-present.”

Francis Bowen.

THE SILVER QUESTION AND THE INTERNATION-
AL MONETARY CONFERENCE OF 1881.

S these lines are in writing, the delegates to the Third In-

ternational Monetary Conference are on their way to their
place of meeting. Before the words here written can be printed
the deliberations of that body will probably have been brought
to a close, and their conclusions will have become more or less
distinctly known to the world. Nothing which can now be said
can have any influence in affecting those conclusions ; but as,
whotever they may be, it is entirely too much to expect that
they will give universal satisfaction, the subject will continue
long to be discussed, and the public will be interested in the
discussion.

It is a fact worthy of mention here that the motive which led
to the call of the earliest of these international councils was very
different from that which has prompted the later. Before 1867 the
exciting controversy which has in more recent years been styled
the “ battle of the standards” had not begun. It was in that as-
sembly indeed, and while its deliberations were in progress, that
the war first regularly opened. The motive of the convention
itself, however, was the hope of advancing, through its instru-
mentality, the progress of a movement which, with steadily
growing activity and success, had been already going forward
for about three quarters of a century, having an object no less
important than the establishment among all nations of a perfect
uniformity in the chief instrumentalities of commercial inter-
course, the weights, measures, and moneys of the world. The
almost endless diversity which from the earliest times has pre-
vailed in the modes of estimating the quantities and values of
exchangeable commodities in commerce has been one of the

THE SILVER QUESTION.

343

most serious hindrances in the way of that intercourse between
nations on which progress in civilization is so largely dependent.

It is a curious fact that the conception of a scheme so preg-
nant as this, with consequences of incalculable benefit to the
human race, should have first presented itself to a European
monarch in so dark a period of human history as the beginning
of the fourteenth century. Philip V., surnamed le long, or the
Tall, formed the project of establishing complete uniformity
of weights and measures throughout his realm ; but which,
had it been successfully accomplished, would undoubtedly have
induced similar reforms among neighboring peoples. He pro-
jected also a reform of the monetary system of France, which
failed for a similar reason ; but if he effected nothing in his ef-
forts to improve the currency, he had at least the merit of leav-
ing it in no worse condition than he found it — a remark which
can hardly be made with truth of any of his predecessors, or even
of his successors down to the middle of the eighteenth century.
The noble disposition of this young monarch, who died prema-
turely in his 28th year, may be inferred from the reply which he
made to certain courtiers and pretended friends, when urged by
them to crush a supposed enemy : “ II est beau” he answered,
“ de pourvoir se venger , et de ne le pas faire 1

The great reform so early projected by this enlightened ruler
ceased with his premature death to occupy the minds of men ;
and for nearly five centuries it remained in the state of an ab-
stract beau ideal, deemed probably incapable of a practical reali-
zation. At length, however, in the year 1790, it was energetically
revived by a man destined to bear a conspicuous part in his coun-
try’s history, the famous and sagacious Talleyrand, who in the
year just named laid before the constituent assembly of France a
proposition to invite the concurrence of the leading European
nations in a scherrre for the construction, on scientific principles,
of a system of weights and measures for the common use of all
mankind. The scheme so constructed it was proposed to sub-
stitute in place of all the endlessly numerous, discordant, and
illogical systems then actually existing. The plan was favorably
received, and in the first measures taken toward its prosecution

Biographie Universelle, tom. 34, art. “ Philippe le long.

344

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

France had the co-operation of Spain, Italy, Switzerland, the
Netherlands, and Denmark. In the subsequent commission ap-
pointed to meet, and which in 1799 at length actually met, to
settle the exact length of the unit-base of the system, derived
from the great meridian survey which had occupied the interven-
ing years, there were present the representatives of ten dif-
ferent governments.

Altho the original creation of a system involving, like the
metric, for the determination of its first element, a great geodetic
operation, extending through the third part of the lifetime of a
generation, was in itself a work of vast magnitude, the introduc-
tion of the system into actual use after it had been perfected
was an undertaking still more formidable. The first was an en-
terprise falling within the domain of exact science, and its suc-
cessful accomplishment involved no question but that of time ;
the other was the task of statesmen who' have to do with the
whims and prejudices of men, and who often find their most
earnest efforts for the public welfare frustrated by coming into
collision with prescriptive usages and with the long-established
habits of the many. Thus the metric system, real and immeas-
urable as are the advantages which, from the simplicity of its
theory and the facility it introduces into calculations, it offers
over every other for the transaction of the business of life, did
not find immediate acceptance even in France ; and it made its
way still more slowly among neighboring peoples. About the
middle of the present century, however, it had been legally and
practically established not only in France and her colonies, but
also in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Denmark, Greece, and some
of the South American republics; and from that time onward
adhesions were frequent on the part of other European powers.
Among these there were, in Germany, Wtirtemberg, Bavaria,
Baden, and Hesse, and, in Italy, Piedmont, Parma, Modena, the
Pontifical States, and Naples. The system was also adopted on
this continent by Mexico in 1856, and it extended itself gradu-
ally throughout the greater part of Central and Southern Ameri-
ca, having been legalized in Brazil in 1862. This so rapid progress
of a reform so important, a reform which has since extended
itself to embrace the entire civilized world with the exception of
Russia and the English-speaking peoples, stimulated a very gen-

THE SILVER QUESTION.

345

eral desire to see the same degree of uniformity prevailing among
the nations as to their means of estimating values which had
already become so nearly universal in their modes of measuring
quantity. A striking evidence of the prevalence of this feeling
was seen in the proceedings of the Fifth International Statistical
Congress held in Berlin in 1863. The object of these congresses,
of which there have been held nine up to this time, has been to
insure a thorough exploration of all the sources of national
wealth and national strength throughout the world, as a basis on
which to found enlightened legislation, and as a guide to direct
the councils of international diplomacy. The nature of its
avowed design rendered it necessary that this body, gathering
its material indifferently from all lands, should adopt some com-
mon mode of estimating quantities ; and it seemed almost
equally necessary that there should be also employed some single
system of estimating and computing values. It cost, of course,
no long deliberation to arrive at the conclusion that for quanti-
ties the metric system of weights and measures should be used
in all the proceedings of the congress and in all its published
documents ; but the money question was not so easily settled.
The question of standard metals was not raised ; but a very lively
debate arose as to the proper unit of value. The pound ster-
ling, the dollar, the florin, and the franc (the marc had not yet
been created), all had their advocates ; but neither party could
command a majority of voices, and the congress arrived at last
at the impotent conclusion that it would be advisable to conserve
all these types.

Thus the congress could not agree upon a type ; but the out-
side world who interested themselves in this matter were not on
that account discouraged. On the contrary, there spread itself
every day more and more widely a feeling that this object was
one which was not only capable of being accomplished, but
which ought to be accomplished, and which another conference
called expressly ad hoc could not fail to accomplish. And out
of this feeling grew the International Monetary Conference of
1867. It was expressly called to devise a scheme for the prac-
tical unification of the money and coinage of all nations. At the
opening of the session this object was distinctly announced by
the president.

346

TIIE PRINCETON REVIEW.

The main question before this body was of course the ques-
tion of an international monetary unit ; but the discussion of
this brought into immediate and unavoidable prominence the
associated question, In what metal shall the representative of
the common unit be struck? This question proved to be so
absorbing in the interest it awakened that it occupied the atten-
tion of the conference for several days, to the exclusion of every-
thing else. Three distinct propositions were presented for con-
sideration : i. To adopt the single standard of silver. This was
rejected with entire unanimity, altho one half of the dele-
gates voting were representatives of countries in which silver
was at the time the standard actually existing. 2. To adopt the
single standard of gold. In the discussion of this question, the
entire argument in favor of the only remaining alternative, viz.,
the double standard of both gold and silver, was urged with per-
sistence and ability, especially by Mr. Wolowski, representing
France, who sustained that view with remarkable zeal and' in-
genuity. The conference, however, in the end approved the
single gold standard by a vote which lacked but a single voice
of unanimity, and thus practically disposed of the third and
only remaining alternative — the double standard — at the same
time.

The question of the standard metal was, however, only sec-
ondary to the main object for which the conference assembled,
which was to decide on, if possible, and to recommend for uni-
versal and exclusive adoption, a common system equally of
money of account and of its representative coinage, to be sub-
stituted for the variety of systems in actual use among the na-
tions. This question was formulated in the following words,
which we copy from the supplementary report on the proceed-
ings of the conference, made in April, 1870, to the Department
of State of the United States, by the Hon. Samuel B. Ruggles,
delegate to the conference:

“ By what means it is most easy to realize monetary unity : whether
by the creation of a system altogether new and independent of existing
systems, or by the mutual co-ordination of existing systems, taking into
account the scientific advantages of certain types, and the numbers of the
populations which have already adopted them ?”

The first of the alternatives here presented, tho advoca-

THE SILVER QUESTION.

347

ted by the representatives of Holland and Belgium, on the
ground of scientific simplicity and because it would avoid all
national susceptibilities, was rejected as involving insuperable
difficulties, not the least of which would be the necessary re-
coinage of all the gold in circulation throughout the world. On
the other hand, in considering the possible co-ordination of ex-
isting types, the national type of France had in its favor the
consideration that the amount of the gold coinage represented
by it, and in actual circulation in the states of the Latin Union,
was hardly inferior, according to the best estimates obtainable
at the time, to that of the entire gold coinage of all the other
nations of the earth put together.

This consideration, with the additional one that the franc is
nearly the fifth part of the dollar of the United States and the
twenty-fifth part of a pound sterling of Great Britain, while Aus-
tria was at that very moment negotiating a monetary treaty
with France for the assimilation of the coinage systems of the two
countries by issuing pieces inscribed io florins , 25 francs , Rou-
mania had actually adopted the French coinage, and Spain,
Sweden, and Greece had given evidence of their readiness to do
so, operated with such force upon the minds of the delegates
as to bring them at length to the conclusion, with only one vote
in the negative, to recommend to their respective governments
that they should adopt, as the unit of the proposed international
coinage, the weight in gold nine tenths fine of the existing gold
piece of five francs.

To say that the recommendations of this conference were
without influence upon subsequent legislation among the nations
would be an error ; altho it is quite certain that in regard to
the principal end for which it was called together the confer-
ence proved a complete failure. Neither Austria nor Sweden ful-
filled the promise held out by those governments in 1 867 of adopt-
ing the proposed international unit ; and in the United States, tho
the effort to secure this result was pressed with great energy,
ability, and persistence, the impression produced was so greatly
disproportioned to the amount of zeal displayed as to overwhelm
the advocates of the measure with discouragement.

But the secondary recommendation of the conference, favor-
ing the single standard of gold and condemning the double

34-8

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

standard, did not prove equally fruitless. This was no doubt
one of the causes, perhaps not the least weighty, inducing the
government of the German Empire to abandon the silver stand-
ard which had prevailed in most of its constituent states pre-
viously to the union in 1870, and to adopt the gold standard in
its stead. This was one of the reasons, but not the only one.
Silver bullion was at the time at a premium in the double-
standard nations, where the legal relation of value between the
metals was as 1:15^; and gold was therefore in fact the
standard in France and throughout the Latin Union, no less
than in the gold-standard countries of Great Britain and Portu-
gal. The statesmen of Germany, accordingly, very naturally
desired to put themselves upon the common European basis.
Tho the mint of France was open to the free coinage of both
metals for all comers, yet silver had almost ceased to be offered
for coinage; so that between 1856 and 1867 not a single full
legal-tender coin of silver had been struck in that country. The
small coinage, from two-franc pieces downward, had only been
maintained in sufficient quantity for the ordinary petty traffic of
every-day life, by the issue of a debased currency of limited
amount and legal tender only in sums not exceeding fifty francs.
In adopting, therefore, for the imperial coinage a system of gold
monometallism, Germany was only conforming in her law to a
state of things which actually at the time existed all around her
in fact, and yielding to a tendency which seemed to be carrying
all the great commercial nations in the same direction.

But it was a necessary consequence of this action of hers that
she had no longer need of the large amount of silver in circula-
tion among her people, which was supposed to amount to not
less than $400,000,000 in value. This, after 1871, she commenced
calling in ; and a portion of the old coin thus obtained she re-
coined to serve as a subsidiary currency. The law regulating
the coinage restricts this description of coin to an amount not
exceeding ten marcs, or two and a half dollars, per head of the
population ; and thus there has been absorbed something over
$100,000,000 of the stock of demonetized silver. The re-
mainder, as called in, has been offered by parcels for sale in the
bullion markets of the world. A very large proportion remains
still in circulation up to the present time, and about $75,000,000

THE SILVER QUESTION.

349

are said to be now lying in the hands of the government. When
this action of the German Government took place, several cir-
cumstances conspired to render the occasion unpropitious for
so heavy a financial operation.

The populous empire of Russia (double standard) and that
of Austro-Hungary (silver standard), having suspended specie
payments, the first in 1857 and the second in 1868, were no
longer purchasers of either metal; and Italy, a double-standard
nation, which had suspended in 1866, was coining only the
limited amount which her relations to the Latin Union per-
mitted ; and coining that not so much for use at home, as for
circulation in the territory of those of her associates of the union
as were still paying specie.

It happened also, inopportunely, at the same time, that the
amount of the so-called “ council-bills” drawn in London on
India, from about £4,000,000 in 1867-8, had been annually and
rapidly increasing, till in 1872-3 the total had reached the enor-
mous sum of £14,000,000, or $70,000,000. Thus the outflow of
silver from Europe toward the great eastern dependency of the
British Empire, with its practically unlimited capacity for the
absorption of that metal, was for the time being checked or en-
tirely arrested, and a market for the silver of Germany had to
be found nearer home. Nor, if the theories of the advocates of
the double standard are to be relied on, should there have been
any difficulty in finding it. The demonetization of silver in
Germany did not affect in any way the amount of the money
metals of Europe; it involved only the necessity of a change of
place of a portion of them. It is the special merit of the double
standard, as the defenders of that system maintain, that it allows
such change of place to occur without disturbance of the rela-
tions between the two metals. The double standard is in fact,
according to them, the great equalizer which, like the governor
of the steam-engine, makes the driving power, which is money,
uniform in effect throughout all the vast machinery of the com-
mercial world. Just in proportion as the silver of Germany was
withdrawn from circulation it was necessary that the vacuum
thus created should be filled up with gold. This demand of
Germany for gold is spoken of by many as a fearful thing,
threatening to create a monetary famine throughout the world.

350

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

The alarm is continually sounded that the world has not gold
enough to provide for the money wants of all nations. But
that is not the question in issue here at all. The question is
only whether, so long as throughout the larger part of Europe
silver continued to be the material of legal-tender money, while
among more than half the populations of the Continent the
double standard prevailed, we ought not to have had a beautiful
example of the saving influence of this double-standard principle
in the emergency presented. According to the estimates made
by Mr. Ruggles in his supplementary report on the monetary
conference of 1867, the states of the Latin Union alone had
§1,250,000,000 of coined gold in their possession ; while the total
amount of silver in all its denominations in circulation through-
out Germany reached only about the sum of $400,000,000.
Certainly, if the principle of the double standard is worth
anything, there ought to have been no perceptible impression
produced upon the money market by allowing all the silver
which Germany could possibly gather, and which has hardly ex-
ceeded the half presumed to be in circulation, to be bought with
French gold and coined at the French mint. Even had there
been German silver enough to displace all the French gold, no-
body ought to have been concerned about the matter. On the
other hand, according to one of the most thorough of the cham-
pions of the double standard, such an occurrence, had it taken
place, ought rather to have been regarded with satisfaction if not
with triumphant gratification.

“ In the past history of the case,” observes Mr. Weston,
“ the actual use of only one of the metals, arising from their
market fluctuations, has been one of the rpost familiarly known
occasional results of the double standard, and has always been
insisted on by its supporters as one of its capital recommendations ;
because it insures the use of the more abundant and therefore
better money, and tends to lessen the dearness of the dearer
money by furnishing it to the markets of the world.” 1 (The
italics are ours.)

It seems to be a sad pity that the conference of the Latin
Union, held as early as January, 1874, immediately after Ger-

1 The Silver Question. By Geo. M. Weston. New York, 1878. (p. 87.)

THE SILVER QUESTION.

351

many began to move in this matter, failed so completely to
“ insist ” on this “ capital recommendation ” of the system which
it was the business of the union to maintain, that they re-
solved to limit the coinage of the “better money” for the year
then commencing, and for all the associated states, to less
than $25,000,000; against which they charged at the same time
$10,000,000 already delivered from the mint on certificates of De-
cember, 1873, so that the actual amount allowed was only about
$15,000,000, and only a portion of this was actually coined.
Similar limitations were imposed in each of the years successively
following, until, just after the adjournment of the abortive Inter-
national Monetary Conference of 1878, the mints were closed
against the coinage of legal-tender silver entirely. The Latin
Union, instead of giving a hospitable welcome to the rich flood
streaming over her boundaries from Germany, threw up dikes
to shut it out and keep it back.

Now it is worthy of note that when they thus resolved to
repel the fertilizing streams of German silver from their terri-
tory, it was not in the least necessary that they should buy this
silver with their own gold. They might have let Germany find
her gold where she could. All that France had to do was to
keep her mint open, and to allow the holders of the silver, who-
ever they might be, to bring it there for coinage into pieces of
five francs. New blood would thus have been infused into all
the veins of French industry; and if there is any truth .in the
theory that the more a people have of money the better they
are off, France, instead of finding herself in 1881 in a monetary
strait-jacket, and having half her legal-tender coin depreciated
to a point at which it is totally unavailable for use except in petty
transactions of retail traffic, might have been to-day the happiest
nation on the face of the earth.

The double standard was therefore killed in the house of its
friends, in what ought to have been, if there is any true philosophy
at the bottom of its theory, the very hour of its most signal tri-
umph. Had not France and, following her example, the Scan-
dinavian states and the Netherlands practically demonetized
silver themselves, it is not conceivable that the act of Germany
could have disturbed in any manner the monetary equilibrium
in Europe. The amount of money would not have been in the

35*

THE PRINCETON RE PIE IP.

slightest degree affected by that act. There would have been an
exchange between neighboring countries of the coin in circula-
tion within their respective borders ; nothing more.

Why then did France pursue a course so apparently, on her
own theory, suicidal ? Beyond any question she did it because
she believes that, for a great commercial nation, gold is a more
desirable material for coinage than silver. In this respect her
opinion is shared by the great majority of the most intelligent
people of other nationalities. There can be no doubt that this
is the intelligent view of the subject taken in the United States.

During all the time that this movement was going on upon
the other continent, it happened providentially that the people
of the United States had no interest whatever in the turn the
affair should take. For more than ten years not a single coin
of any description, gold or silver or copper, had been in circula-
tion throughout our entire territory. During all the eighty
years up to 1873 which had passed since the establishment of
the mint, we had coined but eight millions of silver dollars, or
about $100,000 a year; and for nearly forty of these years we
coined no such dollars at all. Such silver dollars as had been
coined had disappeared from circulation, their value as bullion
having been greater than that for which they were receivable as
coin, and consequently, in the statute adopted in 1873 reorgan-
izing the mint, provision for the further coinage of the silver
dollar was very judiciously omitted ; and the revised statutes
with equal propriety provided, in the year following, that this
piece should be coined no more. This was simply recognizing
in law a state of things which had existed in fact for about half
a century. If ever since the world began there was offered to
a nation a more fitting opportunity for illustrating the wisdom
of the maxim to let well enough alone, the opportunity was in
that crisis ours. The occasion was nevertheless seized by poli-
ticians for throwing the country into an excitement almost
without a parallel, by charging the disastrous fall in the price of
silver in the London market as a consequence of the coinage
act of 1873; and charging further that the provision of that act
in regard to the silver dollar had been procured by secret and
artful practices of the moneyed men in Wall Street and Lom-
bard Street for their own selfish purposes. It was even asserted.

THE SILVER QUESTION.

353

and it has been constantly maintained down to this day, that
the Congress which passed the act and the President who signed
it did not know what it contained — a signal example, if true, of
the carelessness with which legislation often goes on in Wash-
ington ; but in this case the more wonderful from the fact that
the bill was under discussion in two successive congresses, was
printed in both newspaper and pamphlet form and widely circu-
lated, and that its provisions were familiar in all their details,
for months before its final passage, to most of the more intelli-
gent among the people who interest themselves in such things.
For an entire quarter of a century before this enactment the
coinage of silver dollars at our mint had not amounted to six
millions of dollars in all. This fact alone suffices to show the
absurdity of the assertion that the stoppage of such coinage,
under the operation of the act in question, could have in any
manner influenced the price of that metal. Moreover, this legis-
lation, so far from having been brought about by dishonest in-
fluences exercised by interested men, was due to the advice of
the finance officers of the government itself ; for the very suffi-
cient reason that, as prices then stood, silver bullion uncoined
was worth about three per cent more than the same metal
coined into dollars ; so that all the dollars issued from the mint
were immediately exported, or melted up and converted into
bullion again.

It has been said already that the act of 1873 demonetizing
silver was an act which simply recognized in law a state of things
which had already existed in fact in our country for about forty
years. In this respect our experience and our history were but
a repetition of those of Great Britain in 1816 and earlier; for in
the year named England had been practically a gold-standard
country for the whole preceding century. The entire monetary
history of that country indeed, from the period of the first intro-
duction of gold into the coinage under Henry III., has been one
long-continued illustration and demonstration of the utter pow-
erlessness of law to maintain in permanent circulation side by
side both the precious metals as money at the same time. The
very first experiment of this kind resulted in a failure so com-
plete and absolute that it was not repeated for nearly a century.
Gold coins seem indeed to have been struck in Britain as early

354

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

as the time of the Romans, and also later under the Saxon and
Danish kings ; but these with all other traces of that primitive
rule disappeared on the advent of the Conqueror. In the letter
on the coinage of Great Britain addressed by Lord Liverpool in
1805 to his Majesty King George III. there is presented a very
lucid and interesting- history of the vicissitudes to which the
monetary system of the kingdom has been subjected, and of the
chaotic condition into which it has been repeatedly thrown, by
governmental tampering with the currency.1 For almost three
hundred years after the Conquest the only coinage in circulation
in England was of silver; and the only form of silver coin struck
was the penny, of the weight of 22^ grains, making it a little
heavier than the present half-dime piece. This penny was deep-
ly marked by a cross dividing it into four equal parts ; and for
smaller payments it was customary to break it through these
divisions into halfpennies, and quarters or fourths — whence the
modern farthing. The first gold coin struck after the Conquest
was issued by Henry III. in 1257, and was also called a penny.
It had twice the weight and twenty times the nominal value of
the silver penny, from which it appears that gold was then rated
to silver as ten to one. Gold seems at this time to have been
very cheap in England, and the people by common consent re-
fused to receive the gold penny. Lord Liverpool says that the
citizens of London made representations against this coin, and
the king found himself obliged by proclamation to deprive it of
its legal-tender character. It was of course soon driven out of
use. A like fate, and for the same reason, befell the coin of the
same metal issued about a century later by Edward III., in 1345,
called a fiorence or florm. This coin, like the former, proved un-
acceptable to the people ; and, after having been at first made by
proclamation optionally receivable, was within a few months
after its issue withdrawn from circulation.

This monarch, however, succeeded at length in the establish-
ing gold as a part of the coinage ; but such was the instability
of the ratio between the nominal values of the two metals that
the legal ratio during his own and subsequent reigns was subject

1 A Treatise on the Coins of the Realm, in a Letter to the King. By Charles,
Earl of Liverpool. Oxford 1805.

THE SILVER QUESTION.

355

to continual changes. He himself first fixed this ratio at
i : I2-| nearly; but this he afterwards altered to and

in the course of the ten years following he made two additional
changes. Neither of these was great, but experience has shown
that only a very slight discrepancy between the legal and commer-
cial ratio is necessary to produce an active traffic in the coins and
a rapid disappearance of one metal or the other. As illustrations
of this some examples reported by Sir Isaac Newton in 1717 are
instructive. He states that in the reign of William III. louis
d’ors of France were current in England at 17s. 6d., when they
were actually worth but 17s. fd.; and that when by a royal
proclamation it was ordered that these coins should be received
for only 17s., they immediately disappeared. The profit made
by their importation was over two per cent, which was of course
a considerable temptation ; but that on their exportation was
only f of one per cent ; yet they disappeared. At another
time moidores of Portugal passed in England for 28 shillings,
being worth only 27s. 7d. Being reduced by proclamation to
27s. 6d., they also disappeared. The profit this time on importa-
tion was one and a half per cent ; on exportation only one third
of one per cent. So that a change apparently insignificant in
the legal ratio between the metals often serves to drive one or
the other out of circulation altogether.

The struggle to maintain both metals in the coinage was
continued from the time of Henry III. down to the accession of
George I. early in the eighteenth century — that is to say, for
more than five hundred years ; but at this last-named epoch it
was definitely abandoned, and silver has since ceased to be used
in England except for petty retail traffic.

During the reigns of James I. and Charles I. this struggle
was very energetic. It ceased temporarily to occupy attention
under stress of more urgent affairs, during the great rebellion and
the Commonwealth. But after the Restoration, and down to
the accession of William of Orange, it went on actively, one
metal or the other disappearing from circulation after every
fresh effort to prevent this annoying result. The two monarchs
named above, in addition to employing the natural means of
accomplishing their object, which consists of course in endeav-
oring to conform the legal ratio of values accurately to the com-

356

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

mercial ratio, invoked the terrors of the penal law and exercised
all the powers of the High Court of Star Chamber to deter men
from the grave misdemeanor of melting down the coin or carry-
ing it out of the kingdom.

After the Restoration, the rise of the value of gold continu-
ing, Charles II., in coining a new 20 shilling piece under the
name of the guinea , reduced its weight below that of the piece
of similar nominal value issued by James I., and which he had
called a laurel ; but the reduction was not sufficient to put it
into proper adjustment with the silver coins in circulation, and
hence the kingdom was again menaced with a loss of its gold as
complete as had occurred in the beginning of the reign of the
last-named monarch. But here, by a common consent among
the people, an expedient was adopted by which this misfortune
was prevented, or at least mitigated. This was to receive and
pay the guinea not at its mint value, but at its value relatively
to silver (which was always the practical standard) in the
bullion market. The guinea therefore passed for 21 or
22 shillings, and it is stated by Locke that “ the gold coins
varied in their values according to the current rates.” This
practice seems not to have pleased the government, for Lord
Liverpool says there is an order on the council-books for enforc-
ing the currency of the guinea at 20 shillings; but he adds
that it was never issued, and that if it had been, it would have
driven all the guineas out of the country.

During the successive reigns of Charles II. and his brother
the silver coin of England became greatly depreciated by clip-
ping and abrasion ; and at the accession of William of Orange
it was found, by a careful examination of the exchequer, that
they had lost on an average nearly half their weight. A report
of Mr. Lowndes, secretary of the treasury in 1695, states that
this condition of the coin (silver being the general standard of
value) occasioned “ great contentions among the king’s subjects
in fairs, markets, and shops, to the disturbance of the public
peace;” that it embarrassed bargains and greatly diminished
trade ; “ that persons before they concluded any bargain were
necessitated first to settle the price or value of the very money
they were to receive for their goods, and that they set a price
upon their goods accordingly;” also “that these practices had

THE SILVER QUESTION.

35 7

been one great cause of the raising of the price not only of all
merchandises, but of every article necessary to the sustenance
of the common people, to their great grievance.” He further
states that the guinea, in consequence of the deplorable con-
dition of the silver coin, had risen so as to be current for 30
shillings, which was “ much higher than the state of the bullion
market would justify and that consequently “ silver bullion,
instead of being brought to the mint, was exported to be sold
abroad for gold, in which foreigners made their payments, to the
great detriment of the merchants and manufacturers of England.”
In this embarrassing state of things the government sought the
advice of eminent men of science, among them Sir Isaac New-
ton, who was made warden of the mint, and under whose super-
vision the silver coinage was thoroughly reformed. Before this
was accomplished the guinea was, by successive orders, reduced
in current value first to 26 shillings, above which it was not
lawful to pay or to receive it, and afterwards to 22 shillings, -at
which nominal value it remained till 1717, when it was reduced
to 21, at which point it remaine*d permanently fixed.

After the completion of the recoinage, it was supposed, or at
least hoped, that the price of silver bullion in the market would
fall to the mint price ; but the guinea continuing to be over-
rated in popular esteem, it did not do so, and consequently silver
coin began to be exported for the purchase of gold bullion
abroad, as silver bullion had been before the recoinage. Hence,
in 1717, Sir Isaac Newton said that “if silver money should be-
come a little scarcer, people would in a little time refuse to
make payments in silver without a premium.” He showed that
the real value of the guinea in silver was only 20s. 8d., while it
was passing current at 21s. 6d., and he recommended that its
legal-tender currency should be reduced to 21 shillings, which
was done, the other gold coins being reduced in propor-
tion. But as this reduction was not sufficient, silver continued
to be exported, and silver soon ceased to be the practical stand-
ard of value in England. From that time, consequently, except
for petty traffic, it has ceased to be in circulation in England
altogether; or, in the words of Lord Liverpool, “from this
period all considerable payments have been made in the gold
coin ; and the silver coins have generally served in making small

353

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

payments, *or in exchange for the fractional parts of gold
coins. Previous to this proclamation (fixing the guinea at 21
shillings) the people were disposed to make their payments in
the gold coins in preference to those of silver. This last meas-
ure tended to confirm what was before the disposition of the
people, and gave to the gold coins a complete ascendency in
the currency of the kingdom ; and the silver coins have since
become a mere representation of the gold coins, for the pur-
poses before stated. The greatest part of the good and weighty
silver coins which then remained have since been melted down
and exported.” He adds that from 1717 to the end of the
eighteenth century, a period of eighty-three years, not so much
as ^600,000, equal to $3,000,000, in silver had been coined in
England ; and that in the last forty years of the century less
than .£64,000, equal to $320,000, had been coined ; that is, only
;£i6oo, equal to $8000 per annum. The legal ratio of value be-
tween the metals fixed by this last royal determination was
I:15r3865490' > and the entire risq in the value of gold from the
time of Henry III. was 4 7-2JT20 Per cent- Of this 32|~f occurred
within sixty years after the accession of James I.

It was therefore not, as is commonly said, by the act of
Parliament of 56th George III., but by the proclamation of 3d
George I. above mentioned, that the demonetization of silver in
England was for all practical purposes accomplished ; but this
effect, which followed that proclamation by the simple operation
of natural laws, was confirmed by statute law fifty-seven years
later, when, by act of Parliament of 1774, it was declared “ that
no tender in payment of money made in the silver coin of this
realm of any sum exceeding the sum of ,£25 at any one time
shall be reputed in law or allowed to be legal tender within
Great Britain and Ireland.”

But tho this statute demonetized silver as early as the year
1774 by destroying its legal-tender character except for a limit-
ed amount, it did not reduce that coinage to a purely subsidiary
position. That was the special effect which the act of 56th
George III., in 1816, did accomplish by reducing the weight of
the shilling from to .-bit °f a pound of standard silver,
and limiting the legal tender to sums not exceeding 40

THE SILVER QUESTION.

359

shillings. Great Britain has therefore been a gold-standard na-
tion for nearly two centuries, instead of less than one as is com-
monly stated. She became so in consequence of an ineffectual
struggle of several centuries to maintain the double standard ;
during the greater part of which time silver was her actual
standard and her preference.

Our own briefer history is entirely similar. Having estab-
lished our coinage in 1792 upon the ratio, supposed at the time
to be the commercial ratio, of 1:15, our gold coins disappeared
as fast as they were issued from the mint, and in fact the coin-
age of gold was very small. On the other hand, the facilities of
the mint were not sufficient to supply the demand for coins of
the cheaper metal, and we were flooded with Spanish silver for
nearly forty years. We too, in 1834 made a readjustment of
the relation between the metals, as England had done before us
so often ; but our experience was precisely that of King James:
we made the change too great, and our silver disappeared as
rapidly as our gold had done before. We submitted to this,
and in 1853 provided against the loss of all our small money by
reducing the fractional silver to the condition of a subsidiary
overrated token currency of limited legal-tender character, pre-
cisely as England had done in her law of 1816. And the act of
1873 discontinuing the coinage of the silver dollar was, like the
last-mentioned act of the British Parliament, simply a recogni-
tion of the existing condition of things.

Such being the case, the fact that we should have allowed
ourselves, in a season of universal tranquillity and contentment,
to be suddenly embroiled in an affair in which the consequences
of our meddling could only be certain harm to ourselves and
probable harm to others, admits of no explanation except on
the supposition of one of those accesses of popular delusion and
folly of which so many have marked the history of mankind.
The harm to ourselves was certain ; since, had the plan origin-
ally proposed of throwing our mint freely open to all comers
been carried out, the refuse silver of Germany, and not only that
but the silver coin of the Katin Union, Holland, Denmark,
Sweden, and Norway, would have poured in upon us all together,
and gold would have disappeared from our land at once and

360

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

forever. That disaster was momentarily averted, but its com-
ing was only postponed; for the operation of the law actually
enacted is bringing it nearer to us every day.

The harm to others also was more than probable, since the
advocates of the double standard in Europe saw very clearly
that to open the American mint to silver was likely to drive
European governments generally into adopting in law, as they
have already done in fact, the single gold standard. The ablest
and most sagacious of all these economists, Mr. Henri Cernuschi,
has been unceasing in his protests against this supreme of fol-
lies on our part ; and he took the trouble to come all the way to
this country in 1876 to make his protest before the Congres-
sional silver committee of that year. Of that committee Mr.
Richard P. Bland of Missouri was a member, and the response
to the protest was the introduction into the House of Repre-
sentatives of the notorious Bland Bill.

But even supposing there had been wisdom in a movement
in this matter on our part, the form in which our movement was
made was unwise to the last degree. It was insisted that we
should coin once more the dollar of 41 2\ grains, sentiment-
ally called the “ dollar of the fathers of the republic.” But to
do this requires the preservation of the ratio to gold of I : 16,
while the leading European states are agreed on a ratio of
1:15^. The inevitable consequence must be that, in case the
free coinage of silver is recommenced in foreign mints — the
thing which our bimetallist friends profess to hope for and de-
sire— our entire legal-tender silver will be exported and melted
up for recoinage abroad. This is not a result which depends in
any manner upon the price of silver. Whether silver is dear or
cheap, it will pay a profit of 3^ per cent to melt up dollars and
coin them into pieces of five francs. We have coined between
eighty and ninety million silver dollars since the passage of the
Allison Bill of February, 1878, and our only security for the per-
manent existence of a single one of these coins lies in the pos-
sibility that the Latin Union may refuse to coin silver any
more. For the hope that they will adopt our ratio of 1 : 16 has
not a shadow of foundation. They expect to drive us to the
adoption of theirs ; which we cannot do without equally con-
demning our $80,000,000 already coined to the melting-pot.

THE SILVER QUESTION.

361

Thus the inconsiderate rashness with which the forty-fifth Con-
gress rushed into the coinage of the dollar of grains has
no parallel except in the blindness and folly which led to the
coinage of the silver dollar at all.

Several special arguments are urged in defence of the re-
monetization of silver in our country, to which in conclusion it
is proper to give a moment’s attention. It is said, first, that
silver constitutes half the money of the world, and that to de-
prive it of its character as such would be an infinite wrong to
mankind. Very well, then let it continue to be money. The
question at present is not what is good for the world, but what
is good for us here in the United States.

If silver is needed for the world’s money, as it probably is, it
will continue to be used where it is needed. Suppose that all
nations should prefer gold, but that all cannot get gold ; those
who cannot will use such money as they can get. But all do
not prefer gold by any means ; and more than half the popula-
tion of the globe do most decidedly prefer silver, and are likely
to do so for centuries, if not for all time. Hindostan, Burmah,
Siam, the Philippines, and the Chinese Empire not only employ
silver for money, but they consume quantities of it for personal
ornament and for other purposes of luxury. If the present low
price of silver has been really caused, as is claimed, by the adop-
tion of the gold standard in Germany and the cessation of
silver coinage in the mints of the civilized world, it cannot be
permanent; and it will be followed by a rise when the free flow
to the East is re-established and the temporary glut of the
London market is worked off. In the words of Mr. Bagehot,1
“ there is therefore, in the end, a certain market for the silver
displaced from Europe ; it will ultimately go,' as the rest has
gone, to the East, where it is the ancient and the best attain-
able paying medium.” The price therefore must ultimately
rise to the point determined Ijy the cost of production. But if
it has heretofore been ' sustained artificially above that cost, it
will hardly return to the same level again, nor can the reopen-
ing to its coinage of all the mints in the world force it to do so.

But then it is claimed that the production of silver is a great

1 The Depreciation of Silver. By Walter Bagehot. London, 1877. (p. 3.)

362

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

industry, and an industry peculiarly our own ; also that our
silver mines are a source of incalculable wealth : consequently,
that to refuse to coin silver— that is, to buy it — is to discourage
that industry and to check the development of our abundant
natural resources. To this it may be replied, that any industry
which cannot live unless it is supported by the state, had better,
to the full extent to which that is true, be abandoned. Mines
that will pay at the present prices of silver will continue to be
worked ; mines which will not, may be given up ; but it does
not follow that the productive energy which would otherwise
have been spent on them will be lost to the country. It will
only be turned to something more profitable. As a general
principle of public economy it maybe said that a state can com-
mit no greater folly than to pay men for carrying on an indus-
try which is so little needed that it will not pay for itself. There
is nothing in the nature of gold or silver to make its production
more worthy of encouragement than that of hemp or hay, or
rice or cotton. On the other hand, the powerful fascination
exercised by the precious metals over the imaginations of men,
has made the search for them one of the most demoralizing
pursuits in which any people have ever been engaged. It has
everywhere engendered a spirit of reckless adventure and blind
trust in chance which has made the whole business little better
than a gigantic system of gambling. And if in this grand
game it occasionally happens that a great stake is won, it is too
true on the other hand that more frequently the players lose all
they possess. The amount of capital which has been hopelessly
sunk and wasted in our country in ill-judged mining schemes
within the last thirty years, according to recent statements pub-
lished in leading mining journals of this city, reaches a total
truly appalling. We are hence compelled to make a heavy de-
duction from the supposed contributions of these enterprises to
the wealth of the country. For these reasons every statesman
and every true economist will regard as of something more than
doubtful expediency the policy of encouraging by positive legis-
lative action the production of the precious metals as a national
industry.

But it is further urged in favor of the rehabilitation of silver,
that without a legally established ratio of value between this

THE SILVER QUESTION.

363

metal and gold we have no basis for a par of exchange in inter-
national commerce with silver-standard nations. There would
be something at least plausible in this if exchanges were usually
made at par ; but as that is not the case, the par of exchange is
useful only as a point of reference, by means of which to state
simply the actual rate. It is not in the least necessary to its
usefulness that it should be a true par — it may for that matter
be entirely arbitrary and false : all that is needed is that it should
be fixed. We had a false par between ourselves and England
for all the first half of the present century, but it answered its
purpose. The par is like the zero of the thermometer — it may
be fixed at freezing, as in the centigrade, or at the temperature
of melting snow and salt, as in Fahrenheit ; but the actual indi-
cations are equally accurate in either case. In the absence of
law, common consent will soon fix on a mean point about which
the fluctuations of the bullion market oscillate ; and this will
afford probably a better par than any that law could establish.

After what has been said, it is hardly necessary to state our
own conviction, that any attempt to constrain a people, by
royal decree, by legislative enactment, or by international treaty,
to accept a system, political, social, or monetary, to which they
are not borne by the natural course of events, and which does
not approve itself to their general sense of fitness or need, must
be a necessary failure. It is certain that the United States have
become a single-standard nation by the force of circumstances ;
it is certain that a very decided majority of our people do not
want the double standard, and do not approve its principle. It
is next to certain that any arrangement entered into at Paris for
the adoption of such a system, in establishing which the great-
est of all the commercial nations shall decline to be a party,
must prove a failure ; and it is more than doubtful whether the
concurrence of that nation, which is altogether improbable, could
make it a success. Yet we are told that our delegates have de-
parted on their mission “with light hearts,” and in the full ex-
pectation of triumphantly solving the most knotty problem of
the century.

The problem is incapable of solution by any means which
the conference is likely to contemplate. For, first, the delegates
apoear to be practically under instructions to frame if possible

364

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IP.

a convention fixing a definite ratio of values between gold and
silver, which ratio the assenting nations are to accept and to
employ in their coinage. The actual ratio in the market is at
present i : 1 8 nearly. In defiance of this the European bimet-
allists propose to force the adoption of the French ratio i : ish
Our delegates are expected to yield in this matter, tho our
eighty millions of dollars have been coined at the ratio of i : 16.
This decision, if it be what is expected, will either control the
market or it will not. If it does, the holders of silver certifi-
cates in the United States will immediately draw their coin,
melt it into bullion, and carry it to the mint to be coined over.
If the whole is so recoined, the owners will reap an apparent
benefit of two million six hundred thousand dollars; compen-
sated, however, by a probable corresponding fall in the purchas-
ing power of money. In so far as the government is an owner,
it will participate in this advantage, whatever it may be worth.
But if the decision does not control the market the owners of
gold coin will buy silver bullion for coinage, making a profit of
a little over i6i per cent so long as the present commercial rate
continues. Under these circumstances of course gold will soon
cease to form a part of our metallic currency.

. But it will be said gold cannot be exported with profit be-
cause it will bring no more in a foreign market than in ours.
This is hardly true. Unless the oriental peoples come into the
agreement gold will soon begin to make its way in India, where
it is doing so already under the peculiar financial relations of
that country to England ; and before many years are past the
East will prove a more productive silver mine than the Comstock
lode has ever been in its palmiest days. If all the oriental na-
tions could be brought into the agreement a very sensible effect
upon the market rate might very possibly be produced, for the
coinage demand for silver would so far exceed any other possi-
ble demand for that metal as to raise its price ; but even this
could not overrule and control that more efficient cause which
determines finally the price of all commodities, the cost of pro-
duction. Stamped silver would by force of law be exchangeable
for stamped gold, as stamped paper is now ; but unstamped
silver, like unstamped paper, would have to take its chances in
the market. It would, moreover, soon be found that gold coin

THE SILVER QUESTION.

365

would possess a greater purchasing power than silver — just as
before resumption it had the same advantage over paper; and
throughout the world there would be two kinds of money in
circulation, legally equal in value, but practically unequal, to the
great confusion of business and the great embarrassment of
trade.

Moreover, in case England should not be a party to the ar-
rangement, and even probably if she should be, gold would con-
tinue to be, as it is now, the real standard of the world ; and all
the great transactions of commerce would be made with refer-
ence to that standard. Furthermore, in the settlement of inter-
national balances gold would always be the metal preferred and
employed, on account of its superior portability ; so that it
would steadily accumulate with creditor nations, and be with-
drawn from debtor nations.

As the work which the conference have apparently been
called together to do is to report in favor of universal bimetal-
lism on the basis of the ratio 1 : 1 5-^, there seems to be every
probability that they will do this work and adjourn. But there
is something much better which they might do, and in doing
which they might much more effectually serve the interests of
mankind. Let them recommend to the world to abandon the
artificial distinctions of pounds sterling, dollars, francs, and marc-s,
and to restore the precious metals to the footing on which they
stood when they began first to be used as money ; viz., that
of simple units of weight. Let our coins of either metal be
stamped simply with the number of units of weight which they
severally contain, and with the degree of their fineness; and let
them find their relative values, as other commodities do, by free
competition in the open market. Under these circumstances
one metal or the other will be the practical standard of value, and
prices will be quoted in reference to that. The other may be
equally legal tender, but legal tender only at a relative value de-
termined by the condition of the bullion market.. This relation
might even be made permanent for brief periods — say for a
month or a year at a time — by circular notice issued by the Sec-
retary of the Treasury with the advice of a syndicate of mer-
chants, or of the chambers of commerce of the principal cities ;
but the relation would probably remain so nearly constant that

366

THE PRINCE TO X RE VIE W.

these announcements would rarely, and only at long intervals, be
anything more than confirmations of the rates previously estab-
lished.

Under such a system the standard metal would continue in
the United States and England to be gold as at present. The
probability is that the same standard would prevail throughout
the Latin Union, Spain, Holland, Germany, and the Scandina-
vian states. But in all these silver would be equally a legal
tender for the payment of debts; only that at present it would
only be so at one eighteenth of the value of gold, and not at the
present legal ratio of France or of our own country. If by this
use of silver, which fully reinstates it in its function as a money
metal, its price should rise, all the better. Then its legal-ten-
der efficacy will rise also ; and in case of a new and unexampled
increase hereafter in the supply of the more precious metal, and
an extraordinary diminution of that of the less precious, nothing
could prevent the advance of its purchasing power to any ex-
tent. In Austria, Russia, Turkey, and all the East the standard
metal would probably be silver, and gold would be rated as
money relatively to that, varying occasionally in its legal-tender
power, as we have supposed silver to do among the more west-
ern nations. But everywhere, east or west, both metals would
be equally current as money.

A state of things like that here proposed did actually exist
in Great Britain from the time of the Commonwealth down to
the revolution. Silver was the standard of value ; but the gold
coins, tho issued at a fixed legal valuation in reference to silver,
were nevertheless received and paid, as stated by Mr. Locke,
“ according to the current rate.” No inconvenience was expe-
rienced from this practice. On the other hand, it was attended
with the great advantage that it prevented the gold from being
melted up and exported.

It is worth considering, moreover, that by adopting a series
of simple units of weight as coins we shall not be compelled to
depart to any inconvenient degree from our ordinary habits of
thought in matters of money. Take, for example, as the basic
unit one gram of gold nine tenths fine. The value of this in
the money of the United States is six dimes less two mills ; in
that of Great Britain, one’ half-crown less one halfpenny; in

THE SILVER QUESTION.

367

that of France, three francs ten centimes exactly; and in that
of Germany, two and a half marcs plus one pfennig. A coin of
ten grams, which would be a little heavier than our half-eagle,
would be worth six dollars, or thirty-one francs, or twenty-five
marcs, or twenty-five shillings less five pence, with scarcely a
sensible error in either case. Such coins could easily be made
use of as a part of the existing monetary systems of the leading
commercial nations, and might in no very long time supersede
them all.

One important advantage which would result from the use of
coins like those here suggested would be that they would be instru-
mental in fixing in the minds of the people the idea of intrin-
sic value as an essential quality of money, and in eradicating the
pernicious notion which seems to have become so popular, and
which a no less distinguished man than Mr. Cernuschi has dis-
tinctly avowed, that “money is an artificial value created by
law.” It is to the prevalence of this mischievous delusion that
most of the great flood of financial fallacies which have deluged
the nations of the earth in modern times, leaving behind them
only disaster and ruin, have been mainly owing.

The scheme here suggested is not unsupported by authorities
entitled to respect. It was advocated as the basis of an inter-
national coinage by Michel Chevalier, the well-known and
highly distinguished senator and public economist of France,
more than ten years ago. It was proposed in substance for a
similar purpose to the Seventh Statistical Congress, held at the
Hague in 1869, by the eminent statistician Dr. Farr, delegate
from Great Britain. It has been recommended in formal reso-
lutions adopted by the American Metrological Society and by
the American Social Science Association, and it has had the ap-
proval of many men of sound judgment and large experience in
financial matters.

Its adoption by the nations would settle at once and forever
the vexed silver question. And if it is true, as has been main-
tained, that the relation of value between the precious metals,
when not disturbed by legislation prejudicial to either, is one of
the most stable known to human affairs, this relation, in the free
play of exchanges, will soon fix itself with an exactness which
no arbitrary rule of statute law can possibly attain ; and will re-

368

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IP.

main at the point so determined, with oscillations practically
insensible. If it could be counted on as among the reasonable
possibilities that a proposition so judicious as this could be the
outcome of the present council of the nations, the Third Inter-
national Monetary Conference might have the honor of tri-
umphantly accomplishing the object for which the first was
called ; viz., that of giving to the world a system of universal
money, destined, by its simplicity and convenience, soon to
supersede and obliterate the whole perplexing multitude of
locaL and discordant systems now in existence ; and in doing so
might leave upon the page of history a record far more enviable
than that which now probably awaits it, of having added one
more to the innumerable fruitless struggles of the past for the
attainment of the unattainable.

F. A. P. Barnard.

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT.

I AM not singular in holding that the whole subject of causa-
tion has become confused in the minds of educated men,
including scientific men ; and that the time has come for
reconsidering it in the light which science now furnishes. In
.our day two or three doctrines have been elaborated which re-
quire us to revise (so I think) the statements made as to cause,
more especially in its relation to force and energy. It is to be
understood that throughout this paper I refer to causation ob-
jective, and not subjective ; that is, to causation as it acts inde-
pendent of our mind observing it (an ignited lucifer-match will
kindle a rick of hay whether we notice it or not), and not to the
special metaphysical question of ages, as to the origin and nature of
our belief in the relation of cause and effect. It is further to be
borne in mind that in the body of the article I speak exclusively
of physical causation ; that is, of the forces or activities of bodies ;
only towards the close showing that there may be mental or
spiritual powers operating in our world quite as certainly as
there are physical forces. It has been established that,

First, there is a duality or plurality in causation; that there
are two or more bodies in all causal action of a physical nature.
There were thinkers who had a glimpse of this doctrine fro'm an
old date. Aristotle spoke of evvaiTiov, which Hamilton in
noticing it translates concause.* But the truth was first clearly
enunciated by Mr. J. S. Mill in his “ Logic” (B. IV. c. v.) “ The

statement of the cause is incomplete unless in some shape or
other we introduce all the conditions. A man takes mercury,
goes out of doors and catches cold. We say perhaps that the
cause of his taking cold was exposure to the air. It is clear,

* Sextus Pyrrh. iii. 15, speaks of GvvEKTiua, dvvairia, and dvvspycc a'iria.

37°

THE PRINCETON RE FIE IV.

however, that his having taken mercury may have been a neces-
sary condition of his catching cold ; and tho it might consist
with usage to say that the cause of his attack was exposure to
the air, to be accurate we ought to say that the cause was ex-
posure to the air while under the effect of mercury.”

The doctrine had occurred to me before I read Mr. Mill’s
“ Logic but as he published it first, I do not claim any credit in
it. As approaching it, however, from a somewhat different direc-
tion, I believe I can make it more explicit and comprehensive.
In all physical action there are two or more bodies, molecular
or molar ; at the present stage of science I ought to add that
this body may be the ether in which the undulations of light
take place. Now the cause— by which I mean that which invari-
ably has produced the effect, and will invariably produce it —
consists in the mutual action of two or more bodies; that is, their
action on each other. Thus in the case adduced by Mr. Mill
the true cause of the effect, the cold, was not the air alone or
the body alone, but the air and the body under mercury. With-
out the concurrence, or rather the joint action, of the two, the
effect would not have been produced. It is the same in all
other cases. A ball at rest is struck by a ball in motion ; the one
ball is made to move, the other has its motion stayed. The
cause consists of the two balls in a certain state, and the effect
the balls in another state. A picture-frame falls from a wall
and breaks a jar standing on a table below. We say that the
frame, or rather the fall of the frame, was the cause of the frac-
ture of the jar. But the true cause, that which forever will pro-
duce the same effect, is the frame falling with a certain momen-
tum and the brittleness of the jar. Had the frame come down
with less violence or the jar been stronger, there might have
been no breakage. In most cases of action a considerable num-
ber, in some a vast number, and variety of agents combine to
produce the result. Take the sprouting of a flower in spring:
in the cause there are the increased heat and light of the sun,
the state of the plant in the earth, and the state of the soil.
Without the concurrence of all these the effect would not be
produced.

Secondly , there is a duality or plurality in the effect. This is a
further truth which Mr. Mill has not expounded, but which oc-

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT. 37 1

curred to me as I was thinking out the doctrine which Mr. Mill
preceded me in unfolding. It follows from Mr. Mill’s doctrine
when it is properly understood, and seems to me to be quite as
certain and fully more important and of wider range in its applica-
tions. Thus in Mr. Mill’s illustration the cause was the state of
the atmosphere, and the body as affected by mercury; the effect
was the same atmosphere insensibly changed in temperature,
and the body under a cold. In the second case the true cause
consisted of the two balls, one in motion striking the other at
rest ; the effect (which would be forever produced by the same
cause) the ball which was at rest moving and the ball which was
in motion at rest. In the third case the cause was the picture-
frame with a certain momentum striking ajar of a certain struc-
ture; the effect was the frame losing part of its momentum and
the jar broken. In the case of the plant germinating there must
have been in the effect changes — it may be incapable of meas-
urement— in all the agents acting as the causes in the sun’s heat
and light absorbed in the earth and in the plant sprouting.

Taking these views with us, it may be of great use to have
appropriate and definite phrases to express them. The word
Cause, that which invariably produces the effect, should be re-
sefved for the combination of agencies producing the result.
The cause of the man’s taking cold is not merely the cold atmos-
phere or his frame being affected by mercury, but in the two
acting on each other. The word Effect should in like manner be
applied to the combined result, and comprises the change in the
air as well as the colded affection of the body. In the other
illustrative cases it implies the movement of the one ball and
the staying of the other ; the loss of momentum in the' picture-
frame as well as the breaking of the jar; and the change in the
rays of heat and light coming from the sun as well as the -germi-
nating of the plant.

As causes are dual or plural, it is proper to have phrases to
express the parts. The law is often stated that the same cause
always produces the same effect in the same circumstances. But
in order to clearness and accuracy it is essential to specify what
are the circumstances; it is in fact necessary to put them into the
cause, as without them the effect would not follow. In order to the
germinating of the flower there is not only the state of the plant

372

THE PRINCETON RE PIE IK

and soil, but the additional heat of the sun. All the acting
parts may be called agents or agencies, without specifying what
they are. They are bodies in a certain state acting on other
bodies.

Very often one of these agents is more important in itself, or
in our estimation, or for our present purpose, than the others ; this
is designated pre-eminently the cause, and little or no evil may
arise from this provided always that it be understood that this
agent needs one or more co-operating agents which are parts of
the full cause. If it be said that the cold air was the cause of the
man being colded, it was because his body was disposed towards
such an issue by mercury. It is not easy, or perhaps even possible,
to lay down a rule as to which of the agents should be called the
special, the main, or the prominent cause, for the cause consists
in the mutual action of the whole. When man is working he
often calls in one agent to. produce an intended effect. If he
wishes to kindle a heap of straw, the agent he attends to is the
fire he applies ; if he wishes a good crop from his ground, he
looks to the manure ; if he wishes to be cured of a disease, he
selects his medicine : tho in all such cases there is need of co-
operation in the state of the straw, or of the ground, or of his
bodily frame. In nature there is often one agent that is par-
ticularly potent. When a tree is struck by lightning it is the
electricity that is specially noticed, tho the structure of the tree
had also to do with the effect produced.

Fixing on the agent that is most prominent in itself or in
our eyes as the cause or special force then co-operating, that agent
may be called the Occasion. This phrase is specially applied to
circumstances which cast up to call forth a power into exercise
or to work with causes steadily operating. Thus that ill-con-
structed house fell on the occasion of a storm arising; I was
# **

prompted to write a letter to a friend by my affection ; but the
occasion was his suffering a severe loss; the two actually called
forth the letter. Malebranche was the philosopher who brought
the phrase “occasional cause’’ into general use. He represented
the will of God as the true cause of all creative action, but the
volition of man might be the occasion of the forthputting of the
Divine Power. Thus when I move my arm the true cause is
the Divine Will, but my purpose is the occasional cause. In

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT.

373

such a case we may allowably give a prominence to the
Divine Power, but it should be noticed that while one of the
agents is the important one, the other or others, the action of
the brain and nerves, are necessary to the production of the pre-
cise consequence, which will not follow without the co-operation.

We are thus enabled to give a philosophical explanation of
what is meant, or rather what should be meant, by Condition, a
phrase so often used vaguely and illegitimately in the present
day in its application to physical operation. In order to be rid
of an agent or to drive it into a corner they say it is simply a
condition. In order to the production of a given effect a cer-
tain agent is fixed on as producing an end, the other or others
are represented as simply conditions. As proving design we
show that animals with a stomach for digesting flesh have also
claws and strong muscles to catch and hold their prey. But an
attempt is made to do away with the force of the argument by
urging that these adjuncts are merely the conditions of the ma-
chine working. But properly understood the argument lies in
the circumstance that the co-operating conditions have met.
The presence of strings in a harp is a condition of it producing
music, but the evidence of design is in the presence and com-
bination of the necessary strings.

We may legitimately and conveniently use such phrases pro-
vided we understand them ourselves and let our readers or hear-
ers understand what we mean by them. But it should be
distinctly explained that all the agents acting, whether circum-
stances, occasions, or conditions, constitute the cause without
which the effect would not follow.

It is needful to make like explanations and come to the same
understanding as to the Effect. In all cases of physical action
the effect is also dual or plural ; it consists of two or more agents
changed — I hope to show the same agents as are in the cause.
These constitute what has been, and what will always be, pro-
duced by the cause. But it often happens that a special end is
contemplated when we set an agent or agencies aworking ; and
when this is effected it is regarded as the proper or the only
effect. But there may be other consequences which we did not
consider or look for, or which we regard as minor or irrelevant
ones. We wish for a shower to refresh the ground ; as it falls it
25

374

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

accomplishes that end, but it may also so swell a stream that it
works destruction as it overflows its banks. A new machine is
invented which produces a greater amount of work, but it
throws a number of people, who followed the old methods, out
of employment. It is desirable to have a phrase to denote these
secondary effects, as they are regarded; and they may be described
as Concomitants , or more expressly as Incidents or Incidentals. Per-
haps some would call them Accidents, and they may be so called
as they were not intended, as when one fires an overcharged gun
and is wounded by its striking backward. But these accidents
are quite as much caused by the agents as the others that were
expected. In all cases the effect properly understood consists
of the whole of the agents that have been acting put in a new
state. Any one who sets new agencies agoing, say starting a
new trade or passing a new law, is bound to look not merely to
one but all the consequences that must follow.

Thirdly , there is the grand doctrine established in our day of
the Conservation of Energy. It has long been known and ac-
knowledged that the sum of matter in the cosmos is always one
and the same. We burn a piece of paper and it disappears from
our view, but is not annihilated; one portion of the matter has
gone down in ashes, the other has gone up in smoke, and if we
could bring the scattered particles together they would con-
stitute the original paper. It has been established in our day
that the same is true of the energy in matter. This doctrine
was anticipated by Leibnitz and established in our day by
Meyer, by Joule, Grove, and others. According to this doc-
trine the sum of energy, actual and potential, in exercise or
ready to be exercised, is always one and the same. It cannot be
increased and it cannot be diminished by any human, indeed by
any mundane, agency. When any portion of it leaves one body
it enters into another. The sum of energy in the two balls
have in them the same amount of energy before they strike
and after they strike. When the energy disappears in one form,
say in mechanical force moving a mass, it appears in another, say
in heat, which is molecular motion. But the sum is always one
and the same.

It is an integrant part of this doctrine that the physical
forces are all correlated, a truth which has been beautifully ex-

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT.

375

pounded by Grove. The energy may take various forms, say the
purely mechanical, the chemical, the electric, the magnetic.
These forms are capable of being transmitted into each other,
and this in definite quantity, so much mechanical force into so
much chemical force, which chemical force may be reconverted
into the mechanical. This shows the whole physical forces of
our cosmos to be correlated and capable of being transmitted in-
to one another; the sum always remaining the same.

It may be difficult to point out the full relation between these
three doctrines which I hold to be severally established. But
there is no inconsistency between them. Perhaps the full doc-
trine may be so stated as to embrace all the three and make them
aspects of one grand truth. Our cosmos may, as the Pythagoreans
supposed, be like a closed globe with an immensely large but
definite number of bodies in it. Each of these bodies possesses a
certain measure of physical force or forces. These act and react
upon each other, producing all the activity, all the movement, in
our world. The bodies act on each other, forming a cause. In
doing so they modify each other, and the result is the effect.
Meanwhile the sum of matter and the sum of the forces in the
bodies continue one and the same, and both are incapable of
increase or diminution. This is at least an intelligible enough
doctrine, and embraces the three truths which have been separa-
tely stated, and seems in perfect consistency with all that has
been established in regard both to the persistence of matter and
the persistence of energy, as Herbert Spencer calls it.

Meanwhile the conservation of energy may be regarded as
an established doctrine. Savans do indeed continue to assert
that some of the most eminent among themselves do not under-
stand it, or have not expressed it properly, or have illegitimately
applied it. But it is universally admitted that the doctrine is a
true and an all-important one.

But let us properly understand and explain it and keep it
within its proper limits. It will be admitted by all at once that
we are not entitled to affirm that the law extends beyond our
cosmos or knowable universe. For anything we know there
may be other worlds beyond our world, and we have no right to ,
say that in these worlds there is only a definite amount of en-
ergy which cannot be increased or diminished. God may, or

376

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

may not, be creating suns or earths or living beings beyond our
ken and altogether beyond our science. The doctrine of the
conservation of energy, as I understand, holds only on the sup-
position that our cosmos is like a closed globe. It is conceivable
that our world may not be so closed in ; that the dissipated heat
which is passing into space may travel into other worlds and
influence them without our being able to notice it.

This restriction of the doctrine is so obvious that it is scarce-
ly worth noticing it. But there are other limitations which it is
of vast moment to bring into prominence, as they are being
overlooked by some of our scientific men. There is clear evi-
dence that there are other potences or powers in nature besides
the mechanical or physical forces. It is not proven that the
doctrine of the conservation of energy applies to these.

Take Life. So far as I understand him, Herbert Spencer
seems inclined to hold that the doctrine applies to all the powers
in the world, even to the vital and mental ; indeed, he seems in-
capable of distinguishing between nerve force and mental force.
But he brings no proof that physical force and psychical force
can be transmuted into each other. The language of most of our
scientific speculators is hesitating. Huxley and Tyndall reso-
lutely maintain that there is no proof that living beings can pro-
ceed from non-living. Darwin calls in three or four live germs,
which he ascribes to God, before he can account for the develop-
ment of vegetable and animal life. I have observed that those who
reject a separate life or vital force are obliged to bring it in un-
der another form. Thus Darwin calls in a pangenesis pervading
organic nature, and Spencer has physiological units which play
an important part in generation and heredity, and these are cer-
tainly vital forces. Then the arguments and experiments of
Beale have to be met, and they have not yet been met by those
who would deny the existence of a vital potency of some kind
different from mechanical force.

But there are other agents in our world more clearly distin-
guished from the physical forces than the vital powers ar_e. I
refer to the psychical or mental ; to thoset of which we are con-
scious, which in fact we know immediately ; such as our sense
perceptions, our memories, our judgments, our reasonings, our
desires, our emotions, our resolves. These we know as directly

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT.

377

and clearly as we know the affections of body, such as extension
and resistance, and we have quite as good evidence of the exist-
ence of the one as of the other. Are these mental powers to be
included in the physical forces which can neither be increased nor
diminished ? Can the physical forces be transmuted into the
mental, say mechanical, or the chemical into thoughts, inclina-
tions, and volitions? Nearly every scientific man in the present
day admits, nay, maintains, that there is no proof of this. Many
affirm that they cannot even conceive it to be so. Tyndall, no
doubt, in his Belfast address hastened on to a high vaporous
generalization, and declared that it looked as if all things could
be brought under the potency of matter ; in the mean time declar-
ing, however, that he could not conceive how matter could pro-
duce mind, or mind matter. Mr. Fiske talks of our now needing
to assume only one universal assumption, “ the principle of con-
tinuity, the uniformity of nature, the persistence of force, or the
law of causation but then he is obliged to add that “ in no
scientific sense is thought the product of molecular movement,
and that the progress of modern discovery (correlation), so far
from bridging over the chasm between mind and matter, tends
rather to exhibit the distinction between them as absolute.”
The contradiction is here evident, and has been pointed out by
scientific men ; but I need not dwell upon it, my object being
simply to show that thoughts and mental affections have not
yet been reduced to physical forces. No doubt mind and body
do so far affect each other. If a person is told that his dearest
friend has died suddenly, his pulse will be apt to rise. Prof.
Barker attaches a great importance to an experiment of a person
first reading easy English, when his pulse was not affected,
then reading Greek, when it rose several degrees. Such cases,
and they might be multiplied indefinitely, show that mental
thoughts and feelings do affect the brain-action, but they'do not
show that they add to or diminish the physical forces in the
brain, or that the mental feeling or thought has been transmuted
into a movement of the pulse. A man standing by a stream
pushes a big stone in the water aside and the stream flows a lit-
tle more rapidly for a minute or two ; but he has not thereby
added to the quantity of water. Just as little does mental

378

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

action, reasoning or feeling, add to or diminish the amount, of
physical force in the cerebro-spinal mass.

There is no evidence, but the very opposite, that our mental
actions are identical or correlative with bodily motions or activi-
ties of any kind. Take as example, the discoveries of science,
the reasonings of mathematicians, the visions of poets, the pene-
tration of such philosophers as Aristotle, the ardor of the patriot,
the beatific vision of the Christian, the sacrifices made by the
poor for honor and honesty’s sake/ What savant will estimate
for us in quantitative expressions of physics or chemistry the
depth of affection in the mother’s bosom when she incurs death
herself to save her son, or the height of genius reached by Shake-
speare when he conceived Hamlet or Lady Macbeth ? There is
no one proper quality of matter, such as the occupation of space,
or resistance, or elasticity, that can be predicated of thoughts or
affections. There is no one quality of mind, such as perception,
thought, reasoning, or love, that can be applied to this table or
that chair. The instrument has not yet been invented that can
weigh or measure our intellectual or voluntary operations.
When a tree dies it carries into the ground not only the parti-
cles of matter which composed it, but the forces in the tree to
add to the forces in the ground. It is the same with the body
of brute or of man when it is buried, it carries with it into the
grave all the physical forces; but were there any new physical
forces added to the earth when Plato, Milton, Bacon, or New-
ton died ?

It thus appears that in the very midst of the physical forces
and their correlations there may be other operations, mental or
spiritual, and against this science has and can have nothing to
say. I mean to refer to these farther on in the article. Mean-
while let us look at the physical forces acting according to the
principles laid down.

i. Without attempting to explain their exact nature, or to
enumerate them, let us designate the physical agencies operat-
ing in our world by the letters of the alphabet and inquire how
they act. A ball at rest is struck by a ball in motion. Let us
call the ball at rest A, and the ball in motion B. The two con-
stitute the cause, which is

The cause A B.

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT.

379

As they act the effect follows : A moves while B’s motion is
stayed, and as the effect we have bodies changed,

The effect A' B/.

But in its motion A strikes C, and B is struck by D, and we have
Two causes A'C and B'D,

and the

Double effect A2C' and BJD'.

But these agents come to act on other agents, E, F, G, H, and
we have a

Complex result, A3E, C2F, B3G, D2H.

On the supposition that these agencies are in a closed ball
and act on each other and on nothing else, the sum of energy
would be one and the same, while each body might be gaining
or losing energy, one or both.

In the first action of A B, A gains energy from B and moves,
while B loses what energy it gives and is stayed. But A going
through the air and over a surface loses the energy it gained,
imparting it to the air and surface, and comes to rest ; and B is
struck by D and gets the energy it has lost and moves. There
is thus a continual action kept up among the bodies. The en-
ergy in each body varies, it may be from moment to moment,
but the amount among all the bodies continues the same.

2. We see that the effects come to act as causes. Thus if
we represent the cause as A B and the effect as A'B', we see that
each of the agencies A and B is ready to act always when com-
bined with some other agency, such as C and D. These last
acting as causes become effects which may again become causes
in combination with other or the same things. The conserva-
tion of energy thus keeps the world the same through ages,
while these constant changes give it its activity: the one as it
were constituting an unchanging ocean, the other the tides that
agitate it. It is thus, as the Eleatics held, that everything is fixed
and immutable, but equally true, as Heraclitus and the cpiXoao-
cpoi psovre? taught, that everything is becoming.

3. We see that in physical nature (and I speak of no other)
.the effect consists of the agencies which have been the causes
appearing in a new form. When the cause is A B, the effect is
A'B'. When the cause is more complex, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H,
all of these agencies are changed or modified ; and these as

380

THE PRINCETON RE VIE JV.

changed constitute the effect that will forever follow the cause.
This makes all physical causation a kind of evolution or devel-
opment, a favorite doctrine with certain theosophists who de-
rived all mundane things from other mundane things, and all
things from God. This doctrine was apprehended and expressed
in a mystical way, but contains an important truth which can be
separated from the error with which it was associated and put
in a scientific form. It is not that the effect emanates from the
cause ; but the effect consists in the agencies constituting the
cause being put in a new state.

4. It is altogether wrong to represent with Hume the rela-
tion of cause and effect as being merely or essentially invariable
antecedence and consequence. It is something deeper in the
very nature of things. The effect which is always dual or plural
consists of the things that constituted the cause in a new condi-
tion. There is and always must be invariable and unconditional
antecedence and consequence, but prior to this and producing
this there is the conservation or persistence of force which
comes out from the agents acting as the causes, goes into the
effect, and thus necessitates antecedence and consequence.

5. We see what is the inertia of body. Newton’s First Law of
Motion follows from the principles we have laid down. A body
at rest will continue at rest forever unless it is acted on by some
other body ; a body in motion will continue in motion in the
same straight line unless stayed or deflected by some other body.
All this is a corollary from the principle that causal action is the
action of two bodies, and that a body will not act unless acted
on by some other body.

6. We see the nature of the law of action and reaction. A
body will not act unless there is some other body acting on it.
Under this view matter is passive. It acts only so far as it is
acted on. In another sense it is active. One body acts on
another body ; thus two bodies are A and B, and A and B are
both changed. A at rest moves and B is stayed. What B loses
in being stayed, A gains and moves. This gives us Newton’s
Third Law of Motion, that Action is always equal to and the
opposite of Reaction. B gives what it loses to A, but the sum
of energy of the two is the same after action as before action.
It follows that the energy given to A is equal to that lost by B.

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT. 381

7. It is sometimes stated that the same effect may be pro-
duced by different causes. This is not true or it is true accord-
ing as we understand it. A jar may be broken by a picture
falling on it, but it may also be broken by a stone flung at it.
The breaking of the jar may thus be produced by two different
processes. But in both cases the breaking of the jar is only part
of the effect. The full effect in the one case was the jar broken
and the picture stayed ; in the other, the jar broken with the
stone stayed.

8. It is often said that great effects follow from small causes.
A cow kicks a kerosene-lamp, and first the shed is ignited and
then the half of a great city is burned. The British Government
denies Colonial America a comparatively small claim ; and a
revolution breaks forth which separates Great Britain and the
United States forever. But it is not quite correct, it is not the
full truth, to say that one cause did all this. In all such cases
there is a co-operation and succession of various causes. The
fire is carried on by there being all around inflammable materials
to propagate it, and the separation of the countries was really
produced by a widespread discontent. In like manner a mighty
agency may often issue in a very insignificant effect, because
there are no conspiring powers.

Finally, we see what a complexity there is in the activities in
our world. There are two or commonly more agents in every
act of causation, two or commonly more in all effectuation.
What a variety of powers at work in the great natural occur-
rences, say in the seasons, say in the production of spring, with
its increased heat, its buds and leaves and blossoms ! What a
complication in the production of the great epochs of history :
in the spread of Christianity ; in the revival of learning in
the fifteenth century ; in the great Reformation; in the English.
American, and French revolutions! This complexity is vastly
increased by the circumstances that the agents in combination
possess properties which they did not exhibit in their separate
state. Water exercises qualities which did not appear in the
separate action of the oxygen and hydrogen. When combined
in living plants and animals the elements exhibit powers, such as
absorption and assimilation, not shown by the oxygen, hydrogen,
carbon, and ammonia. I feel that there is need in this compli-

382

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

cation of a regulating power to produce order and beneficence.
.Without this all these powers might work capriciously and in-
juriously and have formed only powers of evil, mosquitoes,
serpents, flaming meteors and burning worlds, destructive
machines, and pestiferous creatures devouring each other and
arresting all forms of beauty and beneficence, and yet incapable
of dying. We find instead those millions of agencies combining
to accomplish good and benign ends. All this seems to me to
show that there has been a mind disposing and a wisdom guid-
ing them.

To prove this it is not necessary that we should settle what
are the original constituents of the universe: some suppose
them to be atoms, some represent them as centres of force,
some will allow them to be only centres of motion. Some of our
most distinguished physicists, such as Helmholtz and William
Thomson, are favoring the idea of Descartes, somewhat modified,
that they are vortices in perpetual whirl. Whatever they be,
they need a wise and good disposal to make them perform
bountiful ends. I discover traces in nature of various kinds of
design.

I. There are concurrences of agents to accomplish special
beneficent ends. Take the eye. What a combination of inde-
pendent agencies before we can see the smile on that friend’s
face ! There are vibrations coming from the sun ninety millions
of miles away ; these have passed at various rates through an
ether, they touch and are reflected from the countenance; some
of them reach the corner of an optical instrument called the eye;
they go through, an aqueous humor, thence through the gate-
way of iris into the crystalline lens ; they are there refracted and
pass through the aqueous humors to the retina, where they im-
pact on thousands of rods and cones, and are sent on to the
optic-nerve and the brain ; and we now see the smiles on our
mother’s face. Let any one of these be absent or fail, and na-
ture would remain forever in darkness. Take the ear. A sister
utters a word, a vibration is started, it reaches our ear, is col-
lected by the outer ear and knocks on the tympanum, is propa-
gated into the middle-ear, where it sets in motion the hammer
and the anvil and the stirrup, thence it penetrates into the inner
ear, where it vibrates through a liquid, affects the thousand and

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT. 383

more organs of Corti, is sent round the semicircular canals into
the cochlea, on through the auditory nerve into the brain ; the
silence is broken, and we are cheered by a voice of love.

II. We may discover a plan and purpose in development as it is
carried on in our world. Development is evidently not a simple
power in nature like mechanical force or chemical affinity or
gravitation. It is clear that there is a vast, an incalculable
number and variety of agencies in the process, whether it be the
development of the plant from its seed, of the bird from the
egg, of the horse from its dam, of the threshing-machine from
the flail, of the reaping-machine from the reaping-hook, of our
present kitchen utensils from those used by our grandmother.

Development is essentially a combination of causes fulfilling
a purpose. It is an organized causation for ends, a corporation
of causes for mutual action: It has been admitted for ages that

causation works through all nature ; not only divine causation,
the source of the whole, but physical causation; that is, the or-
dinary occurrences of nature are all produced by agents working
causally ; in other words, fire burns, light shines, and the earth
spins round its axis and rotates round the sun, and the conse-
quence is that we have heat and light and the beneficent seasons.
Men of enlarged minds do now see and acknowledge that in the
doctrine of causation, in the doctrine of God acting everywhere
through second causes, there is nothing irreligious. On the con-
trary, the circumstances that God proceeds according to laws is
evidently for the benefit of man, who can thus from the past
anticipate the future and prepare himself for it. On the same
principle I hold that there is nothing irreligious in development,
which is just a form of causation. It was my privilege in my
earliest published work to justify God’s method of procedure by
natural law. I reckon it a like privilege in my declining life to
defend God’s method of action by development, by bringing the
present out of the past.

There is an arranged combination necessary to produce evo-
lution. The present is evolved out of the past and will develop
into the future all under an arrangement. The present is the
fruit of the past and contains the seed of the future. The con-
figuration of the earth, its hills and dales, its rivers and seas,
which determine the abodes and industries of men and the

384

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

bounds of their habitation, have been produced by agencies
which have been working for thousands or millions of years.
The plants now on the earth are the descendants of those crea-
ted by God, and the ancestors of those that are to appear in the
coming ages. There is through all times, as in the year, a suc-
cession of seasons ; sowing and reaping, sowing in order to reap,
and reaping what has been sown in order to its being sown
again. This gives a continuousness, a consistency, to nature
amidst all the mutations of time. There is not only a contem-
poraneous order in nature, there is a successive order. The
beginning leads to the end, and the end is the issue of the begin-
ning. This grass and grain and these forests that cover the
ground have seed in them which will continue in undefined ages
to adorn and enrich the ground. These birds that sing among
the branches and these cattle upon a thousand hills will build
nests and rear young to furnish nourishment and delight to our
children’s children in millennial ages. Every naturalist has seen
a purpose gained by the nutriment laid up in the seed or pod to
feed the young plant. I see a higher end accomplished by the
mother provided for the young animal. That infant is not cast
forth into the cold world unprotected : it has a mother’s arms to
protect it and a mother’s love to fondle it. Development is not
an irreligious process; every one who has been reared under a
father’s care and a mother’s love will bless God for it.

“ Evolution,” says Herbert Spencer, “ is a change from an in-
definite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent homo-
geneity through continuous differentiation and integration.”
He has sufficient philosophy to refer all this to a power supposed
by him to be unknown working behind the known phenomena.
A deeper philosophy will discover a so far known divine power
producing these effects.

In development there is usually progression. At times there
is degeneracy, chiefly the result of human sin, as we see in the
degeneracy of the Indians. But as a whole there has been an ad-
vance in our earth from age to age. The tendency of animal
life is, upon the whole, upward — from all-fours to the upright
position, in which men can look up to the heavens. Agencies
have been set agoing to produce these evidently intended ends.
Causes that operated ages ago have called in other causes to co-

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT.

385

operate with them, and have thereby added to the power and
riches of the product. The geological changes have made our
earth fit for the abode of man. Human beings have taken the
places which in earlier ages were handed over to wild animals.
There is a greater amount of food produced on our earth than
at any earlier stage. There has been, as the ages rolled on, a
greater fulness of sentient life and a larger capacity of happi-
ness. The intellectual powers have been made stronger and
firmer like the trunk of the tree, and the feelings like the flow-
ers have taken a larger expansion and a richer color by culture.

I am inclined to see purposes in the very forms of animals
and plants, and the manner in which they grow into their type;
while the type ever advances as if to realize an idea. Our roses
are all supposed to be derived from the common dog-rose, and I
see a beauty in that rose as it grows by the roadside. But I dis-
cover a higher manifestation of skill in the way in which the
rose becomes more fully expanded in our gardens. God, who
rewards us for opening our eyes upon his works, bestows higher
gifts on those who in love to them bestow labor upon them.
Dogs, it is said, have all descended from some kind of wolf, and
I see a fitness in their primitive forms ; but I discover a fuller
development in the shepherd’s dog and the St. Bernard dog
with their wondrous instincts. I discover a fitness of parts in
the oldeohippus which used to tread with its five toes on marshy
ground ; but I discover an advance in the pleiohippus, and still
higher perfection in the animal we ride on, so useful and so
graceful, so agile and so docile.

III. I discover an end in the manner in which plants and
animals are produced. Two systems of development are neces-
sary to effect this. First, the tendency of every living thing to
produce a seed or germ. The powers necessary to accomplish
this are very numerous and very complex, but all conspiring to-
wards this one end, as if it were one of the purposes for which
the plant was created. Secondly, there is the development of
the plant and animal from the seed or germ. This, too, implies
an immense combination of arranged elements and forces. It
looks excessively like an end contemplated, an idea to be real-
ized. It looks all the more like this when we notice that the
seed or germ is after its kind and produces a living being after

386

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE IK

the same kind. There is thus a double development in all ani-
mated nature; we see it in the oak producing the acorn, and the
acorn the oak.*

These are mainly operations of the ordinary physical forces
which are all correlated with each other, needing only a dispos-
ing power. But there are in our cosmos other and higher pow-
ers. In closing let us look at these.

First. There is evidence of new and these higher powers
appearing in the progress of nature. I have shown at an earlier
part of this article that in physical causation there is merely a
changed state of the agents acting as the causes. There is no
power in the effect which was not in the causes. If heredity
has a gift committed to it, it may transmit it from parent to off-
spring and from one generation to another. But if there be a
new power appearing, it must be from superadded causes. But
there are products in our world which cannot be developed from
the original elements or powers of nature.

Was there Life in the original atom, or molecule formed of
the atoms? If not, how did it come in when the first plant ap-
peared ? Was there sensation in the original molecule? If not,
what brought it in when the first animal had a feeling of pleasure
or of pain ? Was there mind in the first molecule, say a power of
perceiving an object out of itself ? Was there consciousness in
the first molecule or monad — a consciousness of self? Was
there a power of comparing or judging, of discerning things, of
noting their agreements or differences ? Had they a power
of reasoning, of inferring the unseen from the seen, of the future
from the past? Were there emotions in these first existences?
say a hope of continued life or a fear of approaching death?
Perhaps they had loving attachments to each other, perhaps
they had some morality, say a sense of justice in keeping their
own whirl and allowing to others their rights and their place in
this dance! Had they will at the beginning, and a power of

I “When will apologists begin to perceive that the best apology for the universe
would lie in the belief that it was not designed at all ?” This is the melancholy
conclusion reached by Mr. Grant Allen in a review of Prof. Cleeland’s recent
work. Some are regretting that Mr. Allen should have become so slavish a fol-
lower of Spencer, and be using his power as a critic in the London Academy to
depreciate those who have the courage to avow that they see design in nature.

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT.

3 »7

choosing between pleasure and pain, between the evil and the
good ? Perhaps they had some piety, and paid worship of the
silent sort to God !

It is needless to say that there is not even the semblance of
a proof of there being any such capacities in the original atoms
or force-centres. If so, how did they come in ? Take one hu-
man capacity: how did consciousness come in? Herbert
Spencer, the mightiest of them, would have us believe that he
has answered the question, and yet he has simply avoided it. In
his “ Psychology” he is speaking of nerves for hundreds of pages;
he shows that in their development there is a succession of a cer-
tain kind ; and adds simply that “ there must arise a conscious-
ness"! This is all he condescends to say, bringing in no cause
or link or connection. Thus does he slip over the gap— a prac-
tice not uncommon with this giant as he marches on with his
seven-leagued boots.

It is pertinent to ask, How did these things come in? How
did things without sensation come to have sensation? things
without instinct to have instinct? creatures without memory
to have memory? beings without intelligence to have intelli-
gence? mere sentient existence to know the distinction between
good and evil? I 'am sure that when these things appear, there
is something not previously in the atom or molecule. All sober
thinkers of the day admit that there is no evidence whatever in
experience or in reason to show that matter can produce mind ;
that mechanical action can gender mental action ; that chemi-
cal action can manufacture consciousness ; that electric action
can reason, or organic structure rise to the idea of the good and
the holy. I argue according to reason and experience that we
must call in a power above the original physical forces to pro-
duce such phenomena. I may admit that a body may come out
of another body by the powers with which the bodies are en-
dowed ; but I say that a sensitive, intelligent, moral discerning
soul cannot proceed from the elements of matter. New powers
have undoubtedly come in when consciousness and understand-
ing and will begin to act. They may come according to laws not
yet discovered, but they are the laws of the Supreme Lawgiver.

I can find no more satisfactory account of this process than
that in the opening of Genesis, where new manifestations appear

388

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

in successive days or epochs, the whole culminating in man in
the image of God. “ Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual
\nvtV)jL<xxni6v\, , but that which is natural [tpvxiKOv] ; and after-
ward that which is spiritual.” “And so it is written, the first
man was made a living soul; the second Adam was made a
quickening spirit” (i Cor. xv. 44-46) — where we may mark the
advancement from the merely living soul ( ipvxrjv Zdotjav) to the
quickening spirit ( Ttrsf-ia <? ooo7toiovv ).

Secondly. There are mental and spiritual powers working in
our world. Of the operations of the mental powers we are con-
scious. I am quite as certain that I have thoughts and wishes
as that I have hands and feet. But not only are there psychical
acts, there may be spiritual powers. I am aware that some of
our savans will turn away from such an idea not only with un-
belief, but with scorn, declaring it to be inconsistent with the
uniformity of nature, with all history, and with all science. But
this arises not from the comprehension of their views, but
from fixing their eyes so exclusively on their own favorite sub-
jects that they do not see others lying alongside of them possi-
bly higher and more important.

Earnest men in all ages have been seeking after intercourse
with God. They have prayed in the belief that there may be
One to hear them, and they have expected an answer. They do
not allow to you that God has so shut himself out from his
own world that he cannot act on it. They deny that there is
any proof that our petitions are so bound to the earth by gravity
that they cannot mount upward and reach the ear of their heav-
enly Father, who is felt as pitying them. They believe that
their spirits can hold communion with God, who is a Spirit, quite
as certainly as our earth can act on the sun and the sun on the
earth. They have faith that there are wider and more intimate
unions than those produced by the attraction which all matter
has for other matter. They are sure that all holy intelligences
throughout the universe are in union with the Holy God.

Christians believe that they live under the dispensation of
the Spirit. We have seen that there have been in the history
of our world times or seasons in which new powers, apparently
always advanced powers, appeared. There was a time in which
life appeared, in which consciousness appeared, in which intelli-

ON CAUSATION AND DEVELOPMENT.

389

gence appeared and will appeared, and a conscience discerning
between good and evil appeared, and the full man in the image
of God appeared. There has been a like introduction of new
powers, and a like advance in the revelation which God has been
pleased to make of his will, first in the shadow going before,
then in the grand Personage appearing in the fulness of time.
The Jewish dispensation comes out of the patriarchal, and the
Christian out of the Jewish, in each case something new being
added. Under the old economy there were promises of the
coming dispensation, and there were anticipations of it in per-
sons moved by the Holy Ghost. It was thus in the geological
ages,; as Agassiz delighted to show, in lower creatures stretching
up towards higher and towards man himself. But the full dis-
pensation of the Spirit was introduced when the Mediator, hav-
ing finished his work on earth, went up to heaven : “If I go
away, I will send him unto you.”

Christians believe that in this dispensation they have access
to God. They maintain that science has nothing to say even in
appearance contradictory. Some of the profoundest investiga-
tors of science have believed all this and avowed their convic-
tions, such as Newton and Leibnitz, Brewster and Herschel,
Faraday, Meyer, and our own Henry. They have been quite
as sure of this as of their own great discoveries as to the laws of
the universe.

No doubt these spiritual operations are not without law of
some kind. But that law is not the same with the physical laws
operating around us. It maybe such that we cannot by search-
ing find it out. The arc visible to us is too small to enable us to
calculate the full circle or sphere. So we piously ascribe it all
to the sovereignty of God. “ The wind bloweth where it listeth,
and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it
cometh, and whither it goeth : so is every one that is born of
the Spirit.”

James McCosh.

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART.

IT was a habit of Socrates, — who was himself a sculptor, and
the son of a sculptor, — when he would inquire into the phi-
losophy of any subject, to seek the professional practitioner or
teacher who claimed to be a representative, reasonably inferring
that such an one would be well qualified to furnish the informa-
tion he sought. He then applied his unrelenting system of
inquiry with a keen-scented persistency that was quick to expose
ignorance or fallacy. This method of inquiry as practised by
Socrates, which confronted him at once with the true represen-
tives, we cannot do better than imitate. To the atelier , or work-
shop, therefore, we will go, where, surrounded by the implements
of his art, we shall find the sculptor engaged in the practice of
his calling. The artist may not be always able to give a reason
for his practice — as Socrates sometimes found to be the case —
but the atelier affords ample illustration even of principles too
subtle for logical solution. The studio of the artist is the amal-
gamation of the study and the workshop. The technical and
the intellectual, practice and theory — even the mechanical and
the emotional — are there blended harmoniously as one in the
service of art.

The fundamental element in sculpture is form. The forms
of objects are principally recognizable to the eye by means of
outline and shadow; the first gives the impression of shape, the
second that of relief. Outline and shadow, therefore, constitute
the elements of form as regards our visual impressions. Colorless
objects that are equally illuminated from all sides, tho their sur-
face be roughened or irregular, give no impression of relief save
what is suggested by their outlines. The landscape viewed from
a height under a meridian sun has few distinctions of form;

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART.

391

but as the day declines the lengthening shadows reveal a varied
and broken panorama: hills, valleys, and even the gentler undu-
lations of surface greet the eye.

Sculpture is the least complex of the formative arts r but from
this we are not to infer that its merits are of an inferior order.
Excellence in all the arts is of equal merit, and if there be any/
distinctions of this kind, we may conclude that excellence is of a
higher order in proportion to the simplicity of the means em-
ployed. It is the equable character of true excellence in art
that places on the same plane Homer, Phidias, and Raphael or
Michael Angelo, as merely varied exponents of the same crea-
tive power.

Again, with reference to form as the basis of sculpture, there
are two distinctions that should be borne in mind, viz., the
science of form and the sense of form ; the first relates to fact,
the second to feeling. The first is a matter of systematic
knowledge; the second, of aesthetic perception. No artist is
properly qualified in art who neglects these distinctions, or who
fails to recognize their respective merits as contributing to mani-
festations of the beautiful. No amount of scientific knowledge
of form will avail the sculptor in the absence of that artistic or
emotional sense of it of which sculpture is an expression or rep-
resentative. Nor will a fine artistic sense of form avail, in art,
in the absence of a knowledge of anatomy. I once saw a
statue, representing an athlete, that had attracted some atten-
tion from the fact that it was made by an anatomist — one whose
knowledge of anatomy was justly held to be very considerable.
Great accuracy of knowledge was displayed in the anatomical
forms, while the action chosen was well adapted for muscular
display. But for a work of art this conspicuous motive was a
false one, the emotional character of the action or expression
being subsidiary to the exhibition of knowledge. It excited
curiosity, but stimulated no higher emotion, and the effect was,
on the whole, repulsive.

On the other hand, examples are not rare, in sculpture,
wherein is plainly recognizable the absence of accurate anatomi-
cal knowledge, the result being inane and valueless. Underlying
the higher truth there must be a basis of natural fact, and the
studies of the sculptor are directed to this end. But after veri-

392

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

fying his anatomical forms by constant reference to nature, the
sculptor makes all this subservient to an emotional impulse of a
higher kind. The imagination, regarding his work from an ele-
vated plane, enables him not merely to endow his creations with
life, movement, expression, but also to make them act in a noble
and grand way. He aims not merely to represent the forms of
life, but to express through form a still finer sense of beauty,
not found in the model, but seen through the model, which is
nature in a more select and permanent aspect.

But without further discussion of general ideas, we will go
at once to the workshop. We will follow the sculptor in all his
processes, from his rude first sketch to the completion of his
statue.

The first step in every formative art is generally that of a
rude sketch on paper; but it is not uncommon for sculptors to
make even the first sketch in the clay — generally a very diminu-
tive, hastily executed sketch, designed merely to express the
general idea. The rude, first blot, in whatever form it may be,
is a point of departure; it is the initial fact for the imagination
to rest and work upon. Then follows what is termed a study —
a larger sketch, in which the action and forms are determined
with some care, in accordance with the conception as it exists
in the mind. Generally in this second sketch- reference is made
to the living model, but not always. Before referring to the
model, the artist desires to assert his motive — the conception he
has himself formed in imagination. A too early reference to the
model may substitute for this an action or motive conceived on
a lower plane — the plane of the commonplace. In this model,
either of clay or wax, the sculptor aims to express the action,
the forms and general proportions, freely making changes as the
sketch advances. It is not uncommon to make several experi-
mental designs in different attitudes, exhibiting various actions,
before he decides what will best conform to the leading idea.
It may be that he studies this small model with great care, with
continued reference to nature, and thus matures his conception.

If the proposed statue is to be of life size or larger, fie pro-
ceeds to set it up in clay by proportional measurements made
from the small model. The clay most commonly used is of a
gray color, free from gritty substance, and moistened to a

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART. 393

proper consistency. The figure is built up about the supports
— termed the skeleton — following the attitude and proportions
of the original sketch. The clay is manipulated with the fingers,
and the work, at this stage, is advanced by simple addition.
This “ setting up” of a statue, as it is termed, is generally per-
formed by the sculptor’s assistants, who are guided by propor-
tional measurements. When the material is all placed and the
figure roughly shaped, the sculptor then takes it in hand and
brings to his aid all the resources of his art. Every part is care-
fully studied from the life. The statue is first modelled nude,
and afterward the forms are clothed. The drapery is super-
added to the forms already modelled, by first running over them
strips of clay to represent the folds or masses that are farthest
removed ; but where drapery sinks to actual contact with the
body or limbs, the original surface is carefully preserved, tho
characterized as draped by distinctions of texture and other like
means. Textures and other variations of surface are given by
various tools, usually made of wood. The clay is kept moist,
and when the day’s work is finished it is wrapped in wet cloths,
or covered with an air-tight screen to retard evaporation.

It is important for the sculptor to design his statue so as to
avoid, as far as possible, the extension of any part of the figure
insecurely. He must also bear in mind where the statue is to
be placed, and in what material it is to be finally wrought —
whether it is to be of marble or of bronze. If it is to be of
bronze, he may have certain liberties of which the marble does
not admit, the brittleness of the marble necessitating a more
compact mass. Where the design necessitates extended limbs,
the ancients often resorted to artificial supports; but this has
been avoided in modern times, as they interfere with the beauty
of the statue or group. In bronze-work there are many difficul-
ties encountered in casting complex forms, but skilled founders
find ways of surmounting them. Benvenuto Cellini, in his auto-
biography, gives a very interesting account of the casting of his
“ Perseus,” explaining these difficulties and the care necessary
to overcome them. One of the most remarkable pieces of
bronze-casting is that of the beautiful gates of the Baptistery
at Florence by Lorenzo Ghiberti, of which Vasari gives an
account.

394

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

But this is anticipating. Let us dwell more particularly on
the clay model ; for it is here that the sculptor displays his true
powers, his finest skill. The genius of the artist finds expression
in the pliant clay. With that delicacy of touch by which the
skilled musician modulates sound the sculptor gives expression
to the yielding clay. Having the living model before him, he
seizes upon that which is expressive and characteristic. Avoid-
ing trivial accidents and incongruities, he seeks that unconscious
grace, or it may be that virile action, that is truly natural and
pleasing. His great concern is to conform the outward action
to the inward impulse, that his work may appear artless rather
than artful ; every action being free and unconstrained, sponta-
neous in movement rather than conscious or studied. Few things
have greater fascination for the observer than that of witnessing
the clay start into life under the skilled manipulations of the
sculptor. Slight modifications of form will sometimes make it
quickly assume the character of life. The process itself, passing
from generals to particulars with true logical sequence, is a
most suggestive one, well calculated to stimulate thought in
many analogous ways. In composing his statue, the sculptor
must regard it from all points of view. Unless designed to fill
a niche, it must be so studied that it composes agreeably from
eight distinct points of view — the front, the rear, the sides, and
obliquely. Indeed, his work is in itself a real object, while the
painter’s representation is but the semblance of reality — the imi-
tation of the appearance. In contrasting his own art with that
of painting, a sculptor once said to me, “ There is a satisfaction
in being able to walk round your work, to regard it from all
points of view as a real, palpable object.” And that indicated
the character of the sculptor’s peculiar sympathy for form,
heightened by the sense of reality and substance.

The statue, therefore, must present from every point of view
an agreeable form or outline. In process of modelling the clay
rests on a revolving base, that the figure may be turned readily
when the sculptor desires to view his work from different sides;
and after every considerable addition it must be so regarded. A
distinct manipulation of the clay is required to represent all the
distinctions of surface as to .the character of flesh or of drapery.
Qualities of hardness or softness, roughness or smoothness, are

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART.

395

represented with delicacy or boldness as the case may require.
It is upon the clay that the sculptor bestows all his energies,
even to the extremest finish the character of the work demands.
What follows is mainly of a mechanical nature.

When the statue is completed in the clay, the formatore then
makes from it what is termed a “ waste-mould ” of plaster of Paris.
A waste-mould is distinguished from a piece-mould in that it
serves but for one cast, in the forming of which the mould is de-
stroyed by being clipped off with the chisel. In the forming of
a waste-mould the clay model is entirely wrecked. The mould is
then washed and coated with boiled oil, and when dry it is fitted
together and a perfect plaster cast is made. This the sculptor
receives from his workmen and proceeds to bestow upon it
additional labor. In the place of wooden tools, he now uses
those of steel — rasps, chisels, and toothed implements of various
kinds. In the plaster the statue is brought to a point of actual
finish regarding every detail. The change from the gray clay
to the white plaster is a marked one, and often suggests changes
to be made, by reason of fresh observation consequent upon the
nature of this newr material.

After its completion in plaster, the statue is either repro-
duced in marble or conveyed infections to the foundry. If the
statue is to be of marble, the workmen cover the surface of the
cast with innumerable minute cross-marks, and project from
the raised parts a few points of steel, which serve as guides for
the measurements for its reproduction in stone. With the cali-
pers they determine all the elevations and depressions, and
follow mechanically every variation of surface in the model.
Vasari, in his life of Michael Angelo, thus describes this pro-
cess: “A figure of wax or other firm material being laid in a
vessel of water, which of its nature is level at the surface, on
being gradually raised first displays the more salient parts, the
less elevated still being hidden, until, as the form rises, the whole
by degrees comes into view. In this manner are figures to be
extracted from the marble with the chisel ; the highest parts
being first brought forth, till by degrees the lowest parts
appear.”

Of these various materials in which the statue is wrought,
Michael Angelo said: “The clay represents life; the plaster,

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

death ; and the marble, a resurrection.” The clay is yielding and
expressive ; the plaster, rigid and unqualified ; and the marble
revives again the finer qualities and lends to them a translucency
of its own. When the statue is hewn from the marble — a labor
of many months — it returns again to the sculptor, who gives to
it an expressive finish in conformity with the spirit of his origi-
nal conception. He obliterates the mechanical execution of his
workmen and bestows upon it a facile grace, or delicacy of ex-
pression, that deceives one with the belief that the statue has
come forth from the marble with the ease and celerity of the
thought itself in its original conception.

But if the statue is to be of bronze, the last labors of the
sculptor are bestowed upon the plaster model. When this is
completed, it is cut into sections and conveyed to the foundry.
It is there cast in sections, generally, and these are afterwards
joined, finished, and chased by skilled artisans. The bronze is
then toned, or darkened with acids — and so the work is done.
As the original models are retained by the sculptor, his studio
becomes populated with his works, that may be reduplicated to
any extent; in which respect he has an advantage over the
painter. There is an endurance, also, about this art that is im-
pressive : the marble and the bronze live forever, while the
masterpieces of pictorial art perish with time, and become, as
with the Greeks, merely a vague tradition. The powers of the
orator and the actor die with them ; those of the painter may
survive a thousand years, or by extraordinary chance, as in the
Pompeiian frescos, to twice this period ; but sculpture endures
throughout the ages. The museums of Europe contain Egyp-
tian statues and reliefs that belong to the fourth dynasty — as
early as t .e forty-second century B.C. The endurance, there-
fore, no less than the palpable reality of sculpture give to it a
value peculiarly its own.

The location of statues governs, in a measure, the character
of their execution. Those which may only be seen from a dis-
tance should be more rudely executed to give the desired effect ;
and yet the Greeks paid little heed to this. The Phidian statues
from the pediments of the Parthenon are, many of them, finished
with great care. The “ Theseus,” the “ Ilissus,” and the beautiful
group of the Fates are finished with extreme care. The Greeks

397

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART.

apparently followed the beautiful for its own sake. They neg-
lected nothing. Phidias, when asked why he bestowed such
care upon those parts of his works which, necessarily, were shut
out from view, is said to have replied, “ The gods see them, and
they must be satisfied.” A moral lesson truly, whether applied
to art or to life itself.

Greek statues of single figures not designed to serve as
architectural ornaments — such as the Apollo or the Venus — are
equally beautiful from every point of view from which they are
regarded ; while a bas-relief, like a picture, is to be viewed in
front alone. As compared with painting, the range of subjects
admissible in sculpture is limited. Single figures serve best to
express the finer qualities of this art. Groups, as a general
thing, belong to a subordinate plane. Even the most famous
groups of antiquity bear a subordinate relation to single figures.
Perhaps the finest instance of two figures thus grouped is that
of the Fates — Ceres and Proserpine — belonging to the eastern
pediment of the Parthenon. Groups comprehending more than
two figures — as the “Laocoon,” or the “ Farnese Bull,” particu-
larly the latter — decidedly belong to a period of decadence in
sculpture. The figures there stand in a picturesque rather than
plastic relation to one another, and are necessarily viewed sepa-
rately; thus are introduced conflicting elements that mar sim-
plicity.

Every work of art interests us not merely from its intrinsic
merit, but as a manifestation of the character of the creative
impulse that is behind it. Statues belonging to the best periods
of Greek art are simply and nobly conceived. There is no
resort to novel or specious effects, or to mere elaboration for its
own sake. The art is grand because it is the embodiment of a
grand conception, and executed with a noble disdain for triviali-
ties. It is beautiful for the reason that it is simple, natural,
economical; nothing remains to be added or taken away; the
whole is composed of strictly essential parts. The perfect cor-
respondence of the form and action with the motive satisfies the
mind. Every part, every division of the body, the limbs, the
muscles, perform their functions naturally and economically ;
nothing is strained, no action is forced ; the movement corre-
sponds with that action of the mind that is composed even

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

398

in energetic and quick exertion, as in the throwing of a
discus.

Proportion is an element of form that is of supreme impor-
tance in sculpture. There is an innate sense of proportion in
most minds, but under cultivation this is capable of being
greatly refined. Even an uneducated ear may easily detect dis-
proportion in verse and discord in music. But it requires accu-
rate technical knowledge to be able to detect how and why
certain works of art fail in due proportions. But if there were
no general sense of these things possessed in common, music
would alone address the sensibility of the musician, and rhythm
that of the poet ; but in a general way we all share in a like
susceptibility, but varied in degree, to these influences. A sense
of human proportion is awakened by countless impressions that
are stamped upon the mind by the sense, and natural selection
evolves from these impressions an average, or ideal, underlying
endless variations of the real.

In order that we may comprehend the school in which the
ancients studied their athletes we should follow them to the
arena, where they witnessed performances that called forth un-
studied action under circumstances impossible now to imitate.
The ancient Romans, especially the lower orders, including the
slaves, were fond of sketching upon the walls of the ante-rooms
such scenes as interested them most in these spectacles, and the
greater part of them represent gladiatorial combats. Cardinal
Wiseman has given an interesting description of some of these
scratchings ( graffiti , as they are called). “ They present to us a
class of very rude but very interesting monuments. One of
them records a peculiar occurrence. It is indeed only a battle in
the amphitheatre, but it is between two men in very different
positions ; the names of the combatants are given, as they always
are, and numbers over their heads tell how many victories each
one had achieved. This battle, then, is between Spiculus, a tyro —
that is, one who had never before fought — and Aptonetus, libra-
rius, or holding a high office among the gladiators, a man who
had gained sixteen victories, as his number indicates. The first
has over him the letter V — vicit, he conquered ; the other, P —
periit, he perished. In fact, the old gladiator, with the sixteen
laurels that he had won, is lying on the ground wounded to

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART.

399

death, or dead ; and the youth who had dared to fight him is
alive, holding the point of his sword against the prostrate
figure.”

Such is the rude sketch as it remains upon the wall after
twenty centuries have passed. But we must imagine the emo-
tions with which these two men approached each other in
deadly combat, with the eyes of fifty thousand spectators intent
upon them — the one a veteran, crowned with sixteen victories,
indignant that a stripling like that should presume to cope with
him; the other ambitious of the great glory that awaited his
victory. The sketch records the sequel. We may conceive with
what intentness the eye of the spectator — the Greek sculptor —
would observe every display of action, the tension of muscles,
the swollen veins like knotted cords, the dilated nostrils as
each stifles the anguish of a wound. “ What the Greek sculptor
knew how to seize, and alone had the opportunity of seizing,
was the result of such deep, such extraordinary emotions as, act-
ing outwards from the nobler organs, impressed themselves in
that wonderful way we see represented in their art.” They
were not permitted to dissect the human body. Galen was
obliged to study the ape for his approximate knowledge of
human anatomy. The Greek or Roman arrived at the knowl-
edge of the interior construction of the figure from what he saw
without. But his school was an extraordinary one ; for, as we
have seen, he witnessed physical action under circumstances so
intensified in interest, as in mortal combats, that the faculties of
the artist were rendered acute and penetrating.

The athletic sports of the ancients also afforded fine oppor-
tunity for studying the physical form. Their five gymnastic
exercises were boxing, running, wrestling, leaping, and throw-
ing the discus. The physical form was developed by careful
training. Persons of all ranks participated in these sports.
Pericles had won prizes, and so had Socrates, and these triumphs
were always regarded with pride. In these games the body was
generally nude; the surface of the skin was rubbed with oil, to
toughen the fibre. We see in one of the finest statues of the
ancients — the “ Apoxyomenos” — an athlete scraping himself
with the strygil, after his return from the arena.

Thus we may form some idea of the nature of the experience

400

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

whence the Greek artist drew his inspiration and his sense of
fine action and true proportion. That the ancients had certain
fixed standards of proportion there is no doubt. By some it is
claimed that the Greeks derived their standard of proportion
from the Egyptians, and a statue known as the“ Water-carrier,”
or the Egyptian Antinous, is adduced in evidence of this deriva-
tion ; but the historic origin of their system we will not now
discuss.

In Egyptian sculpture the proportions of their statues were
rather more than seven heads high ; they were equally poised
upon both legs, often one foot is advanced, and the arms hang
straight down on either side ; or if one is raised, it is bent at
the elbow at a right angle across the body. Their attitudes are
simple and rectilinear, without lateral movement. In contrast
with this, the Greeks, even in the earliest times, were freed from
this rigid and constrained type. Between the Greek and the
Assyrian there is thought to be a resemblance of forms and
types that might indicate direct descent, if indeed the Greeks
owed anything to foreign influence. Whatever may have been
borrowed in the earliest times, the Doric migration created a
new spirit which pervaded the Greek people and asserted their
independence in forms of government, art, and life. Diodorus
remarks that the Egyptian artists wrought after an exact
measure, but that the Greeks were guided by the accuracy of
the eye. Winckelmann refutes this, and indeed it is now well
known that the Greeks employed in sculpture, as in their archi-
tecture, certain fixed ratios of proportion, which, however, dif-
fered at different times and with the change of subject. The
Egyptian Antinous, now in the museum of the Capitol at
Rome, is thought to embody proportions that are found applied
in the finest examples of Greek art. The measurements derived
from this statue are found to correspond to those of the
“ Theseus” and the “ Ilissus,” by Phidias, examples of the best
period of Greek art. These portions have a wider application,
covering a larger number of the best statues, than any other
known standard. Vitruvius, tho writing on architecture, gives
details and statements respecting the proportions commonly
employed by Greek sculptors. He says, “The members of the
body have certain proportions that were always observed by

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART.

401

the painters and sculptors” of his time, which was that of
Augustus; and he adds, “We must always look for them in
those; productions which have excited universal admiration.”
He then designates these proportions as follows: “ The measure
of the head from the chin to the top of the scalp is an eighth of
the whole body ; the face from the top of the forehead should
be one-tenth part of the whole stature.” The face he divides,
longitudinally, into three equal parts; the foot is, in length,
equal to a sixth part of the stature. All measurements are
longitudinal. “ The height of the human frame is equal to its
breadth when the arms are stretched out,” etc. etc.

It is observable in the works even of inferior sculptors of
Greece that the proportions of their statues are generally fine,
altho in purely artistic qualities they may be poor. This, I
think, evinces a knowledge of some system of measurement
that was common to all their artists.

It is well known that in their baths, which were places of
general resort for intellectual as well as physical discipline and
recreation, they preserved accurate records of the measurements
of their most distinguished athletes. If one was distinguished
for strength, agility, or grace of form, he was measured accord-
ingly, and these records doubtless supplied the data for deter-
mining a true system of proportional measurements. In modern
times Massaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Raphael,
Albrecht Diirer, and other distinguished representatives of the
arts, have left records of their search for accurate systems of
measurement — they all sought to discover the system of the
ancients. It is partly due to the accuracy of the principles
taught, and to systematized knowledge of this kind, that is to be
attributed, in some degree, that prevalent excellence in art
manifested in Greece in the time of Pericles, and in Italy in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Diirer, in the preface to his
treatise on mensuration, complains that young painters were too
often allowed to grow up in ignorance of the principles of pro-
portion as applied to the human figure. He divided the height
of the human figure into seven parts, each having the same
length as the head. Again he divided it into eight parts. A
woman, he concluded, should be an eighteenth part shorter than
a man ; and in his proportional measurements of the female

402

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

form he follows, perhaps unwittingly, the celebrated standard
of the Venus de Medici. He also gives ludicrous examples
resulting from mathematical variations of proportion, or the
exaggeration of one proportion at the expense of another.

Leonardo termed himself “ the admirer of the ancients and
their grateful disciple; but one thing,” he adds, “is lacking in
me, viz., their science of proportion.” In his own treatise on
this subject he thus writes: “ In general, the dimensions of the
human body are to be considered in the length and not in the
breadth, because in nature we cannot in any species find any
one part in one person precisely similar to the same part in
another.” He “divided the form of bodies into two parts; that
is, the proportion of the members to each other, which must
correspond with the whole ; and the action, expressive of what
passes in the mind of the living figure.” A man, he adds, has
the length of two heads from the extremity of one shoulder to
another; the same from the shoulder to the elbow; and also
from the elbow to the fingers. He agrees with Vitruvius that a
well-proportioned man is ten times the length of his face.

Michael Angelo, as the result of a long life devoted to the
study of the human figure, sixteen years of which were given
to the study of anatomy, declared that there was a harmony
of the proportions throughout, and that “ these proportions
have a law.”

The importance of proportional measurements to the sculp-
tor is apparent in his daily practice. Every statue is “ set up”
by means of such measurements ; and if it be of colossal size,
the symmetry of the whole cannot otherwise be attained. An
ideal exaggeration like that of the Farnese Hercules could not
well be produced without it ; for in that statue the exaggeration
of the general proportions is not only admirably sustained
throughout, but every individual muscle is developed harmoni-
ously in accordance with that exaggeration, and strictly parallel
with nature, tho far removed from nature’s accustomed practice.

Heroic proportions with the Greeks generally included in
the height of the figure eight heads; the common standard for
minor, or portrait, subjects was seven heads. Thus the smallness
of the heads of many ancient heroic statues was the result of
deliberate design ; as was also the lengthening of the lower limbs

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART.

403

beyond the proportions usually found in nature, which lent dig-
nity and elegance to the figure. Winckelmann asserts that the
rules of proportion as adopted in art from the human figure
were first established by sculptors, and afterwards became
canonical in architecture likewise. He states that among the
ancients the foot was the standard of the larger measurements.
Vitruvius states that the ancients gave their statues six lengths
of the foot. Modern sculptors generally adopt the head and
face as standards of measurement. In general, the face may be
thus divided into three equal parts — the forehead, one ; the
nose, another ; and the mouth and chin included in a third.
The ear is of the length of the nose, and parallel with it. The
space between the eyes is of the width of one eye, and the
base of the nose is of the same width ; the mouth half again as
wide.

Every sculptor who is thoroughly conversant with his art has
these proportional measurements instinctively in mind, and ap-
plies them accordingly in modelling a bust or statue. Of course
the individuality of portraiture necessitates accidental deviations
from arbitrary rules.

A few suggestions may be made with reference to action or
pose, as evinced in sculpture. All outward actions of the body
proceed from some inward impulse of mind, unconsciously per-
haps, but nevertheless they bear strict relation to character.
The ancients regarded slow movements of the body as a charac-
teristic of dignity and the profounder movements of thought.
Demosthenes reproaches Nicobulus for his quick mode of
walking: he connected impudent talking with quick walking.
An elegant composure of action is a marked characteristic of
Greek art. There is perhaps no more marked contrast in art
between the ancient and modern idea of the manifestation of
supreme power than that afforded by the Jupiter of Phidias
and the Christ of Michael Angelo, as depicted in his “ Last
Judgment.” In the first the expression, the action, is one of
repose — power at rest, unexercised, undefined, consequently un-
measurable. But the Christ of Michael Angelo, putting forth
his denunciation of the damned, evinces a power that must
exert itself for a special object, and with a vehemence that is
disproportioned to a just conception of that power. The up-

404

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

lifted arm and the lowering features, therefore, suggest finite
limitations less grand than the idea of supreme power conceived
by the ancients.

As refined taste, no less than great elegance, was displayed
by the ancients in their draped statues, drapery is by ho means
an unimportant element of beauty in sculpture. As more draped
than nude figures were executed in the early periods of Greek
art — and this continued to be the case in regard to female figures
even in the most brilliant epochs, “ so that fifty draped statues
may be counted for every nude one” — it was, of course, the aim
of the sculptor at all times “ to attain not less to elegance in
drapery than to beauty in the nude figure.”

The statues of goddesses and heroines are always draped,
with the exception of Venus and the graces. The dress con-
sisted of an upper and an under garment, the pallium and the
tunic — the pallium of the Greeks corresponded with the Roman
toga; the tunic was of linen; both garments were usually
white. The women frequently wore three garments — the man-
tle, the tunic, and an undergarment of some light fabric, with-
out sleeves, which was fastened together at the shoulder with a
button. The usual manner of wearing the toga, as seen in
ancient statues, was to draw it under the right arm and cast it
over the left shoulder. Elegance was not considered by the
ancients a property of the dress itself, but as imparted to it by
the wearer in the arrangement of its folds. The earliest Romans
are said merely to have worn the toga; the tunic was a later
addition. Augustus was reproached for the weakness of wear-
ing nether-garments in cold weather. The Greek statues of
Demosthenes and Sophocles are clothed simply with the pal-
lium, or toga. The ancients were never dazzled with the merely
ornamental.

The following selection from the “ Charmides” of Plato may _
serve to suggest something of the Greek susceptibility to the
beauty of physical form: “ ‘ I will question them,’ said Socrates,

‘ whether among the youths of the time there were any that were
distinguished for wisdom or for beauty, or for both.' On this,
Critias, looking towards the door, where he saw some youths
coming in wrangling with one another, and a crowd of others
following, said: ‘As for beauty, Socrates, you may judge for

THE SCULPTOR AND HIS ART.

405

yourself; for those who have just entered are the admirers of
him who is reckoned the handsomest young man now going; no
doubt they are his precursors, and he himself will soon be here.’
‘And who, and whose son, is he?’ said Socrates. ‘You know
him,’ answered Critias, ‘ tho he was a child when you went away.
It is Charmides, the son of our uncle Glaucon, and my cousin.’
‘ By Zeus ! I knew him,’ said Socrates ; ‘ even then he was not
ill-favored as a boy; but he must be now quite a young man.’
‘You will soon know,’ replied Critias, ‘how big he is, and how
well-favored.’ And as he spoke, Charmides entered. He did
seem to me wonderfully tall and beautiful, and all his com-
panions appeared to be in love with him, such an impression
and commotion did he make when he came into the room.
Other admirers followed him. That we men looked at him with
pleasure was natural enough; but I remarked that the boys,
even the smallest, never took their eyes off him, but all looked
at him like persons admiring a statue.”

John F. Weir.

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

IN attempting to define the limits of legislative control of
railroads, whether de jure or de facto , the first requisite is to
find with whom, and subject to what conditions, the ownership
of them lies. Mankind in their simplicity have believed, and
wrought their faith into their fixed and not easily changed
modes of speech and action, that those whose funds build the
roads own them. If the State builds a railroad, it owns it,
as the State of New York owns the Erie Canal. If private indi-
viduals, under a charter of incorporation from the State, build a
railroad or canal, paying all charges for land, construction, and
equipment out of their own pockets, as they have built the New
York Central alongside of the Erie Canal, they own it. But no.
According to that master of bright legal paradox, Judge Black,
in his recent letter, it seems that the common-sense of mankind,
asserting itself in its habits of speech and action, has been all
astray on this subject. He tells us, “The corporations who
have got into the habit of calling themselves the owners of the
railroads have no proprietary right, title, or claim to the roads
themselves, but a mere franchise annexed to and exercisable
thereon.” A little farther on, he likens the proprietorship of
the stockholders of a railroad to that of a collector of a port in
the custom-house he occupies in the discharge of his office.
That is, they are not owners at all. The $ 5, 000, 000,000 expended
by our own and foreign investors in our railroads give them no
ownership whatever. They belong to the State. On whatever
theory such a doctrine may be defended, those who advance it
need not shrink from being called communists. If this is not
communism as respects this immense mass of property, we look
in vain for it. Farmers and all other property-holders may as

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

407

well understand, withal, that no private property can long sur-
vive the grasping of railways by the State. Some indeed, as
Mr. Henry George in his “ Progress and Poverty” (p. 364), who
favor the latter, are already pressing the confiscation of land by
confiscating its rents.

But it is said that the State owns these properties because a
part of the land they occupy has been obtained, by the exercise
of the State’s power of eminent domain, from such proprietors
as would otherwise refuse to part with it, if not utterly, yet at
any fair rates. But this is only the power to get it by paying a
fair price, judicially ascertained. To whom does it belong if
not to him that pays for it, and so obtains a deed for it? Of
course the State aims in granting this high power, to secure a
public benefit otherwise unattainable, by enabling parties willing
to incur the expense and risk, to provide means of transporta-
tion so indispensable to the people as railways. But could pri-
vate capital be found to build and run them if it were under-
stood that those who pay for them do not own them? Never.
With such an understanding there would not be one mile of
railway where now we have ten, and this only of the poorest
kind. Besides, what are railway mortgages or debentures worth
if given by those who are not owners of the property?

However the title to the railway is acquired by its proprietors,
in all circumstances it is subject to State taxation unless ex-
pressly relieved by its charter, and also to what is known as the
police law of the State, which applies to all property according
to its kind. This is simply the means by which the body-politic
protects itself from harm. It aims to enforce the principle, sic
ntcre tuo, ut alienum non Icedas. All laws designed to protect
from injury or destruction the persons or property of those
having to do with railroads, whether in moving upon or about
them, such as requiring proper brakes, gates, cattle-guards,
fences, switching safely, etc., fall under this head.

Railroads also fall under the provisions of the statute
and common law respecting common carriers. This be-
' cause they are such. And this law applies to them in a man-
ner corresponding to their nature and peculiarities, holding
them to reasonable precautions to insure safety; responsibility
for losses and injuries to persons and property transported

408

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

by them arising from want of due care ; also to impartiality in their
dealings with, and treatment of, all parties applying for trans-
portation by them. Further, like all other common carriers, the
common law requires that they shall be “ reasonable” in their
charges and accommodations, all circumstances considered. All
this may be assumed, for the purposes of this discussion, to be
enforceable before our courts at common law, without special
enactments, however these may sometimes be adopted by leg-
islatures ex abundanti cautela. But it is not so much the prbi-
ciples of impartiality and reasonableness in fares and accom-
modations that are in debate, as the proper interpretation of
and mode of applying them in relation to the peculiar and
immensely complicated circumstances of railroads. The con-
sideration of these will bring into its sweep the vexed question
of discrimination in rates in all its aspects.

Reasonings based on supposed analogies between railway
and other modes of transportation are very apt to mislead.
English railroad legislation long proceeded on the theory
that they were part of the “ king’s highway.” It tried to fix
tolls of particular articles or classes of articles, till they were
found to be beyond enumeration or feasible classification, and
the whole attempt, like many other forms of legislative inter-
ference, has been gradually abandoned as beyond even the
“ omnipotence of Parliament.” With the advantage of unity
of government and smallness of territory, regulation of railroads
by Parliament has been getting more and more minimized, till
some of the pet schemes of our own reformers have been dis-
carded, because outgrown or proved mischievous by experience.
The railway is a thing sui generis. It is a highway, resembling a
turnpike or canal only in this respect : that it is for purposes
of travel or transportation' by all who desire to use it, according
to the conditions peculiar to it. If built by private capital, it is
privileged to obtain a fair remuneration for this, provided the
public use of it is sufficient for the purpose.

The fixing of the rate of highway tolls by the charter, or by
the legislature, is confined to a few simple things, for which just
and plain rates can be made with comparative ease. Neither are
such roads common carriers. Those who use them may become
common carriers, as they may use any roadway or water-way,

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

409

natural or artificial, in conformity to its nature, for this purpose.
But railroads, while possessing immense capacity for trans-
portation, can only be used by their owners or lessees. Not
only must the road-bed and track be theirs, but all the cars,
engines, rolling-stock, machinery, and conveniences for trans-
portation must be so, and worked wholly by them. Theirs
alone is the power and responsibility. Otherwise these road-
ways could not be worked a single week without numerous col-
lisions and wreckings. They can transport for others, but they
cannot allow others to put their own cars and engines on their
road at pleasure. Their charges must be for transporting per-
sons and freight in vehicles, and by motors and employes wholly
their own, or wholly subject to their control. Now this involves
an enormous expense for repairs of road, track, bridges, loco-
motives, cars, motive power, the vast pay-roll of employes, etc.,
which must be reimbursed from receipts for what they transport ; if
possible, too, with due remuneration to the capital invested. Here
is a vast complexity of expenses, also, in the kinds and amounts of
the articles transported, and of the conditions and circumstances
which affect the relative cost of such transportation. It is not
within the capacity of any legislature, or commission thereof, to
adjust a tariff with reference to each article, or classification of
articles, that shall be always and everywhere reasonable. The
problem is so intricate as to prevent more than an approximate
adjustment of it, even after the longest experience, by railroad
experts and officials themselves. It is ever growing upon them
with new elements of intricacy, and tasking their ingenuity for
solution. The past twenty years have shown that fluctuations
in the price of labor and the purchasing power of legal-tender
money, not less than other causes, render any just fixing of rates
by law impossible.

Meanwhile, nothing in the premises impairs the obligation
of impartiality on the part of railroads towards their patrons ;
that is, of affording all, equal accommodations at precisely equal
rates, under precisely like circumstances. If A and B, at the
same time and place, ask like rates for precisely like ser-
vice, impartiality requires that they both be treated alike. That
there have been some rather gross violations of this is prima
facie established by the testimony taken before the Investigat-

4io

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

ing Committee of the New York Legislature ; pre-eminently in
the case of the Standard Oil Company and its accessories. If the
railroads made any contract, as is alleged and we have not seen dis-
proved, with this company or its accessories which were refused
to others in like circumstances, and especially a covenant to pro-
tect any of these corporations from “ competition,” all this is be-
yond their legitimate province, and contrary to public policy and
morality. No denial nor adequate justification of having made
considerably lower charges for grain transportation to some
great houses in New York than to others has been brought to
our knowledge. Probably a sufficiently keen experience of the
effect of such real or apparent partiality has been had to prevent
its repetition. Probably, too, without the veil of secrecy these
transactions would not have occurred.

On the other hand, we see no sufficient reason for anti-
' discrimination statutes based on the assumption that, in order
to be reasonable and impartial, rates must vary just in propor-
tion to the amount, distance, or speed of transportation. In
order to partiality, unequal favor must be shown to different
persons in like circumstances. Now this does not apply where
a greater proportionate charge is made for a shorter than a
longer haul of the same goods, when the expense of terminal
handling is the same for each. A high authority, speaking from
experience, says that the terminal expenses in New York, inter-
est of capital and all else considered, are equal to one hundred
miles of haulage. Consequently the cost of freight-carriage
from New York to Newark, nine miles, is more than half that
to Philadelphia, ninety miles. It varies, too, with severity of
grades, cost of construction, fuel, etc. Nor does a failure to vary
charges as the amount carried, cctcris paribus , necessarily infer
partiality. It is so evident that larger amounts can be carried
proportionably cheaper than smaller ones, that this has generally
been conceded by the most extravagant adversaries. It is per-
fectly evident that one thousand car-loads could be profitably
taken from Chicago to New York at proportionably lower rates
than twenty. Nay, more : it is demonstrable that it sometimes
costs more to carry a single or few parcels, parts of car-loads, car-
load, or car-loads, a shorter distance than a longer, over which
trains loaded to the full capacity of the engine can be carried to

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

41 I

adequate terminal facilities. A full train of anthracite coal can
be taken from Easton to Trenton at fifty cents per ton. To drop
a single car-load of six or eight tons at a way-station on the road
would, we learn, cost four dollars, 'besides the cost of the haul
there. It can hardly be questioned that a full freight-train from
Chicago to New York can take on its full maximum there at a
cheaper rate per car than it can switch off and otherwise handle
from one to half a dozen cars at Fonda, Deposit, Cresson, or
Martinsburg.

Anti-discrimination statutes, hardening into inflexible laws,
may cause more real partiality than impartiality. Mathematical
ratios seem very conclusive in the abstract, until, in their con-
crete application, they are often antagonized by forces as inevi-
table as those which thwart the finest contrivance for perpetual
motion. The law of impartiality is right. Any fixing of rates
by law to enforce, is pretty sure to defeat it, as much so as a
law that street-cars and omnibuses should charge in exact pro-
portion to the mileage, or hotels in proportion to the stay of
guests, irrespective of other considerations. What cannot be
accomplished by competition, the desire of patronage, public
opinion, and the like, in these respects, never can be effected by
mathematical legislation. Imperfections and grievances will
doubtless remain, at the best, here and everywhere. But all these
things in railroads, and other matters innumerable, whether, as
Lord Coke said, “affected with a public interest” or not, might
be immeasurably worse. In our opinion legislative interference
of the kind invoked would be sure to make them so. Such has
been the effect of it in the Granger States, in Colorado, in Great
Britain, where, of one kind and another, it has been annulled or
minimized after experience of its unhappy effects.1 The courts
can now enforce impartiality as binding at common law on the
common carrier. It is for them to determine in each concrete
case brought before them, whether and how far parties differ-
ently charged or otherwise treated were in such “like circum-
stances” as to constitute the action complained of a breach of
impartiality. But legislatures can rarely frame laws to deter-
mine this that would not encounter as many exceptions as a

1 See “Railroads: their Origin and Progress,” by C. F. Adams, Jr., pp. 80-90.

412

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

revival of the obsolete laws fixing the price of bread and meat,
or a law that merchants should show impartiality by charging
at the same rate for a piece, a bale, or a hundred bales of the
same kinds of goods, and not higher than a certain maximum
profit of ten per cent in any case. As to any secret rates, draw-
backs, rebates, contracts inconsistent with this impartiality, they
are not to be defended. Yet we find that Belgium, in work-
ing her own state railroads, fell into the system of “ special
rates.”1 Abuses of this sort have grown up which due publicity
will rapidly reduce to a minimum.

But it will not do to say that a railroad may not regulate
its rates to a reasonable extent for the purpose of develop-
ing business on its line, because the power is liable to abuse.
All power has this liability. Denied this privilege, many of
them would never be built, especially those depending on land-
grants or running through new and sparsely settled countries.
No doubt special rates may be made in order to plant or de-
velop or keep alive a business that will directly or indirectly
bring valuable patronage to the railroad. Still this must be
subject to the law of impartiality; i.e., it must be done alike
for all and each in like circumstances. “ Reasonable” is the
standard established bv the common law in regard to all de-
mands by and upon railroads, whether relating to the police
regulations for the safety of all persons and property dependent
on their care and vigilance, or to the requisites to impartiality.
The courts are to ascertain and judge of this “reasonableness”
in actual cases brought before them. No cast-iron statute in-
flexible to circumstances can do it. And this reasonableness
may vary with the circumstances of different roads. It might
seem a good law that no cars shall be run without Westing-
house air-brakes. How soon may a cheaper and better brake be
invented ? Or how many roads are unable without bankruptcy
to come up to this grade of high equipment? A decision in a
recent case by a Kentucky court shows how exquisitely such a
tribunal may ascertain the “ reasonable” in an actual case, when
an unbending statute would be a signal instance of sumtna lex ,
summa injuria. It was a question of damages for the death of

1 “Railroads: their Origin and Progress,’’ p. oo.

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

413

a person caused by the wrecking of a train running into a herd
of cattle on the track, where there was no negligence on the part
of the employes of the road, or failure to use all available means
to prevent the disaster. But it was proved that, with West-
inghouse air-brakes, it might have been averted. Hence it was
claimed and adjudged that the company was able to provide
them, and therefore liable for lack of due care and diligence in
not providing them.

We have seen how utterly inapt legislation is, which attempts
to proportion charges to distance or amount of transportation
in all circumstances. Moreover, the value of the service of the
railroads at different places must or certainly ought to weigh in
determining charges. The value of any service, when rendered
to others for compensation, is what they can pay with advantage,
and will pay, rather than not have it. Now, in the case of rail-
way transportation, that value varies greatly for a like amount
of service at different places and times. Where there is a com-
peting water or railway communication, exactly the same service
may be worth far less than where there is none, and more at
some of these latter places than at others. The number of rail-
roads is large which cannot pay expenses, unless they can charge
all along the line in some proportion to the value of the service
rendered. The number is much larger in which no proper re-
muneration of capital can be made without this liberty. They
cannot fairly live without adding to the higher rates which they
can command where there is no competition, the lower which is
the most they can get where there is competition. Without this
they may be unable to maintain the expenses of the trains that
carry all they can get, but not to half their capacity, at the higher
rates. If they were shut up to either class alone, or if they were
obliged to carry all at the lowest rates of competitive points,
they could not live, much less thrive, or get beyond that starve-
ling standard which necessitates the highest rates for the poor-
est service, and adds to a famishing railroad a famishing popula-
tion alongside of it.

All this is conclusively demonstrated by M. de la Gournerie,.
Inspector-General of the French Corps of Bridges and Highways,
to be true not only of railway but other modes of transportation,
in an article published in the “ Bulletin of the Society for the

4*4

THE PRINCETON RE FIE IV.

Encouragement of National Industry in France,” and repub-
lished in the Appendix to the volume of “Testimony of George
R. Blanchard before the Investigating Committee of New York
State.” (pp. 682-3.)

This brings us to the “ pooling” now so largely adopted by
the railroads at their great competitive centres, especially in the
interior, for carriage to the seaboard.1 There have no doubt
been just causes for grievance to shippers and merchants in the
sudden fluctuations of rates of transportation from these great
centres, thus adding another element to the capriciojjs uncer-
tainties so baneful to sound business. It was the shock of com-
petition between these colossal carrying agents — a shock as in-
evitable as the collisions of trains which made such havoc with
life, limb, and goods in the early days of railroads, and which, after,
all the securities devised to prevent them, will occasionally recur.
Desperate unregulated competition tends sooner or later to the
ruin of the roads and the injury of the people. Now there are
only three ways of ending it : 1. Governmental prohibition, which
means forbidding any railroad to carry between competitive
points below a certain minimum rate. And what legislature,
State or national, will undertake to forbid a railroad from carry-
ing as cheaply as it pleases? Or 2. By the stronger crushing
out the weaker, resulting in a survival of the strongest only, if
not the fittest. Is this the issue coveted ? Or 3. What, in slang
phrase, is called “ pooling,” and is advocated by such competent
observers and long students of the subject as C. F. Adams, Jr.,
under the more dignified title of the “ Federation of Railroads.”
The essence of this is an agreement among them for each to
accept as its share of the competitive business, at a moder-
ately remunerative rate common to all, what shall be judged to be
its just proportion by an umpire or board selected by them all to
make the apportionment. This is vehemently attacked by some.
It is said to deprive the public of the benefits of competition.
It has, however, only ended an extreme competition ruinous to all
parties. Mr. Simon Sterne, in his great argument before the
Special Assembly Committee versus the railroads, admits that it

1 On this subject the writer advances no opinions not to be found in his article
on the “ Great Railroad Strike,” in the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Re-
view, for October, 1877.

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

415

“ has brought about a change for the better from that which pre-
vailed immediately before the pooling arrangements were made”
(p. 97). He insists that it “ has been discovered in this country and
England that competition was not the proper regulator of rail-
way charges” (p. 104).

The several doctrines on this subject insisted on by the as-
sailants of the proper autonomy of railroads, would either de-
stroy them or greatly aggravate the evils of which they com-
plain. Suppose that, first, there could be no stop or check to
the internecine competition at Chicago, St. Louis, and elsewhere,
and, next, that railroads must charge the same proportionate
rates from all other points as from these. If they should con-
tinue the competitive through business, and do all other busi-
ness at these ruinous rates, this would soon bankrupt and wreck
them. If they discontinued the through competitive business,
they would be obliged to charge higher local rates from non-com-
petitive places than ever. Or, if this were impracticable, the road
would sink in its condition, equipments, capacity for speed, safety,
and accommodation far below what it is when great through
trains help sustain and make profitable a more perfect road, and
increased accommodations in every department. All places gain
on the whole, even if any lose in some particulars, from the re-
inforcement of local with through business. They commonly
have better roads, better tracks, better trains, and more of them.

In connection with the proportioning of railroad charges
to the value of their services, the question of charging for carry-
ing articles “what they will bear” comes in. This vague and
elastic phrase has figured very odiously, and played an impor-
tant part in late railroad controversies. It was employed in a
joint answer of the presidents of the two great New York trunk-
roads to the inquiries of the legislative committee as follows:

“The managers of a railway company desire to make all the money
they can for their clients, and to do this they have before them the ques-
tion, What rate, within their chartered limits, will an article bear that will
yield the largest profit, and at the same time stimulate its production.”

We have not struck upon the origin of a different twist of
this phrase put in quotation-marks in the question of the New
York Chamber of Commerce Committee, which professes to give

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

the true meaning of the doctrine on this subject of late sanc-
tioned by authoritative railroad managers:

“ 7. Do you think it is safe to allow railroad managers to disregard the
old theory upon which charges for transportation were based ; namely,
that they should be ‘ reasonable ’ and based upon ‘ cost of service,' and
adopt the new theory which they have annunciated of charging 'all the
traffic will bear,' themselves being sole judges of this question ?”

Yet the principle involved is so obvious that the framers of the
question are constrained to admit it in the very document con-
taining it. A page or two farther on in their Report they say :

“ Of course the consideration of what the traffic will bear is one of the
elements entering into the fixing of all rates for transportation, but to for-
mally recognize the abrogation of a principle as great as competition is a
step your Committee believe the American people are not ready to take.”

Why, then, object to railroads considering “what the traffic
will bear” in adjusting their tariff, if in the nature of things it
must come in? It is impossible to exclude the value element
of railroad service from the estimation of its proper price. To
put it as the seventh question above quoted puts it, as if this
were a new standard, excluding “ reasonableness,” consideration
of “cost of service” and competition, is absurd. By their own
showing it must be a great element in determining “reasona-
bleness” of charges, and the necessity of it grows out of com-
petition at least as often as anything else.

As to “abrogating competition” in transportation, it is im-
possible and undesirable. It needs regulation, not destruction.
Like so many other things, within bounds it is an inestimable
good ; beyond these it becomes an agent of devastation and
ruin, like an uncontrolled locomotive, or a fire let loose. Abro-
gate competition ! As soon abrogate gravitation or the tides !
There are forces that will and must prevent transportation
charges from competitive points rising for any length of time
above, if they cannot prevent their falling below, a reasonable
standard. One is the great navigable water-courses from the in-
terior, west, south, north, and south-west to the ocean. Another
is the steady multiplication of new lines from the great interior
railroad centres where agricultural products accumulate for
transportation to the Atlantic and gulf ports. Now if from

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

417

great competitive points, which these new lines are con-
stantly reaching, profits can be made at much lower rates than
those now established by mutual agreement of existing lines, the
new lines will immediately “cut under” them, in order to grasp
a larger share of the business than they could be allowed in the
pool. Here is competition. Not only so; but rates *must be
limited by the very nature of things unless the managers would
limit and minimize their business. If their rates rise above cer-
tain limits, they raise the price of our products in foreign mar-
kets too high for export, and consequently cut off transportation
for this purpose. This of such great entrepots for distribution and
transportation at home and abroad as Chicago, St. Louis, and
Kansas City. But there is hardly a local town of importance on
our great trunk-lines which is not pierced by competing lines,
direct or indirect, to all important points, in addition to navigable
waters in close proximity. Moreover, an undue tariff from any
place of importance is sure sooner or later to bring competition,
and to impair the business and patronage that would otherwise
arise. If all these were abolished, the competition between cities
would still operate. There are forces more certain and mighty
than legislation that will keep alive all that is healthy in com-
petition, especially so long as a general railroad law, now almost
universally prevalent, confronts special charters and monopoly
privileges.

The report from which we have just quoted proposes what is
so often and loudly urged, that the people should “take every
constitutional means to prohibit combinations and enforce com-
petition as if the two were incompatible. We do not see how.
Combinations are of two kinds; either of those which form parts
of a continuous line, as the several roads between New York,
Albany, and Buffalo, which were combined in one corporation,
the New York Central and Hudson; or of those which go from
one point to another by different routes, as the New York Cen-
tral and Hudson, and the Pennsylvania, from Chicago to New
York City. The former sort of consolidation it is about as easy,
sensible, and advantageous to prevent, as it would be to turn the
Hudson River into a series of separate levels by dam and lock
for slack-water navigation. The vast gain in economy, speed,
safety, profit of transportation to the railroads and the public,

418

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

from placing long stretches of railroad under one direction is too
plain to be disputed. The progress of such unification can no more
be arrested than the westward march of empire. Probably, how-
ever, it is the other form of “ combination” that legislation is to be
invoked to prevent ; viz., an understanding between roads run-
ning from one competing point to another by different routes.
It will take something more than legislation to prevent forward-
ers from the same place to the same place charging the same
rates, and from having a mutual understanding what this rate
shall be. Adversaries themselves being judges, this is far better
for all parties than desperate and reckless competition.

But railroads are corporations, and corporations are the por-
tents of the time, mightier than the people, and swaying an iron
sceptre over them. Surely human depravity worms itself into cor-
porations as well as elsewhere, and in all places in some propor-
tion to the scope offered it. The question is not whether it
shall, but how it shall least, infest all things human. But do
those who are declaiming and raving against corporations really
think themselves through to the logical outcome of such
assaults? It is utterly impossible to harness the gigantic
forces of nature to serve man, as steam is now made to do,
without employing immense masses of capital for this pur-
pose. Small capitalists are debarred from all possible partici-
pation in this kind of property, unless it is divided into shares
capable of distribution and ownership in larger or smaller par-
cels, held and managed by a corporation. Otherwise these
vast properties so necessary to the convenience, commerce, and
productiveness of the country, must be exclusively the private
property of single or few individuals. Is that the alternative so
much coveted ? Probably not. The outcry against corpora-
tions is an outcry not only against a few railroad magnates, but
against the vast multitude of small owners, including widows
and orphans and the prudent laborer whose savings are invested
in them, whether they be railroads, canals, banks, mines, manufac-
tories, steamboat companies, or whatever else. To hurl these cata-
pults at corporations is but saying, either that the productive
properties they hold shall be annihilated ; or that they shall be
owned by individuals, single -or in partnership ; or that they shall
be owned by the State — from which latter condition we might

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

419

expect utter political demoralization and national bankruptcy.
What are all the present “spoils of victory” in elections in
comparison with a prize of $5,000,000,000, now rapidly expand-
ing to $10,000,000,000? Where the carcass is, there are the
vultures. Are not our river arid harbor bills proof enough of
this ? And as surely as every Stony Brook or Buttermilk Falls
now demands its appropriation as a condition of voting for ap-
propriations for improving real harbors, will not every cross-
road demand its railroad station as a condition of authorizing
really national lines? Is it not pretty certain, too, that when
other revenues for the purpose fail from exhaustion, the vacuum
will be supplied by the indefinite issue of irredeemable legal-
tender paper money — from all which may God deliver us !
Demagogues are already proposing, as the watchward of future
political campaigns, that “ all privileges conferred upon corpora-
tions are rights taken from the great body of the people,”
and to “ assail corporations and the officials who act in their
interests,” and “ on this line to establish an aggressive cam-
paign.” Such people may light a fire. Any incendiary can do
this. It does not follow that they can so easily put it out be-
fore it burns them out. Let this raid on corporations succeed
in destroying them, and they may contend for other property
tenures who will. They will doubtless get their labor for their
pains. The great landholders will come next, and the smaller
ones will quickly be drawn into their wake. Agrarianism and
communism will luxuriate in the ashes of their own fires.

We may not ignore the fierce outcry against railroads as
monopolies and extortioners. Judge Cooley says : “ The word
monopoly has an ominous sound to American ears, and when-
ever the appellation fairly attaches itself to anything, it is already
condemned in the public mind” (PRINCETON REVIEW, .March
l878,p. 257). Hence the eagerness with which the assailants of
any kind of business, privilege, or property try to make it odious
by hurling at it the epithets of monopoly or extortion. But in no
proper sense are the railroads of the country monopolies. They
are all exposed to the construction of competing lines, and it is
only the fewest that have wholly escaped, and fewer still that will
hereafter wholly escape competition. Most of the States allow
the construction of railroads ad libitum , under general laws. In

420

THE PRINCE TO. V REVIEW.

others, special charters are freely granted when asked by peti-
tioners able and willing to build roads. No vestige of railroad
monopoly exists. To say that because people have only a sin-
gle railroad near them, therefore this road has monopoly privi-
leges, is like saying that cases of being near a single store, or
craftsman, or hotel, turns them into monopolies.

Never was a truer sentence uttered than that of the late Dr.
Chapin at some festivity in New York : “The LOCOMOTIVE IS
A GREAT DEMOCRAT.” Nowhere, not even at the polls, are all
more completely on a level than in the American railway-car,
and that, too, in the enjoyment of advantages and comforts
unknown half a century ago to the proudest monarchs, with
thousands of chariots and horses at their command. But the
steam-chariot cannot thus be a great democrat without being
also, within due limits, a great autocrat. On his own road he
must be sovereign. All else must give way and clear the track.
Nothing must or can stand before him. One master-mind, too,
must rule the whole road and its motors, or confusion and deso-
lation come in place of those blessings which, rightly guided,
with colossal might, he bestows on all. And yet, as with man
himself, his unmatched strength is close to the greatest weak-
ness. The endowments whereby man is a but little lower than
an angel, in the very image of his God, make him capable of
becoming a very worm, a brute, a fiend, “ crushed before the
moth.” So, if the locomotive can move man and his products
with a resistless energy and speed, a rotten tie, a loose spike, an
unseen flaw, a mischievous boy, or senseless animal may get in
its way, and, even if destroyed itself, precipitate it and its train
to utter destruction.

We have uttered no uncertain sound in favor of regulated, and
against reckless, competition. Not less than for other reasons
we favor the “ federation of railroads ” in order to fix steady
and fair prices for transportation, and prevent such evils, so
far as they are due to this cause. Nor have we yet heard of
any other mode of preventing these that would not bring in
tenfold greater ones. But, as it is not possible that all evil can
be utterly eliminated from competition, or anything else earthly
and human, however beneficial on the whole, let us none the less
do our best to minimize it. It is also worth while to remember

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

421

that fluctuation of railroad rates is, even at its worst, but one of
many more formidable, yet unjustifiable, causes of such fluctua-
tions, which are quite beyond the reach of legislation. We speak
not now of those which arise from fluctuations of supply and
demand, issuing from providential causes, such as the state, of
the crops, markets, belligerent or peaceful relations at home
and abroad, but rather of what is due to the voluntary inter-
ference of mischievous human agencies. Prices of the chief
articles of railroad transportation are constantly forced up
and down, not only to the prodigious risk and frequent ruin
of dealers in these articles, but even to the taking of the
bread out of the mouths, the life-blood out of the veins, of
the poor and needy, and the stinting of the comforts and neces-
saries of life for the average laborer. What are all the variations
of railroad charges in their effects on merchants, shopkeepers,
and the cost of subsistence to the people, compared with the
“ corners” produced by the great speculators and Napoleonic
gamblers in wheat, pork, cotton, coffee, and the like, who seek
to control the market, and, by monopoly prices, to enrich them-
selves through a forced levy on every consumer in the land? To
wrench these out of the people by a turn of their speculative
crank is to such men as light a matter as a snap of the finger.
We notice names connected with this onset upon railroads for
causing fluctuations of prices, of men who have alternately
grasped millions and got mired in bankruptcy by such foolhardy
tossing of the dice, to gain or lose all, in trying to monopo-
lize and force up the prices of indispensable necessaries or com-
forts of life. What then ? Can legislation stop it? It has not
been yet found how, without interfering with that freedom of
contract which is one of the highest prerogatives of man, to
surrender which is a degradation, to possess which is to possess
what is capable of immense abuses as well as noblest uses.

Men are about Wall Street not only dealing legitimately in
money and securities, but wielding money by the million, and
tens of millions, for the sole purpose of so raising or depressing
prices as may further their speculative movements. Nothing is
more common than to loan millions one day upon call to tempt
smaller speculators for a rising market, and to call it in the next
day, or when it suits their purpose, so as to strangle the simple-
28

422

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

tons they have lured into their toils. This not only makes or
ruins, helps or hurts, the neophytes who are scenting the Stock
Exchange for the chance of finding a bonanza in the wake of the
“ great operators,” but it tightens money and causes injury in
every department of business, and nowhere more than in pro-
duce, groceries, and dry-goods. Can any legislation be devised
to stop this which will not do far more harm than good? Even
in the church, tares will get mixed with the wheat, often so that
they cannot be rooted out without destroying the wheat.

Much is said of railroads revolutionizing the seats of trade
and of special industries. There is no doubt of it and no help
for it, nor is this any just ground of complaint, unless it be
caused by what, all things considered, is partiality towards par-
ticular persons and places. It has been the effect of improved
methods and routes of transportation and travel in all ages and
countries. The Erie Canal pushed the great sources of wheat
and lumber supply to the west of where it had been. The rail-
roads have driven them still farther and yet farther west. This
is inevitable. As surely as man will seek the maximum of utili-
ties with the minimum of effort, he will use the railroads and
steamships to this end when he can. What then? Has this
destroyed or impaired agriculture in the Eastern or Middle
States? Never. It has changed the form of it somewhat.. But
statistics show a great increase in Massachusetts and New York
of the number of farms, the quantity, variety, and value of
their products, nay, even a considerable advance in the amount
of wheat raised in the Empire State. That some thin and ex-
hausted farms should be abandoned or pass into the hands of
foreign-born laborers now become capitalists is a matter of
course, railroads or no railroads. To complain, as some do, that
one cannot be sure that the business-place he buys in New York
now may not be less suitable and valuable five years hence, and
lay it to the charge of the railroads, is puerile. It is hardly forty
years since the average New York merchant felt that he had
made the surest provision for his family if he left them stores
in Pearl Street, then the centre of dry-goods jobbing. This has
since crept up Broadway and cross-streets, till it centres around
Franklin Street, while Pearl Street property is relatively second
or third class. Scarcely a generation has passed since the Astor

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS. 423

House was the leading hotel, without a rival above City Hall
Park, and considerably less than half a century since it was
built. The railroads are responsible for this only as they are
responsible for the growth of the metropolis.

The question of limiting the earnings or dividends of rail-
roads has comednto some prominence in connection with these
discussions. This cannot be of great moment as long as the
average dividends of the railroads of the country are about
two, and in the most favored States ordinarily only three, per
cent on their capital.1 * Of the great trunk-lines, the Erie with
its enormous earnings is, and- always has been, saying nothing
of the future, far enough from any dividends from earnings.
The Pennsylvania had to suspend them for years, and the
Baltimore and Ohio at various times. Mr. Hepburn, Bank
Superintendent of the State of New York, says, in his recent
report, that in the State of New York, “excluding leased
lines, there are only two railroads, the New York Central and
Hudson, and Boston and Albany, that for five years past
have paid consecutive annual dividends amounting to five per
cent each.” 3 As to the leased lines, the lessees, with a single excep-
tion, to the best of our knowledge, altho ranking as wealthy
corporations, have paid no, or next to no, dividends for nearly the
same period. Now as to profits, New York railroads stand high,
on the average, in competition with those of the entire United
States. The risks, therefore, of railroad investment are some-
thing tremendous, arising from various sources : the frequent
lack of remunerative business ; the liability to lose it through the
construction of competing lines ; the exposure to all sorts of de-
structive casualties from fire, flood, tempest, collisions, flaws
in rolling-stock or rails ; the neglect or forgetfulness of servants,
in all of which the railway company, i.e. stockholders, must
indemnify for losses and injuries, sometimes of prodigious magni-
tude, consuming profits, and even bankrupting roads. At best
there is the constant exposure to new and competing roads which
may render a property, before valuable, utterly or comparatively
valueless. The risks are therefore immense. All losses must be

1 See “Railroads of the U. S.,” by Edward Atkinson, p. 29.

s Supplement to Com. and Financial Chronicle, Feb. 1881, pp. 1, 2.

424

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

borne by the stockholders first and creditors next. Must the
shareholders be cut off from all chances not only of fair interest
upon the capital invested, but even of generous profits in the
very exceptional instances in which rare opportunities and
management may honestly yield them ? If so, this is unlike any
business. Capital will instinctively be shy of it if it must bear
the most unlimited losses, with no chance for the gains when
they are handsome. In point of fact the cases are few in which
railroads have averaged six per cent from the first ; fewer still
that have averaged eight. Most roads now solid and paying hand-
some dividends for years paid none. On the other hand, many
roads once dividing ten per cent have come to divide nothing.
As to stock dividends, in slang phrase called “stock-watering,” if
they represent earnings applied to the improvement of the road
rather than to dividends when earned, what can be more just?
If made on no such basis, they are only the company’s choice as
to number or form of shares.

As a general principle, we doubt the policy of restricting the
earnings of railroads by legislation. We think prosperous rail-
roads a far greater blessing to the community than bankrupt,
starving, or poorly paid ones. They are more likely to keep up
and advance their roads to the highest state of speed, safety,
commodiousness, in order to keep and increase their business,
by cheapening its cost to themselves and the public, while they
increase its quantity. Thus only can they withstand competi-
tion. Thus only can come the substitution of steel for iron rails ;
of heavy rails for lighter ones ; of heavy for slender ties ; of broken
stone for ground ballasting; of a double for single track ; of a
triple or quadruple for a double track; of stone or iron for
wooden bridges ; of crossings above or below other roads instead
of at grade, or, where this is impracticable, the substitution for it
of gates and flagmen ; the increase of terminal facilities so neces-
sary and yet so costly in our great marts of trade. A railroad is
never completed, and the further it is perfected in such a way
as to lessen its risks and the danger to those who use it, to
cheapen and expedite its service, while this is responded to by
an increase of business that warrants and takes advantage of it,
the better for the public. and the road.

So statistical tables show on the great-trunk lines a constant

THE REGULATION OF RAILROADS.

425

growth of business, at constantly decreasing rates and charges,
and a gradual increase of profits, until their charges have fallen
a great deal below a cent a ton per mile. Yet they are able, by
means of their economies and improvements, to make money
now at rates that would have bankrupted them a few years ago,
and would now bankrupt them upon a small business. Who
believes that any such result could have been reached under any
conceivable system of State management ; i.e., management at
the behest of politicians dependent on universal suffrage for their
places and opportunities of emolument? For, after all, it will
turn out that those who control the votes which lift political
parties to the ascendency will for the most part have the places
at their command. And it is one thing to regulate railroads or
any other business by selecting for service persons because they
can command votes, and another by selecting them on account
of their pre-eminent fitness for the position they fill. Gen. J.
H. Devereaux has been recently reported as saying:

“Tonnage is so heavy that the difference of the small sum of one mill
per ton makes the difference of a dividend or bankruptcy. On my road it
makes something like $400,000 difference, while on the New York Central,
I do not hesitate to say, I think it makes a difference of $2,000,000.”

Think of that, and think of the legislature attempting to fix
a tariff. It were better occupied splitting hairs, or seeking Cap-
tain Kidd’s treasure. The fact is, had it undertaken any such
function in the past, the economy of railroad transportation never
would have reached this “ fine point.” If the New York Legisla-
ture prohibits “ discrimination ” charges on the railroads no more
than it does on the canals it owns, they have not much to fear
in this way. It is stated that the Canal Board has abolished all
tolls on west-bound traffic — but that it discriminates against all
salt made out of the State ; doubtless in the interests of the
farmers and butter-makers on its line and beyond, who could
well afford to quadruple railroad freights if they could thus expel
counterfeit butter from the market.

The railroads have received their charters from the States.
They are subject to the police regulations of States ; to State
taxation ; to the principles of common law applicable to them as
common carriers or otherwise ; to such statute laws of States

426

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

adapted to their special peculiarities, with respect to these mat-
ters, as may be found necessary and involve no violation of their
charters. But they are entitled to the unimpeded use of the
privileges granted in their charters, short of manifest abuse. This
cannot be interfered with without violation of that clause of the
national constitution which forbids any action by State authori-
ties impairing the obligation of contracts. And for reasons al-
ready adduced, we do not think the exercise of the State power
to interfere by statute with railroad tariffs ordinarily expedient,
even if its existence were unquestioned. No clear judgment in
respect to this power, so far as we knew, has yet been given by.
the U. S. Supreme Court. That given in the granger cases
related to roads in which the States reserved in the charters
given the power to change them at pleasure. It has no reference
to charters not thus conditioned. But the experience of the
effects of this granger legislation and its like everywhere has
led to its substantial abandonment, as hurting not only the rail-
roads, but still more the people.1

What is known as t*he Reagan bill in Congress reported from
the same committee as the River and Harbor bill, by Mr. Reagan
as chairman, would be vastly more mischievous than the granger
legislation of the North-west. Several features of it are obnox-
ious ; such as making a “ car-load the unit,” prohibiting pooling,
enforcing the same proportional rate for one as any number of
such loads, and applying criminal penalties for charging more
than reasonable rates without clearly defining what is a reasona-
ble rate. This is a very different thing from a railroad being
answerable in damages for charging unreasonable rates, the

1 “ Wherever State control or ownership has been attempted, it has failed to pro-
mote cheap railway service. The history of the Tunnel and the Hartford and
Erie legislation, when fully written, will be marked not only by their utter failure
in securing the objects aimed at, but by corruption and fraud, by the subornation
of legislators, by the prostitution of the powers entrusted to the senators and rep-
resentatives for private ends, and even in the very last session by the open sur-
render of the interests of the State to the supposed requirements of the private
clients of legislators.” (Atkinson, p. 28.) See also that bright book, “Chapters
in Erie,” by C. F. Adams, Jr., for still more terrible legislative and judicial pros-
titution in lending support to plunderings of stockholders of railroads, on a scale
of enormity to which civilization furnishes scarcely a parallel. Let the eight-
hour laws of Congress, the New York capitol, the New York City court-house,
the canal rings, the street-cleaning of the city, the pilot monopolies, convey their
own lesson on the management of railroads by politicians.

THE REGULA TION OF RAILROADS. 427

courts being judges of all the circumstances in each case which
make them reasonable or unreasonable. But our objection to
this national interference lies deeper. The general question of
trenching on the prerogatives of the States aside, we believe this
whole pretension is ultra vires , beyond the scope of national
power over interstate commerce. So far as we know, this power
has never been exercised, even if it has been invoked, to deter-
mine the prices of interstate transportation. It was, we believe,
never conveyed for any such purpose in our national Constitu-
tion. It has been exercised chiefly, if not wholly, to remove ob-
stacles interposed or permitted by the States to free commer-
cial interchange between them, or between this and foreign coun-
tries. Can the national government, under pretext of regulating
interstate or foreign commerce, say what carrying vessels and
steamers on the Ohio, Missouri, Mississippi, the Delaware, the
Atlantic coast, across the ocean, shall charge for passengers and
freight? If they can, the power is merely theoretical, which
may as wisely be exercised as the power to secure the importa-
tion of wheat into the United States, if such power exists. We
have a still deeper aversion to this from the practical side, for
reasons so well stated in the answer of the Massachusetts Com-
missioners to the Chamber of Commerce committee, which our
limits prevent us from quoting. It proves that all present evils
connected with railroad management compare with what would
grow out of congressional supervision, as ant-hills with moun-
tains.

There is, however, one danger to our channels of interstate
communication by railroad with which the power of the national
government is alone adequate to cope, and which it ought effectu-
ally and promptly to prepare itself to meet. We refer to the
violent stoppage of these arteries of the national life by strikes,
mobs, and riots, of which the great railroad strike of 1877 gave
us dire experience and ample premonition. The days and weeks
in which violent men stopped the interflow of commodities
between the interior and the seaboard amounted to a reign of
terror, and showed us how quickly it could not only arrest
foreign and domestic commerce, but precipitate a famine. We
know not how soon this may occur again. The last two com-
mercial panics (in 1857 and 1873) were precipitated by sinking
immense amounts of capital in unproductive railroad-building.

428

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

This process has commenced already. Brokers are, as we
now write, offering 6-per-cent gold railroad bonds at about
90. General Devereaux predicts a speedy crash. We trust it is
not near. But come in due time it will and must, necessitating
that lowering of wages which is sure to be resented by strikes.
These might be borne if other workmen were allowed to take the
strikers’ places. But that is resisted by violence, else the strikers
are baffled. Now here is the time and place for the national
government to intervene with its fullest power ; to insist that
these arteries of interstate commerce shall not be cut, and to
protect the liberty of all to work the railroads without molesta-
tion, by grapeshot and cannon-ball if need be. Was it not hu-
miliating, in 1873 that this great nation was disabled by mobs
and ruffians from carrying its own mails with punctuality and
regularity ? And are any wire-drawn theories about overriding
State rights again to fetter and disable the nation from defend-
ing its own life and property in mob-beleagured States?

We will only add that laws are needed to prevent fraud on the
part of projectors and managers of railroads, by which they dis-
honestly tempt the ignorant and unwary to sink their savings in
mere speculative enterprises, or by which the stockholders in good
railroads are unwittingly stripped of their property for the special
behoof of the managers. Railroads ought seldom, in our judg-
ment, to be allowed to create a bonded debt or advertise bonds
for sale not backed by something like an equal amount already
expended on the road, or its equivalent in lands as security.
Rarely, if ever, should railroad managers be allowed to buy,
lease, or otherwise get control of a connecting or parallel road
with the funds or on the responsibility of the original road, with-
out sanction of the stockholders first obtained after due notice.
Many roads have been weighed down by onerous leases of this
kind which have inured to the benefit of managing rings at the
cost of the stock- and bond-holders. We believe that due
publicity here as in regard to rates of transportation, and all the
rebates and drawbacks heretofore too often kept secret, would
prove the sure and adequate remedy for the evils that have
furnished any serious ground of complaint.

Lyman H. Atwater.

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION.

HE comparative study of the non-Christian religions has,

as every one knows, become in recent time a prominent
subject of public attention, and is likely so to continue. It has
even been ticketed with the name of a “ science,” in accordance
with the fashion of the day — or, it may be said, with the intent
of claiming for this department of investigation a breadth of
basis, a strictness of method, and a certainty of attained results
analogous with those of other departments commonly called by
the same name. As to whether the claim is well founded
opinions will, and with good reason, differ; yet many who now
regard the title as at the best prematurely assumed will allow
that the study may, if successfully conducted, grow into the
proportions and solidity of a science. In any event, it is desira-
ble to see what are the fundamental views held, rightly or
wrongly, by those who are devoting themselves to the science ;
and to set these forth, as looked at from its own point of view,
is the object of the present paper.

The new “ science” is an inseparable part of the study of pre-
historic man, of the origin and development of his culture, his
knowledge, his institutions, and his arts. Its nearest affinity is
with the modern science of language. The analogy between the
two is so close that the one is constantly called in to illustrate
the other. Almost every student of general language is drawn
over perforce to investigate the history of religions also ; and in
popular opinion (especially among English-speaking peoples) the
same authority is even credited with the establishment of both,
and with just about as much and as little reason in the one case
as in the other. Beliefs and practices such as we call religious
are as widely found among men as any of the other ordinary

430

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

constituents of human culture (whether they are to be deemed
universal is a point considered further on) ; and the method of
their fruitful study must plainly be, like that of all the rest, a
comparative one : the widest possible collection and co-ordina-
tion of facts, with careful deduction of general principles and
determination of causes. There can be no successful investiga-
tion of any part of man’s historical development in any other
way; we are too much the creatures of habit and of the preju-
dice engendered by habit to comprehend the character of what
we ourselves possess, or to see how we should have come into
possession of it, save as we set it beside the kindred possessions
of our fellow-men.

It has been till recently, and is still to a considerable extent,
the prevalent assumption that the universality of religious phe-
nomena among men could have no other ground than a primi-
tive revelation of some sort, a miraculous communication to the
ancestors of our race of a certain amount of absolute truth
respecting the unseen world and man’s relations to that world,
which truth has been variously lost and disguised and corrupted,
till in place of it have come the systems, ranging through every
conceivable degree of falsity and degrading absurdity, which we
find to have actually existed in the earth since the first begin-
ning of historical record. If this were true, the task of a science
of religion would be to determine the amount and character of
that primitive revelation, and to demonstrate in human nature
and human circumstances the reasons of so signal a disappoint-
ment of the purposes of the revealer in making it. This would
furnish sphere and occupation enough for the scientific student.

But it hardly needs to be pointed out that the whole ten-
dency of modern scientific thought is opposed to the passing of
such an assumption unchallenged. It seems a part of the old
free-and-easy system of accounting by a miracle for anything
that seems difficult of explanation ; and that system has long
been tumbling to pieces, undermined by historical research.
Until within a comparatively short time, it was questioned by
no one that the earth was turned out of hand a few thousand
years ago, called up out of nothing as a ready-furnished abode
for men, with a firmament of heavenly bodies revolving about it
for his convenience and pleasure. At present no cultivated

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION.

431

person holds any such view ; we recognize the action of second-
ary causes, operating through immense periods of time, as finally
bringing about the state of things with which we are familiar —
the last (so far) of a series of states which were very different
from it and from one another. An example of closer applica-
tion is presented by language : the doctrine was formerly current
that a ready-made vocabulary and grammar had been put into
the minds and mouths of the first human beings by a super-
human agency ; and that variation, not unaided by miraculous
intervention, of that original tongue had resulted in the infinity
of dialects now existing. But the students of language have
come to see clearly that men as they are, with the natures
implanted in them and in the circumstances by which they are
surrounded, not only might, but certainly would, work out by
the normal exercise of their powers means of expression and
communication such as we now see them possessed of ; and that
the origin and history of speech are thus completely accounted
for by causes which we are accustomed to call natural. This
explanation is not yet so universally accepted as is that of the
geological history of the earth ; but only because it is newer,
and deals with considerations of a less palpable, physical order:
no well-informed and candid man will question that the evidence
in its favor is capable of rising to a degree of force that shall be
practically irresistible. Nor is the case far different with the
other institutions of our race. Every people that has risen high
enough in intellectual curiosity to speculate on the beginnings
of its culture has attributed them to the direct agency of its
gods, unable to understand how they could otherwise have come
into being at all; unable to conceive of primitive man as set
down in the earth naked and weaponless and destitute, and yet
endowed with powers by whose gradual training and exercise
he should win the forces of nature to his service, and gain com-
mand of a wealth and knowledge whereof we do not yet see the
limit.

Now it seems evident to the modern students of man’s his-
tory that the same question has to be raised respecting his
religious institutions that has been already raised, and in good
measure answered respecting his languages, his organizations of
society, his arts, and the rest. We must at any rate look to see

432

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

whether there is anything in ordinary and universal human
nature that should necessarily lead men to the discovery of
religious truth, or of what they take for such, to the formation
of a body of beliefs and of practices incorporating those beliefs.
That is to say : men being such as we perceive them to be, and
their circumstances such as we know them, are the great mass
of the religions of the world to be accounted for as results of
the normal exercise of men’s faculties under government of the
usual motives to their exercise? If such is found to be the
case, the scientific study of religions wins a very different basis;
indeed, we may even claim that it for the first time finds a solid
basis at all. For the miraculous is no proper matter of scientific
investigation. This can be carried on only in the way of observa-
tion and comparison ; and a miraculous intervention neither
comes at present under the ken of the student, nor is admitted
by him in the past for any department of man’s development
save the religious. If, on the other hand, we have within our
reach the whole material of study, with all the forces whose
action is to be allowed for, in human circumstances and human
nature respectively, the problem is a truly scientific one, like
that of the origin of language or of the solar system, and capable
of such solution, more or less complete and detailed according
to their inherent difficulty and our command of the necessary
data, as scientific problems in general admit. The use, then, of
the name “ science” of religion, or of anything equivalent to it,
implies that there is believed to exist in observable human
nature something which regularly and inevitably leads to the
formation of religions. And such is the firm belief of those
whose views we have undertaken to set forth. As things now
are, a religion of some kind constitutes a part of every existing
form of culture, and is handed down to each inheritor of that
culture — like, for example, his language ; but if we could sup-
pose them all torn up to the last rootlet and flung away, some-
thing like them would (we cannot tell in how long a time) spring
up to take their place, and that without any superhuman aid.
How much of absolute truth would be in any or in all of them
is another question. The Christian believes that only by an
auxiliary revelation could the rooted errors of every heathen

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION.

433

belief be destroyed, the actual origin and destiny of man made
known, and the successful practice of righteousness assured;
and it involves no relinquishment of this belief to admit the
natural and necessary growth of such reachings-out after the
truth as religions of the origin just assumed would be, or as
those are which are now seen in existence outside the pale of
Christianity.

But what is the faculty or tendency in human nature work-
ing toward such an end? To call it a “ religious instinct” will
not help us much : any more, in fact, than the assumption of a
linguistic instinct to explain the formation and use of language,
or of an architectural instinct to explain the building of shelters,
from the ice-hut of the Eskimo to the palace of the European
noble. The application of the word instinctive at all to the produc-
tions of human intelligence amounts to a confession of inability
to say anything in explanation of them. We recognize instinct
in the song of the solitary cage-reared bird, precisely agreeing
with that of his kindred in field or forest ; or in the dam-building
of the tame beaver in his waterless hutch ; but man’s way of
working is by the slow process of observing and comparing and
deducing and applying means to ends — a process of which, when
his powers of reflection are developed by culture, he can give a
reasonable account to himself. Beavers’ dams are practically
alike, wherever set up; but religions are as unlike as buildings;
and an instinct or special faculty producing them all would cer-
tainly admit of an analysis that should leave only a minimal
residuum for the pure unalloyed product of the faculty itself :
the differences between religions are many times greater than
the difference between certain religions and nothing at all. Of
still less use, if possible, is it to trace religion to a desire to
“ apprehend the Infinite;” nor is it easy to see how one should
imagine that by such a dictum is contributed any aid either to
the theoretical comprehension of religion or to the explanation
of its origin. It reminds one of nothing so much as of the wis-
dom of the Sunday-school orator who, having let fall the word
“ abstract,” immediately added, “ You will understand that by
an ‘abstract ’ I mean an ‘epitome.’ ” Or it is as if one were to
ascribe language to a yearning to incorporate the incorporeal, or

434

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

instruments to a tendency to enslave the energies of matter.
Such indefinite and high-sounding phrases are only a cloak to
hide poverty and indistinctness of thought.

No one will deny that the object of religious inquiry, in all
ages and stages, is to learn something about the Maker and
Governor of the world, and our relations to him : the question
for us to solve is, What should lead even unenlightened men to
enter upon such a far-reaching and difficult inquiry, and what
should put into their minds the answers with which they strive
to satisfy themselves? The solution lies so near at hand as not
to have been missed except by those to whom a simple solution
is no worthy one. Before and around all men alike are spread
out the works and ways of the creation, in which, if anywhere,
the nature of its creator is to be read. If we take any other than
the transcendental view, asserting that we know only our own
existence and states of mind, if even those, we must hold that
man is in his most essential character an intelligent being, capa-
ble of being impressed by those processes of the external world
which communicate themselves to him, of apprehending them,
studying them, reasoning upon them, and adapting himself,
actively and passively, to them. If there is a Creator, it is the
simplest thing in the world that men should gain from his works
some knowledge of him, and ever more and better. But, also,
if there be none, or none of whom we can have any real knowl-
edge, men, on their way to the recognition of the fact, will
postulate one, and give him form and attributes, in a series of
successively amended incorporations, until the error of even the
last and best of these shall be finally discovered.

The intellectual agency at the bottom of the process, efficient
equally in the unenlightened and in the enlightened stages of
human development, is the simple faith in the connection of
cause and effect, the belief that behind every effect lies a cause,
which is to be sought and may perhaps be discovered there.
That such a belief is firmly established in the mind of every
human being is universally allowed, tho as to how it came there
there is plenty of dispute, some regarding it as an intuition, a
part of the very structure of the mind itself, while in the view
of others it is rather an article of mental furniture, an immovable
fixture, a deduction from experience, which shows so widely and

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION.

435

constantly that one thing proceeds necessarily from another, and
that a thing is because something else has preceded and led to
it, that we generalize it into a universal rule, of which the sway
grows firmer with every new experience of necessary sequence.
On such points opinions will probably always be at variance, ac-
cording to the character and training of those who form them (a
certain American metaphysician of no mean repute holds even
that the law of gravitation is an intuition) ; but so far as our
present purpose is concerned the variance is of no account. The
truth that we need is one conceded by all ; namely, that men,
even the lowest, will look for a cause or causes behind those events
of external nature which concern them, and will find or imagine
one ; will frame a theory to explain whatever they regard with
interest. Every race that has risen above the very lowest cares
of provision for continued existence has some sort of a philoso-
phy, or theory of the universe ; and, as a part or aspect of this,
a religion. The philosophy is the more comprehensive thing,
including the religion ; but the latter is the more practical and
urgent, and apt to outgrow and overshadow the other. The
philosophy is a matter of curious inquiry; the religion, one of
absorbing personal interest. How it comes to be superadded
we have now to go on and ask.

In the first place, as the problem of explanation of the phe-
nomena outside himself must inevitably arise in the mind of
man, however primitive and untutored, so the solutions he
devises will as inevitably be anthropomorphic, and for the sim-
ple reason that he can form no distinct conception of anything
of a different character. To him, he himself and his kind are
the active and efficient agents whom he knows and knows best —
agents that can devise and make, that can form a plan and carry
it out. Accordingly, behind the effects of nature he conceives
a set of more or less manlike effecters — beings endowed with
will and the ability to execute it; of superhuman power, because
their works are on a scale of grandeur far beyond the measure
of man’s abilities ; undying, because they act on and on without
cessation ; invisible, because they are only perceived in what
they do ; but endowed, if the vivid fancy of their believer gives
him sometimes glimpses of them, with a form resembling his
own: in short, magnified and intensified human beings, with

436

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

only such variations and additions as the imagination working
on a human basis may suggest. All the occurrences of nature
are paralleled with human proceedings: the wind is blown
breath ; the thunder-storm is a battle ; the sky looks down at
night with innumerable eyes ; the earth is a mother, bringing
plants and animals to birth when fertilized with showers of rain
by the heaven-father; the sun rides up the sky; he shoots
burning arrows at the earth; or he is born in the morning out of
the bosom of the night and dies again at evening — and so on in
endless variety, which it is needless to attempt here to illustrate.

There follows from this a corollary, which may well enough
be at once noticed : No religion having a natural origin can be
otherwise than polytheistic. The variety of effects to be ac-
counted for leads without fail to the assumption of a variety of
causes. The power to penetrate this variety and discover
beneath it an essential unity belongs to a later and higher stage
of development. A theory of primitive monotheism suits well
enough with one of primitive revelation, but with nothing else.
This seems so clear as to call for no labored argument to sustain
it. And the facts of religious history are wholly in its favor.
No trace of monotheism is to be found anywhere in the world
except with a polytheism behind it : witness the Semitic poly-
theism out of which issues the Hebrew, and later the Mohamme-
dan, belief in one god, or the Aryan polytheism underlying
both the dualism (if it is fairly to be so called) of Zoroaster and
such philosophic unity of creator as Hindu sages of the later
time have sporadically come to hold. Where the contrary of
this is sought to be discovered — as, for instance, by some
authorities, in the Vedic hymns — it is only by an inversion of
the true and obvious relations of things, and by other fruitless
straining of facts to sustain an untenable theory.1

1 That there is room, beside these two fundamental varieties of religion, to
set up a third, a “ henotheistic,” as has lately been done by Muller and some of
his imitators, is by no means to be conceded : the so-called henotheism is a
purely individual phenomenon, of the most subordinate consequence. A heno-
theist is one who, while fully and constantly believing in a variety of gods, yet
cannot refrain from ascribing to the one whom he is at the moment worshipping
more than the strictly due share of power and prominence in the system. Any
one who keeps a fetich or carries an amulet is as much a henotheist as is a Vedic
poet ; or, for that matter, whoever acknowledges a patron-saint.

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 437

So far we have noticed only the philosophic factor of belief :
the mere recognition of extrahuman and superhuman powers
under anthropomorphic forms is not yet a religion. But the
other factor follows this by a necessity. Anthropomorphism is
internal as well as external ; it extends to character and motive
not less than to shape and mode of action. The manlike beings
who wield the forces of nature have also the feelings and pas-
sions of men, the disposition to do good and to do harm, and
the capacity of being propitiated. If men could hold on their
own independent way in the midst of nature, careless of what
happened about them, their philosophy would never grow
into a religion. But that is far enough from being the case:
the supernatural powers are all the time interfering for good or
ill with the concerns of man ; his whole happiness is at their
mercy; they send down upon him alternately blessings and
calamities ; causes outside both of himself and of his fellows are
either frustrating his best plans or furthering them to a success-
ful issue ; and this he must attribute to the favor or disfavor of
those whose will he regards as expressed in such influences.
Propitiation must be attempted ; if possible, one must ingratiate
himself with the unseen beings whose benevolence is so impor-
tant to him ; or he must deprecate the malevolence they show.
Hence follow two results of the highest consequence. In the
first place, the practice of sacrifice and offering, which is a
feature of every known religion : offering of property, deemed
valuable to the divinity because it is valued by the offerer, and
in every kind, from insignificant trifles up to animal life, and
even that most precious article, human life ; offering of what-
ever may be in other ways costly to the worshipper, as labor
and penance, fasting and vigil, mutilation and self-torture ; and,
where the religion rises to a higher and more spiritual strain,
offering of homage, of praise and of prayer. In the second place,
the practice also of such conduct as will be pleasing to the super-
human powers. And what that is the anthropomorphic rule,
of course, determines. Whatever is held by the man himself to
be good and desirable he cannot but regard as acceptable also
to the divinity. Religion thus re-enforces conscience, and adds
a new sanction to the feeling of duty. The thing which should

be done wins a greatly enhanced authority, as being demanded
29

438

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

by those under whose direction is the government of creation.
Man makes himself and his conduct in this way a part of the
general order of things : with what important effect is too obvi-
ous to need to be pointed out. This is the highest and the
most elevating aspect of religions. They gain a moral element,
and become furtherers of righteousness. The ideal of morality
set up by different religions is, to be sure, a very various one,
and often low enough ; it cannot, in fact, but correspond to the
grade of enlightenment of the moral sense reached by the vota-
ries of each faith ; but it is never altogether wanting, and it acts
everywhere as a quickening and purifying influence ; in devotion
to religion is found in general the highest virtue and the fullest
self-abnegation of which individuals in a given community are
capable.

We are prepared now to lay down what may be called a his-
torical definition of a religion, one representing its character as
a historical development, taking due account of the elements
that go to make it up, and applicable to any and all, whether
the amount of truth contained in them be greater or less. A
religion is the belief in a superhuman being or beings whose
actions are seen in the works of creation, and in such relations
on the part of man toward this being or beings as prompt the
believer to acts of propitiation and worship, and to the regula-
tion of conduct. It is a philosophy with the application to
human interests added ; and not only added, but, as could not
well be otherwise, made the prominent consideration : for man
is everywhere ready enough to regard himself as the highest of
nature’s works, and to believe everything else made for his use
and behoof ; and, even if this were not so, his own destiny and
what bears upon it is to him the thing of most consequence.

It will be clear from this why the question as to the univer-
sality of religion is a real one, and liable to different answers
even from those who have the same, or nearly the same, facts
before them on which to found an opinion. For there is nothing
absolute about the presence or absence of religion in a certain
culture, as there is, for example, about that of oxygen in a cer-
tain compound. It is a matter of degree ; and hence the ques-
tion of fact is in part also a verbal question : Are we justified in
giving the name of religion to what is so little, or to what is so

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION.

439

low ? As regards the quantity, it seems certain that, whatever we
may deem possible in the very initial stages of cultural develop-
ment, no race of men has ever been actually met with which
had not arrived at some body of views, tho of only the most
indefinite and shadowy character, respecting the forces — that is
to say, the beings : for in such a mental condition the one is the
necessary form of the other — expressing themselves in the phe-
nomena of nature ; the germs of a world-philosophy are every-
where to be met with. That might be, however, without
excluding the possibility that the feeling of relation between
the extra-human forces and human beings which leads to acts of
propitiation should be nearly or altogether wanting. Such a
deficiency we call a lack of religiosity, or of the religious sense ;
and we see that it can be traced to absence of imaginativeness
or of fervor of disposition on the part of certain communities, as
on the part of individuals in any community. But that it is
ever so complete in a whole race as to occasion a total absence
of practices that may be denominated religious is not generally
believed. Religious institutions are held with probability to
form some part, if only a minimal one, in every scheme of cul-
ture, however elementary, that has yet been brought to light.

A much more serious question is this: How broad and deep
are we to draw the line between religion and superstition ?
That in their origin and essential nature they are alike is not to
be denied. Both include a recognition of the supernatural, and
a desire and attempt to win it over to the furtherance of human
welfare. The distinction between them appears to be one of
degree, and yet the difference in their tone and spirit is so great,
as also in their effect on the human mind and on human culture,
that we are naturally loath to give the nobler name to the more
ignoble and degrading thing. We may also fairly say that the
modern agnostic philosophy is bound on the same general
errand ; it, too, is searching after the hidden forces of universal
nature, and striving to make them subservient to man’s interests,
as well as to his craving after knowledge ; and it is of high im-
portance to note this pervading analogy in men’s dealings with
the extra-human, from the very beginning through to the end.
But, as the last of the three has succeeded in eliminating the
element of a religion altogether from its belief, must we say also

440

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

that the first has not reached the height of a religious belief?
The surface distinction between religion and superstition is
obvious enough : the former looks up, the latter looks down. A
religion has gods, whose worship does at least something to
idealize and exalt the worshipper. A superstition is rather the
incorporation of cringing terror; its gods are omnipresent evil
influences, its rites are magic, and its priests are sorcerers. The
lowest and most synthetic form of recognition of the super-
natural is fear of the dark; it is almost to be called an instinct,
and is universal among those who are childish, in years or in
development. It is not the mere feeling of helplessness when all
that capacity of defence that depends upon sight is taken away ;
there is in it the element of the uncanny, an overmastering
dread of unseen hostile powers. That which in the lowest races
takes the place of religion is hardly more than an expansion of
this feeling into an infinity of details, and an attempt by magical
devices to establish such relations with the hostile powers as
shall enable one to ward off their malevolence from one’s self
and turn it in the direction of others. An anthropomorphic
conception of the forces of nature is as clearly traceable here,
and as much the fundamental and determining element, as in
the religions of a higher stage. But another anthropomorphic
element is also very widely found in such beliefs; namely, the
interference of disembodied human souls. It is astonishing how
generally, in every stage of culture, men have been unable to
believe that death is the last of a man. Races are the rare
exceptions who do not hold, with greater or less distinctness,
that those who have left this life are transferred to some other
condition or place of being, and retain, at least some of them
and at least for a time, their identity and the interests and dis-
positions that belonged to them in life. The more conspicuous
illustrations of this are in everyone’s mind — the happy hunting-
grounds of our Indian tribes; the Valhalla of the Norse warrior;
the Hades of the Greeks ; the resort to Y ama, first semi-divine pro-
genitor of the race, by his descendants and followers, which was the
simple old Vedic belief, afterward altered into a series of heavens
and hells, and still more into a system of universal transmigration,
for the later Hindus; the ancestor-worship of the Chinese, strik-
ingly akin with the Vedic; and the belief, obviously underlying

ON THE SO-CALLED SCLENCE OF RELICLON. 44J

the funeral rites of the ancient Egyptians, that death is a transi-
tion state, paralleled with the underground nightly course of the
sun; and that, if the right means are used, the personal identity
may be indefinitely maintained, until the time of awakening
shall arrive. The impressions under government of which, with-
out the aid of any revelation respecting another world, this doc-
trine of existence after death grows up, assuming such variety
of form, have been often set forth : inability to credit the com-
plete stoppage, often suddenly and in mid-career, of so high an
activity; the analogy of the deathlike, but only temporary, con-
dition of sleep; dreams and visions, in which the dead are seen
as if still living, or in which distant and strange scenes are visited
by the sleeper; and other the like. The lowest and most super-
stitious form of the doctrine is the simple belief that the dead
come back again and mix themselves in the affairs of the living,
for good or for evil, but, in accordance with the cringing charac-
ter of this stage of faith, especially for evil ; accompanied, of
course, by the further belief that they can be called up and
their action controlled and directed. And this mixture of the
post-human with the extra-human is capable of being carried so
far that the distinction of the two becomes evanescent, and the
spirits of the departed and the hostile spirits that are threaten-
ing harm to men from behind every natural phenomenon are
well-nigh or quite identified. The whole class of doctrines
belonging in this lowest stratum, and in which this peculiar kind
of anthropomorphism has blurred the line between the human
and extra-human, has for some time past gone by the name of
“ animism" — a successfully descriptive and useful designation,
provided we do not suppose ourselves to have explained by it
the nature of the system, or fail to resolve its varieties into the
action of their determining causes in human nature, and of the
same causes which have given birth also to the religions of
higher class.

Since low superstitions of the kind we have been noticing
seem to be characteristic of a stage of intellectual development,
the inclination is strong among students of religions to regard
them as historically the antecedent and foundation of whatever
is higher; or, rather, to assume as underlying the polytheistic
religions a condition of belief in which there was nothing better,

442

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

nothing more definitized and clear, than in the forms of animism ;
for some of these have worked themselves out into such a com-
plex of degrading and disgusting practices that the possibility
of their development by internal forces into anything more
elevated seems excluded ; the ground they occupy is barren of
good until cleared of them by some destructive process. But
no religion is free from admixture of superstitious and magical
elements ; not even professed acceptance of the very highest
can banish from men’s souls all allegiance to practices that
belong to the lowest. Devils and demons continue through all
changes of faith to be the anthropomorphic solution of the
problem of evil ; the practice of witchcraft was forbidden, not
its possibility denied, in the most enlightened communities of
the world down to almost our own time; and lucky and unlucky
times and acts, and the evil eye, and amulets and consecrated
rosaries, and so on, attest even now the almost insuperable diffi-
culty of rooting out of the mind those persuasions which have
been from the beginning of time the source of false religions.
Religion alone is not equal to the task ; only under the added
influence of physical science, which draws with sure hand the
boundary-line between the human and extra-human, and substi-
tutes a philosophic for a magic control of the forces of nature,
does witchcraft lose all its power and disappear, simply because
it no longer finds any credit.

Our general conclusion, then, must be that the question
where, in the continuous development of men’s inferences from
the phenomena of nature respecting the forces that move
nature — that is to say, of their philosophies — the element to be
distinctly called religious comes in, as well as where it goes out
again, is mainly a question of the division of things that pass
into one another by insensible gradations and are mixed together
in varying proportions; and so that it is a matter for reasonable
difference of opinion, and of only subordinate consequence in
comparison with our recognition of the unity of those tenden-
cies in human nature, acting under the impulse of human cir-
cumstances, which produce the whole course of the development.
The number and variety of beliefs and practices in the sphere of
religion is infinite, and in their details a subject of extreme diffi-
culty to deal with ; even as the number and variety of men’s

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 443

languages, and of the formations and combinations which these
contain. In them are incorporated all the differences of men’s
capacities and dispositions, working themselves out under all
the differences of external conditions mixed with conditions of
historical sequence. They may be found set forth more or less
fully in the many descriptive works on the heathen religions
which have appeared in recent time ; we have no room here to
exemplify them, even briefly and in the way of illustration.

It follows from the views here taken that there would of
necessity grow up, in every primitive community that was
homogeneous and held together long enough, a certain body of
common views of the system of nature, with the consequent
admixture of a religious element, or of what did duty as such,
finding expression in words and acts and institutions ; and that
these would be handed down by tradition, changing as they
went, like other practices and institutions. Now, of all tradi-
tional institutions, the language of a community is found to be,
on the whole, the one that cleaves closest, leaves its traces
longest, and yields the most accessible and the most trustworthy
evidence. There is nothing else which discloses so much respect-
ing the existence and fates of those early communities which were
in great part races also, and apart from which, at any rate, we
shall never know much about the ancient divisions of humanity.
If, then, we discover in language evidence of the former exist-
ence of a unitary community which has spread and branched
and scattered until its dialects have come to occupy a consider-
able part of the earth’s surface, we shall have no doubt that it
possessed before its dispersal a common religion, of which traces
may be expected to be found in the various beliefs of those
among the now separated branches which have not in the mean
time undergone a religious revolution. Every one knows what
is the most conspicuous and important illustration of this truth
that has yet come to light : the establishment on the evidence of
language of a primitive Indo-European mother-tribe, from whose
tongue have descended those of all the enlightened communities
in Europe and of a part of those in Asia, at once challenged a
search after relics of the faith that must have been held by that
mother-tribe. And every one knows how well the search has
been rewarded : how that the records of the old Vedic mythoh

444

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

ogy, chancing to exhibit something of the same exceptional
primitiveness which belonged to Vedic language, were applied
successfully to explain the mythologies of the pre-Christian
periods of the other branches, Greek, Latin, Germanic, and the
rest ; nay, that even beneath an upper crust of Christianity have
been found all over Europe in popular festivals and superstitions
and legends — in short, in the whole department of folk-lore —
abundant traces of the original Indo-European beliefs. This
discovery laid, in fact, the practical foundation of the whole his-
torical and comparative study of religions ; since it was seen
that what had been found true in this instance might, with due
allowance for the difference of circumstances, be found true
elsewhere. The idea of ethnic religions, and of their divarica-
tion by traditional growth, was clearly grasped, and the method
of their historical investigation was established, and then faith-
fully extended and followed out. Another natural result was
the linking of the comparative study of religions to that of lan-
guages, which had been and continues to be its most efficient
aid ; the striking analogies of material and mode of treatment
between the two have been already referred to above.

An ethnic philosophy with its accompanying religion has its
normal growth by gradual modifications and additions and
losses, just like a language. Each successive phase of it con-
tains nearly the whole of the next preceding phase, and more or
less of yet earlier phases, in proportion to their distance. In
spite of all the changes passed upon it, the traditional basis long
continues traceable, altho, after a lapse of time greater or less
according to the rate of alteration, it is capable of disappearing
beyond recovery ; even as the original structure and material
of a language may be wholly hidden from sight by the disguising
growths of a later time. Hence it follows that the first shapings
of the hitherto indefinite views of a race, their first crystalliza-
tions into the form of doctrines, or myths, or individualized
divinities, must have an influence out of proportion to their
intrinsic importance upon the views of after-generations and the
history of development of those views : even, again, as the first
beginnings of structure in a developing language go far to deter-
mine the lines of later growth. But the growth of a religion is
by no means wont to be informed throughout by the full intel-

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION.

445

ligence of those who hold it, and to change only in adaptation
to the changes of their religious sense and of their comprehen-
sion of the world about them. On the contrary, it always tends
to outgrow the understanding of its votaries, and to become a
traditional system of names and forms, taken upon trust and
believed in because hitherto believed in, its fundamental doc-
trines obscured, its practices only half comprehended, and their
origin wholly forgotten. What in the history of language is
analogous to this is the oblivion of the imitative and interjec-
tional basis on which its first spoken signs rested, and its reduc-
tion to a purely conventional and traditional character; and
then, further, the constant virtual repetition of this process in
the neglect of the etymological meaning of individual words,
and their transfer to offices which that meaning would never
justify. But language is an instrumentality of which practical
availability is the highest quality ; and since this is only fur-
thered by the complete conventionalizing of its constituent
words and forms, the conversion is to be regarded as a normal
and healthful one ; while the traditionalizing and formalizing of
a religion is of quite a contrary tendency. The rationale of the
process is simple enough. As a rule, all over the world, a child
grows up believing and worshipping as those about it, especially
its parents, do; following the same religion with them, and the
same sect of a religion, if there be such, down to its minutest
subdivision, by the mere force of imitation and instruction.
Then, when he grows older, and should have a judgment of his
own to exercise in the matter, his habits and prejudices are
already so formed as to render him incapable of a real judg-
ment, and he goes on to the end as he had begun, accepting and
in his turn propagating such doctrines and rites as he is used
to, with a comprehension of them far less than would have been
needed to compel his free and independent adhesion to them,
making his religion a matter of faith with every degree of
insufficiency of knowledge down to its total absence. A doc-
trine at its inception is strongly felt ; it is the direct expression
of the religious sense of its founders; but their actual vision
becomes transmuted into the blindness of imitation on the part
of their successors. A divinity is inferred from a certain class
of effects in nature, and receives a name and is invested with

446

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

certain offices and attributes ; then he becomes more and more
an object of imitative worship and echoed description, and all
that was at first characteristic of him is blurred into indistinct-
ness. The history of rites is the same. The religious practices
of a community come to be an established institution, having an
independent propagative power of its own, its general purpose
well enough understood, but all its details lacking the living force
that once belonged to them. The stated performance of a fixed
ceremonial, public or private, gets to be viewed as the highest
religious act. It is by no means only in the department of
religion that human institutions have the tendency thus to
swing off their natural basis and acquire an independent value
and sanctity : look, for example, at the way in which the senti-
ment of loyalty has exalted into something almost divine the
simple administrative device that, for the greater stability of
organized society, the eldest son of a chief ruler shall succeed to
his parent’s prerogatives. To hear some of the extollers of
royal legitimacy, one might suppose the world created chiefly
for the purpose of incorporating the great principle that a
hereditary sovereign is master of the fates of his subjects.

Of the formalizing of religion by tradition there are certain
special classes of results which call for brief notice.

In the first place (as already intimated above), the original
significance of the names of gods, and their original spheres of
action, are dimmed and forgotten. As regards the former, their
fate is like that of proper names in general, which, beginning
always with being significant, end in pure conventionality ; and
the individual office, tho the distinct recognition of it lasts
for a time, is equally liable to fade out of knowledge. In the
stage, for example, which the old Indo-European religion had'
reached in Greece, name and office of even the chief divinities
have in general become so disguised as not to be traceable with-
out the most careful investigation, and the help of comparison,
especially with a less metamorphosed stage, like the Vedic;
while even in the latter there are a plenty of doubtful problems.
Sometimes the still discoverable etymology of a name furnishes
a valuable intimation of the primary office, as when we find the
words dyu, “ heaven,” and dyu pitar , “ heaven-father,” in Zeus
and Jupiter, or interpret the Vedic Varuna as the “ enveloping”

ON THE SO-CALLED SCLENCE OF RELLGION.

447

firmament; and it is in this way that language-study furnishes
much of its aid to mythology. But, on the other hand, the
office may be more distinct than the name, as in the case of the
Greek ocean-god Poseidon , or the Hindu god of the thunder-
storm, Indra, at the significance of whose titles only dubious
guesses can be given. Characters and offices undergo redistribu-
tion, and a gradation of rank springs up which is foreign to the
primitive character of a nature-religion.

Again, a mythology is liable to undergo a similar metamor-
phosis. A mythology forms a part of every nature-religion, and
is more or less full and rich according to the liveliness of poetic
fancy of its makers, and the distinctness of anthropomorphic
personification with which they have invested the objects of
their worship. A myth is by origin the statement of a natural
phenomenon, cast in terms of a personal action : thus, Thor the
thunderer hurls his hammer at the giants; it is stolen from him
by the powers of winter, but recovered again after a season ; his
Indian counterpart Indra drives his noisy chariot across the
sky, and transfixes the demon Vritra with his sharp weapon;
the Dawn, a beautiful maiden, opens the gates of morning to
the sun; Night spreads her sable mantle out over the world;
and so on. In the beginning these statements have just as
much distinctness and universal intelligibility as belongs to the
beings to which they attach themselves ; but they too share in
the dimming and transforming to which these are subject. They
are told over and over, passed from mouth to mouth, each time
with some' loss of comprehension of what they really signify,
and with additions and alterations, always in the direction of a
completer anthropomorphism ; till they become mere stories,
bits of biography of the divinities active in them — or of the
heroes into which, by their aid and by the exaggeration of the
anthropomorphic process, those divinities are converted. For,
tho we need not deny that, in the growth of religions, mor-
tals are sometimes raised to the rank of gods, we see clearly
enough that the transfer is usually in the opposite direction ;
legend is in great part mere metamorphic myth, and legendary
heroes are nature-gods humanized into the semblance of flesh-
and-blood men : it is another way in which the boundary-line
between the human and extra-human becomes effaced in the

448

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

naive apprehensions of a primitive people. There is nothing
more obscure in this than in the other parts of the formalizing
transformation of religions under the careless keeping of tradi-
tion ; but because tradition implies the instrumentality of lan-
guage, it has seemed to certain scholars that they account for
the whole process by defining mythology as “ a disease of lan-
guagea definition in which, if we are to take it as seriously
meant, and not as a mere piece of mythologic pleasantry, we
hardly know whether to wonder most at its utter misrepresenta-
tion of language, or at the ignoring of the real forces concerned
which it implies.

Yet again, it is still more obvious that the forms and cere-
monies of a religion tend to become stereotyped, to be practised
by those to whom their original sense is unknown, and would if
realized be unacceptable, and to have a growth of its own, as
ceremonial, without reference to its underlying meaning. Thus,
for example, the infinitely complicated Vedic ritual maintained
itself throughout the whole series of revolutions of religious his-
tory in India, and is even yet practised by the Brahmanic priest-
hood, tho its significance has long since completely died out.
Or — since there is almost nothing in heathen religions which has
not its analogue in the aberrations of one or another form of
Christianity — we may take as an example of a different kind the
growth and propagation of the Romish ceremonial, involving
the metamorphosis of the simple commemorative Lord’s supper
into a miraculous sacrifice, patterned after the sacrifices of the
religions which Christianity displaced.

Once more, it may be fairly claimed that idolatry, wherever
found, is a product of the degradation of a religion. There
seems no good reason to believe that the actual worship of indi-
vidual objects, whether images or anything else, is an original
feature in any religious system, lower or higher. At the outset,
the use of such objects was only an aid to devotion, or help to
the worshipper in his effort to concentrate his thought upon
what is invisible and ineffable; or else, by some means or other,
the particular object has acquired a special portion of the uni-
versal energy, something of the sanctity which is capable of
being attributed also to particular times and particular places.

ON THE SO-CALLED SCIENCE OF RELIGION.

449

The most enlightened worshippers continue fully aware of the
merely representative character of the object : only, of course,
the ignorant multitude as good as deify the symbol, and that in
the highest religion as well as in the lowest. It is but a
descending series from the holy water and relics and miraculous
images of Catholicism, down through the effigies and holy places
of the nations in general, and the almost universal use of amu-
lets, to the rude stone or clod of the fetish-worshipper. Fetish-
ism is the lowest form of idol-worship, yet essentially akin with
all the rest, and, like the rest, a blundering and degraded version
of something better that preceded or accompanies it. And the
very spirit of fetishism is seen in the insistence on the details of
ceremony, and the worship of utensils and postures and dresses,
which are not unknown even within the limits of Protestant
Christianity.

It is to be added that a most important item in the history
of development of a religion, giving enhanced efficiency to all
its bad tendencies, is the uprisal of a priestly caste or guild,
regarded as supernaturally endowed with peculiar wisdom and
sanctity, which takes into its special keeping the doctrines as
well as the practices of the national faith, and authoritatively
expounds the one and performs the other. Not only does this
widen the distinction that must always exist between the in-
structed and the uninstructed worshippers, but it introduces an
element of selfish interest that tends to spread corruption every-
where. We have no room to dwell upon the priestly factor in
religious history, but it plainly does much to complicate the
already intricate combination of causes that enter into and
determine the course of that history.

Under all these influences, it may fairly be claimed that the
normal tendency of a religion, when once formulated and estab-
lished, is toward decay : it is not maintained at its .original
height, but sinks on the one hand into priestly formalism, and
on the other into popular superstition. To a gradual and pene-
trating reform, which should keep it up to the level of the best
and truest thought in the community that professes it, it offers
in general a successful resistance. The case cannot in the nature
of things be otherwise. A religion is, as we have seen, the out-

450

THE PRINCE TON REVIEW.

growth in a certain direction of a philosophy. It is founded on
and includes in its own structure a certain solution of the prob-
lem of the universe, investing that solution with all the inviolable
sanctity which it is able to bestow. Its attitude is not that of
one offering the best light that is thus far to be had, and craving
more ; it is that of one who knows absolutely, and can speak
with supernatural authority. It says, the gods are so and so,
and their government of men is after this fashion, and they are
to be thus propitiated and worshipped ; and he who says other-
wise is an impious blasphemer. And this, partly with all the
fervor of sincere faith, partly with the obstinacy of unreasoning
conservatism, and partly with the selfish fury of a guild that
sees its craft endangered. No religion that does not itself con-
tain and teach the absolute truth can look without fear on those
who, unsubmissive to its authority, are searching after more and
truer truth. This is the ground of the so-called antithesis
between science and religion. Even the Greek faith, hollow and
weak as it was, and nearing its downfall, had vigor enough left
to persecute the philosophers, and put the best of them to
death. The sometimes-vaunted toleration of Mohammedanism
lasted for but a moment of perplexed ignorance, until the faith-
ful realized what was the nature and tendency of the scientific
movement ; when they stamped it out so thoroughly that nothing
more was ever seen of it. Even Christianity, three centuries
and a half ago, had to pass through a revolution, with fire and
sword and endless devastation and misery, in order to make
partially successful what needed not to be the substitution of a
new faith, but only the return to something nearer its own origi-
nal standard, to rid itself of the usual dual product of degrada-
tion, priestly formalism and hypocrisy and popular ignorance
and superstition, and to shake off the Inquisitorial hands that
forced a hollow and fruitless recantation from the lips of Galileo,
and even now would gladly strangle modern knowledge and
education, as subversive of its sway over the minds of men.

Thus the old race-religions could not but become effete,
incapable of satisfying the more enlightened religious cravings
of the communities that had produced them. But, incapable
also of reformation from within, of revivifying themselves by

ON THE SO-CALLED SCLENCE OF RELIGION.

451

absorbing and representing the thought of the best and wisest
of their devotees, they have had to submit to complete over-
throw, and the substitution of faiths of a different origin.
There is no more marked distinction among religions than the
one we are called upon to make between a race-religion, which,
like a language, is the collective product of the wisdom of a
community, the unconscious growth of generations, and a reli-
gion proceeding from an individual founder, who, as leading
representative of the Tetter insight and feeling of his time
(for otherwise he would meet with no success), makes head
against formality and superstition, and recalls his fellow-men to
sincere and intelligent faith in a new body of doctrines, of
specially moral aspect, to which he himself gives shape and
coherence. Of this origin are Zoroastrianism, Mohammedanism,
Buddhism ; and, from the point of view of the general historian
of religions, whatever difference of character and authority he
may recognize in its founder, Christianity belongs in the same
class with them, as being an individual and universal religion,
growing out of one that was limited to a race. For faiths thus
originated have a very different propagative force from their
predecessors : the latter were content with the allegiance of the
race that produced them, tolerant if not interfered with on their
own ground, ready to admit the claims of other faiths like them-
selves, and even to borrow from them ; the former claim an
undivided authority and unlimited acceptance ; they go prose-
lyting, by persuasion or by force, in every direction ; they are
strict to impose uniformity within and break down opposition
without ; and they have long since brought within their pale all
the leading nations of the world.

We have thus made a hasty review of the outlines of what
the historical and comparative study of the world’s religions,
ancient and modern, believes itself to have established, &nd so
solidly that it is likely in the main to- stand, whatever modifica-
tion in minor respects, and whatever filling-in of particulars, it
may receive from the results of future investigations. That it
will ever attain in detail the definiteness of the kindred science
of language is hardly to be expected ; it is a history of men’s
opinions, as inferred from modes of expression far less clear,

452

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

objective, and trustworthy than are the records of speech. But,
whether it attain or not the status of a science, it is at any rate
a branch of the study of man and his institutions having such
importance that no one can afford to be ignorant of its methods
or to disregard its results.

William D. Whitney.

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