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Princeton Theological Seminary Library

https://archive.org/details/princetonreview5818unse

THE

APR 12 1924
^iOGl CAL

R I N C ETO N

REVIEW.

33g ®23f)om, all tijuifls ; for 2Mom, all tijtnfls.

FIFTY-EIGHTH YEAR.

J AN U ARY — j UN E.

I

NEW YORK.
1882.

JANUARY.

nsi

FUTURE PAPER A.ONEY OF THIS COUNTRY .... i
Prof. Lyman H. Atwater, Princeton College

THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN . 26

G. Stanley Hall, Ph.D., Cambridge

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY 49

President James McCosh

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS ART 72

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

ANTI-NATIONAL PHASES OF STATE GOVERNMENT ... 85

Eugene Smith

THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CUR-
RICULUM 103

Francis L. Patton, D.D., LL.D., Princeton Theological Seminary

MARCH.

THE PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF LAND 125

J. M. Sturtevant, D.D., LL.D.

MODERN /ESTHETICISM ' . 148

Prof. Theodore W. Hunt, Ph.D., Princeton College

THE COLLAPSE OF FAITH 164

President Noah Porter, Yale College

A

PACK

PATRONAGE MONOPOLY AND THE PENDLETON BILL . 185

Dorman B. Eaton, LL.D., New York

PHILOSOPHY AND ITS SPECIFIC PROBLEMS 208

George S. Morris, Ph.D., University of Michigan

EVOLUTION IN EDUCATION ,233

Principal Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S.

MAY.

AMERICAN AGRICULTURE .... .... 249

Francis A. Walker, Late Superintendent of the Tenth Census

RIGHT AND WRONG IN POLITICS 265

Sheldon Amos, LL.D., University College, London

ORTHODOX RATIONALISM 294

Newman Smyth, D.D.

THE PAINTER’S ART 313

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

CHURCH ECONOMICS 325

Rev. Dr. John Hall, New York

THE COLLAPSE OF FAITH 339

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

JULY,

PAGE

WAGES, PRICES AND PROFITS i

Hon. Carroll D. Wright

THE PERSONALITY OF GOD AND OF MAN .... 16

George P. Fisher, D.D., LL.D.

POLYGAMY IN NEW ENGLAND . 39

Leonard Woolsey Bacon

RATIONALITY, ACTIVITY AND FAITH 58

Professor William James, Harvard College

THE NEW IRISH LAND LAW 87

Professor King, Lafayette College

PROPOSED REFORMS IN COLLEGIATE EDUCATION . . 100

Lyman H. Atwater, Princeton College

1

SEPTEMBER.

CAN AMERICANS COMPETE IN THE OCEAN CARRYING

TRADE? 1 21

George F. Seward

THE FUTURE OF TURKEY ... .... 133

Canon George Rawlinson, University of Oxford '

THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY IN THE LIGHT OF

RECENT PSYCHOLOGY 156

Henry N. Day, D.D.

PAGB

PERSONALTY AND LAW— THE DUKE OF ARGYLL iSo

Mark Hopkins, Ex-President of Williams College

CO-OPERATION IN THE UNITED STATES .... 201

R. Heber Newton

THE DAWN OF THE ENGLISH REFORMATION ... 215

James E. Tiiorold Rogers, M.P., London

NOVEMBER.

WAGES 241

William G. Sumner, Yale College

THE THEOLOGICAL RENAISSANCE ‘OF THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY 263

Professor Allen, of the Cambridge Episcopal School

GREAT BRITAIN, AMERICA AND. IRELAND .... 283

Goldwin Smith, D.C.L.

THE EDUCATION OF THE WILL 306

G. Stanley Hall, Ph.D.

THE SCOTTISH PHILOSOPHY AS CONTRASTED WITH THE

GERMAN 326

President James McCosh, Princeton College
TARIFF REVISION 345

David A. Wells, LL.D., D.C.L.

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

HE people of this country want a sound paper currency,

in a supply as ample as consists with its soundness and
instant convertibility into coin for its face. If there were no
stronger reason for this, the habit of using it has mastered them.

This habit, however, is due to reasons which are intrinsic
and weighty. They will insure its general use in the long-run,
all demonstrations of doctrinaires to the contrary notwithstand-
ing. It is far safer and more convenient than coin, even if it
be gold, which is some sixteen times more convenient than sil-
ver, except for fractional currency. If lost or destroyed, there
is no absolute destruction of property. A piece of paper has
been lost ; the coin constituting the real value represented by it
remains. The title to it has indeed gone from the loser of the
bank or Treasury note, but it remains in the hands of the bank
or government, whose paper note, now lost, promised to pay it on
demand. There is no destruction of value, but only a transfer
of its ownership. Moreover, the loss from wear and tear and
replacement of paper money is infinitesimal. That from the
necessary abrasion as well as the clipping, punching, and sweat-
ing of coin in constant use would be very onerous, as all his-
tory, especially the state of English coin before the establish-
ment of the Bank of England, and of the old Mexican coins not
long ago current in this country, abundantly proves. Nay, aside
of all wear and other loss, the simple cost of the necessary coin
to take the place of its present paper substitutes would be enor-
mous ; likewise the cost of handling and guarding it. The quan-
tity required for the purpose would be immense ; the cost of
exchange, and by consequence of the articles exchanged, would
thus be much enhanced. Prices would rise enormously even

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

2

measured by a metallic currency, and, in the face of a common
impression to the contrary, vastly beyond the standard reached
under the use of our present convertible paper substitutes for
coin. The coin now used is little more than infinitesimal in
proportion to the paper substitutes for it employed in exchange.
It is simply enough to serve as a measure of value, and bears
somewhat the proportion to the notes, checks, and bills of ex-
change actually discharging the function of money in trade,
which the standard weights and measures of commerce bear
to the articles whose quantity they are used to ascertain. The
paper presented by Controller Knox at the recent Bankers’
Convention at Niagara Falls shows that the responses of 1966
out of 2106 national banks to inquiries made by him proved,
that “the relative proportion of gold coin received was 0.65, of
silver coin 0.16, of paper currency 4.06, and of checks and drafts
95.13 while at the banks in New York City the proportions
were: gold coin 0.27, silver 0.01, paper currency 1.02, checks,
drafts, etc., 98.70 per cent. At Sir John Lubbock’s bank in
London it was ascertained that the proportion of the different
items received in payment for a certain period was : checks and
bills 96.8 per cent, Bank of England notes 2.2, country-bank
notes 0.4, coin 0.6. Mr. Knox also testifies : “ The people
throughout the country everywhere ask for paper, and the
banks find difficulty in ^applying the demand, and a like diffi-
culty in inducing their dealers to accept coin in payment. The
Clearing-House vault in New York is full to overflowing.”

This too demonstrates that the coin ordinarily used in com-
merce is barely enough to serve as the yard-stick to determine
the value represented by the paper instruments convertible into
it which are actually employed. It further confirms the view
of such writers on economics as J. S. Mill, that bank notes or
paper money, so long as convertible , perform a very subordinate
part in inflating that bubble of baseless credit which is the pro-
lific cause of financial convulsions and panics. The loans of
banks against which checks can be drawn, having all the power
not only of paper but of metallic money between those who
respectively draw and accept them, are twenty times the amount
of the paper money, indeed all money, used in the liquidation
of debts and the exchange of commodities. To this source, far

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

3

more than any unhealthy expansion of mere currency kept re-
deemable for its face, is to be attributed the inflation which
portends and causes commercial panics. Whether a bank issue
its credit in the form of circulating notes, or deposits to the
credit of its borrowers, against bills discounted, to be drawn
against by check, matters not. Depositors as well as bill-hold-
ers can demand specie. The real question is, whether it has
loaned its credit to those having means, present or prospective,
to pay these bills at maturity. If so, all is well. If otherwise,
on any large scale, disaster will come to the bank or banks thus
issuing baseless credits, and to the whole mercantile community,
and others involved with them. This is the true secret of com-
mercial panics : baseless credit given on a large scale to prop
unproductive enterprises or extravagant living which consumes
without producing. It may, as the last great commercial panic
did, begin with the' fall of great banking houses that have loaned
their means imprudently, and in their own downfall have shaken
the banks that have sustained them by loans. The notion that a
plentiful supply of bank notes, constituting less than a twentieth
of the actual medium of exchange, so long as they are kept con-
vertible into coin, can cause any considerable and permanently
dangerous inflation of prices and consequent speculation is
groundless. The moment prices are raised abnormally in this
way, importations will come in from foreign countries to reap
these high prices. Foreigners will require these bank notes to
be converted into coin, and the requisite contraction will quickly
come about, especially in these days of telegraphs and steam-
ships. An inconvertible currency is another thing, and oper-
ates on the reverse principle.

Most standard political economists and bullionists from
Adam Smith down have maintained that, if an inconvertible
paper currency made legal tender could be kept down to the
amount of coin that would circulate in its place, were there no
paper money, it would have precisely the same value. It is sel-
dom that a fallacy so gross has shown such vitality. The idea
that bits of paper without intrinsic value, and inconvertible into
coin, because armed by despotic authority with the power to
wipe out debts, can have the same value or fulfil the same
functions as coin or its representative — coin salable in the mar-

4

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.

kets of the world for its face value when it goes out of use as
money — is preposterous. Such government notes have pre-

cisely the same value as stay-law certificates, which they are in
fact. All other money functions or purchasing power in them
are simply derivative from this. Their value is in the main
regulated by the prospect of their redemption as respects the
fact, degree, and time of it. This was shown abundantly dur-
ing and after our last war, in which their gold price fluctuated
from 38 to 100 cents on the dollar, and often several per cent
in a day, according as the fluctuating phases of the war affected
the prospect of their redemption. Would this have been pos-
sible in respect to gold and silver or their representatives ?

It is a notable fact that the panicky element, always an un-
avoidable, tho in one sense needless, secondary aggravation of
commercial crises, which leads to the locking up of money in
hoards beyond the reach of solvent borrowers, through fear that
its possessors may not be able to command it when they want
it, is usually quieted by some device which brings into use some
temporary substitute for the regular currency, and not subject
to its legal limitations. This stops the panic by providing for
the supply of the needs of solvent borrowers irrespective of the
lawful money kept in inaccessible hoards for the time being.
Then the lawful money itself comes out of its concealment,
seeking good borrowers and profitable investment. This after-
ward, so far from continuing scarce, often becomes a drug.
Panics have been repeatedly arrested or prevented in London
by an order in council removing for a time the limitation
upon the issues of the Bank of England imposed by its last
charter. As soon as the merchants found the money could
be had, they did not want it. By a temporary suspension of
specie payments in this country in 1857 the needed inferior cur-
rency was supplied, which dissolved the panic and restored coin
payments in six months. In 1873 the “lawful money” seques-
tered by the panic was not specie-paying; consequently certain
“ bank certificates” were devised to take their place temporarily.
These dissolved the panic, and “ lawful money” soon returned
to its normal channels of circulation.

In discussing the paper money of the future it may be as-
sumed: I. That no better was ever devised than that of our

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

5

present national banks secured by national stocks ; 2. That it
is the national will steadily to reduce and speedily extinguish
the public debt, so that the very basis and possibility of such
a currency will steadily be passing away; 3. The question What
is the best circulating medium to supply the vacuum? is more
concrete than abstract ; not merely what is ideally the best, if
the people could be persuaded to adopt it, but what is the best
that, with their predilections, traditions, and prejudices, they
can probably be induced to adopt.

The practical alternatives are national Treasury legal-ten-
der notes; national-bank notes secured as best they may be by
other means than United States stocks; the system of State-
bank circulation ; the currency provided by some great over-
shadowing national bank and its branches, concurrently with
the circulating notes of State banks, which prevailed through
most of the first half-century of our national history.

Some say, indeed, the State is under no obligation to pro-
tect the people against issues of worthless money, and that the
principle of caveat emptor applies here as well as elsewhere. Bank
bills, however, circulate as money only in virtue of being issued
by public institutions founded and authorized by government.
It is the duty of government to make the best practicable pro-
vision that what thus is made current as money by its own
virtual imprimatur , be good for its face, whether paper or
coin, and to suppress all counterfeit, unsound, and fraudulent
issues. These operate as a fraud upon innocent holders. They
destroy the very standards of value and instruments of honor-
able trade. If the State abdicates this function, there will be
no end of schemes and institutions for creating property, or
rather filching it from the people, by issuing engraved paper
dollars worth less than the paper on which they are inscribed,
in exchange for it. Conscience and the Bible alike pronounce
“ a false balance an abomination to the Lord.” Spurious money
is the worst form of this sort of imposture.

It will be convenient to treat of the different kinds of paper
money which may take the place of the national-bank notes
now secured by the deposit of government stocks in the na-
tional Treasury, in the event of these being retired by the pay-
ment of the national debt or otherwise, in an order the reverse

6

THE PRINCETON RE VIE W.

of that in which they respectively succeeded each other in the
past.

i. The only paper currency left us, without further legisla-
tion, on the extinction of national-bank notes, would be the
legal-tender notes of the national Treasury, in which the former
are now legally redeemable. These could be multiplied indefi-
nitely for the simple cost of engraving by the national Treasury.
If adequate provision both could and would be made to insure
their redemption in gold or equivalent silver, in every emergency-
short of revolution, they would form the best conceivable cur-
rency. It would be the equal of coin without discount in every
corner of our country, and in foreign countries even, to an
extent not easily foreseen. The profit, whatever it might be,
would belong to the people. This, however, is of small moment
when balanced against its soundness and redeemability at what-
ever cost, in order both to preserve the national faith inviolate,
and prevent the moral and commercial plague of inconvertible
legal-tender paper money among a people. Still, to the full
extent to which government keeps in circulation its own notes
without interest, in excess of the amount of coin necessary to
be kept on hand for their redemption, and the other expenses
of maintaining it, it gains a gratuitous loan from the people.
The real net profit of this, after all expenses, at the present low
rates of interest on government loans is not large. It includes,
however, in addition, the slight gain arising from the loss or
destruction of these notes in any hands but its own.

Two questions arise at this point : (i) Whether it could, and
(2) Whether it would if it could, keep them redeemable in all
emergencies short of some social or political upheaval equiva-
lent to revolution, and in the amount required for the public
welfare, neither more nor less?

That it can do this is beyond all doubt. Even on the sever-
est estimate, that its coin reserve must be fully equal to its
paper promises to pay on demand, and that it must have a gold
eagle in its vaults for every paper eagle on the wing, it is super-
abundantly able to do it. The paper currency of the country,
adding the government legal tender to the national-bank notes,
amounts in round numbers to $700,000,000. Government could
easily command this by the issue of 3- to 4-per-cent bonds to

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

7

procure whatever coin or bullion is necessary, in addition to its
ordinary specie reserve, to make up this sum. For this it would
be reimbursed by an equal value of its convertible notes in pay-
ing its obligations and debts of whatever kind. But the govern-
ment can provide for the redemption of its notes on far better
terms. Gold coin of two fifths the amount of the bills issued
would be ample in all normal, and most abnormal, conditions to
secure their redemption on presentation.1 The gold would
rarely be wanted for the paper, except to settle adverse foreign
balances, as long as the bill-holder is sure he can have it if he
wishes it. And the people of the country, if it is their will to
have a specie-paying currency, never will fear that the notes of
their government will be dishonored.

But if in any monetary convulsion panic should arise, even
with respect to government redeeming its notes, the emergency
can be met at once by issuing short-term bonds for the gold
at such rate of interest as will certainly command it, and draw
it from the hoards which will readily yield it up for such golden
securities. This is the normal and effectual way, as all history
shows, of commanding the means to meet 'extraordinary emer-
gencies. The mere fact of its being known that it could and
would be resorted to in case of necessity would rarely fail to
prevent such necessity. Except for meeting foreign adverse
balances, the known fact that in any event the government
could and would provide for their redemption, would prevent
their being presented for redemption. This was well illustrated
by the effect of the 44-per-cent loan which Secretary Sherman
was authorized to make, and did make, in aid of the resumption
of specie payments. It not only accelerated and insured this
at the time fixed by law, but virtually effected it considerably
in advance of that time, and in a way vastly more propitious to
the public interest than any attempt to compass the same end

1 U. S. Treasurer Gilfillan in his recent report pronounces a specie reserve of
40 per cent, or two fifths the amount of all immediate liabilities of the Treasury,
ample to protect them. At present it holds this proportion of specie ‘reserve to
its legal-tender notes, and the full amount of the face of its gold and silver certi-
ficates in coin of each kind respectively, thus making the proportion of entire
coin reserve to immediate liabilities over 51 per cent — about $64,000,000, or,
exclusive of fractional coin, $38,000,000 in excess of an ample coin reserve to pro-
tect all immediate obligations.

8

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

by contracting the currency — a process far more stringent and
disturbing than that of raising it towards par by accumulating
coin for its redemption. There can be no doubt, then, of the
ability of the national government to provide a sound paper
currency, good always and everywhere for its face in gold, and
everywhere preferred to it, with rare exceptions, with equal
profit to itself and advantage to the people. But if it under-
takes this function, will it take the necessary means to make
and keep it always sound and convertible?

It must be confessed that here is where this scheme labors.
Once it is recognized as the function of government to create
money by engraving paper and making it legal tender whether
convertible or not, and there is no end of the temptations on
every hand to repudiate the obligation to redeem it, nay, to
issue it, in such quantities as to necessitate its being irredeem-
able, in furtherance of all sorts of jobs by which all sections
seek to drain the public treasury for their own benefit, or for
the behoof of political parties and the cormorants who fatten
upon them. No doubt a sound and conservative sentiment
will be strong enough to oppose and possibly defeat such a
breach of national faith, and debasement of the very measures
of value and standards of honesty. But it is by no means
certain to prevail. Of that we have had painfully convincing
evidence in the long and severe contest for the resumption of
specie payments, which more than once only escaped failure by
the narrowest, and by the aid of the most adroit parliamentary
tactics or hair-breadth technicalities — thus proving too clearly
that the heart of the people, or enough of them to sway great
parties, was joined to these paper idols and would not let them
alone. These irredeemablc-paper-money factions are even now
courting and courted by political parties. When these are
pretty evenly balanced, they become the make-weights to give
the preponderance to that with which they can make the best
terms. They are possessed with the delusion that value can be
indefinitely created by the fiat of the government making paper
stamped with the word “ dollar” equal to 24^ grains of gold
stamped likewise ; and that so it has only to make the decree,
and it will thus make itself rich, the people prosperous, and
wealth abundant, by engraved pieces of paper.

FUTURE RATER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

9

The recent action of the government with regard to silver
dollars shows a less gross, but none the less real, form of the
same delusion, still dominant in Congress and the national gov-
ernment. As we now write, the silver dollar of 412^ grains is
worth in the markets of the world .8701 of the gold dollar of
the United States. Yet it is made a legal tender for debt of
every kind by congressional enactment for an amount precisely
equal to the gold dollar. Congress, which herein is presumed
to express the will of the nation, not only ordains this equality
of debt-paying power between the gold dollar and the silver
dollar to-day worth less than f of it, but further requires the
continued coinage of at least some twenty-five millions of these
depreciated dollars annually, altho by no device can it keep
the greater part of them in circulation, on account of their bulk
so inconvenient, and on account of their depreciation so unac-
ceptable to the people. Their circulation would be far less if
there were any adequate supply of one and two dollar bills.
This simply proves that the delusion of “ fiat money,” i.e., of
creating intrinsic value by simply legislating it into being, domi-
nates the mind of the nation to the extent of inducing a persis-
tent attempt to add one eighth to the intrinsic value of silver,
by mere arbitrary legislative decree. The principle is precisely
the same, altho less grossly applied, as if the government
should order that a clipped dollar, the present half-dollar, or a
pound of lead, or a piece of engraved irredeemable paper should
be legal tender for equal sums with the present silver dollar.
The only palliating circumstance is the fact, that the existing
silver dollar has the same weight of silver as when in a past
generation it was equal or superior in bullion market value to
the gold dollar. They were then both made of equal legal-ten-
der value, because they were deemed to have the same intrinsic
market value. When thus precisely equivalent in value, gold
will practically supersede the silver dollars in actual use, on
account of superior convenience. The fact that afterwards the
market value of silver so advanced as to make the standard
silver dollar worth more than the gold dollar drove it into entire
disuse, and so effectually demonetized it, on the principle that
the cheaper of two currencies of equal debt-paying power will
always drive out the dearer, all other things being equal. Silver

IO

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

having been thus in fact demonetized except for fractions of a
dollar, the further coinage of it was in 1873 prohibited by Con-
gress. It was thus, to all intents and purposes, abandoned in
fact, and in the public apprehension, as a national coin, except
for small change. This was the state of things when our
national loans were negotiated. In terms payable in coin, the
only coin meant and understood by all parties was the only coin
then made and issued by the government, small change excepted,
i.e. gold. This was expressed and implied in all the phraseology
then in use respecting the obligations of the government pay-
able in coin. No thought of restoring the old silver dollar in
coinage and use was entertained until the Bonanza silver-mines
of the Rocky Mountains and the extensive demonetization of
silver in Europe cheapened it in the markets of the world, mak-
ing a silver dollar of the former weight and fineness worth from
f to -Jg- of the gold dollar. Then arose a loud clamor for the
restoration and profuse coinage of the “dollar of the fathers,”
made equal in fiat or legal debt-paying power to the gold dollar,
worth from 10 to 15 cents above it in the markets of the world.
The profuse coinage of it was then begun, and is now going on,
by command of Congress making it likewise a legal tender for
all debts due to and from the government, and all other persons
and parties.

Now this would have been unobjectionable, not in some
minor points, but in graver and more essential aspects, econo-
mical and ethical, which awakened intense opposition, had this
remonetization of silver been guarded by two provisions which
were purposely and even defiantly omitted. 1. That at the
start the silver in the silver dollar should be so increased as to
make it equal in value to the gold dollar. 2. That its legal-
tender quality should not apply to debts contracted during the
period in which it had been demonetized by law, or of gold
monometallism, but solely to debts contracted when the silver
was concurrently with the gold the recognized legal-tender
dollar of the country. With these provisions the re-introduction
of the silver dollar would have violated no equity. All parties
making contracts to pay or receive money, or its equivalent
paper representative, would have done it knowing what they

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

1 1

were about, and the chance of the payer, and the risk of the
payee, that if either metal should depreciate, the cheaper would
be used to discharge the debt. It would be the only fair bi-
metallism. It is not in the nature of things, or according to
experience, that the relative values of gold and silver should
remain unchanged, whether as affected by the cost of producing
them, or the alternations in demand and supply for useful and
ornamental purposes other than money.

But as it is impossible permanently to legislate value into
any human product beyond the cost of its reproduction, so no
such factitious value can be long injected into silver by any
government or syndicate of governments. The recent confer-
ence of diplomatic representatives of the great powers to fix
the relative values of gold and silver, broke up without seriously
making the attempt; and well they might, for all such attempts
are vain unless they can prevent all discoveries of Bonanza
mines of either metal to lessen the cost of its production, or
can increase the demand for it by arbitrary annulment of the
laws of human nature which determine its wants and their in-
tensity. The apparent exception in the case of the present con-
current circulation of gold and silver dollars, the latter worth
in the markets of the world less than seven eighths of the other,
is no real exception. It is due wholly to government monopoly
of the coinage of silver dollars. If free coinage of silver, or
coinage at a seignorage barely sufficient to pay its cost, were
allowed, as in the case of gold, the process would be a very
short one to the virtual demonetization of gold. All who had
debts of any magnitude to pay would buy silver bullion at pres-
ent prices and demand its coinage at the national mints, thus
saving one eighth of the amount of the debt. The principal
accumulations of gold coin, whether in Treasury or bank
vaults, or private hoards, would with great rapidity find their
way to the melting-pot, or to the steamship for transportation
to pay for foreign imports, when $871 gold would pay as much
as $1000 silver: just as, during the era of irredeemable legal-
tender paper, gold, being at a premium, was used to discharge
foreign debts, and the greenbacks or their representatives for
all domestic money.

12

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

The same principle has been illustrated in reference to frac-
tional currency throughout our whole history, which want of
space alone prevents us from showing.

And to this complexion it must come at last with respect to
our present silver dollar, if its coinage is persisted in even as a
government monopoly. The silver dollars, so far as the gov-
ernment is able to keep them afloat, keeping faith with its
bond-holders by paying them gold according to the meaning of
its contract with them, and at the same time to avoid obstruct-
ing commerce by so bulky a medium of exchange, are taken
without hesitation (i) because they are legal tender, and (2) be-
cause creditors will take them from their debtors so long as they
know that others will take them from themselves in satisfaction
of debts. On the other hand, they do not yet supersede gold,
because, owing to the government monopoly of legal-tender
silver dollars, they cannot be obtained by the people on better
terms than gold dollars. But if government coinage of them
goes on without check or stint, this equality of the two coins,
and their continuance as such in use side by side, will cease.
In due time the accumulation will be such that government
must pay them out profusely in discharge of its obligations.
Its gold will either be drawn from it in preference by creditors
and note-holders, or kept from them and withheld from circula-
tion. If drawn out it will go, in one form and by one channel
or another, where it will do something more than pay debts
which are equally well paid by a coin of seven eighths its value.
In either case silver, the cheaper, will banish gold, and converti-
ble paper dollars will be only convertible into our present silver
dollars. This is only a question of time, if the present policy is
persisted in. This is what the promoters of the policy mean,
so far as they understand themselves ; and at this point they
know what they are about quite as well as they can be told.
The whole clamor for the present silver dollar being put on an
equality with gold worth 12^ per cent more, is for the purpose
of keeping the real legal-tender dollar as much below gold, as
much vitiated, as was the paper legal tender for some years be-
fore the resumption of specie payments. For this reason we
greatly fear that the doctrine of “ fiat money” would more or
less dominate the policy of the government, if it were entrusted

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

13

with the delicate function of supplying the paper money of the
country; and all the more so, as this would open an easy way
to supply means for the innumerable claimants and jobbers who
are always trying to enrich themselves and their constituents
from the national Treasury. The present silver-dollar policy is
a constant menace to a sound currency.

We are somewhat encouraged, as we see that Mr. Burchard,
Director of the U. S. Mint, hitherto an earnest advocate of con-
tinued coinage of the standard silver dollar, advises its discontinu-
ance, on the ground that, so far from promoting the union among
the nations to fix a ratio of valuation between silver and gold by
which 15^ grains of the former shall be equal to one of the latter,
it rather retards that consummation. We warmly second his
proposal, if we cannot second his reasons for it. For we do not
believe it in the power of the legislation of one or many nations
to establish a fixed ratio of value between silver and gold, any
more than between iron and lead, wheat and maize. Their rel-
ative value must in the long-run be determined by their intrin-
sic value, and this in turn by the cost of production interwork-
ing with the law of supply and demand. Such value cannot
long, in any normal state of things, exceed the cost of its re-
production. On the other hand, it will cease to be reproduced
at existing prices unless they afford a profit. Since, therefore,
silver continues to be largely produced at present market rates,
and, even so, makes fortunes for many of its producers, it is idle
to claim that it has, or by legislation can permanently be made
to have, more than its market value. The rate, too, at which
gold bullion sells, exceptional disturbing influences aside, fairly
represents the cost of producing it as compared with silver. If
it did not, if at present market rates mining gold were decidedly
more profitable than mining silver, gold-mining would increase
until the equilibration of the relative cost and price of the two
metals would be effected.

Let it be noted, however, that, whatever tendency exists in
the national government to vitiate its own paper currency by
making its own Treasury notes legal tender, whether redeemable
or irredeemable, and however this may be a reason for resort-
ing to other methods of supplying the needed paper currency
of the country, the evil and the danger cannot be wholly

14

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

avoided so long as the national government issues its own
legal-tender notes as a substantive part of the national currency.
For, while it does this, these notes are the supreme standard,
above which no issues of banks or other institutions can rise.
As they are obliged to receive legal-tender notes in satisfaction
of debts due them, so they can be required to pay nothing
higher in discharge of the debts they owe. Consequently,
whatever the deterioration of the government issues, no others
can rise above them. Until, therefore, Congress can be induced
to remove the temptation to vitiate this currency by utterly
abolishing it, or the legal-tender element in future issues of it,
nothing is gained by resorting to other methods of filling the
vacuum caused by the gradual extinction of the currency sup-
plied by our present national banks. Like the present and past
notes of these banks, however iron-clad their security, it can
only secure their being as good as the national legal-tender
notes which make a complete redemption of them.

2. Supposing the present security of national-bank bills to
be no longer available, let us next consider the alternative of
their continued issue protected by the best securities that re-
main available. What are these ? First in order are State
stocks. These cannot form the basis of a national currency
when nearly one half the State debts are in default as to their
interest, or under repudiation as to principal and interest. The
same is true of a very large proportion of all municipal debts,
county, town, and city. Under a system of State-bank circula-
tion there are doubtless a few States in which, not only their own
debts, but those of all subordinate municipalities within them
are to all intents good. But in a national system it would be
impossible to discriminate by any sure criterion sound from un-
sound securities ; or, if this were possible, to do it in such a way
as not to exclude from participation in the privileges of such
a banking system so large a part of the country as to insure
the defeat of such legislation in Congress.

3. Another plan of considerable merit for continuing the
issue of bills by the national banks is, to limit the amount of
them to half the capital of the bank issuing them, and make
them a first lien on all its assets. No doubt this would be ample
security for ordinary cases. But the failure of banks finally to

FUTURE RARER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

15

redeem their notes and pay their other debts is not an ordinary,
but an extraordinary, case under any tolerable system of bank-
ing. We need a system which will make the notes worth their
face in gold in all contingencies. What would such a system
amount to in the case of the late Mechanics’ National Bank of
Newark, New Jersey? Here the losses of the bank from the
thefts of its cashier and his confederates, artfully concealed,
but stupidly undiscovered, were nearly five times the capital,
three times the combined capital and surplus of the institu-
tion, and twice the amount of the capital, surplus, and the as-
sessment upon the stockholders equal to the capital. As it is,
whoever else loses, the bill-holders are secure, and the notes as
good as those of the New York Bank of Commerce. Still, with
any tolerable inspection by examiners appointed for fitness,
rather than party service, it could hardly happen that a bank
could be kept from going into liquidation before its means were
too far exhausted to pay its circulating notes, if guarded on all
sides as proposed in this plan of Mr. Coe, submitted to the re-
cent bankers’ convention. Nevertheless, this plan falls below the
present system of securing notes by government stocks in one
very important respect. Government bonds can instantly be
turned into cash for the redemption of the notes of an insolv-
ent bank, as soon as they are presented. No doubt exists any-
where, or for any time, as to the equivalency of a national-bank
note to its face in coin. No one to whom it is offered stops to
inquire whether it is issued by a solvent or insolvent bank, no
matter where located. The bills of the Pacific National Bank
of Boston just reported to have failed are received as readily as
those of the New York Metropolitan Bank.

This could not be so in respect of bills secured merely by
the ordinary assets of a bank, consisting of the notes of its bor-
rowers or other investments usually made by banks, even tho
a prior lien upon them. For first, and at best, it must take
time to realize upon these assets through the usual legal pro-
cesses incident to insolvent persons and institutions. This of
itself would render the notes unbankable, and subject them
to more or less discount for this reason. And secondly, in
nearly all cases of bank-suspension (commercial panics aside)
the insolvency of a bank is presumptive evidence, not only of a

i6

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

temporary but an absolute inability to meet its obligations to
a greater or less, certainly to some undefined, extent. At a
distance from them, often in their immediate neighborhood,
such bills would cease to circulate. Bankers and money-deal-
ers in the vicinage would have means of approximately esti-
mating their value, and would soon fix a market price for them
if they were worth anything. Their value would be inversely as
their distance from the place of issue. Take for illustration the
two lately suspended banks to which we have referred. With-
out the security of their circulating notes by national stocks,
who would trust them beyond their immediate neighborhood,
even if there, especially the bills of the Newark Mechanics’ Bank?

This points to another evil of such a currency, the same in
kind as, but far less in degree than, that which prevailed under
the old system of State-bank currency before the civil war and the
national banking system which grew out of it. The soundness
and solvency of each bank being known only among the people
in its immediate neighborhood, the tendency of all its circulat-
ing notes would be to centre there, and to possess only a local
credit. If they find their way to distant parts of the country,
they would, as a whole, be quite sure to be sped back to the re-
gion where the credit of the bank issuing them could be known,
and their soundness at once tested. The impairment to any
extent of the full national credit of any kind of paper money
in a like degree impairs its usefulness. It so far forth loses its
character as currency and becomes classified, like a large portion
of the former State-bank issues, as “ uncurrent money,” because
in so many places at a discount, or unbankable at its face value,
especially in the great monetary centres. The evils of this will
further appear as we discuss the ante-war State-bank notes
which preceded those of the national government and the na-
tional banks.

4. This system had furnished the paper money of the coun-
try, including almost its entire circulating medium, for about a
quarter of a century preceding the outbreak of the war; and
concurrently with a great National Bank of the United States
and its branches, chartered by the general government, during
nearly our entire previous national history. We will consider
these as they operated while alone, and then as they operated

FUTURE RARER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

1 7

while under the concurrent but predominating influence of a
great overshadowing United States Bank. Of course, it is only-
in their relations to paper money, as banks of issue, that we
have any present call or space to look into them.

The States early began to assume the prerogative of char-
tering banks, not only of discount and deposit, but of issue,
thus, in addition to other benefits, giving them the inducement
arising from the profits, to furnish the people with the conven-
ience, of paper money. It has been a question whether, under
the provisions of the U. S. Constitution giving Congress the
power “ to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of for-
eign coin,” and forbidding any State “ to coin money, emit bills
of credit, make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in
payment of debts,” the States have the power of indirectly
emitting such bills of credit, through the institutions they char-
ter and authorize to emit them, for the purpose of being used
as money, and performing every ordinary function that the
coining of money would perform. We think this would be an
open question now among jurists, had it not been decided affir-
matively by the U. S. Supreme Court ; and that it would bear re-
consideration quite as well, if not somewhat better, than the first
decision of that court denying the constitutionality of the irre-
deemable U. S. legal-tender notes. It is a curious commentary
on this, however, that the general government in establishing the
national-bank-note circulation extinguished the power to issue
circulating notes which the Supreme Court had affirmed to be
lodged in the States by the Constitution, by imposing a io-per-
cent tax upon it — a sufficient evidence that it would be danger-
ous to allow the States to tax government debentures of what-
ever kind ; that even if the States have power to authorize
banks to issue paper money ad libitum , when the national gov-
ernment has the will, it can find a way to stop it. A question
might arise here too as to the legitimacy of imposing taxes for
such purposes.

However this may be, we have no doubt of the expediency
of preventing issues of money, paper or metallic, by the States,
or by their agents and institutions, and of putting upon what-
ever is allowed to pass with the imprimatur of public authority,
as money, the stamp of national authority. If the prohibition

18

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

were now removed, State banks of issue would be multiplied
indefinitely, and their unsecured circulating notes would deluge
the land. During the period of this kind of currency it was
issued under two systems as to the constitution of the banks
themselves, with still further diversities of administration in
different States, to insure the convertibility of their issues. The
two great systems were banks, each with its own special char-
ter, and free banks, i.e. banks established under a general law
authorizing their formation by all who would comply with its
provisions. The prevailing system was that of special charter.
The free system was an episode in a few States, but it was still
in operation in the State of New York when the war broke out.
It undoubtedly suggested the analogous system of free national
banks having their circulating notes protected by adequate pub-
lic securities lodged with the fiscal department of the State. It
followed the failure of the safety-fund system in the State of
New York. This required all the banks of the State to contrib-
ute a small percentage of their capital annually, to be held by
the State as an insurance fund for the redemption of notes of
broken banks. It proved inadequate to bear the strain put
upon it by the bank failures which multiplied through the
commercial panic extending from 1837 to 1842. The State of
New' York then adopted the system of making every new bank
and every old bank, on the expiration of its charter, at once
free and the insurer of its own bills, by requiring the deposit of
an amount sufficient for the purpose in approved mortgages
and public stocks, national, State, or municipal. This tempted
single men, and coteries of men, all over the State, who held
mortgages, or the kind of public stocks required, to organize
free banks and issue circulating notes nearly equal to the face
of the securities deposited, thus duplicating their interest. The
result vTas the speedy failure of many, and crippling of most of
them. The security for the bill-holders proved imperfect or
worthless. Mortgages, if good, required a tedious process to
turn them into cash. Often the real estate which secured them
shrunk in value far below the face of the mortgage, and had to
be accepted instead of cash by the mortgagee, or by the State
as trustee for the bill-holder. Many stocks of States since solv-
ent then w'ere in default for interest. This class of securities

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

19

proved inadequate. Altogether the system was a failure, while
it taught one great lesson; viz., that nothing is a proper security
for bank circulation but that sort of public stocks which, in any
and all circumstances, have an immediate salable value above
the face of the notes protected by them. The New York free-
banking system was at length reformed so as to rule out all but
the highest grade of securities, such as United States or New
York State stocks or their equivalents, as the basis of their bank
circulation. At the time of the adoption of the national-bank
system nearly all the New York State banks had got upon this
footing. The free-banking system which was copied from New
York in the adjacent States of New Jersey and Connecticut had
only a transient trial, and disappeared prior to the war.

In the country at large, for a quarter of a century before
the national-bank system was established, the circulating me-
dium was issued by banks, either under general laws, or each
specially chartered by its own State, and with various privileges
and restrictions affecting the amount and safety of their issues.
But the exceptions were few in which banks were not practi-
cally allowed to issue all that they could keep afloat while re-
deeming it on presentation. As a whole, banks were soundest,
and the baseless inflation least, in the older sections of the coun-
try and in the strongest commercial centres. What in slang
phrase was known as “ wild-cat banking” was, as it always will
be, most rampant in pioneer States. The results of the sys-
tem were :

1. That failures of banks were much more frequent than
now, owing to the fact that the attempt was so largely made to
create capital by issuing engraved notes representing no capital,
and having no substantial basis of issue or redemption.

2. Hence so many of these bank notes became of no, or of
uncertain value, that, except at their places of issue, all were at
greater or less discount proportioned, other things being equal,
to their distance from the place of issue and redemption. At
their best estate, they suffered a discount equal to the cost of
sending them to the counter of the bank issuing them.

3. The loss of merchants whose business required them to
receive remittances in bills of distant banks was very large.
Publishers of periodicals often lost from two to five per cent in

20

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

turning their remittances into bankable funds. Great banking
houses grew wealthy in the business of buying uncurrent money
at a discount.

4. It was impossible to travel any distance without taking
coin with all its inconvenience and exposure.

5. The liability to commercial panics was augmented so far
as it was consequent on reckless or injudicious banking, and fab-
rication of paper money. Runs on banks always began with
panic-stricken bill-holders in the vicinity — a thing impossible un-
der our present system of perfectly secured bank notes.

No doubt similar evils would follow the free re-introduction
of State-bank bills as the paper currency of the country, miti-
gated indeed on one side by the postal money-order system and
the great development of railroads and telegraphs through the
country, but proportionally aggravated by the immense increase
of its area, as these affect the facility of circulating bank notes
and returning them to bank counters for redemption.

6. Prior to the era we have been considering, of a paper cur-
rency issued by State banks in different States, their operation
and influence were much ameliorated by the concurrent agency
and influence of a great overshadowing United States Bank. Of
these there were two, one succeeding the other after its dissolu-
tion by the expiration of its charter. The first was planned by
Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury,
and, largely through his influence, chartered by Congress in 1791
for twenty years, with a capital of $10,000,000. It was located
in Philadelphia, with branches in Boston, New York, Baltimore,
Washington, Norfolk, Va., Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans.
It was established, despite strenuous opposition on alleged con-
stitutional and other grounds. But it was found absolutely
necessary as a fiscal agent of the government, a regulator of
paper currency issued by State banks, an instrument for carry-
ing on the exchanges of the country, and, in general, for evolv-
ing order out of the financial chaos induced by the expenditures
of the Revolutionary war, and the enormous issues of irredeem-
able paper money spawned forth by the States individually, and
as confederated, to carry it on. It was of incalculable benefit to
the people. Altho its influence was great and beneficial upon the
currency, exchanges, and business of the country, yet the opposi-

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

21

tion to it was great, not only on account of the natural antagonism
of many to great corporations and moneyed powers, but also to
its supposed inconsistency with certain political and constitu-
tional theories largely cherished by parties, and for reasons, we
have no room here to discuss. Its charter was not renewed. But
the war of 1812 immediately following its extinction brought
financial disturbances and exigencies which made the necessity
of some national fiscal institution for the transaction of govern-
ment business, conducting exchanges, furnishing a national cur-
rency, and giving steadiness and trustworthiness to the issues
of State banks, more urgent than ever. Accordingly, in the
face of strenuous opposition, a second United States Bank was
chartered in 1816 for twenty years, with a capital of $35,000,000,
having its central location in Philadelphia, and branches in other
chief commercial centres. It was started in the midst of pre-
vailing financial chaos, and a generally depreciated currency of
broken State banks, which had been greatly multiplied to fill
several times over the vacuum created by the extinction of the
original Bank of the United States. After earnest and persis-
tent struggles it brought order out of this confusion, became
the great medium of inter-State exchanges, and the source and
promoter of a sound and stable national and State currency.

These Banks of the United States operated beneficially in
various ways, which we shall not here undertake further to re-
count. Their place has, in our altered state of things, been
sufficiently well filled by the national banks in respect to inter-
state exchanges, and also with respect to a national paper cur-
rency. We shall now simply refer to their influence in provid-
ing a sound national currency, and promoting soundness in the
circulation of State banks in the absence of secured circulating
notes such as the national banks now furnish, thus showing
what they might do again, if this currency should pass away
with the rapid discharge of the national debt.

First. These United States banks furnished a paper currency
really current through the nation. It was known to be backed
by what was then an immense capital, and to possess all the
prestige of national authority, indorsement, and use. Hence it
was received everywhere without discount as readily as gold and
silver coin. It could be used in travelling in every corner of the

22

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

land. Through their branches and the State banks to which
their notes were constantly paid, they could almost every-
where be had in exchange for bills of the solvent State banks.
When payments by bank drafts, checks, and bills of exchange
were less known and available for multitudes than now, it was
common to send notes of the Bank of the United States in let-
ters from one extreme of the country to another. A common
method of remittance from the South to students in college, as
we recollect, was to cut a $100 bill of this bank in two, and send
half in one letter and half in another, to guard against thefts in
the Post-Office and mail robberies.

Secondly. This U. S. Bank was felt in arresting extravagant
and hazardous issues of circulating notes by State banks. For
such over-issues were sure to find their way in large quantities
into a bank of the magnitude of this institution, and they were
forthwith returned to the counters whence they were issued
for redemption. We have no doubt that such a bank, with
sufficient capital and branches, might be so organized as to
supply a sound and adequate national paper currency, and to
check the excessive formation and issues of State banks — to
be, indeed, another Bank of England here. But we do not be-
lieve that the temper of the country will permit its re-establish-
ment. Altho re-chartered by Congress, it was vetoed by Presi-
dent Jackson, and encountered from him a bitter and unrelent-
ing hostility, which succeeded in crushing it. This led to the
profuse chartering of new State banks. Many of them pros-
pered by Jackson’s transfer to them from the Bank of the
United States of the government deposits. This was among
the causes (not, in our opinion, as has so generally been held,
the chief cause), of the great commercial panic and suspension
of specie payments from 1837 to 1842. Speculating in land
instead of cultivating it was a far more potent cause, as may
readily be seen if we call to mind that in 1836 breadstuffs were
imported to this country from Europe, while multitudes of par-
venus were building palaces and sporting their horses and equi-
page on the basis of paper fortunes reared on farms converted,
by map at least, into town and city lots. A great financier said
that the trouble was, that “one half of the people were making
carriages and the other half riding in them and it was only the

FUTURE PAPER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

23

caricature of exaggeration. The result was that the Bank of the
United States, failing of re-charter by Congress, obtained a char-
ter from the State of Pennsylvania, by paying a bonus of nearly
six millions. Thus swept from its proper national foundations,
it was plunged into the mire of corruption in the very first step
of its new abnormal career. Out of its normal sphere it fell
into the hands of speculators and kiters, and so fell to ignomini-
ous ruin. It is needless here to rehearse the steps by which the
political revolution of 1840, having for an object the restoration
of the United States Bank, failed of it through the untimely death
of President Harrison, and the succession to his place of a Vir-
ginia abstractionist, who vetoed the bill re-chartering it. After
so many mortal blows it died past resuscitation, and has left an
odor from its expiring struggles which, added to the prevailing
unpopularity of colossal moneyed corporations, will probably
prevent its reorganization, whatever its capacity for usefulness.
The insufficiency of State banks, without some such regulator,
to provide the currency we need, cannot be questioned. It is
almost equally certain that no such regulator can be established,
even if intrinsically desirable. If there be a system of State or
national banks, it should be under a general law, and not by
special charters. The bonus for the charter of the United
States Bank by the State of Pennsylvania is only an instance,
of unparalleled enormity indeed, of this sort of corruption in
granting special bank charters more than forty years ago. If so
then, what would it be now ?

The outcome of the foregoing discussion with respect to the
paper money of the future is:

1. That the people will, and of right ought to, have such
money, in some form immediately convertible into specie, as
their chief circulating medium.

2. That the present national-bank notes, secured by govern-
ment stocks, are incomparably the best actual or possible, unless
notes of the government itself, based on such coin reserves and
other provisions as shall secure their redeemability in every con-
tingency less than some great national revolution or convulsion.
The great question is whether the disposition of the nation is
equal to its power, to provide such a currency.

3. The gradual extinction of the national debt is likely to

24

THE PRINCETON RE PIE IK

work the gradual extinction of our present national-bank
notes.

4. The continuance of the national-bank issues, secured by
a limitation of them to from half to two thirds of their capital,
and by a first lien upon their assets, is somewhat inferior to the
present national-bank currency, but immeasurably superior to
any system of bank-note issue controlled by the caprice of State
legislatures.

5. Such a State-bank currency is proved intolerable both in
theory and practice.

6. State-bank notes concurrent with the issues of a great
national bank and branches everywhere at par, and at once
checking and regulating, while exchangeable with the former, is
a vast improvement on a simple unmitigated State-bank-note
currency. But the traditions and instincts of the people afford
little prospect of a return to such an institution.

7. An ultimate national Treasury-note currency has the high-
est intrinsic basis of soundness and redeemability, if the people
incline to use their resources for this purpose aright. But the
temptations are strong, and in some contingencies might prove
irresistible, to issue it upon the principle of “ fiat money,” in
quantities practically irredeemable.

8. On the other hand, while any, even the best form of bank
issues, except those secured by government stocks, have less in-
trinsic resources for securing redeemability in all circumstances
than Treasury notes, yet so far as they are affected by the
temper of the people, this will tend to hold them up to specie
payments, because it is in the highest degree exacting towards
moneyed corporations. But, in reference to the government,
it is more favorably disposed towards free issues and a depreci-
ated standard of currency, because it is liable to conceive that
money is thus made plentiful and cheap, and that the people,
instead of the banks, reap the profits of it.

Should the issue of the national-bank notes, or the profits of
that issue, in any way cease, the taxes on these institutions ought
proportionally to cease or abate. Indeed the present rate of tax-
ation upon bank capital is in many instances simply extortionate.
Between State and national taxation many banks annually pay
5 per cent or more of their capital in taxes. This is simply

FUTURE RARER MONEY OF THIS COUNTRY.

25

burdening the cost of exchanges, which means ultimately the
cost of all articles of exchange to the consumer. It is vain to
say that the banks can and do stand it. The more they are
oppressively burdened, the less they will be multiplied and the
more they will be decreased. The facilities for exchange they
furnish, and the benefits of competition among them, will pro-
portionally decline. The capital of the banks in New York
City was reduced by many millions in order to offset the tax-
ation of their surplus, insisted on by assessors and sanctioned
by the courts. So the State lost both the taxes and the advan-
tages of a large banking and loan capital too. Many places are
now deprived of the advantages of banking facilities on account
of the taxation which crushes them out. Multitudes are edu-
cated by demagogues and other blind guides to look at national
banks very much as a mad bull looks at a red flag. This infuri-
ated spirit begets the most wild and frantic assaults upon them.
They feel in the same way about those other great instruments
of exchange, the railways. They might as well vent their spite
at steamships and other vehicles of transportation and exchange,
and bring back the glories of the “ Age of Homespun,” or of
simple barbarism. Let abuses be reformed. But reformation
is not destruction.

Lyman H. Atwater.

THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF
CHILDREN.

THE policy which the German states have long pursued
with more or less constancy was first forcibly indicated
by Luther, who declared that he who did not send his child to
school must be regarded as an enemy of the state. A strong
and almost universal public sentiment, backed by compulsory
laws with cumulative penalties, and rigidly enforced, now gives
the greatest practical efficacy to the principle that all citizens
must send their children to school as well as, and for the same
reasons, that they must pay taxes or fight in time of war ; viz.,
pro bono publico. In his famous addresses to the German na-
tion Fichte urged, near the beginning of the century, that if
Germany was ever to rise from the low estate to which she had
then fallen, it must be by becoming, as Nature and Providence
seemed to him to have decreed her, pre-eminently and exclu-
sively an educational state. It was her peculiar mission, he
believed, to develop educational institutions, which should sur-
pass and give pattern to those of all the rest of the world, and
to allow the German instinct for unity to be moulded into the
form of real nationality by these. Something like this has be-
come the method of imperialism there. Perhaps it is hardly
too much to say that educational laws, methods, and establish-
ments are the very best products of civilization in Germany.
The lessons of history, past and contemporary, are brought to
bear by scholars and specialists of European fame upon every
new measure proposed in diet or reichstag; and the ministry
of education is, to say the least, second to no department in the
German cabinet. The general result is that, while no modern
state has had greater obstacles to overcome, such as provincial-
ism, the worst of military-strategic situations, poverty, an aggra-
vated and ever-recurring religious question, etc., the German

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 2 7

state to-day is very strong not only in material, but also in the
ideal elements of national strength. More than any other gov-
ernment she has known how to adopt the best features of both
the Roman and the Greek states, and in several of its more
unobjectionable aspects she has even actualized the Platonic
Republic, in which the chief care of the law-giver was the educa-
tion of the young. Her methods and aims in this direction are
now, especially since the Franco-Prussian war, slowly gaining
force in the school legislation of most countries of continental
Europe, as well as in our own.

But if popular education is now assumed as a condition of
existence for monarchies, it is obviously far more essential to
the stability and permanence of a republic, governed by nearer
the average intelligence, and where schools have most to do in
determining the level of that average, and with practically no
educational qualification for citizenship. If, in view of this, any
one will take the trouble to look over the statistics of illiteracy
in our own country, or to examine, if only cursorily, the present
educational condition of the Southern States and its obvious
and undisputed effects upon the tone of public life, or to read
up some representative chapter of the recent history of our edu-
cational legislation and to observe how much of it is distorted
and perverted by jobbery or partisan interests, compromises,
etc., and how much more of it is the work of the ambition of
incompetent third-rate legislators, he will perhaps begin to real-
ize more plainly than ever before in how real and literal a sense
the life of our republic is a struggle for existence against igno-
rance and the evils which troop in its train, and to see how it is
that the question whether a republican form of government can
be permanent is at bottom a question of education. There is
ample evidence that the founders of our institutions realized
more clearly than we do that “ a republic demands for its con-
tinued existence a higher standard of both knowledge and vir-
tue among the people than any other form of government,”
that school laws are the most fundamental department of legis-
lation in a republic, and that the peculiar political problems
liable to a republic can be finally solved not by the legislation
of majorities, but gradually and by no other means than by edu-
cation. Indeed, our patriotism is not so much love of past his-

28

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

tory or confidence in present institutions as it is belief that
human nature is at bottom good, and trust in the beneficent,
regulative power of knowledge.

The notion of freedom as quite commonly interpreted is
strictly anti-pedagogic. John Stuart Mill is wrong. The laissez
faire, laissez aller principle is suicidal in a republic, impressive as
is the casuistry with which it is so often defended. There must
be despotism here if need be. There will always be many who
will have to be forced to go to school, coaxed, hired, threatened,
flogged, trepanned almost to learn when they are there, and con-
stantly watched and withheld from every evasion or way of es-
cape. Some can respond to no motives but love, praise, and
reward, and would be spoiled by coercion, while others, in whom
these main-springs of action do not exist and cannot be devel-
oped, respond readily and naturally only to a rod of the liberal
dimensions prescribed by German school laws. Moral freedom
is attained only in so far as the highest motives are spon-
taneously and autonomously acted upon, and as lower selfish
motives are disregarded. This real freedom is the end of edu-
cation, and if it be assumed at the beginning education is im-
possible.

There are now abundant indications that we are again be-
ginning to realize that the three R’s, or indeed intellectual
training alone, is not all that is meant by education, as is so
often implied by current educational rhetoric. When we speak
of loving knowledge for its own sake we mean for the sake
of its effect on our characters as distinguished from all mate-
rial advantages which may result from it. Strictly speaking,
love of knowledge for its own sake is a psychological impossi-
bility. It cannot exist without affecting conduct and character,
and its value is measured by the way and the degree in which it
does so. That knowledge can have any intrinsic value in and of
itself alone is, indeed, the superstition of rationalism and Sclair-
cissement , and is no less misleading than is the merely commer-
cial view of it. Like light, knowledge, it is well said, is good to
see by rather than to see. Without exerting or ripening into
ethical potency, knowledge is not power but weakness, and is
nearly as likely to arm the bad as the good elements of the soul
and of society. German educators at least have little respect

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 29

for the Platonic scruple whether virtue can be taught, and so
call their department pedagogy (which even Hegel defined as
pre-eminently the art of making men moral), despite the un-
pleasant associations which the word calls up, because the term
includes moral discipline in addition to mere didactics. They
assume that “ life without knowledge is better than knowledge
which does not affect life,” and that “ all which frees the mind
is disastrous if it does not at the same time give self-control and
make us better.” In a republic, then, in a peculiar sense, I con-
clude, moral, at the very least, as much as intellectual training
is the obligation which the schools owe to the state and even
to society.

To realize how great and peculiar is the need of moral train-
ing in this country we need simply to reflect that nowhere
are children emancipated from the control of parents at so
early an age, that nowhere is individual liberty respected, or
self-control and spontaneity addressed so precociously. The
American child, too, comes into incessant contact with children
of all social grades and nationalities, and is more liable to the
contagion of vice. It should also not be forgotten that frauds
in business and politics make public life, in which scarcely any
great event has of late been accomplished without scandal, a
school of immorality for the young. Private character is sub-
jected to unusual strains in many ways, including all those
peculiar to a period of transition in matters of faith, and the
administration of justice, in which republics so easily and fatally
fail, is already in many portions of our land, to say the least,
exceedingly imperfect. It is not pleasant to dwell upon pictures
like these, nor is it pessimistic ; but it is simply unpatriotic to
refuse to recognize tendencies which strike competent foreign
students of our institutions so forcibly and against which the in-
fluences of education should be mainly directed.

In most European systems moral is intimately bound up
with religious training ; the moral code is derived from Scrip-
tures, much as it is by very many teachers of religion in our
own country. Here, too, moral training has in the past been left
mainly to the church, the strong line of partition between
which and the state is perhaps the most original and cherished
solution of the religious question in history.

30

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

Salutary and important as this principle has proved.it hardly
need be said that it must not be too rigorously insisted upon.
If each sharp-scented sectary in this land of sects had been
allowed to go through all the school-books and sift out all that
seemed objectionable to him; if the Jew were permitted to
eliminate all that was distasteful to him in the history of primi-
tive Christianity, and the Catholic to weed out the story of the
Reformation and evolutionary text-books, and if Quakers, athe-
ists, Methodists, and all the rest could challenge what their
respective consciences found offensive, what sort of a curriculum
would be left in history, literature, or the arts? Yet altho the
separation between school and church can never be absolute,
because the human soul cannot be cleft in two, the method
has such practical advantages, and is so congenial an expression
of the instinct of religious toleration, that it is quite commonly
assumed that the state has no right whatever to inquire into the
efficiency of the ethico-religious methods of training adopted by
the church, still less to interfere with them, whatever their char-
acter or however great the public need.

The difficulty of coming into close quarters with our theme
is vastly augmented by the fact that the literature upon the
subject is so voluminous that most of it represents the views of
single individuals, denominations, or confessions, and that no
serious or competent attempt has been made, at least in the
English language, to give comprehensive, practical, organic form
to the insights that must be sought from so many widely differ-
ing sources. Some one has conjectured that if all the volumes
now in existence which are expressly devoted to moral and
religious training were piled together, a structure as large as
the tower of Babel might be reared of them alone, and adds
that if they could all speak, a confusion of tongues surpassing
the “ Babel-babble” would be heard. Not only Catholics, Jews,
and sceptics but all Protestant sects have contributed to this
confusion, until many have drawn hence additional reason for
complacency in things as they are, and until, altho we are just
beginning to seek a course in practical mechanics for public
schools so generic that no special industry shall be favored above
another, and of utility for all children like the three R’s, the very
possibility of such a course in religion and morals as shall be

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OR CHILDREN. 3 1

impartial to all the sects, but helpful to each of them, is doubted
or even denied. Scarcely a decade ago most of us would have
perhorresced the idea that there could be a seven years’ course
of Bible study adopted in common by most of the Protestant
sects. But it is plain that the consensus respecting right and
wrong conduct is still wider. Much moral truth is taught in
common by Jews, Catholics, and Protestants by unpedagogic
methods, which would be greatly improved if the same common
matter were to be admitted by the consent of all into the public
schools. The deeper and broader the religious life, or conscious-
ness, experience, insight, the larger does this common element
become. Indeed, the existence and need of common elements
which no one can doubt, which must be held by all, always and
everywhere, which men must believe as men, has been postu-
lated often enough by Protestant thinkers, and underlies the
very idea of Catholicity and, in fine, of religion itself. The very
idea of Bible is consensus. It assumes the same needs, instincts,
possibilities, talents, and predispositions in all for receiving the
deliverances of the highest of all muses, the Holy Spirit.

So far as the psycho-pedagogic or practical character is con-
cerned, and rigorously excluding every other aspect of it, religion
is most fundamentally characterized as the popular culture of
the highest ideal as opposed to material utility, which dominates
so many of our intellectual interests, by reconformity of life to
it. It may be formulated as unity with nature, as the readjust-
ment of conduct to conscience, as restored harmony with self,
reunion with God, newly awakened love for Jesus, fresh insight
into his mind as new impulse to do his will. The common ele-
ment is obvious. There has been a loss of the primitive relation
or attitude to the highest or ideal norm, and man struggles back, *
not without pain and great effort, to restore the lost relation-
ship. In a word, there must be atonement with implication of
previous estrangement. When this process is conceived as in-
tellectual, faith or intuition are said to close in with certain doc-
trines considered as normative and central ; as emotional the
heart is reconciled and loves a divine person, and as volitional
God’s will is done. How man came to deviate from the ideal,
the cause and extent of the alienation ; how the ideal is to be
conceived, whether subjectively as conscience or a higher in-

32

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

stinct always pointing toward the undiscovered pole of human
destiny, or objectively as an offended deity who must be placated
by religious observances, or as the incarnate logos ; how the rec-
onciliation takes place, whether the divine ideal inclines to us or
we to it first, most, or on what occasion and motive, and in the
face of what difficulties and with what kind of mediation, if any ;
and possibly even whether the whole process be literally real
and actual, and accomplished in one time and place for all times
and places, or an expression for the whole course of individual life
and human history ; or, finally, as a sort of formulation which
some universal sentiment, like, e.g., that of absolute dependence,
gives itself naturally in all ripely developed lives, or indeed all
these at once, the results here and hereafter, — these questions,
important as they have become, must be subordinated as differ-
ent explanations of the one great law under which morality itself
as well as religion is included. The difference between the
lowest, most undeveloped, or natural religion and its highest
form of revealed Christianity is so vast, and so justly emphasized
by the church because it is so essentially pedagogic and practi-
cal, or because it makes what the individual is too limited to
more than vaguely anticipate, so articulate, apprehensible, and
available as a stimulus and guide to right conduct. It is not
mere subjectivism, as Palmer charges in his “ Evangelischen
Padagogik,” to say that there must be a natural instinct in man
coinciding more or less exactly with all that revelation gives,
because but for this the latter would be unapprehensible and
worthless. Indeed, it is because this fundamental native in-
stinct, often described as longing, craving, homesickness for
the good and true, is undeveloped that religion is so often con-
ceived as the irruption of a foreign principle, a graft from a new
stock. It is a psychological impossibility to teach anything
as purely authoritative. If religion can be taught or revealed, it
must already be preformed in us by nature, tho it may be
but dimly. The teacher, then, must ever regard and inculcate
religion as in a sense a growth or development, and in such a
way that this natural predisposition be neither neglected, re-
pressed, nor distorted. The pupil should, and in fact naturally
does, repeat the course of the development of the race, and
education is simply the expediting and shortening of this course.

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 33

This latter is mainly accomplished in religious training by avoid-
ing the countless and tedious deviations, superstitions, and
errors which make up so large a part of the history of religion.
In a word, religion is the most generic kind of culture as op-
posed to all systems or departments which are one-sided. All
education culminates in it because it is the chief among human
interests, and because it gives inner unity to the mind, heart,
and will.1

It only remains to be said that this common element of union,
alienation from and reunion with God, is first and most pro-
found both logically and psychologically. The points of differ-
ence between sects, and perhaps to some extent between the
ethnic religions, have their justification in natural differences
of race, temperament, culture, and associative connections of
thought and feeling generally which are not developed in child-
hood. All differences of this sort should have a very subordi-
nate place or none at all in the religious training of the young.
For a child to know more about matters that are peculiar to the
sects, or even to Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism, than
about the practical notions of religion itself would be as absurd
pedagogically as for a medical student to learn the fine points
of difference between the nativistic and empirical theories of
physiological optics before the fundamental structure of the
eye was understood. We are now ready to inquire how this
common element should be taught.

II. To be really effective and lasting, moral and religious
training must begin in the cradle. It was a profound remark of
Frobel, who, altho he could study only borrowed babies because
he had none of his own, has really seen further into the infant
soul than Darwin, Taine, Preyer, Kussmaul, or Romanes in their
baby-studies, that the unconsciousness of a child is rest in God.

1 Cf., on this paragraph, Diesterweg, “Wegweiser zur Bildung fur Deutsche
Lehrer,” 5te Auflage, 1875. Bd. II. s. 3, et seq.

Th. Waitz, “ Allgemeine Padagogik.” 2te Auflage, 1875. Bd. II. s. 279-95.

Fr. Dittes, “ Schule der Padagogik.” 1875. S. 432-53.

Ostermann, “ Padagogische Psychologie” (on Lotze’s basis). 1880. S. 60, et

seq.

Ziller, “Allgemeine Padagogik.” 1876. S. 153, et seq.

Schrader, “ Erziehungs- u. Unterrichts-lehre,” p. 306, et seq. — eta/.

3

34

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

This need not be understood in any pantheistic sense. From
this rest in God the childish soul should not be abruptly or pre-
maturely aroused. A generic germinal-physical sensation be-
fore the special senses develop their functions, a vacuous envis-
agement of pure being, a feeling of transcendent happiness or
even angelic communion, gradually lapsing into the particular
experiences of life, have all been conjectured, and may, for
aught we can prove to the contrary, all exist in the infant soul,
down and back into which scientific observation has scarcely
more than just begun its explorations. Even the primeval
stages of psychic growth, or objectivization, are rarely so all-
sided, so purely unsolicited, spontaneous, and unprecocious, as
not to be in a sense a fall from Frobel’s unconsciousness or rest
in God. The sense of touch, the mother of all the other senses,
is the only one which the child brings into the world already
experienced ; but by the pats, caresses, hugs, etc., so instinctive
with young mothers, varied feelings and sentiments are commu-
nicated to the child long before it recognizes its own body as
distinct from things about it. The mother’s face and voice are
the first conscious objects as the infant soul unfolds, and she
soon comes to stand in the very place of God to her child. All
the religion of which the child is capable during this by no
means brief stage of its development consists of those senti-
ments— gratitude, trust, dependence, love, etc. — now felt only for
her which are later directed toward God. The less these are
now cultivated toward the mother, who is now their only fitting
if not their only possible object, the more feebly they will later
be felt toward God. This, too, adds greatly to the sacredness
and the responsibilities of motherhood. I believe with Frobel
that thus fundamental religious sentiments can be cultivated in
the earliest months of infancy, altho I cannot see all the efficacy
his followers claim for the means to this culture developed in
his “ mother and cosseting songs.” It is of course impossible
not to seem, perhaps even not to be, sentimental upon this
theme, for the infant soul has no other content than senti-
ments, and because upon these rests the whole superstructure of
religion in child or adult. The mother’s emotions, and physical
and mental states, indeed, are imparted and reproduced in the
infant so immediately, unconsciously, and through so many

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. * 35

avenues, that it is no wonder that women are more disposed
than men to believe in occult and perhaps supernatural influ-
ences or rapports connecting the souls of distinct individuals.
Whether the mother is habitually under the influence of calm
and tranquil emotions, or her temper is fluctuating or violent,
or her movements are habitually energetic or soft and caressing,
or she be regular or irregular in her ministrations to the infant
in her arms, all these characteristics and habits are registered in
the primeval language of touch upon the nervous system of the
child as surely as the planchette responds to the influences of
unconscious cerebration. At no period of life is it truer in a
broader sense that she does most for her child who does most
for herself. All that affects her affects it. From this point of
view poise and calmness, the absence of all intense stimuli and
of sensations or transitions which are abrupt or sudden, and an
atmosphere of quieting influences, like everything which retards
by broadening, is in the general line of religious culture. Fr5-
bel well compared thfe soul of an infant to a seed planted in a
garden. It was not pressed or moved by the breezes which
rustled the leaves overhead. The sunlight did not fall upon
it, and even dew and evening coolness scarcely reached it ;
but yet there was not a breath of air, nor a ray of sunshine,
nor a drop of moisture to which it was unresponsive, and
which did not stir all its germinant forces. The child is a
plant, must live out of doors in proper season, and there
must be no forcing. Religion, then, at this important stage, at
least, is naturalism pure and simple and nothing more, and
religious training is the supreme part of standing out of nature’s
way. So implicit is the unity of soul and body at this forma-
tive age that care of the body is the most effective ethico-
religious culture.

This is not the place to enter into details respecting the
psychic growth of children, but it should be specified that, how-
ever successfully it may be delayed, the time must come when
the child will know its own limbs, then its own body as a'whole
as distinct from other objects, and when its narrow circle of re-
membered and associated impressions rounds off into a rudi-
mentary personality. Fichte thought this stage epochal, and
celebrated it by a banquet when his child first used the pro-

36

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

noun I. Frobel thought this independence could be cultivated
earlier by the little game of bo-peep on the mother’s lap, by
holding the child erect at arm’s length from its mother, etc. As
the infant thus learns to distinguish between what it does to or
for itself and what others do for it, it becomes capable of com-
manding and obeying, of helping itself, and of feeling the na-
tural consequences of its own acts. Its cerebral centres are
rapidly taking shape and acquiring firmness of texture, and it
should be most carefully thrown on its own resources so far as
they are fully developed, but no farther. Before the child can
speak the mother is called upon to distinguish between the
sounds which spring from helplessness and dependence, and
real needs which should be cultivated on the principle of broad-
ening by retarding, and those which spring from the moods and
whims of an embryonic personality which may be dwarfed or
perverted if allowed to functionate too early, as surely as its legs
may become bandied by trying to walk prematurely. It is be-
cause as babies grow few and rare, and as mothers tend to
become more fond than wise, that this tender but important
cradle-battle so often goes against the latter, and children are
spoiled, mothers enslaved, and instead of pleasures which are
few, mild, and uniform, special, unusual, and intense enjoy-
ments which bring reactions are permitted, and artificial sys-
tems of rewards and punishments are resorted to, while the
mother gradually loses her influence over the child before the
dawn of that adolescent age in which maternal influences and
home-ties should be at their strongest and best. The great
lesson of this protracted stage of development is the limitation
of the absolute selfishness of infant nature, and the recognition
of and entire subordination to the rights of others upon whom
it must be made to feel its almost absolute dependence. No
sharp or rude constraints should interfere with the expansion of
its sympathies and affections to others, and no indulgences
should obviate the lesson of quiet submission to the authority
and even convenience of adult wisdom above its own. The
child has few rights other than the satisfaction of its physical
needs, for it can perform few duties.

Next to be considered are the sentiments which unfold
under the influence of that fresh and naive curiosity which

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 37

attends the first impressions of natural objects from which
both religion and science spring as from one common root.
The awe and sublimity of a thunder-storm, the sights and
sounds of a spring morning, objects which lead the child’s
thoughts to what is remote in time and space, old trees, ruins,
the rocks, and, above all, the heavenly bodies, — the utilization of
these lessons is the most important task of the religious teacher
during the kindergarten stage of childhood. Still more than the
undevout astronomer, the undevout child under such influences
is abnormal. In these directions the mind of the child is as
open and plastic as that of the ancient prophet to the prompt-
ings of the inspiring Spirit. The child can recognize no essential
difference between nature and the supernatural, and the prod-
ucts of mythopoeic fancy which have been spun about natural
objects, and which have lain so long and so warm about the
hearts of generations and races of men, are now the best of all
nutriments for the soul. To teach scientific rudiments only about
nature, on the shallow principle that nothing should be taught
which must be unlearned, or to encourage the child to assume
the critical attitude of mind, is dwarfing the heart and prema-
turely forcing the head. To indulge in goody talks, or to mor-
alize about God or heaven, is here impertinent and stultifying.
The one course paralyzes the healthiest and strongest senti-
ments, the other cultivates sentimentality and the affectation of
impossible insights, or else makes these subjects uninteresting
or positively distasteful later, when the mind is ripe for them.
It has been said that country life is religion for children at this
stage. However this may be, it is clear that natural religion
is rooted in such experiences, and precedes revealed religion in
the order of growth and education, whatever its logical order in
systems of thought may be. A little later habits of truthful-
ness are best cultivated by the use of the senses in exact obser-
vation. To see a simple phenomenon in nature and report it fully
and correctly is no easy matter, but the habit of trying to do so
teaches what truthfulness is, and leaves the impress of truth
upon the whole life and character. I do not hesitate to say,
therefore, that elements of science should be taught to children
for the moral effects of its influences. At the same time all
truth is not sensuous, and this training alone tends to make the

33

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

mind pragmatic, dry, and insensitive or unresponsive to that
other kind of truth the value of which is not measured by its
certainty so much as by its effect upon us. Renan has remarked
in substance that all higher truth consists in nuances, which
play over that realm of conscience and the humanities where
open questions will always excite hope and fear. We must
learn to interpret the heart and our native instincts as truthfully
as we do external nature, for our happiness in life depends quite
as largely upon bringing our beliefs into harmony with the
deeper feelings of our nature as it does upon the ability to adapt
ourselves to our physical environment. Thus not only all re-
ligious beliefs and moral acts will strengthen if they truly ex-
press the character instead of cultivating affectation and insin-
cerity in opinion, word, and deed, as with mistaken pedagogic
methods they so commonly do. This latter can be avoided only
by leaving all to naturalism and spontaneity at first, and feeding
the soul only according to its appetites and stage of growth.
No religious truth must be taught as fundamental — especially
as fundamental to morality — which can be seriously doubted or
even misunderstood. Yet it must be expected that convictions
will be transformed and worked over and over again, and only
late, if at all, will an equilibrium between the heart and the
truth it clings to as finally satisfying be attained. Hence most
positive instruction in Christian truth should be delayed at the
very least to the first school year. Many things must come of
course incidentally. These should be taught only when de-
manded and in the briefest possible way, and with the feeling
impressed upon the child that these are most serious things, but
too high for it yet. This will stimulate curiosity for them later.
Up to this age, at the very least, the child should not be encour-
aged in church-going or public piety of any sort. If permitted
at all it should be only as a reward, but is dangerous lest
sacred things become familiar and conventionalized before they
are felt or understood.

So long as the child’s parents supply the place of Providence
to it, and before its wishes and desires expand beyond the
domestic circle, it is only a pretty affectation to cultivate a sense
of very great intimacy with the Heavenly Father. To feel its
inmost thought watched by a divine eye will only tend to foster

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OR CHILDREN. 39

self-consciousness, or a morbid and precocious conscientiousness,
or at best the forms of conventional morality, while its concep-
tions of God’s nature will be inadequate even to the verge of
idolatry, and perhaps forever dwarfed by childish associations.
The child’s real communion with God is in fact far too immedi-
ate and inward to be more than faintly typified by any forms
of conscious worship which it can share. It is the being of a
precociously and wrongly apprehended God which soon comes
to need proofs of his existence ; and perhaps, as Lotze says,
men were mistaken when they thought they had done well in
raising God from that region where he is clung to by the whole
soul with all its spontaneous energy, and conferring on him the
honor of exactly demonstrating his existence. There is a sense,
altho it seems more indefinite and general than Lessing thought,
in which the stages of a child’s mental growth repeat the expe-
rience of the race. The idea of God is not flashed in upon the
infant mind complete and vivid at first by any native intuitions.
It can be realized in a natural way only after the necessity of a
cause is felt to be general, or when the demand for a unity and
centre of things in the wide and varied world arises. The child’s
conception of God should not be personal or too familiar at first ,
but he should appear distant and vague, inspiring awe and rever-
ence far more than love ; in a word, as the God of nature rather
than as devoted to serviceable ministrations to the child’s indi-
vidual wants. The latter should be taught to be “a faithful ser-
vant rather than a favorite of God.” The inestimable pedagogic
value of the God-idea consists in that it widens the child’s
glimpse of the whole, and gives the first presentiment of the uni-
versality of laws, such as are observed in their experiences and
others, so that all things seem comprehended under one stable
system or government. The slow realization that God’s laws
are not like those of parents and teachers, evadable, suspendable,
and their infraction perhaps pardoned, but changeless, pitiless,
and their penalties sure as the laws of nature, is a most important
factor of moral training, more Jewish perhaps than Christian,
more scientific it may be said than evangelical, but a factor too
noble to be obscured or suppressed, or prematurely superseded
as it often practically is by the notion of God as a fond and too
indulgent Heavenly Parent, like the father or mother swayed

40

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IK

by foolish childish petitions and always ready and longing to
forgive. First the law, the schoolmaster, then the Gospel ;
first nature, then grace, is the order of growth. That child is
unfortunate which has never seen its mother or its father pray,
but it does not follow that it should be encouraged to frequent
child-prayer-meetings.

The pains or pleasures which follow many acts are imme-
diate, while the results that follow others are so remote or
so serious that the child must utilize the experience of others.
Artificial rewards and punishments must be cunningly devised
so as to simulate and typify as closely as possible the real
natural penalty, and they must be administered uniformly and
impartially like laws of nature. As command are just, and
as they are gradually perceived to spring from superior wis-
dom, respect arises, which Kant called the bottom motive of
duty, and defined as the immediate determination of the will
by law, thwarting self-love. Here the child reverences what
is not understood as authority, and to the childish “why?”
which always implies imperfect respect for the authority, how-
ever displeasing its behest, the teacher or parent should always
reply, “You cannot understand why yet,” unless quite sure
that a convincing and controlling insight can be given, such as
shall make all future exercise of authority in this particular un-
necessary. From this standpoint the great importance of the
character and native dignity of the teacher is best seen. Daily
contact with some teachers is itself all-sided ethical education
for the child without a spoken precept. Here, too, the real
advantage of male over female teachers, especially for boys, is
seen in their superior physical strength, which often, if highly
estimated, gives real dignity and commands real respect, and
especially in the unquestionably greater uniformity of their
moods and their discipline.

During the first four or five years of school life the point of
prime importance in ethico-religious training is the education of
conscience. This latter is the most complex and perhaps the
most educable of all our so-called “ faculties.” A system of
carefully arranged talks, with copious illustrations from history
and literature, about such topics as fair play, slang, cronies, dress,
teasing, getting mad, prompting in class, white lies, affectation,

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 41

cleanliness, order, honor, taste, self-respect, treatment of animals,
reading, vacation, pursuits, etc., can be brought quite within
the range of boy-and-girl interests by a sympathetic and tactful
teacher, and be made immediately and obviously practical.
All this is nothing more nor less than conscience-building. The
old superstition that children have innate faculties of such a
finished sort that they flash up and grasp the principle of things
by a rapid sort of first “ intellection,” an error that made all
departments of education so trivial, assumptive and dogmatic for
centuries before Comenius, Basedow and Pestalozzi, has been
banished everywhere save from moral and religious training,
where it still persists in full force. The senses develop first,
and all the higher intuitions called by the collective name of
conscience gradually and later in life. They first take the form
of sentiments without much insight, and are hence liable to be
unconscious affectation, and are caught insensibly from the en-
vironment with the aid of inherited predisposition, and only
made more definite by such talks as the above. But parents
are prone to forget that healthful and correct sentiments con-
cerning matters of conduct are at first very feeble, and that the
sense of obligation needs the long and careful guardianship of
external authority. Just as a young medical student with a
rudimentary notion of physiology and hygiene is sometimes
disposed to undertake a more or less complete reform of his
diet, regimen, etc., to make it “ scientific” in a way that an
older and a more learned physician would shrink from, so the
half-insights of boys into matters of moral regimen are far too
apt, in the American temperament, to expend, in precocious
emancipation and crude attempts at practical realization, the
force which is needed to bring their insights to maturity. Au-
thority should be relaxed gradually, explicitly, and provisionally
over one definite department of conduct at a time. To dis-
tinguish right and wrong in their own nature is the highest and
most complex of intellectual processes. Most men and all
children are guided only by associations of greater or lpss sub-
tlety. Perhaps the whole round of human duties might be
best taught by gathering illustrations of selfishness and tracing
it in its countless disguises and ramifications through every
stage of life. Selfishness is opposed to a sense of the infinite

42

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

and is inversely as real religion, and the study of it is not, like
systematic ethics, apt to be confused and made unpractical by
conflicting theories.

The Bible, the great instrument in the education of con-
science, is far less juvenile than it is now the fashion to suppose.
At the very least it expresses the result of the ripest human
experience, the noblest traditions of humanity. Old Testament
history, even more than most very ancient history, is distilled to
an almost purely ethical content. For centuries Scripture was
withheld from the masses for the same reason that Plato refused
at first to put his thoughts into writing, because it would be
sure to be misunderstood by very many and lead to that worst
of errors and fanaticism caused by half-truths. Children should
not approach it too lightly. It might seem that doctrinal cate-
chisms were the most unpedagogic methods of approach, but a
more baleful one has been developed in the ardor of those Sun-
day-school teachers who require devotion in their closet as the
chief means of preparation, and go tingling with the self-
consciousnesS which is the bane of American childhood to
inoculate their classes with their own neurological states. Belief
is actually made a duty; and as if that, as too often taught,
were not enough to stultify conscience, it is made the supreme
duty and a condition of salvation even for children.

The Old Testament, rather than the New, is the Bible for
childhood. A good, protracted course of the law must peda-
gogically prepare the way for the apprehension of the Gospel.
Even for the Old Testament, a propaedeutic selection of the
choicest moral tales from Catholic legends, classic and Hindoo
mythology, ancient myths and fables, German mdrchen, and per-
haps from the Bibles of other religions, etc., should serve as a
sort of introduction. What a Sunday-school library might be
gradually developed from such sources, in place of the trashy and
even pathological matter so commonly in use ! Then the study
of the Old Testament should begin with selected tales, told, as
in the German schools, impressively, in the teacher’s language,
but objectively, and without exegetical or hortatory comment.
The appeal is directly to the understanding only at first, but the
moral lesson is brought clearly and surely within the child’s
reach, but not personally applied after the manner common with

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 43

us. In that country only clergymen who have passed a special
examination for that purpose are allowed to teach the Bible to
children. This is done in the schools in a way so impressive
that the knowledge of the Bible possessed by the average Ger-
man child of the age of confirmation is infinitely better than
that acquired by the best children under our uniform lesson sys-
tem. The causes of unbelief in that country are not found in
what precedes that age, but may be due in part to the fact that
Bible study generally ceases then for life. The Old Testament
is from beginning to end one long and impressive argument in
favor of the practical wisdom of righteousness as a condition of
personal welfare and national stability — a lesson not untimely
now, and in our land. This lesson must be thoroughly and pro-
tractedly taught before the sublime altruistic stand-point of the
New Testament can be apprehended. Up to this point the es-
sential training of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant children now
differs only in method and detail, and it seems by no means
impossible that a portion of this common element may be some
time mutually agreed upon, and even taught in public schools
by common consent and with the real advantage of superior
methods to all.

Probably the most important changes for the educator to
study are those which take place between the ages of twelve and
sixteen, when the young adolescent receives from nature a new
capital of energy and altruistic feeling. It is a veritable second
birth, and success in life depends upon the care and wisdom
with which this energy is husbanded. These changes constitute
a natural predisposition to a change of heart, and may perhaps
be called, in Kantian phrase, its schema. Even from the psycho-
physic stand-point it is a correct instinct which has slowly led so
large a section of the Christian church to centre its entire cultus
upon regeneration. In this I of course only assert the neuro-
physical side, which is everywhere present, tho everywhere
subordinate to the spiritual side. As everywhere, too, the
physical is regulative rather than constitutive. It is .therefore
not surprising that statistics show — so far as I have yet been
able to collect them — that far more conversions, pro rata ,
take place during the adolescent period, which, according to
the best authorities, does not normally end before the age

44

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

of twenty four or five, than during any other period of equal
length.

Before this age the child lives in the present, is normally
selfish, deficient in sympathy, but frank and confidential, obe-
dient upon authority, and without affection save the supreme
affection of childhood, viz., assuming the words, manners,
habits, etc., of those older than itself. But now stature sud-
denly increases, and the power of physical endurance dimin-
ishes for a time ; larynx, nose, chin change, and normal and
morbid ancestral traits and features appear. Far greater, more
protracted, tho unseen, are the changes which take place
in the nervous system, to which it seems as if for a few
years the energies of growth were chiefly directed. Hence this
period is so critical and changes in character so rapid. No
matter how confidential the relations with the parent may have
been, an important domain of the soul now becomes independ-
ent. Confidences are shared with those of equal age and with-
held from parents, especially by boys, to an extent probably
little suspected by most parents. Education must be addressed
to freedom, which recognizes only self-made law, and spontaneity
of opinion and conduct is manifested, often in extravagant and
grotesque forms. There is now a longing for that kind of close
sympathy and friendship which makes cronies and intimates ;
there is a craving for strong emotions which gives pleasure in
exaggerations ; and there are nameless longings for what is far,
remote, strange, which emphasizes the self-estrangement which
Hegel so well describes, and which marks the normal rise of the
presentment of something higher than self. Instincts of rivalry
and competition now first naturally arise in boys, and girls grow
more conscientious, and begin to feel their music, painting, etc.,
and to realize the bearing of these upon their future adult life.
There is often a strong instinct of devotion and self-sacrifice
toward some, perhaps almost any, object or in almost any cause
which circumstances may present. It is never so hard to tell
the truth plainly and objectively and without any subjective
twist. The life of the mere individual ceases and that of per-
son, of the race, begins. Many relations of things which hitherto
seemed independent are seen. It is a period of realization, and
hence often of introspection. It is the golden age of life, in

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 45

which enthusiasm, sympathy, generosity, and curiosity are at
their strongest and best, and when growth is so rapid that, e.g.,
each college class is conscious of a vast interval of development
which separates it from the class below ; but it is also a period
subject to Wertherian crises, such as Hume, Richter, J. S. Mill,
and others passed through, and all depends on the direction
given to these new forces.

The dangers of this period are great and manifest. The
chief of these, far greater even than the dangers of intemper-
ance, is that the sexual elements of soul and body will be
developed prematurely and disproportionately. Probably the
greatest and most experienced living teacher of physiology
has expressed the opinion that at least nine tenths of the
thoughts, feelings, imaginations of the average male adolescent
centre for a few early years of this period about this factor of
his nature. Quite apart, therefore, from its intrinsic value, educa-
tion should serve the purpose of preoccupation, and should
divert attention from an element of our nature the premature
or excessive development of which dwarfs every part of soul
and body. Intellectual interests, athleticism, social and aesthetic
tastes, should be cultivated. There should be some change in
external life. Previous routine and drill-work must be broken
through and new occupations resorted to, that the mind may
not be left idle while the hands are mechanically employed.
Attractive home-life, friendship well chosen and on a high plane,
and regular habits, should of course be cultivated. Now, too,
tho the intellect is not frequently judged insane, so that pubes-
cent insanity is comparatively rare, the feelings, which are yet
more fundamental to mental sanity, are most often perverted,
and lack of emotional steadiness, violent and dangerous im-
pulses, unreasonable conduct, lack of enthusiasm and sympathy,
are very commonly caused by abnormities here. Neurotic dis-
turbances, such as hysteria, chorea, and, in the opinion of some,
sick-headache, are peculiarly liable to appear and become seated
during this period. In short, the previous selfhood i9 broken
up like the regulation copy handwriting of early school years,
and a new individual is in process of crystallization. All is
solvent, plastic, peculiarly susceptible to external influences.

Between love and religion God and nature have wrought a

46

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

strong and indissoluble bond. Even Plato, in the symposium,
teaches this very impressively. Change of heart before pubes-
cent years is the most disastrous of all precocities and forcings.
The age signalized by the ancient Greeks as that at which the
study of what was comprehensively called music should begin,
the age at which Roman guardianship ended, as explained by
Sir Henry Maine, at which boys are confirmed in the modern
Greek, Catholic, and Lutheran churches, and at which the child
J esus entered the temple, is as early as any child ought to go about
his heavenly Father’s business. “ It did not seem tome modest
for my daughter to hear,” said a cultivated and devout German
mother, explaining why she had sent her twelve-year-old daugh-
ter from the room while I was describing revival scenes I had
witnessed in this country. If children are instructed in the
language of these sentiments too early, the all-sided deepening
and broadening of soul and of conscience which should come with
adolescent years will be incomplete. Revival sermons to young
children are analogous to exhorting them to imagine themselves
married people and inculcating the duties of that relation. It is
because this precept is violated in the intemperate haste for
immediate results that we may so often hear childish sentiments
and puerile expressions so strangely mingled in the religious
experience of otherwise apparently mature adults, which remind
one of a male voice constantly modulating from manly tones
into boyish falsetto. Some one has said of very early risers
that they were apt to be conceited all the forenoon, and stupid
and uninteresting all the afternoon and evening. So, too, pre-
cocious infant Christians are apt to be conceited and full of
pious affectations all the forenoon of life, and thereafter com-
monplace enough in their religious life. One is reminded of
Aristotle’s theory of Katharsis, according to which the soul was
purged of strong or bad passions by listening to vivid representa-
tions of them on the stage. So, by the forcing method we de-
precate, the soul is given just enough religious stimulus to act
as inoculation against deeper and more serious interest later.
At this age the prescription of a series of strong feelings is very
apt to cause attention to concentrate on physical states in a way
which may culminate in the increased activity of the passional
nature, or may induce that sort of self-flirtation which is ex-

MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 47

pressed in morbid love of autobiographic confessional outpour-
ings, or may issue in the supreme selfishness of incipient and^
often unsuspected hysteria. God, Scripture, etc., cannot seem
supreme unless taught most vigorously near the end rather than
near the beginning of the educational course. Reference to
these should be after we have thought and investigated and ap-
plied our faculties to their uttermost, rather than before. Those
who are led to Christ normally by obeying conscience are not
apt to endanger the foundation of their moral character if they
should later chance to doubt the doctrine of verbal inspiration
or some of the miracles, or even get confused about the Trinity,
because their religious nature is not built on the sand. The art
of leading young men through college without unsettling any
of the religious notions of childhood is anti-pedagogic and un-
worthy philosophy, and is to leave men puerile in the highest
department of their nature.

At the age we have indicated, when the young man instinc-
tively takes the control of himself into his own hands, previous
ethico-religious training should be brought to a focus and given
a personal application, which, to be most effective, should be
according to the creed of the parent. It is a serious and solemn
epoch, and ought to be fittingly signalized. Morality now needs
religion, which cannot have affected life much before. Now du-
ties should be recognized as divine commands, for the strongest
motives, natural and supernatural, are needed for the regulation
of the new impulses, passions, desires, half-insights, ambitions,
etc.' which come to the American temperament so suddenly
before the methods of self-regulation can become established
and operative. Now a deep personal sense of purity and im-
purity are first possible, and indeed inevitable, and this natural
moral tension is a great opportunity to the religious teacher. A
serious sense of God within, and of responsibilities which tran-
scend this life as they do the adolescent’s power of comprehen-
sion ; a feeling for duties deepened by a realization and expe-
rience of their conflict such as some have thought to -be the
origin of religion itself in the soul, — these, too, are elements of
the “theology of the heart” revealed at this age to every serious
youth, but to the judicious emphasis and utilization of which
the teacher should lend his consummate skill.

4S

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

Finally, there is danger lest this change, as prescribed and
formulated by the church, be too sudden and violent, and the
'capital of moral force which should last a lifetime be consumed
in a brief, convulsive effort, like the sudden running down of a
watch if its spring be broken. Piety is naturally the slowest
because the most comprehensive kind of growth. Quetelet says
that the measure of the state of civilization in a nation is the
way in which it achieves its revolutions. As it becomes truly
civilized revolutions cease to be sudden and violent, and become
gradually transitory and without abrupt change. The same is
true of that individual crisis which psycho-physiology describes
as adolescence, and of which theology formulates a higher spirit-
ual potency as conversion. The adolescent period lasts ten
years or more, during all of which development of every sort is
very rapid and constant, and it is, as already remarked, intem-
perate haste for immediate results, of reaping without sowing,
which has made so many regard change of heart as an instan-
taneous conquest rather than as a growth, and persistently to
forget that there is something of importance before and after it
in healthful Christian experience.

G. Stanley Hall.

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

LL people interested in the state of opinion know that

there met at Concord, in the middle of July last, a com-
pany of very high-souled men and women who held high con-
verse with one another, and with high theories, till the middle
of August. I was politely asked to join them, albeit they knew
I was not one of them. With great delicacy of feeling they
proposed to me a theme in which it was supposed I would be
specially interested, the Scottish philosophy, in which I was
reared and to which I adhere, not, however, in all its doctrines,
but simply in its method, which discovers truths prior in their
nature to the induction which discovers them, and which indeed
could not discover them unless they were already there in the
mind. I regarded it at the time, and still regard it, as a misfor-
tune to me that, owing to an old standing obligation to go else-
where, I was not able to accept their invitation.

Those who met were drawn together by a common faith and
sentiment not easily defined (the school is not much inclined to
lay restraints on itself by definition), yet noticeable by all. They
constitute a school quite as much so as the ancient Pythago-
reans, the Platonists, and Neoplatonists, with whom they have
certain interesting affinities. They believe in mind as infinitely
higher than matter, — some of them believe in matter simply as
a veil thrown over mind. They are sure that in mind there is
vastly more than sense, than sight or touch or hearing. Some
of them would burst the bounds of space and time, which do so
hem us in, and go out into the eternal, the infinite, the absblute.
They are seeking to mount to a sphere far above the mundane,
and if they do not rise to the sky, which is apt to become ever
more remote as we ascfend, they at least, as in a balloon, reach

4

50

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

the clouds, whence, as the traveller in the Alps, they gain grand
views of the heavens above them and lovely views of the green
vales below them.

They are all aspiring after an excellence which they do not
find in the busy pursuits and attractive fashions of the world ;
nor even in its literature and its science, in its newspapers and
its novels, which seem to them to have too much of the clay of
the earth sticking to them, and to be all too much held down
by terrestrial gravity. They are longing and seeking for some-
thing higher and better for themselves and for the community.
All of them are utterly opposed to materialism under every
form. A number are driven to Concord under the influence of
a recoiling wave opposed to the whole secular spirit of the age.
They feel that even physical science, as the mere co-ordination
of material and ever-changing objects, cannot satisfy the crav-
ings of the soul. Most of them adopt the Christian religion on
the same ground as many of the Platonists did in the second
century, as in consonance with their lofty philosophic ideas.
Others rather turn away from it as the Neoplatonists in Alex-
andria did, because (as shown so graphically in Kingsley’s
“ Hypatia”) it is too definite in its precepts and statements
of fact and doctrine. Some of them, in accepting it, adapt it
to their tastes and make it a cloud lowered from heaven to
earth, and embracing in it Buddhism and all religions with their
acknowledged errors because containing so much truth. A few
of them are disposed to believe in spiritual media and rope-
tying — just as their prototypes among the Alexandrian Neo-
platonists did in magic and necromancy, as bringing heaven into
close connection with earth.

Most appropriately the association met at Concord. The
place, with its three thousand dwellers, is in the level country
as it swells towards the mountain country to which it looks up.
It is a characteristic New England village, only it has been asso-
ciated with more men and women of real genius than any like
place in America: with Hawthorne and his weird fancies; with
Margaret Fuller1 and her enthusiastic and fascinating talks;

1 Julia Ward Howe tells us “ Margaret Fuller once said that she accepted the
universe, and Carlyle laughed heartily on hearing it, and said, ‘ I think she’d
better.’ ”

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

51

with Thoreau and his wild-bird wood-notes ; with Ripley and
his high Coleridgean criticisms. Alcott and Emerson, thank
God, are still spared to gather their pebbles from the plains and
to scatter them ungrudgingly. These two may be regarded as
the true fathers and founders of the school, and their children
are proud of them. They were not able to take a very promi-
nent part at the meetings, but they looked in upon them (Alcott
occasionally spoke with his old glow), and were welcomed with
profound respect and warm affection, as well they might be.
From this place Mr. Alcott years ago stretched out his arms
to embrace Buddha and all Asia in his wide religious creed. It
is understood that latterly he has lost all partiality for bald
Unitarianism, and has returned to the faith of the Episcopal
Church. Here Emerson has strung his lovely pearls often on
slender strings and woven them into a rich necklace. The
meeting was honored with the presence of Mr. Stedman, who
composed the poem “ Corda Concordia” (a considerably labored
composition), than whom we have not a finer critic of high
poetry in this country, Mr. Sanborn, besides reading some lit-
erary papers, was the instrument of bringing together the men
and women of kindred tastes from various States of the Union.
The association has had a most important accession to it by the
removal of Dr. Harris from St. Louis to Concord. If I mistake
not, he will henceforth be the leader of the sect. It is expected
that he will be the philosopher of the school, and give it organi-
zation and system ; and if so, it will become more philosophi-
cal and less poetical, and possibly thereby less attractive in the
eyes of some who love to wander in the wayless and to gaze on
gilded clouds.

It might be curious, and very instructive withal, to have laid
bare to us the past experience in thought and belief and feeling
of those who met together and spoke and listened. But we
have no means of ascertaining this, no right to pry into it.
Some of the older men, we know, were loosened from the old
faith and trained in another faith by Channing, who had' such
influence in Boston an age ago. Most appropriately an even-
ing was devoted to talk of his merits, and the conference was
led by Mr. Hazard. The school of Channing (in this respect,
but in no other, like the school of Hegel) has divided into three

52

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

streams. There is the Middle division, faithfully keeping to the
position of Channing himself. They are a smali body of men
and women now venerable from age, dreadfully alarmed about
the wild course which some of their sons are pursuing, and
hesitating whether they should not go over with them to Dr.
Brooks’s church to save them from utter scepticism. It is clear
that the young generation will not stay where Channing stayed,
because they see that while he professed to follow the Scrip-
tures, he yet preached doctrines palpably inconsistent with
them. The party of the Left are more numerous and active.
They see that Unitarianism cannot be drawn from the Scrip-
tures, of which they have let go their hold, and are descending
into the barest negation-s of all belief, and running a risk of
sliding into agnosticism and even materialism ; the ministers
among them seeking to interest and keep up their congrega-
tions by preaching on the topics of the times and not on those
of eternity. Dr. Frothingham, late of New York, was much
troubled with them, and has given us a graphic description of
them and of his disgust with them ; and has ended with re-
tiring from the active ministry, as not knowing what to believe.
The Channingites of the Right are of a higher class. Channing
himself was a man of high moral tone, but in no special sense a
philosopher ; and this class of his followers feel their need of a
deeper foundation to rest on, and came in considerable force to
Concord in search of it. They feel that they need something
more soul-satisfying than Unitarianism, and yet are not disposed
to go back to the old orthodoxy. Some of them are striving
hard to believe that they have found stable rest in Plato, in
Kant, or in Hegel.

It is interesting to find it stated that at the meetings there
was a larger number of females — all well educated — than of men.
It is also a significant fact that a considerable number of na-
tional teachers did thus spend their weeks of vacation, seeking
profit as well as pleasure. It is clear that there are in the coun-
try inquiring minds seeking for something higher than the busi-
ness and fashions of the world can give them, than even the
science of the day can furnish, or its newspaper literature or its
state school lessons. I am not sure that these wishes and hopes
were fully gratified ; whether the food dispensed has been found

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

53

to be as solid and nourishing in the mastication and digestion as
in the feeding upon it. Some, I know, felt that the philosophy
taught was too impersonal, and not sufficiently practical to meet
the wants of men, women, and children in a world of struggle and
temptation, of suffering and of sin.

The meeting at Concord last summer is worthy of being
carefully noted by thinking minds. It is true that the country
as a whole paid little attention to it. The public press, so far as
they observed it, did so with a leer, as if not quite sure whether
they should admire it or amuse themselves with it. But then
it is true that the world has never noticed at the time the oc-
currences which have afterwards produced such mighty results ;
the seed lying in the ground is not observed till it springs up
simultaneously in the whole field. It may be doubted whether,
when the history of 1 88 1 comes to be written by some future
Bancroft, the meeting at Concord will have even a passing no-
tice. The historian will dilate on the assassination of Garfield
and the madness feigned and real of Guiteau, on the sulks of
Conkling, and will settle it for us whether Grant is even now
counselling with the President. But he will have little to tell
us of the progress made by the grand question of civil reform —
the only measure fitted to save us from the tricks of miserable
politicians — and still less of the signs of the deeper thoughts of
the country as not just accomplished but indicated at the Con-
cord meeting. That meeting, particularly the success so far of
the meeting, has its significance. It was a protest against a
clamant evil, the wide-spread tendency towards materialism. It
expressed a want to be met and relieved, and a strong desire on
the part of a body of sincere people to elevate the faiths of the
country. Questions were put that must be answered, and these
ultimately more momentous than those discussed in the news-
papers and in Congress.

I am of opinion that the influence of the meeting has, upon
the whole, been for good. The papers read were of a high
order both in thought and expression. The inclination of
everything was upwards — sometimes, indeed, only the flight of
a kite which will have to come down again when the wind which
bore it up has subsided. There was a confessed or implied
belief in, and constant appeal to, the highest ideas which the

54

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

mind of man can entertain. A high ideal of some kind was be-
fore every one. I am prepared to maintain and to prove that
every one of the ideas and beliefs to which they were appealing
has a place in the mind of man, and has in itself an elevating
tendency. Such are the ideas of the true, the good, the beauti-
ful, of the infinite, the lovely, and the perfect. It is good to
hold up these before the eyes of the men of the world, of the
worshippers of wealth, of the votaries of fashion, and the exclu-
sive cultivators of natural science. They are all realities in the
mind, quite as much as the monkey, the cat, the newt, and the
lamprey, which our naturalists are studying so carefully, are
realities without the mind. The speakers at Concord did not
err in seeking to draw attention to these mental realities. But
the naturalists who have lately written papers on the animals
named have not assumed beforehand what they are, but have
inquired diligently into their nature, their structure, their growth
and habits, and by the careful observation of facts, carried on
for months or years, and by searching experiments verifying
the hypotheses or theories previously formed. The great defect
of the members of the Concord school is that they assume,
adopt, and apply the ideas without any previous scrutiny of
them after the maieutic manner of Socrates, or observational in-
duction of them after the method of Bacon.

In reading these papers I often wished that Socrates had
appeared among them. Boston, of which Concord is an annex,
has often been called, not just the modern Athens (Edinburgh
is vain enough to claim that title), but a modern Athens. It
has a distant resemblance to that ancient city. It has had
orators and talkers, poets and poetasters, historians and story-
tellers, journalists and critics, literary societies and cliques. But
strange as it may sound, it has never had a Socrates — greatest
man in the greatest nation of heathen antiquity — one whose
function was to search every kind of wisdom, real or pretended.
Had there been such a one in Boston, he would certainly have
been attracted to Concord last summer. We can picture him
appearing there after having travelled the distance on foot,
— certainly I would have travelled a thousand miles on foot
to witness the scene. I see him with my mind’s eye at this
moment, “ with that Silenic physiognomy, with that grotesque

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

55

manner, with that indomitable resolution, with that captivating
voice, with that homely humor, with that solemn earnestness,
with that siege of questions.” " Oh,” says Dean Stanley, “ for
one hour of Socrates ! Oh for one hour of that voice which
should by its searching cross-examination make men see what
they knew and what they did not know ; what they meant and
what they only thought they meant ; what they believed in
truth and what they only believed in name ; wherein they agreed
and wherein they differed!”

Had he appeared, he would certainly have been welcomed
by all, even by the few in secret dread of his cross-questioning.
In suasive conversational tone he would have begun simply and
innocently by stating that for himself he knew nothing, but
learning that so many wise men had met he had come seeking
instruction. He might then have taken up the subject discussed
by the paper just read, and said how much he had been gratified
with it. Having thus gained favorable ears, he would now put
questions so easy that they would at once be answered. As I
am not that Socrates, I am not able to give his questionings.
The subject might be the pre-existence of the soul and the idea
in it, as discussed in the Platonic papers by Dr. Jones, or the
Hegelian reality, opposed to the Kantian formality, as pro-
pounded by Prof. Harris. His avowed object would be by the
use of example and logical division to lead them to define what
they evidently understood so thoroughly and were talking of so
glibly. “ It is not that. What then is it? I am not to be satis-
fied with a statement about the thing ; I must know what the
to ’6 v, the very thing, is.” In order to find this he would now
approach the subject from a different point, and put another
set of questions which would be answered as readily as the pre-
vious ones. Not till he had proceeded a certain length in this
his skilled dialectical process would he bring out his terrible
elenchos or principle of contradiction got from Zeno, and crush
as in a vise the double set of answers, showing that they con-
tradicted each other — this amid the visible mortification of some
and the gratified tittering of others. Having thus fulfilled one
of the ends of his life in exposing the show of pretended wisdom,
we can conceive him setting off to Boston to wait the opening
of Harvard College, there to have the opportunity to play the

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

fire of his dialectics on students and even professors, and ques-
tion them as to the consistency of their philosophy and the
worth of their boasted science. Quite as likely when half way
he would have stopped and stood still for hours, being arrested
by his daimonion, and then returned to Concord to have another
gymnastic contest, ending in the dissipation of error, if not in
the establishment of truth.

If Socrates was the wisest man in old Athens — so declared
by the oracle — Bacon may be regarded as about the wisest
guide in modern times. I cannot find that the philosophers of
Concord are following the method, or that they have drunk into
the spirit, of the father of induction. They feel the slow method
of observation to be tedious and irksome to their ardent nature.
They seize and cling to what recommends itself at once to their
higher nature, intellectual and moral, and would mount to the
supreme truth at once. They are unwilling to start with what
Bacon insists we should begin with in all research, “ the neces-
sary rejections and exclusions,” with what Whewell recommends
as “The Decomposition of Facts;” that is, to fix on the precise
thing to be examined, and put the irrelevant matter out of the
way. The whole school are apt to mix up things which should
be carefully separated, and to affirm of the whole what is true
only of a part. They are especially averse to the slow and labori-
ous method recommended by Bacon of collecting facts external
and internal (for there aro internal facts as well as external), of
collating and co-ordinating them, and thus rising, not per saltunt
but gradatim , from particulars to lower laws or axioms (as
Bacon calls them), thence to middle, and only then to the
highest of all, and to causes and forms.

I hold that the grand ideas which they fondle and cherish
and hold forth to the view of the world are all genuine ; that
they are all in the mind of man, and are ever coming forth into
actual exercise in our inward experience. The business of the
true philosopher should be to examine them carefully, to deter-
mine their exact nature and objective validity. They are en-
titled to use them only so far as they have done so. But by
assuming them at once, and applying them without induction
and without analysis or criticism, they mingle error with the truth,
and often make the truth bear up the error. They are ever

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

57

forming rapid generalizations upon loose resemblances, which
cannot be carried out legitimately ; and in applying them they
are ever falling into serious mistakes. Hence the common
objection taken to them that they are mystical, which may be
described as seeing everything in a mist. By gazing intently
upon certain truths they have cast a halo around them, created
by the eye that looks to them. Those who are religiously in-
clined among them claim to discover truth by divination, and
often mistake their own fancies for the inspiration of heaven.

I regret much that I have not been able to obtain a full
report of the proceedings of the Concord meeting. I applied
to the Boston Traveller , which gave an account of the proceed-
ings from day to day, but there were gaps in the numbers sent
me, and I cannot give and do not pretend to give an epitome
of the papers read.1 I must satisfy myself with bringing out the
characteristics of the school.

I may begin with Dr. Jones. He is a genuine and represen-
tative member of the school. I have taken a fancy for him : he
has so much personality, he is so unlike his age, so unlike his
country. He is a native of Virginia, but is now settled in Illi-
nois. Here he established some twenty years ago the “ Plato
Club of Jacksonville.” It opened with him and two or three
ladies to whom he read a dialogue of Plato. “ It has had,” says
a writer in The Platonist, “ vicissitudes of interruption and
resurrection. Meeting originally at various residences, it at
length found a permanent home in the parlors of Mrs. J. O.
King, who has been a member from the first. A few years ago
the meetings were transferred to the rooms of the sister of Mrs.
King, Mrs. Eliza Wolcott, who is also one of the original mem-
bers. Of this society Dr. Jones is the permanent lecturer. It
meets every Saturday at io A.M. The reader reads Plato ordi-
narily in the Bohn translation, the Greek original being at hand,

1 When this article was nearly completed (Dec. io) I received The Journal of
Speculative Philosophy for July, the publication of which has been evidently
delayed. It contains articles read at Concord from Aug. 2 to 5, viz.: The Kant
Centennial, by Prof. Mears; Kant and Hegel, by Dr. Harris; Kant’s Transcen-
dental Deduction of Categories, by Prof. Morris; The Results of the Kantian
Philosophy, by Julia Ward Howe ; also a brief Report of Discussions at Concord,
by Mr. Sanborn.

53

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

and he commonly comments upon it at length.” The writings
of the great masters of literature and the sacred books of the
world are frequently adduced in corroboration and explanation
of statements made. In this way are frequently used the Bible,
Homer, the Greek tragedians, the Hindu dramas and sacred
texts, Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe. Some of us are
grateful that we have one Bible ; but this club has a number
of Bibles, — from some of which it might be as difficult
to get light as to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. It be-
lieves in the Bible of the Hebrew and Greek Testaments, —
always as interpreted in accordance with Plato ; but it also be-
lieves in others. “ All Bibles,” says Mr. Block in an article in
The Platonist , “ are myths — narratives so constructed as to re-
veal to the fit interpreter the Absolute Truth.” If this means all
truth or truth without error, I fear the fit interpreter has not yet
appeared. The club has been honored by a number of eminent
visitors, such as A. Bronson Alcott, Harris, Emerson, Snider.
Should I ever be in the region, I hope they will allow me the
privilege of attending one of their meetings. Their creed seems
to be : “There is one God, and Plato is his prophet” — a higher
prophet I acknowledge than Mohammed, or even than Hegel,
whom the Germans so admired an age ago ; but, alas ! they are
now inclined to tear down their idol. As Plato was a prophet,
we can conceive him to have had a glimpse of this Jacksonville
club rising up in Illinois twenty-one hundred years after, and I
am sure the thought brought a gratified smile upon his face and
helped to bear him under those doubts and snarls that sate on
the countenance of his critical pupil Aristotle as he listened to
his master.

Dr. Jones delivered two courses of lectures at Concord : one
on “ Law in Relation to Modern Civilization,” the second on
“ Platonism.” He revels in the grand ideas of Plato. He
quotes numerous passages which set forth the grandeur of the
soul, its pre-existence and its immortality. Applying his lofty
views to the present day, he shows what is the downward tend-
ency of “ the cognition of a physics without a metaphysics ; a
natural without a supernatural ; a material without a spiritual ;
a real without an ideal world ; a lower world without an upper
world, and consequently a natural order without an intelligible

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. 59

order; natural law without mind, natural forces without will
forces, and in fine a Cosmos without a Logos.”

I regard it as quite in order to refer to the Platonist, a
periodical published monthly at St. Louis and edited by Thomas
M. Johnson, who seems to be a scholarly man. It is devoted
chiefly to “ the dissemination of the Platonic philosophy in all its
phases.” So far as I have seen it, it gazes most fondly on one
phase ; this, I may add, the highest. Plato was a many-sided
man. In particular he had both a negative and a positive side,
a searching, doubting side and a doctrinal, dogmatic side. He
does seek to establish truth, but like his master Socrates he is
quite as frequently employed in exposing pretension. In many
of his dialogues he seems to be satisfied with sifting the theo-
ries advanced in his time as to truth, beauty, virtue, and kindred
topics, is at no pains to specify what is the truth, and leaves
us in doubt whether it can be found. This side of Plato was
accepted by the academic schools — older, middle, and new —
and in the end ran itself out in the barest scepticism, which dis-
cussed everything but settled nothing. But Plato had another
and more attractive side. He rose up as on eagles’, nay, rather on
angels’ wings towards the contemplation of the eternal Idea in
its relations to God, the soul, and the world. This side culmi-
nated in the Neoplatonism of Alexandria, which represented
the highest state of the soul as consisting in ecstasy ; that is,
the soul gazing forever on the One, the True, the Good — which
became in the end a blank enough and profitless exercise. This
is the side commonly presented to us in the Platonist. The
periodical gives us the treatises of Porphyry, Iamblichus, Plo-
tinus, and Proclus in the version of Thomas Taylor, of whom
it has- always been doubted whether he understood the works
he translated.

Dr. Mulford is held in high esteem in the association and
beyond it. He is the author of “The Nation: the Foundations
of Civil Order and Political Life in the United States.” He
there rests the state on God as the foundation, and binds the
superstructure by morality. He has another work, “ The Re-
public of God,” which has reached a fourth edition. In it he
discusses high philosophico-theological themes in a lofty tone
of thought and language. He has a higher estimate than I

6o

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE IV.

have of Hegel and his artificial forms, and of Maurice, whose
mists, which so impressed many an age ago, are now melting
away. He does treat of sin at considerable length, but his view
of it and of its essential evil is not sufficiently deep. “ Sin,”
he says, “ is unreal ” (p. 140) ; “ it is the contradiction of life ; but
in the consciousness of its contradiction [Hegelian] there is
the evidence of a deeper unity in which it may be overcome,
and of the ground of its obliteration. There may be a root of
righteousness of life that is deeper than the root of evil.” Sin
seems to me to be as real a thing as moral good, and I do not
care about putting good and evil into a unity. Proceeding in
this line, Bailey in “ Festus” calls “good God’s right hand, and
evil his left.” In the paper read at Concord he criticised the vari-
ous schools of political life, such as the physical, the utilitarian,
the social, the formal or abstract. He maintains that the state
implies continuity, authority of law, religion, and morality.

The Rev. Dr. Bartol spoke of the “Transcendent Faculty
in Man.” He has glowing passages. He says man is an ani-
mal ; “ but he is an angel too : feels the wings folded up on
him, is aware of his ability to slough off his physical organism
as a serpent does his skin in the wood, conscious that he can
dispense with many a tendency and proclivity characteristic and
conspicuous in his present life and history, yet not lose his iden-
tity, but be the same in essence when he shall soar as now he
grovels or gropes.” I doubt much whether he sees the right
way in which man may soar. “ His constitution, as it is at any
given time, is all he has to go by. It and not the new transla-
tion, the Bible revised or unrevised, is that real word of God
which is not a book but, as the sacred volume itself avers, a
hammer and a fire and runs very swiftly. Can a book run or
be a hammer or fire? The word of God came to Isaiah or to
Micah : did it not to Garrison and Lincoln and John Brown?
As says the Greek sage, ‘ all flows,’ and our nature blends in the
flux of things. We have ecstasies, exaltations above our ordi-
nary state to appreciate Paul’s trances, or the transfiguration
of Jesus with Peter and James and John, or George Washing-
ton’s elevation once above himself, as the historian relates, on
the battle-field.”

The Rev. Dr. Kedney (author of a work on Aesthetics) deliv-

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

6 1

ered an able lecture on the “ Groundwork of Ethics.” He re-
viewed the improved Benthamism as presented by John Stuart
Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and Herbert Spencer, and gave an expo-
sition of the ethics of Kant.

Professor Harris seems to me to be at this present time the
greatest man in the school, and the most likely to rule its future
destinies.1 I look upon him with profound respect. It may
be doubted whether there is or was an abler superintendent of
schools in America than he was when he held that office in Mis-
souri. I do hope that he will continue to further the cause of
education by lecturing to our teachers and in colleges on what
is called Pedagogic in the German universities, or in some other
way that may occur to his fertile mind. But his great work, as
it appears to me, is The Journal of Speculative Philosophy , of
which he is the learned editor, and which he has carried on
with infinite courage and perseverance for a great many years
in spite of indifference on the part of the public, and I suspect
under a heavy pecuniary burden. In that journal he has had
discussed, always from a certain standpoint but invariably in an
elevated tone, the deepest problems of human — I believe he
would say divine — thought, and tried to make clear to the Amer-
ican public the profundities of Hegel. Once in St. Louis I had
the privilege of listening to one of his papers or lectures deliv-
ered in a parlor to a dozen high-class ladies, who looked as if
they understood him, and who certainly appreciated him highly.
He made the generalizations of Hegel as clear and satisfactory
as they could possibly be made — generalizations very far-rang-
ing, but, I may add, with which I could not concur. He deliv-
ered at Concord two courses, five lectures in each : one on “ Phi-
losophical Distinctions,” and the other an exposition of Hegel’s
philosophy. I do hope these last lectures will be published in
his journal or in a separate form, so as to enable Americans to
determine whether Hegel’s strongly compacted system is a cas-
tle on the earth or a castle in the air ; it is visibly a castle with
battlements, with bastions and towers of an imposing apd for-
midable character. In the course on “ Philosophical Distinc-

1 If so, it will have less of Plato and more of Hegel : less of gold-leaf and
more of iron ; less of rich pasture and more of fences ; less of flower and fruit and
more of stalks and branches.

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tions”he has stages of cognition arranged a la Hegel in a triune
or triplet form. The first stage is sense-perception, in which
there is no thinking. This gives us mechanism. My criti-
cism is that there is intelligence in sense-perception, and that
there cannot be mechanism without thinking. The second stage
is reflection, which classifies and arranges. I remark that this
is a peculiar use of the word reflection, the function of which is
usually supposed to be the bending back of the mind and the
looking on what is in the mind or has been in it. Arranging
and classifying has been commonly ascribed to the compara-
tive powers of the mind. This second stage brings us to chem-
ism, which, as it appears to me, cannot fall under reflection.
The third stage is aetiology or teleology, which carries up to
another triad — the miracle, art, and religion. These three things
may have some affinity as all coming from the higher nature of
man, but their bond of union is very loose. It appears to me
that an ingenuity much inferior to that of Hegel or Prof. Harris
could draw out of the worlds of mind and matter an indefinite
number of such trinities, made in a vague way to embrace all
things under them, but the distinctions having no deep or ac-
tual foundation either in mind or matter.

I am sorry that I have not the means of sketching certain
other papers. As I am dealing with philosophy I pass over the
literary papers, some of which were brilliant. I have studiously
omitted those of the professors who came from their academic
halls to discuss metaphysical subjects, as President Porter (who
had read for him the paper which appeared in the last number of
this Review), Professors Morris, Mears, and Watson. They
appeared personally or by their papers chiefly to ventilate Kant
in this his centenary year. I may refer to them in a later part
of this article, when I treat of the great German metaphysician.

It could be shown by a large induction of historical facts
that every prevalent opinion, nay, every practical measure fol-
lowing, is apt to fall back on a philosophy to sustain and defend
it when attacked. Hitherto the Concord school has leaned
mainly on the ideas of Plato, so grand but at the same time so
vague and unbounded. The feeling now is that they must
have something more definite and logical. At this present
time while there are countless metaphysicians of ability in Amer-

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY. 63

ica, there is, unhappily or happily, no influential philosopher
or philosophic school commanding the thought of our young
men and calling forth their devotion. The consequence is that
those who are not content with the commonplaces of America
are resorting to the imposing systems of Germany, most of them
to Kant and Neo-Kantism — which is the form in which Kant is
now presented, and a few of them to Hegel.

In the last century Locke was by far the most influential phi-
losopher in America. He was the leader in the great movement
which set aside the old abstract philosophy drawn out of the
brain in favor of the new method founded on facts and experi-
ence, and so he was hailed by a people who rebelled against
kings and established a republic. Locke easily derived all our
ideas from sensation and reflection. Happily this philosophy
was never accepted entirely in America. Men seeking to de-
fend truth and morality were always calling in, consciously or
unconsciously, and appealing to something deeper than a gath-
ered experience which can never be necessary or universal.
The Scottish principle of common-sense satisfied many for a
time, but is now forsaken, as supposed to be a mere appeal ad
populmn and not sufficiently profound. American youths, after
finishing a rather commonplace course of mental philosophy in
their colleges at home, now betake themselves to Deutschland,
with high expectations of being able to reach the bottom of
things. A writer in a foolish paper lately published, apparently
on the principle “Answer a fool according to his folly lest he be
wise in his own conceit,” thus describes them (“Conflicts of the
Age,” p. 72) : “ I have observed of those youths who, after finish-
ing their course in the college down there, set off for a year or
two to Germany, that they come back with a most formidable
nomenclature as ponderous as the armor of Goliath of Gath.
How I rejoice to find a boy rising up to lay them prostrate with
a more primitive weapon! For they have become unbearably
haughty, and would slay all who cannot pronounce their shib-
boleth at the fords of speculation. They are introduced at the
German universities to a set of distinctions which seem very
deep, — the distinction between form and matter, subject and ob-
ject, a priori and a posteriori, phenomenon and noumenon, — by
which they are led into a labyrinth with no clue to bring them

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

out. In all these distinctions, and in the nomenclature express-
ing them, there are subtle errors lurking which lead through
idealism to scepticism.” These youths, not willing to lose the
wares they have gained with such labor and at such expense,
bring them home with them, and use them without being able
to sift them or cast out the adulterations, and they dispose of
them to half-admiring, half-doubting pupils.

Kant has reached, as it appears to me, his highest altitude
in this his centenary year, — few philosophers have lived so long.
In Germany the works upon him, volumes, articles, pamphlets
published this year, are uncountable, all acknowledging defects
in Kant as understood an age or two ago, but expounding, or
more frequently hinting at, a Neo-Kantism which is to avoid
the obvious errors of the old. I have at this moment on the
table, before me four goodly volumes on Kant written in the
English tongue within the last few years : There is the elabo-
rate volume on “ Kant,” written by Professor Edward Caird, of
Glasgow, who examines Kant on the principles of Hegel, and
reaches a more ideal realism, which no doubt is self-contradic-
tory,— but then all truth is the combination of contradictories.
There is. a smaller volume “On the Philosophy of Kant,” by
Robert Adamson, of Owens College, Manchester, who discusses
the problems started by Kant, acknowledging that Kant’s
“system has manifested inner want of consistency and evident
incompleteness but so far as I can see, not putting in its room
anything satisfactory. He says: “ It can hardly be too strongly
impressed on the student of philosophy that the ordinary mode
of starting in constructive metaphysic with the Cartesian cer-
tainty of one’s own existence is misleading, and likely to entail
the gravest error.” I have not been able to find what he pro-
poses to start with. There is the work of Professor Watson, of
Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, “ Kant and his English
Critics,” in which he acutely criticises Balfour, Stirling, Lewes,
and others who are charged with not properly interpreting
Kant. He meets these men by showing that Kant when prop-
erly understood is not responsible for their opinions. In my
opinion, they may be more successfully met by showing that
Kant is himself wrong in those points in which they father their
errors on him. Professor Watson is constantly hinting that he

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

65

could improve Kant on certain points. Of course I have no
opinion as to these improvements till they are drawn out. I
have also before me “Text-Book to Kant:” Translation, Repro-
duction, Commentary, Index, with Biographical Sketch, by James
Hutchison Stirling ; 550 pages. Written in his usual Carlylish
style, often exaggerated to crankiness, he has some admirable
expositions and valuable criticisms of Kant’s Critique. Once
more, I see an advertisement of a translation of the Critique by
Max Muller.

I believe that we have now reached the watershed, and that
henceforth the stream will descend. Every one of these authors
so far finds fault with Kant. From this date he will be criticised
more and more severely. More fundamental objections will be
taken to him than is done by these his admirers. All philoso-
phers now see that such ideas, or rather convictions, as identity,
infinity, and moral good cannot be derived, as Locke maintained,
from sensation or the reflection of sensation in the mind. So,
with the ghost of agnosticism grinning at us in the darkness,
we shall now have to inquire whether, on Kant’s theory that
the mind begins with phenomena in the sense of appearances
(. Erscheinungen ), it can ever rise to realities.

I have as great an admiration of Kant, of the man and of his
philosophy, as those I have been criticising have. Vast good has
resulted from his calling in mental principles which guarantee
higher truth than the senses and save us from scepticism. I
like much his partiality for the old logic, and I approve of some
of his improvements of it, as, for instance, in introducing Im-
mediate Inferences. For what is valuable in his categories he
is very much indebted to that old logic. He has done invalu-
able service to morals, and I may add religion, in upholding the
practical reason with its categorical imperative. The study of
his philosophy calls forth and braces the highest energies of the
mind, and makes us feel that truth and virtue have an immov-
able foundation.

But, on the other hand, he has fallen into errors which, legiti-
mately or illegitimately, have been used to support and justify
very pernicious ends. I do not allow that Kant met the scep-
ticism, or rather the agnosticism, of Hume in a wise or satisfac-
tory manner. Hume made the mind to start with, and in the
5

66

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

end to be in possession of, only impressions and ideas. His
opponents should meet him here and drive back the ravager at
the entrance. But Kant took down his outer wall and allowed
the Trojan horse to enter with an armed force which he could
not cast out, and which kindled a conflagration which left noth-
ing but ashes and mounds behind.

i take deeper objection to Kant’s philosophy than was done
by President Porter or Professor Morris at the Concord meet-
ing. First, I object entirely to his phenomenal theory of knowl-
edge, to what is called phenomenology. Professor Mears says
in his paper of “ the materials presented to us by the inner and
outer sense:” “These materials are not objects, and their pres-
ence does not constitute them experience until they have passed
through the pre-existing moulds of the mind and taken their
shape. They are not in space or in time of themselves ; they
are neither one, nor many, nor all ; they are neither like nor
unlike [is one rose not like another?]; they are neither sub-
stance nor qualities, neither cause nor effect ; they have in fact
no being except as the mind by its own insight recognizes or
affirms it of them.” The professor is forever lauding Kant for
undermining sensationalism ; but he did so by making mind as
well as matter unknown, and thereby, without meaning it, land-
ing us logically in agnosticism, in the darkness of which Huxley
builds up materialism. I could show that agnosticism claiming
to be logically derived from Kant is lowering thought in this
the last quarter of the nineteenth century quite as much as
sensationalism professing to come logically from Locke did in
the corresponding quarter of the eighteenth century. As Ameri-
cans began then to search Locke, so they must now commence
to search Kant, — always after studying him and taking what is
good from him. Dr. Stirling thus expounds: “In short, both
outer object and inner subject, being perceived only through
sense, are, by necessary consequence, perceived not as they are
in themselves, or not as they just are , but merely as they ap-
pear. Whether we look to space or time, it is only our own
states we know in either,” — and I may add, our own states merely
as appearances. I hold that the mind begins with things and
not with phenomena, with things appearing and not mere ap-
pearances. Even a tree seen in the water with its head down

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

67

is a real thing : it is the reflection of light from the water. But
it will be asked me contemptuously, “ Can it be possible that
you hold the vulgar doctrine that you perceive the very thing?”
They will condescend to remind me that to the eye the sky
seems a concave, whereas it is an expanse ; that color seems to
be in the rose, whereas science tells us that it is a vibration at a
certain rate in an ether ; that we seem naturally to see things at
a distance, whereas we perceive only things touching our eyes.
Having condescended thus, they will then turn away from me
as not worthy of being further reasoned with. Now I am quite
disposed to meet them if they will meet me in argument. By
the help of a few acknowledged distinctions I am able to hold
by the trustworthiness of the senses. The senses may be charged
with giving us more than realities, may seem to be giving us the
distance of objects, whereas experiments wrought on persons
born blind show that originally man has no such endowment.
The difficulty is removed by drawing the distinction between
our original and acquired perceptions, and showing that our
original perceptions, which by the eye is simply a colored sur-
face, do not deceive but show us the very thing. If those who
disagree with me refuse contemptuously to argue with me, I
can take it patiently, being sure that some other will be raised
up to do what I have not been able to do. Of this I am cer-
tain, that the phenomenal theory of knowledge cannot stand
much longer ; if we do not begin with knowledge in the senses,
inner and outer, we can never get it by a further process. Bacon
in a well-known passage speaks of men being first inclined to
believe in God, afterwards having doubts as they see difficulties,
but in the end reaching a well-grounded faith. There is apt
to be a like process in the theory of the senses. Men are led
primarily to believe their senses, then they discover that the
senses seem at times to deceive, but at last they are brought to
acknowledge that the deceptions are apparent, not real.

Secondly, Kant has given a very erroneous account of .those
principles of the mind which he calls in to beat back Hume’s
scepticism. He represents them as forms imposing themselves
on phenomena, whereas they are not moulds superimposing
qualities, but perceptions of things' with their qualities. They
do not impose space and time upon objects, but perceive

68

THE PRINCETOH REVIEW.

objects as in space and time. The very favorite phrases of
Kant, a priori and a posteriori , may cover error. There is not an
a priori form to impose on things; there is merely the a priori
capacity to discover things and what is involved in them.

Thirdly, Kant pursued a wrong method throughout — the
Critical. I admit that what he calls a priori principles are to be
sifted before they are accepted. But they are to be sifted
simply by inquiring what they are and what they reveal. This
does not make a limited experience the foundation of truth.
Any one who will give his attention can understand that there
may be truths prior to induction and above induction, but the
nature of which we can discover only by induction.

But what are we to make of Hegel? I believe I had better
let that question be answered by Prof. Harris. Some of my
readers, however, may be interested to learn what pains I have
taken to be able to find an answer for myself. A quarter of a
century ago I resolved to spend five months of the vacation
allowed me in Queen’s College, Belfast, in mastering the sys-
tem of the mighty man who for a time reigned as king of
thought in Germany. I got a good edition of his works and
set myself earnestly to the task of understanding the profound
thinker. To assist me I read at the same time Vol. IV. of
Willm’s “ Histoire de la Philosophic Allemande,” which ex-
pounds the system with all the French clartd. I was soon made
to realize that I was travelling with a giant who walked with
seven-leagued boots, and that I had great difficulty in keeping
up with him ; but this arose simply from his strength and my
weakness, and not from any defect of his. So I persevered.
I felt at times as if I got glimpses of his meaning, and then I
seemed to lose them. I was sure that this stream must be very
deep, and I was bent on sounding it. But then it was pressed
upon me that it might look so very deep because it is so drumly.
Still I held on with all the obstinacy of a Scotchman for weary
months in the sweet summer days. After months of study I
thought it right to take a survey and an estimate of what I had
gained. As I drew in the net I felt that I had an immense,
seemingly an immeasurable length of knotted cordage, but the
living fish were very few. At length, feeling my brain oppressed,
I broke off and betook myself to the Grampian Mountains,

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

69

where I found the observation of the forms of nature, especially
of the mountain plants, to be far more pleasant, and I thought
profitable, than the study of the artificial forms of Hegel’s dia-
lectic. In the end I came to the conclusion that I had gone
far enough into the labyrinth, and that as life is so brief and
uncertain, and as I had so much other study to carry on and
work to do, it might be as well to stop.

Since that I have once or twice ventured to criticise Hegel,
but was told very emphatically by those who appeared to un-
derstand him that I did not understand him, and I was not quite
sure whether they might not be right. I have watched with
deep interest the history of the system, and conversed with
several eminent Hegelians both of the right and left for hours
at a time, and found no two of them agreeing with each other.
I have observed that when any man opposes the system, he is
told that he does not understand it. I was amused at, and
rather gratified with, the story told that Hegel had said, “Only
one man understands me, and he does not understand me.” I
was not amazed, nor was I sorrowful, to hear that the believers
in Hegel were every year becoming fewer and fewer, tho
metaphysicians still continued to study him and admire his dia-
lectical skill. I confess, however, that I was taken by surprise
when the pessimists, who follow much the same method but
reach far different results, described one so famous as a charla-
tan. Finding that in the histories of philosophy he had a great
name in the statement and interpretation of opinions, I betook
myself to him at times when I was studying some of the an-
cient systems, such as that of Aristotle ; but I found that he
put them all under his own forms — in short, Hegelized them.1
Of Christianity he always wrote in the way of compliment, but
it is when he has made it speak as he speaks.

It is not easy to criticise Hegelianism, for this among other
reasons, that it contains so much, all things divine and human,

1 Many of the German histories of philosophy and those who copy' them in
England and America fall into a like fault. Thus they represent the Greek phi-
losophers as seeking after the absolute, which is a German thought. What the
Greeks were seeking after was to ov, the reality, the real thing ; not the Ding
an sick, which is an absurdity, as there can be no such thing as a thing in itself ;
but the thing itself, the very thing.

70

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

that few if any finite minds can comprehend it. Those who
would chivalrously enter into the lists against him may find
that they are fighting with forms and not realities — with wind-
mills, like Don Quixote. His philosophy seems to me to con-
sist of rapid generalizations drawn by the speculative intellect
from a few loose but at times true points of resemblance, over-
looking specialties and differences. Such are his perpetual trin-
ities, being, essence, notion: under being, quality, quantity,
measure ; under essence, ground of existence, phenomenon, re-
ality; under notion, subjective notion, object, idea; and these
again subdivided into threes, the whole in the end being identi-
fied with the Christian Trinity. They remind me of those sys-
tems of physical science which were taught in our universities
before the days of Newton and induction, complete beyond
what any physical philosopher can teach in our day. Not being
formed carefully after the nature of things, but by pure think-
ing, these grand logical laws could not be legitimately carried
out, and when they were carried out came into collision with
facts in our nature or beyond it. But Hegel with his powerful
intellect was determined to carry them out, and in doing so was
alarmed by no consequences. When nature goes against reason,
he holds that it must give way before reason, the higher. When
he found that Newton’s discoveries would not fall into his frame-
work, he did not hesitate to set them aside, a circumstance which
first led scientists to doubt of his pretensions. He is ever as-
suming what he should first have proved, and he does not scru-
ple to set aside self-evident truth when it crosses his path. He
admits that some of his positions are contradictory of each
other, but then he maintains that truth is made up of two sides
which are contradictory. It can be shown that these antino-
mies, and those of Kant as well, are not contradictions in things,
but simply one-sided, partial, and perverted accounts of things.

He was not contented to be the minister , he was the magis-
ter natnree. He ever lauded religion, but it had to submit to be
ruled by his laws. It is well known that he did not go regularly
to any church, and when his wife, a pious woman, would invite
him to go with her, he would reply, “ Mein Herz, thinking
is also devotion.” I apprehend that these two things, first his
thinking not founded on facts and not subject to God, and sec-

THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY.

71

ondly his ambitious speculative intellect, were the two sides or
personalities that met in the third thing his philosophy, the
whole constituting a trinity which he devoutly worshipped, and
in the light of which is revealed more of the “ Secret of Hegel ”
than even in Dr. Stirling’s elaborate work.

It is a curious but not an inexplicable circumstance that
while his sun has been going down in Germany, it has been ris-
ing in some other countries. In Great Britain and Ireland, and
I may add in America, there has been no influential thinker
since the decease of Mill and Hamilton, — always excepting Her-
bert Spencer, to whom many of our higher minds are not willing
to submit because of the agnosticism of his “First Principles”
and his identifying mind with nerves. Finding nothing at home
to satisfy them, a number of youths in these countries have been
resorting to Germany. In particular Merton Hall in Oxford
has been a nursery of Hegelianism, which has had powerful
propagators in Mr. Wallace and the two brothers Caird, the
principal and the professor. In America Hegel has had an en-
lightened admirer in Dr. Harris, and a powerful defence in a
group of writers in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy.

To sum up, I believe in the lofty aims of the school at Con-
cord. I go with them in their courageous opposition to scepti-
cism, agnosticism, and materialism. They are doing good by
holding before the age certain elevated ideas to lift up its down-
ward look. But they will require carefully to determine what
these ideas are, and what the laws by which they are regulated
and limited ; what they can do and what they cannot do. Many
dissatisfied with the meagre philosophy of England, Scotland, and
America at this present time are looking anxiously towards Ger-
many. But I do not believe they will be able to beat back the
tide by the embankments erected by Kant and Hegel, which
when they give way, as they are evidently doing, will only let
in the floods of scepticism with greater force. When the an-
cient Britons were wishing to drive out the Romans they called
in the Anglo-Saxons, who became more formidable masters than
those they drove out. So it will be with the Teutonic invasion
which many are calling in : it may introduce a deeper error than
that which it has been brought in to expel.

James McCosh.

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS ART.

i4| KNOW not,” says Viollet le Due, “whether poets, musi-
1 cians, and painters are ever suddenly inspired to write an
ode, to compose a sonata, or paint a picture ; I am inclined to
think not, because no poet, musician, or painter of genius has
ever revealed to us any such phenomenon in his experience. The
sacred fire does not kindle itself. In order to create a blaze we
must heap wood and live coals together, arrange the sticks, and
blow the smoldering pile until it breaks into a flame.”

We have not to inquire very deeply into the means and
methods of art, whether they be those of the painter, the
sculptor, or the architect, before reaching this conclusion. We
find that every great creation of art is a growth, a development,
a result of previously acquired facts grouped and fused under
some dominating impulse or idea. The poet browses up and
down the present and the past, stores his mind from others’
harvests, gleans again the oft-gleaned fields ; but when his song
flows forth, freighted with the rich spoils of patient industry, it
has the spontaneity of an inspiration. While viewing the noble
river we forget the springs and rills that comprise its source.

The painter presents an image that seems flashed upon the
canvas with the ease and celerity of thought, with the vividness
and truth of nature; but behind all this there is the laborious,
painstaking, studious inquiry into the appropriateness of every
detail, that the harmony and value of the most insignificant
part may have due reference to the effect of the whole. Follow-
ing- the methods of the architect we shall reach a like conclusion
in his case. When he has an edifice to construct he first collects
all the data, the requisites, comprehending use, cost, and loca-
tion, the nature of the material to be employed — in short, every

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS ART.

73

prominent practical requirement the character of the edifice de-
mands. These he reduces to order by distinguishing the more
prominent wants from those that are merely accessory. Upon
this data, thus ordered, he erects his constructive forms, subor-
dinating everything architectural to the utilitarian aspects of the
plan ; and when he has so arranged, adapted, and simplified
these requirements as to fulfil every requisite, then he proceeds
to give to them architectural expression.

The art of disposing his materials in a suitable and economi-
cal manner to attain a given utilitarian end is properly comprised
in the science of engineering; but when above and beyond these
utilitarian ends, yet in no particular subverting them, the builder
seeks some expression of beauty in his construction, he then be-
comes an architect.

Architecture has been defined as the art of ornamental con-
struction. A building constructed without reference to orna-
mental design should not properly be termed architectural.
Mechanical construction, even when applied to house-building,
when devoid of expression or ornamentation, as a factory, for
instance, is not architecture. Such a building, however, may be
made architectural by artistic treatment.

The first consideration of the architect, therefore, is to secure
a proper arrangement of “ the real requirements and determine
their relative importance, without occupying himself with any
considerations of architecture.” He adjusts and readjusts the
parts, transposes the various divisions, and finally unites them
under some prominent necessity. He sketches the ground-plans
with reference to their general areas, and subdivides these ac-
cording to the requirements of the proposed edifice. He applies
himself again and again to this task, “ changes from left to right,
puts that in front which was behind, and returns a hundred
times to the disposition of details in his design.”

Have we not seen in the analysis of every art how from small
beginnings the idea shapes itself ; how it grows by the accretion
of new facts, and is pruned by the elimination of those that are
unessential ? Often there is much groping under faint gledms of
light, when suddenly the architect “ believes that he has discovered
in his programme a principal idea, subordinating every other
consideration. New light breaks in upon him ; instead of ex-

74

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

amining the proposition before him in detail, to arrive at the
general combination of the whole he reverses the operation, he
discovers that until then he has had but a glimpse of the true
requirements of the structure, and finds that its various apart-
ments and dependencies should be submitted to a new general
disposition, on a larger scale, affecting all their arrangements and
communications.” In all this extraordinary combination of
geometrical figures — squares, rectangles, parallelograms, circles
or their segments, and what not — there has been not the first
inkling of architectural ideas. Both the architect and the en-
gineer are thus far subordinated to the geometrician. “ If,” says
Le Due, “ during these studies, the architect thinks about the
orders, the works of the Greeks, the Romans, or the Goths, or
anything foreign to the interior development of his own concep-
tions, he is lost, and instinctively sacrifices some practical neces-
sity of his plan to obtain a desirable architectural effect.”

But his plan settled upon, “ his elevations are a part and
expression of them, he sees how he should construct them, and
the dominating idea of the plan becomes the principal feature of
the elevations.”

But while sketching this method of procedure I am not insen-
sible of the fact that there is no arbitrary rule of composition or
growth in creations of art. Every artist forms his own habit, his
style, and he carries his peculiarities down to the very elements
of his art. Conversing once with a prominent architect on this
very subject — with reference to first conceptions — he declared
that the elementary methods varied with the character of the
artist ; one may carefully determine the ground-plans, and adapt
to them the elevations ; while another, as was not infrequently
the case, may conceive of the whole as a unit — plans and eleva-
tions fused under one general and dominating idea. Indeed, we
may draw an inference from Michael Angelo’s looking upon
Brunelleschi’s dome at Florence, and declaring that he would
suspend it in the air in his contemplated construction of that of
St. Peter’s, at Rome: and I have no doubt that that dome was
the first as it was the last inspiration of his vast undertaking.

It is absurd, therefore, to prescribe as arbitrary the rules for
art, when we find ample evidence of their violation by the great-
est masters — when we find Shakespeare violating Aristotle’s

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS ART.

75

fundamental requisites for dramatic composition, as well as the
grammarian’s most rigid rules of syntax. Nevertheless the merit
of a rule is tested through its common observance, rather than
by its occasional violation, and the practice of architects com-
monly conforms to the method of proceeding suggested above :
on the whole, experience proves this to be the wisest and most
natural way of evolving from given premises structures that
adequately fulfil the ends for which they are designed. Having
therefore determined the arrangement of his interior plans, the
architect then erects upon paper “ a sort of skeleton or frame, a
combination of masses, in which he proceeds to make the exte-
rior appearance a manifestation of the interior dispositions, to
cause the idea of the plan frankly to reappear in the elevation,
and to decorate or subordinate the various parts according to its
suggestions.” Here, then, he enters upon the true province of
the architect. Here his judgment, his taste, all the resources of
his memory, his invention, and his artistic skill, are in demand.
The vice-like tenacity of practical requirements in the elevations
yields to other influences — allows of some latitude for pleasing
effects. He spaces off the main divisions of the exterior walls
by determining the construction of the internal arrangement.
He expresses frankly the divisions of stories, and the subdivis-
ions of these in accordance with the requirements of construc-
tion. He pierces the walls with openings for light and for
entrance-ways; and when he has, by many repeated experiments,
brought his conception to a definite end, so that his idea is
shaped and defined, and capable of being formally expressed, he
then gives to his draughtsmen, to be worked out with more care,
the fragmentary and experimental records of his task.

The architect employs various kinds of draughtsmen: to each
is given the parts adapted to his skill. They are required to be
conversant with isometric and projection drawing, and perspec-
tive, besides the application of tints indicating the nature of the
various materials employed in construction. The drawings of
architects comprise plans, elevations, sectional elevations, and
perspective views — which latter profess to give a representation
of the appearance of the building when completed. These last,
I may add, are designed too often to captivate the unlearned.

;6

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

The critical generally mistrust them, and prefer the dry anatomi-
cal definition manifested in the plans and elevations.

In every formative art, drawing is of fundamental importance.
The architect should be able to transfer to the paper, with ease,
grace, and facility, that which he conceives in the mind. “With-
out this power he is unworthy the name of architect.” In the
process of making drawings the architect repeatedly goes over
the careful and finished work of his assistants, making fresh
suggestions, modifications, or amendments, with a free hand.
Finally the finished drawings are made, adapted to a scale,
and from these estimates are formed by the builders, in-
cluding all the specifications descriptive of the nature and cost
of materials, and the labor and time necessary for the completion
of the work. What are termed “ working-drawings” are likewise
made, for actual use upon the ground. The preparation of
working-drawings involves a thorough knowledge of projection
drawing. They include samples of various parts of the con-
struction, of every important detail respecting the mason-work,
the cutting and framing of timbers and trusses, the carving of
ornaments — in short, they serve as guides for workmen of all
kinds, who, as a general thing, are incapable of executing the
simplest task without rule or compass. The thorough architect,
therefore, comprehends the mathematician and the engineer.
He must be conversant with the branches of mathematics relat-
ing to stone-cutting and warped-surfaces, with the nature and
strength of materials, with the proportion of weight to its just
support, and with all that pertains to the forces that are active
in the arch.

All the old architects claimed that a knowledge of anatomy
was useful to the architect : Vitruvius, Brunelleschi, and Michael
Angelo agree in this. Every fine architecture frankly expresses
its anatomy. It aims not to conceal its construction, but to ex-
press in the externals some suggestion of that which is within.
Thus we find its masses and its general forms determine the
character of the parts and the details. Many principles of con-
struction have been directly derived from the anatomy of the
human form.

In addition to this, the finished architect must carry the sen-

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS ART.

77

sibilityof the painter and the sculptor into his work. He should
understand the use of color, in its harmonies and contrasts ; and
the values of relief resting in sculptured ornament. In short,
his requirements, both with respect to science and art, are of
such a character, and so numerous, that one may well exclaim —
as did Rasselas, when the necessary qualifications of the poet
were enumerated — “ Enough, for you have convinced me that no
man can be — an architect.”

Mr. Ruskin, who has been a close student of architecture,
and who has attained in that branch of art a high reputation as
a critic, even among professional architects, declares that, in his
opinion, “ no person who is not a great sculptor, or painter, can
be an architect. If he is not a painter or sculptor, he can only
be a builder. The three greatest architects hitherto known to
the world,” he says, “ were Phidias, Giotto, and Michael Angelo ;
with all of whom architecture was only their play, sculpture and
painting their work. All great works of architecture in exist-
ence,” he continues, “ are either the work of single painters or
sculptors, or of societies of painters and sculptors.” A Gothic
cathedral he defines as “ a piece of the most magnificent associa-
tive sculpture.” This he says in defence of his proposition that
“ ornamentation is the principal part of architecture.” Profes-
sional architects, I may add, take exception to this. They hold
that “the true nobility of architecture consists not in decoration,
but in the disposition of the masses, and that architecture is, in
fact, the art of proportion.” If the proportions of a building are
bad, no amount of decoration will serve to lend to it a pleasing
or impressive effect. Undoubtedly, underlying every idea of
detail, proportion is fundamental in architecture. If we dissect
a temple of the Greeks — the Parthenon, for instance — we find
the principal features of the facade may be defined as follows :
a triangular form, termed the pediment , resting on a horizontal
parallelogram, termed the entablature , which is supported by
eight vertical props, or columns, called the peristyle. These
three principal features explain the construction — vertical posts,
supporting a horizontal beam, on which rests the roof, sloped to
shed rain. Following the order in which these were defined and
ornamented, we learn that the proportions of length, breadth,
and height were then determined. The columns were consid-

78

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

cred with reference to their true proportions, and with reference
to the intervening spaces. Their vertical lines were found to be
so pleasing that these were multiplied by fluting the columns.
The entablature was spaced horizontally, and then vertically,
by adding the tryglyphs. Lastly metopes, or carved reliefs, were
inserted between the tryglyphs, and the pediment was filled in
with sculpture. Thus construction gradually blossomed into
architecture.

In the early forms of architecture the mass preponderates
even to a disproportion of weight to its just support — as in the
Egyptian. In the Grecian, symmetry , or weight subjugated by
science, is felt to be the marked characteristic ; while in the
Gothic, weight is vanquished by the arch, and we find space
superseding mass. Underlying these elemental features, the
fundamental principle is that of proportion. The history of every
art reveals a natural development or growth. The theory of evo-
lution becomes strikingly manifest in their successive changes.
The earliest builders could not calculate the proportion requi-
site between superincumbent weight and its just support; and
they erred on the right side, by providing superabundant strength
to carry their intended burden. “ We observe how, by degrees,
every architecture becomes slimmer and lighter as experience has
brought these proportions to the test.” The Egyptian is heavier
than the Greek ; and likewise after the Doric comes the Ionic

r

then the Corinthian, and at last the Composite, each order being
lighter in construction than its predecessor. Abundant evidence
remains to prove that the heavier construction of remoter periods
was not based upon any accurate calculation of ratio between
support and weight — the first went beyond the demands of the
second. In like manner, at a later period, we pass from the
Norman, through the intermediate stages of pointed architec-
ture, to the Flamboyant or Decorated. We find the architects
of the sixteenth century “ fearlessly altering the old Norman
arches into the pointed, and round massive piers into slender
clustered columns ; thus cutting out masses of sustaining mate-
rial without apprehension of insecurity.” In the same manner
the walls undergo a change. The apertures for windows are en-
larged until they absorb the greater part of the spaces between
the supports sustaining the groined arches, while these supports-

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS ART.

79-

are reinforced with buttresses and flying buttresses, and thus
the bearing lines are continued through a succession of curves
or angles to the very ground, quite without the walls. We find,
therefore, in the Gothic, vast spaces enclosed, with very little
massive material used in construction. Science thus reinforces
art, and by its subtile laws enables the architect thus to subju-
gate matter.

The three grand divisions in architecture originated in the
three methods of covering a space; and these three are pure, says
Mr. Ruskin, exactly in proportion to the simplicity and direct-
ness with which they express the condition of roofing on which
they are founded. The Greek is the architecture of the lintel ;
the Roman, that of the round arch ; and the Gothic, that of the
gable.

“ The most perfect example of the Greek is the Parthenon.
The Roman divides into eastern and western — Byzantine and
Lombardic. Of the former, St. Mark’s, Venice, is the most per-
fect example ; of the latter, the Duomo at Pisa. The Gothic
likewise divides into eastern and western branches — the Arabian
and the European: the latter may be termed the pure Gothic.
In the Greek, the Western-Roman, and the Western-Gothic, the
roof-mark is the gable ; in the Eastern-Roman and Eastern-
Gothic, it is the dome.” These distinctions of Mr. Ruskin are
both accurate and simple, and once fixed in the memory they
will serve to explain much that is fundamental in the principal
distinctions of architecture.

But a slight acquaintance with Grecian architecture will en-
able us to see that the effect of symmetry and elegance was based
upon a perfected system of proportion. The general proportions
of the Tetrastyle , or four-column porticoes, was based upon the
square, the height being equal to the breadth. One third is given
to the supports, the same to the intercolumniations, and a like
area to the entablature, or load supports. The proportions of
the Hexastyle, or six-column porticoes of Doric temples, were
comprised within a parallelogram of a square and a half. .The
relative proportions of the entablature, the columns, and the
intercolumniations, are the same — each comprising one third of
the general space enclosed by the outline of the entire facade.
The Octastyle, or eight-columned portico, of which the Parthenon

8o

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE IF.

is the most perfect example, comprises the double square, hav-
ing twice the number of columns that are found in the tetrastyle.
The proportions are relatively the same — one third to the sup-
ports, and a like area each to the entablature and the intercol-
umniations. The Roman Octastyle, as exemplified in the Pan-
theon, divides the intercolumniations equally with the solids —
that is, with the columns and entablature combined. The Pan-
theon portico is a double square without the pediment, and in
this respect the Romans differed from the Greeks.

The vertical and horizontal lines of Greek architecture — the
outlines of the columns, and the lines of the architrave — are
found, on close investigation, to differ in reality from their ap-
pearance. Penrose subjected some of the temples to mathe-
matical measurements, and determined the nature of these varia-
tions— or at least proved their existence — without penetrating
to their origin or cause, except so far as to infer that they were
designed to overcome certain optical illusions, and render an
increased effect of elegance. Thus the architrave, which has the
appearance of being perfectly horizontal, was found to be slightly
arched — perhaps to correct any optical interference of the slop-
ing lines of the pediment. This was common to all their temples,
but in the Parthenon the curve was applied to the sides also.
The columns, likewise, which appeared to be bounded by straight
lines, were found to have a convex profile, very slight indeed
(in the Parthenon it is only of the whole height), and this
outline was in the form of a very delicate hyperbolic curve.
Another peculiarity of the Greeks was that of making the
columns of their temples slope inward, very slightly it is true,
but with a uniformity that evidently was the result of design —
it may be, to increase the impression of strength. All the curved
lines used, says Penrose, were either hyperbolas or parabolas.
“ Whatever process of reasoning was employed in arriving at
these extreme niceties, the Greeks evidently attached the highest
importance to fulfilling the laws deduced with such accuracy.”

Accurate measurements having been recently applied to
Lincoln, Salisbury, and other of the English Gothic cathedrals,
the results obtained show conclusively the mathematical basis of
all true proportion in this architecture as well as in the Grecian.
Indeed, we must concede that harmonious proportions, whether

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS ART.

8l

applied to form, sound, or color, have their mathematical ratios
underlying their effects, producing harmonious or discordant,
agreeable or disagreeable impressions.

The proportions of Gothiq architecture have not the fixity of
the Grecian system : they differ in German, French, and English
cathedrals. The general plan which prevails extensively in
Gothic architecture is that of the cross. In the East the ground-
plan is that of the Greek cross; in the West it is the Latin
cross. The latter, says Gwilt, being divided into squares, gives
3, 5, and 7 as the ruling numbers — the arms and centre equal
three squares ; the whole number, omitting the centre, equal
five; and seven is the sum of the length and width. This, ac-
cording to descriptive geometry, gives the development of the
cube. These numbers have been found to predominate in the
proportional measurements of a large number of the best Gothic
cathedrals. I will not insist upon the absolute accuracy of any
such system of measurement ; but through increased attention
lately given to searching out these proportions, by measuring the
surfaces, solids, and spaces of Gothic architecture, they have been
found to prevail extensively. That some like system must have
been employed in structures of such vast extent, we cannot
doubt. It would have been impossible to preserve symmetry
and elegance on a scale so extensive without it. The proportion
of height to breadth, which varies considerably in English and
continental Gothic, is yet conducive to symmetry and beauty in
both instances. Pugin declares that, when he began the study of
English Gothic, he conceived the proportions to be very defec-
tive, and decidedly inferior to those employed in continental
cathedrals. But on closer acquaintance he perceived that the
distinctions were such as indicated a distinct development of
Gothic architecture, and upon laws peculiar to this development.
The greater length of nave is peculiar to English Gothic, while
the continental is narrow and higher.

The Roman and Gothic roofs are divided into two parts :
the lower, or visible vaulting, and the upper, or roof-mask, which
protects the lower from the weather. “ Thus we have the arch
for the bearing line below, and the gable for the protecting line
above.” The Roman has a flattened gable surmounting a round

arch; the Gothic, a high-peaked gable surmounting a pointed
6

82

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

arch. These simple features, in their variations respecting the
arch and the roof-mask, enable us to distinguish these two archi-
tectures clearly. These distinctions are repeated throughout
the details, as well as in the general forms. “ Romanesque and
Gothic buildings are more or less Roman or Gothic in propor-
tion to the number of their respective forms that we find united
in them,” says Mr. Ruskin. Thus we find the semicircular arch
of the Romanesque employed throughout the details and orna-
ments, as in the facade of the Cathedral of Pisa ; and in the early
Saxon and Norman architecture of England. In the Gothic,
the pointed arch, with its high gable, supplies the forms that
everywhere prevail throughout this style. It is by the study of
these details, no less than the general forms — the vaultings of
the nave and aisles, and their respective roofings — that we arrive
at a perception of the distinctions and merits of Gothic archi-
tecture.

About the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thir-
teenth century, a change took place in the architecture of
Europe. The flat southern roof wras superseded by the high-
pitched northern covering of ecclesiastical edifices, and its intro-
duction brought with it the use of the pointed arch in place of
the round, or semicircular ; and this was a necessary conse-
quence, for the roof and vaults, being thus raised, necessitated a
change in the combination of general forms. Heavy roofs, with
few ribs, and great width of vault carried by massive walls with
small openings, are characteristic of Romanesque work. Its
successor was exactly the reverse — the subdivision of roofing
into a collection of light ribs and groined work ; the growth of
the engaged or disengaged pillars into the lines of the vaulting;
the substitution of clustered columns for massive round pillars ;
and the large windows, both in the clere-story and the main
walls, made so large that the walls often appear to be merely
the frames of these, but secured against the lateral thrust of the
arches by flying-buttresses that offer resisting points. The
transition from the Romanesque, or Norman, to the Gothic was
beautifully expressed by the substitution of clustered shafts for
plain round pillars. These groups of slender supports spring
aloft with great lightness, disappearing in the varied foliage of
their numerous capitals, and then again rising beyond the clere-

THE ARCHITECT AND HIS ART. 83

story they soar aloft and disappear in the groined vaultings of
the roof.

“ The eye requires, on a slender shaft, a more spreading capi-
tal than it does on a massy one, and a bolder mass of capital on
a small scale than on a large.” But while the eye is thus agree-
ably impressed with the beauty of the capital, its actual use, or
service, is “ to gather the bearing forces of the upper masonry
and concentrate them upon the shaft.”

Endless change without repetition is a characteristic of the
best Gothic. The source of its inspiration was found in nature.
Variety under general uniformity is one of nature’s laws which
the Gothic architect emulated. The capitals, the shafts, the
traceries, the carvings — all weave a harmony of variety in unity
throughout this architecture. The round, the angular, the
spiral, and the grooved shafts give a varied and complex assem-
blage of lines that entice the eye aloft, as religious aspirations
do the soul. The Gothic cathedral is avast aspiration transfixed
and petrified, and as such it is one of the grandest embodiments
of religious fervor — the bodying forth of a great Christian im-
pulse. Compared with this the small Grecian temple has a
finite fixity, a completely compassed, finished, and intellectually
rounded end and defined character that is an end in itself — tho
one of extreme beauty. Architecture presents a field so vast, so
varied, and so suggestive of the greatest triumphs of the human
mind, that it is impossible, within the limits assigned me in this
article, to give more than a few bald suggestions of its scope and
character.

The dome presents a subject of extraordinary interest, and
there are few things more fascinating in literature than Vasari’s
account, in his life of Brunelleschi, of the building of the great
double dome of the cathedral at Florence, and of Michael
Angelo’s erection of that of St. Peter’s, at Rome.

The Indian minar, the Turkish minaret, the Italian campa-
nile, the Gothic spire, the Norman tower, the Saxon belfry, ate,
in themselves, beautiful creations. “To build high has been the
aspiration of all great builders in every country where architec-
ture has had any share in the expression of life and power and
these structures were “ raised to be seen from a distance, to cry
from, or to swing bells in.”

84

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

One cannot put too high an estimate upon the power of
architecture to impress human sensibility, or inspire profound
thought. If any one doubts this power, let him make a pil-
grimage to its shrines. There is no mere description that will
more than dimly suggest the sensations experienced on first
entering those vast temples of worship. It is not the skill of
the architect we dwell upon in recalling those lasting impressions
that overawed the mind and lifted the thought on wings as we
entered their solemn aisles and stood beneath their spacious
vaults. But it is the voice of art that speaks so eloquently
through dumb but expressive silence — as in the struggle of
irruptive and dazzling light pouring through lofty stained win-
dows, and dying away in the solemn depths of shade that fill the
vast interior spaces of the cathedral. All these combined effects
of light, shadow, color, space, and beautiful forms, that are the
delight of the beholder, were once but a thought in the mind of
the architect. To his art all other arts are made tributary.

A recent effort of Wagner, the composer, to unite the arts
under one great musical supremacy, was, in a sense, but a dim
reflection of that grand mediaeval idea embodied in the cathe-
dral— for while the thought was then expanded and lifted by
the vast and solemn architecture, the eye fell upon the sacred
subjects of pictorial art, and saintly forms carved in stone. The
ear too was filled with the grand waves of the organ and the
solemn cadence of chanted verse. Thus all the senses were made
avenues through which the mind and sensibility were blended
in one common aspiration of joy. Poetry, painting, sculpture,
music, and architecture were thus harmoniously united in one
voice — the voice of art.

John F. Weir.

ANTI-NATIONAL PHASES OF STATE GOVERN-
MENT.

HE rapid growth of the United States has developed a

J- new want in our system of government. In very general
terms it may be defined as the need of securing in some efficient
way a closer intercommunication and harmony of action be-
tween the separate States in matters of purely State* jurisdiction.
It is the object of this essay to point out precisely the nature
and exigency of the want referred to, and to suggest means of
supplying it.

The United States in relation to foreign powers is a nation
possessing all the attributes of an undivided sovereignty; but
in its internal organization and government, and in the relations
of the several States to each other, the United States is in only
a very qualified sense a nation ; it is rather a congeries of inde-
pendent powers. Viewed from within, the States are merged
in the federal government, or subordinated to it, in really few
particulars, and those particulars not the ones that enter most
deeply into the development and life of a people. All foreign
relations, including war and commerce, naturalization, bank-
ruptcy, coinage of money, post-offices, patents and copyrights,
and the suppression of insurrections and invasions — this is a
substantially complete list of the interests committed to the
federal government, and as to these the States are welded to-
gether into national unity. But in all matters other than those
above enumerated each State is an independent sovereignty,
practically unhampered by the Union, and holding to the other
States, in law and in fact, the relations of a foreign government.

These statements are truisms, but many of the consequences
they involve are practically under-estimated. The legal separa-

86

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

tion and independence of the States from each other is greater,
and the constitutional power of the federal government to con-
trol or supplement State action is far more limited, than the
masses of the people are disposed to believe. But it is a fact
that in most of those interests that bear vitally upon the pros-
perity and well-being of a people, the separate government of
each State is absolute and supreme. Each State has its own
code of civil law presiding over all the transactions and conduct
of daily life, its own criminal jurisprudence, its own mass of
judicial decisions interpreting its written and unwritten law.
Each State pursues its own methods in all that relates to the
security of life and of property within its borders ; has its own
system of taxation, its own system of education, its own system
of public charities. There is no social relation and hardly a
phase of individual life in which the power and influence of the
State are not vastly greater than those of the federal govern-
ment.

These various State codes and methods and systems that
flow through the very arteries of social and of individual life are
widely diverse, and are often in sharp conflict with each other.
This discordance and conflict between the laws and institutions
of the different States present one of the gravest evils in our
government. The wrongs resulting from it are hostile to the
interests and growing national spirit of the people, and they are
wrongs without a remedy ; there is no organized instrumentality
for their correction within the four corners of our system of
government. For these reasons the evil has appealed to revo-
lutionary methods for its cure, and the fact suggests grounds of
apprehension for the future.

The “ conflict of laws” has formed the subject of large trea-
tises ; and it is only possible within present limits, by the selec-
tion of a few instances, to illustrate the pernicious operation of
such conflict upon our national prosperity. For this purpose
consider, first, the subject of State taxation.

In all the States personal property is made an object of local
taxation. There are two legal principles regarding personal
property, both equally well established, which may be applied
in its taxation. The first is that personal property has no situs
apart from its owner, but is to be regarded as located at the

ANTI-NATIONAL PHASES OF STATE GOVERNMENT. 87

place where the owner is domiciled. The other principle is that
each State has supreme jurisdiction over all persons and over
all property actually within its boundaries. A resident of New
Jersey owning personal property in Massachusetts is personally
subject to the jurisdiction of New Jersey and taxable there;
and, under the legal fiction that all personal property, wherever
located in fact, is legally situated at the place of the owner’s
domicile, New Jersey may assert the right to levy taxes on
account of the property in Massachusetts. On the other hand,
Massachusetts, invoking the second principle above stated,
claims supreme jurisdiction over the same property on the
ground that it is actually within the State, and imposes a tax
upon it. And thus the owner is compelled, under strictly legal
principles, to pay taxes for the same property in both States.
Suppose, further, that the property is subject to a mortgage
held by a resident of Ohio : he, too, may be taxed in Ohio upon
the value of his security — that is, on the value of his interest in
the property ; and so the same property may be the object of
taxation in three or more separate States. Yet every State will
declare that it is wrong in principle to subject any property to
double taxation, and that it is a grievous hardship upon an
owner of property, paying a tax on it in one State, to endure
the exaction of a second tax in another State. But neither
State, while asserting the true principle, can yield the tax-payer
any relief. The courts of New Jersey must declare: You are a
citizen of this State and subject to its laws ; under the system
of taxation established and enforced in New Jersey, you have
been legally taxed, while the hardship of paying a second tax in
another State, of which you justly complain, is attributable to
the peculiar laws of Massachusetts, for which we are in no wise
accountable. The courts of Massachusetts are equally clear in
their logic : We cannot remit this tax without reversing the
policy and system which the State of Massachusetts has
adopted of taxing all personal property located within the
limits of its jurisdiction. The opposite State policies not .only
inflict on the individual a hardship for which there is no redress,
but they put a direct check upon the employment of a common
capital in different States and upon the extension of industrial
and business enterprises from one State into others; they are

88

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

repressive in their operation, inducing the confinement of each
interest within the limits of a single State jurisdiction, and so
hampering that free expansion of trade which is essential to its
healthy growth.

The same obstructive influence of conflicting State laws
manifests itself in numberless directions, and their tendency is
always blighting on the material prosperity of the people.
Negotiable paper is the circulating medium of trade, and is
indispensable in its operations very much as free air is needful
for the processes of respiration. The laws that govern the
validity and negotiability of commercial paper ought to be not
only uniform but absolutely identical throughout a country
whose business interests are closely interwoven from the Atlan-
tic to the Pacific. And yet the utmost diversity prevails among
the different States even upon such elementary questions as —
What constitutes a negotiable note? Who is a bona-fide holder
for value? What is a valuable consideration? Some of the
States have usury laws, others have none ; the consequences of
usury are widely diverse, in some States forfeiting the entire
debt, in others only the interest, in others involving some dif-
ferent penalty, and in others making usury a criminal mis-
demeanor. A note may be perfectly good in one State and
utterly worthless in another, while its possession in a third
State may subject the owner to actual imprisonment. And so
it is that negotiable paper, which ought to circulate with the
widest freedom and security, has become a most precarious and
dangerous article ; and State laws, instead of fostering inter-
state commerce, have by their contrariety hampered and dis-
couraged it.

It is perhaps misleading, however, to particularize negotiable
paper, for the same absence of uniformity resulting in the same
pernicious consequences is found in almost every other species
of contract. The force or validity of a contract may be sub-
jected to the test of one of four separate systems of law : first,
the law of the State where the contract was made ( lex loci con-
tractus) ; second, the law of the State where the contract was to
be performed (law of the place of performance) ; third, the law
of the State where the specific property affected by the contract
may happen to be situated ( lex loci reisitce ); fourth, the law of the

ANTI-NATIONAL PHASES OF STATE GOVERNMENT. 89

%

State where the action is brought {lex fori)] and in some classes
of actions the law of a fifth State may be controlling the State
where the parties are domiciled {lex domicilii): In many cases

the four or five systems of State law thus to be selected from
may be in direct conflict with each other, and it is often a mat-
ter of extreme doubt and difficulty to determine which system
is properly applicable to the decision of a given case. And even
if the States agree in the settlement of that preliminary ques-
tion, it still follows that the same kind of contract made in
separate States is valid and enforceable in one State, only par-
tially valid in a second, and wholly illegal in a third. It is a
conclusive presumption of law that every person contracting in
any State is familiar with its laws, and the contract is construed
as if the parties had incorporated in it, pro hac vice, the laws of
that State. And yet the laws and legal remedies of the sepa-
rate States are so dissimilar that a prudent lawyer would decline
to give an opinion, without making special examination, upon a
simple question relating to the laws of another State than his
own. This dissimilarity is not confined to the law of contracts :
it extends to wills, intestacy, the law of corporations and part-
nerships, domestic relations, and through the whole circle of
State legislation.

Apply this chaotic jurisprudence to the numerous cases that
that will present themselves to every practical mind. Railroad
corporations, whose lines traverse a dozen States, making con-
tracts for transportation in each of them, dealing with enormous
properties in each of them, incurring liabilities for loss or negli-
gence in each of them, and yet subject to a dozen different and
conflicting systems of law, regulating their rights, their duties,
and their liabilities ; insurance companies and telegraph com-
panies, having agencies and transacting business in every State
in the Union ; every manufacturing interest and every commer-
cial interest having business relations, more or less extended, in
different States, and yet encountering diverse laws as they pass
each State boundary ; that these enterprises can yet thrive in
the face of such adverse and fluctuating circumstances is a mar-
vellous proof of the ingenuity of man and of the vital energy of
trade in overcoming obstacles.

There is an equal diversity in the forms of procedure enforced

90

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

and in the remedies yielded by the courts of the different
States. In a word, the States are legally foreign powers with
reference to each other, and their systems of law and of adminis-
tration, so far as they clash or even fail to harmonize, are for-
midable obstacles to national growth and unity. To foster
industry and trade you must give certainty and consistency
to the civil laws that govern them ; and if their extension to
another State requires a new adjustment or a reorganization to
secure the same legal rights, or subjects them to new conditions
under a different State policy, their natural development is
repressed by a check that is always pernicious and may some-
times prove insurmountable. The material and moral interests
that knit the country together are regardless of State lines,
except as they are unduly diverted or severed by incompatible
State laws and policies.

The moral interests of the country suffer as well as its mate-
rial prosperity. The proper treatment of marriage and divorce
is fundamental to the morality and even the civilization of a
people ; and here, at least, it would seem that substantial uni-
formity might be expected among the States forming a single
nation. But in fact the divergence between State laws and
adjudications on this vital subject, and the injurious conse-
quences flowing from that divergence, present a spectacle that
is revolting to moral sentiment. The possible complications of
domestic life in its most sacred relations that may actually arise
under the conflict of States tax the ingenuity of the imagina-
tion. A citizen of the United States may be legally incapaci-
tated to contract a marriage in one State which the laws of an-
other State sanction; he may be a married man legally in one
State and at the same time an unmarried man in another State;
he may actually have one lawful wife in one State and another
lawful wife in another State. But the real facts of a case re-
cently adjudicated in the New York Court of Appeals will give
a keener sense of the conflict of laws than any abstract state-
ment or hypothetical example can do.

In 1871 Frank M. Baker married Sallie West in Ohio; he
subsequently abandoned her and established his domicile in New
York. The wife, who remained domiciled in Ohio, then brought
her suit in the courts of Ohio to obtain a divorce; judgment of

ANTI-NATIONAL PHASES OF STATE GOVERNMENT. gi

absolute divorce was rendered in her favor in 1874, and in the
following year she married one C. H. Murray. After the entry
of the judgment of divorce Baker also contracted a second mar-
riage, marrying one Eunice Nelson within the State of New
York. He was then indicted in New York for bigamy; he
pleaded in defence that the divorce in Ohio having terminated
his first marriage, left him free to marry Eunice Nelson. It was
conceded that the judgment in Ohio was regularly obtained in
accordance with the laws of that State, and that it was unques-
tionably valid in Ohio ; but, on the ground that the defendant
was domiciled and actually resident in New York, and did not
appear by attorney in the divorce suit, the Court of Appeals
held that the divorce was not binding on Baker or on the courts
of New York; the divorce was held valid as to the wife, Sallie
West, but a nullity as to the husband, Frank M. Baker; by vir-
tue of it the wife became divorced from her husband, but the
husband did not become divorced from his wife; Frank M.
Baker continued to be the husband of Sallie West when he mar-
ried Eunice Nelson, and hence he was guilty of bigamy, and
was sentenced to the State Prison for five years, and there he
probably is to-day. The anomalies involved in this decision are
very striking. If Sallie West, now Mrs. Murray, should move
with her husband, Mr. C. H. Murray, to New York, she would
have two husbands here — no, the subject demands the utmost
exactness of language — she would have only one husband, but
two husbands would have her as their lawful wife. Mr. Baker
has never been deprived of her, altho Mr. Baker is to her no
relation, for she was divorced but he was not. Sallie, having
been legally divorced, had a right to marry Mr. Murray, was
legally married to him in Ohio, and the validity of Mr. Murray’s
claim to her must be recognized even by the courts of New
York. Regard the matter now from Mr. Baker’s standpoint:
Suppose that he had married Eunice Nelson in Rhode Island
instead of New York, and had gone to Ohio upon his wedding
tour ; the courts of Rhode Island accept the Ohio divorce as
valid, and Eunice and her husband consequently set out on
their journey a legally married couple ; in crossing the State of
New York Eunice ceases to hold any lawful relation to her hus.
band, whose New York wife is Sallie West; and, on reaching

92

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

Ohio, Mr. Baker ceases to be a married man at all, for, as the
decree of divorce prohibited him from marrying again, Ohio will
not recognize the validity of the subsequent marriage in Rhode
Island.1

It is proper to observe, that the decision of the New York
Court of Appeals in the case cited does not mark any new de-
parture, but seems to be sustained by the weight of authority
both in the State and the federal courts. This case is a forci-
ble illustration of the inextricable and hopeless confusion that
has resulted from the adoption of distinct policies by the sepa-
rate States ; and that, too, in a matter where in the reason of
things there is not the slightest cause for divergence from abso-
lute uniformity. It is difficult to estimate the demoralizing
effects upon the people of such subversion, under the forms of
law, of relations that ought to be held sacred. Add to this the
utterly insoluble questions about rights of property and legiti-
macy of offspring growing out of such indeterminate family re-
lations, and the conflict of laws becomes an evil that is insuffer-
able— an evil that in some way and by some means must be
cured, not only in the interest of decent morality, but in the
interest of civilization itself.

The illustrations given of the conflict between State policies
have touched but a few of the salient points of the subject; it
would be easy to trace this conflict further into all the depart-
ments of State legislation and State administration, and to de-
tect the injurious and anti-national tendencies of it in many
phases of the life and development of the people. But my pres-
ent object has been accomplished in pointing out the existence
and the nature of the evil ; that it is an evil, and that the coun-
try needs relief from it, none will be disposed to deny.

It was intimated at the outset that the evil complained of
had been developed by the growth of the United States. This
is true, not so much in the sense that the divergence of State
policies has been increasing, but in the sense that the changed
conditions of our national growth are making that divergence to
be felt more painfully, and its effects to be more and more in-

1 1 am not aware that this last point has ever been expressly passed upon in
Ohio, but, as it has been so adjudicated in some other States, it answers the pur-
pose of a fair illustration.

ANTS N A TIOiVAL PHASES OF STATE GOVERNMENT. 93

jurious with every step of our progress. At the foundation of
the government the people of the several States were really sep-
arated in policy and interests; the States had just emerged from
the condition of colonies, and were but partially amalgamated.
The colonies had led each a separate existence, somewhat aloof
from one another and holding toward each other an attitude of
jealousy and suspicion. New York and Connecticut had been
traditionally at open feud ; the existence of Rhode Island had
been a kind of standing protest against what was there deemed
the illiberal policy and bigotry of Massachusetts; New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and Maryland had had little in common in their
origin or in their colonial history, and the Southern colonies
were at variance with the Northern in their political govern-
ments and in the prevailing sentiments of their people. Facili-
ties for intercourse between the colonies were meagre, and in-
stances of social commingling or of business connection between
their inhabitants were of comparatively rare occurrence. The
common desire for independence from the British crown, and
the sympathies and mutual interests developed by their union
in the Revolutionary struggle, constituted the bond that drew
the colonies together into national unity. When independence
was finally achieved the new States retained much of the colo-
nial exclusiveness, and shrank from anything more than a very
qualified merger of themselves in a national government. The
articles of confederation served rather to foster the jealousy of
the States than to knit them together in closer union. And
when the Constitution was framed, consolidating the States
more firmly, and depriving them of some of the elements of sov-
ereignty, it was not received with universal enthusiasm ; it was
only after years of reluctance and under the pressure of obvious
policy that the Constitution was finally accepted by all the
States.

These sharp lines of demarcation between the States have
by the progress of time become nearly obliterated in the inter-
ests and temper of the people, while legally they remain as at
first. It admits of no doubt whatever that the population of
the United States is vastly more homogeneous and more truly
national in spirit than it was in its beginnings. This is probably
true even of the Southern States, for the past few years give

94

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IF.

hopeful signs that the wounds of the civil war are healing, and
that the South is slowly growing into the nation. The causes
that are strengthening the bonds between the people are as
obvious as the fact itself. The civil war strongly intensified the
sentiment of nationality; it brought into intimate contact and
comradeship large bodies of men from every section ; it cement-
ed the people into firm unity by common sympathies, hopes,
and sufferings ; and its issue was the distinct triumph of the
principle of union over the principle of State segregation. The
assassination of Lincoln, and, even more, the assassination of
Garfield, have fused the people into a brotherhood in the deep
feeling of a common grief. The material interests of the nation
are all co-operating in every direction toward the same result.
Railroads and telegraphs and the newspaper press are daily
drawing the people into closer and closer contact ; the develop-
ment of our resources, the extension of business and industrial
enterprises, the great moral and social movements of the time
— all these agencies are national in their scope and tendency.
State lines do not hem in the circle of influences that regulate
any employment of capital however local, or any industry how-
ever humble ; all trade, all labor, all individual activity of what-
ever kind, are parts of one national life, measured by one common
pulse that beats alike through the length and breadth of our land.

The conflict of State laws is directly opposed to all these
nationalizing tendencies ; it is essentially anti-national in its
nature and far-reaching in its pernicious working. Interests of
labor and of capital that are identical throughout the land are
locally hampered or distorted in their development by incom-
patible systems of State laws and of judicial remedies ; lines of
progress that are naturally independent of State divisions are
intersected by State boundaries, and are apt to be cut off or
deflected by an adverse State policy. This contrariety of State
systems has no justification in reason or necessity: and a sense
of incongruity in dissecting a homogeneous nation into thirty-
eight territorial divisions and subjecting these divisions to sepa-
rate and distinct governments with inharmonious and con-
flicting laws that yet have supreme local jurisdiction over what
concerns most deeply the life and character of the whole nation
— a sense of incongruity and of unwisdom in this disintegrating

ANTI-NATIONAL PHASES OF STATE GOVERNMENT. 95

policy has given rise to that tendency, so strongly manifested
of late years, toward centralization of power in the federal gov-
ernment. The want of harmony between the States, in dealing
with interests of common and really national concern, has
seemed to many a proof that the States, acting apart, are not
competent to govern those interests, and that there ought to
be a central power which should secure to the people a common,
or at least a self-consistent, government. And so it is that
in the conflict of State laws the minds of the people turn for a
remedy to the federal government.

It is certain that the federal government is absolutely power-
less to grant any relief, or to exert any influence which shall
tend to draw the States toward uniformity or harmony. The
limits of its jurisdiction are rigidly and jealously marked by
the Constitution, the tenth amendment of which explicitly
enacts that “ the powers not delegated to the United States
by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
reserved to the States respectively or to the people.” The pro-
visions of the Constitution which aim to secure harmony of
State action are strikingly vague as well as few and simple.
“ Full faith and credit shall be given in each State to the public
acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other State
“ the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges
and immunities of citizens in the several States a fugitive
from justice from one State found in another State shall be
delivered up on requisition to the State having jurisdiction of the
crime ; the United States shall protect each State from invasion ;
and, finally, the federal courts shall have jurisdiction over contro-
versies between two or more States or between citizens of dif-
ferent States, and over claims made by one State against citizens
of another State ; not , be it marked, over claims made by the
citizens of one State against another State. A State cannot
be sued except by another State ; and as the conflict of State
laws acts injuriously upon the citizens of the States, and not
upon the States themselves in their corporate character, the
suffering parties cannot bring their defendant into court. But
in no event can Congress or the federal judiciary intervene
between the States in any, the slightest way, without subverting
the whole system and theory of the Union. The States, in all

g6

THE PRIXCE TON REVIEW.

matters not delegated to the United States, are as absolute and
supreme as the United States is in its sphere; and the United
States has no more right to restrain the freedom of State
action, touching matters of State jurisdiction, than a State has
to override the legislation of Congress upon a topic of federal
jurisdiction. Two limits only the Constitution sets upon the
discord and wranglings of the States: (i) they shall not pro-
ceed to open war, actual invasion ; (2) the Supreme Court is
vested with power to decide “ controversies” between the
States, but this has been held to be limited to controversies
of a judicial nature, not touching the political sovereignty of
each State.1 The fact remains that the federal power cannot
be invoked to reconcile the conflicting policies of the States
upon matters not expressly delegated by the Constitution to
the United States.

It is not difficult to discern the causes that have led the
States apart on divergent lines of legislation and policy. The
variance cannot be laid to the charge of the State judiciaries.
The judges of the State courts, who as a class have been men
of broad views and often able jurists, have been keenly sensible
of the evils attendant upon a conflict of judicial decisions ; they
have laboriously collated the decisions of other States in kindred
cases and have habitually aimed to reconcile and harmonize
them, and so far as possible to follow them. But the differ-
ences complained of are inherent in the laws themselves, in the
statutes enacted by the separate State legislatures ; and it is
upon these bodies, the legislatures of the several States, that
rests the burden of accountability for the diverse and conflict-
ing systems. The evil is largely the natural outcome of that
worst fact in our political history — that politics have become
a trade, and not a science. The highest intelligence and the
most sterling moral forces in the community have kept aloof
from politics, and have delivered over the control of caucuses
and political parties, and hence the practical administration of
government, to those elements of society that are not rightfully

1 1 do not overlook the restrictions imposed by the Constitution upon State
laws, that they shall not impair the obligation of contracts, etc., for these restric-
tions are founded upon natural right, and would practically be enforced without
the Constitution.

ANTI-NATIONAL THASES OF STATE GOVERNMENT. 97

the dominant ones. It is the natural result that State legisla-
tures fail to represent the best intelligence or moral purity of
their constituencies, and are apt to be manipulated by ambi-
tious leaders who are skilled in intrigue but are wholly unfitted
to deal with broad questions of statesmanship.

There are other causes lying deeper than the personal char-
acteristics of those who enact the laws. There are no adequate
means by which legislators, however honest or able, can acquaint
themselves with precisely what the real needs of legislation de-
mand from them ; in acting upon a proposed law they are often
ignorant what legislative action the other States have already
adopted upon the same subject, what practical difficulties such
legislation in other States has encountered, in what directions
kindred laws have clashed in different States, suggesting dangers
to be avoided and differences to be harmonized ; nor can they ac-
quire this information, so essential to guide their action, without
studious and laborious research, for which, by their habits and
abilities, they are utterly unqualified. There is no official bureau
of political information, no official organ of communication be-
tween the States, through which the legislature of one State can
readily place itself en rapport with the other States, gain authentic
knowledge, by their experience, of a common want, and co-
operate with them in carrying out a defined policy with intelli-
gence and efficiency. So the State sovereignties plod on apart,
each in the path of its own narrow policy, legislating only for
the supposed interests of its own commonwealth, heedless of
harmony with its sister States, and practically ignoring the
inter-State conflict of jurisprudence. But meantime a consoli-
dated nation has sprung up and has outgrown the States ; the
constriction of State lines and of local laws and policies is gall-
ing to its energy and its growth ; and there has arisen among
the people a yearning (often undefined, but yet clearly percep-
tible) to be governed by a national law and a firmly centralized
government.

It is exactly here, in my judgment, that lie the weakness, and
the danger in the system of government devised by our fathers.
While it left each State supreme in all matters not delegated to
the federal government, it provided no agency to keep the States
upon parallel lines of policy, instituted no official organ of po-
7

98

THE PRINCETON RE VIE W.

litical communication between the States, established no instru-
mentality to harmonize State laws or to reconcile conflict be-
tween them upon matters within State jurisdiction, but of
national concern. The civil war itself was a culminating out-
break through this very flaw ; the causes that were visibly lead-
ing to it were beyond the reach of the government, which was
powerless to act until they had ripened into actual “ insurrec-
tion.” And the same absence of organized channels for the
peaceful diffusion of a national spirit and a national polity, the
same lack of official agencies to disseminate the influence of
dominant public sentiment and the comprehension of common
public interest, which made the war inevitable, have been sen-
sibly felt since the war in keeping the North and South apart
and in retarding the progress of reunion.

The proposed remedy, of centralizing power in the federal
government, subverts the sovereignty of the States, and is
clearly unconstitutional and revolutionary. The only conserva-
tive remedy possible must rest in the voluntary action of the
States themselves ; and it remains to inquire what new measures
are best adapted to bring the States together where they
have diverged, and to maintain among them a homogeneous
policy.

This inquiry, so far as it relates to the single topic of mar-
riage and divorce, has recently elicited considerable discussion.
The action of Congress has been invoked, and in other quarters
a constitutional amendment has been suggested as means of
securing a uniform System of laws relating to marriage. Presi-
dent Woolsey, in a late publication, has demonstrated the revo-
lutionary character of efforts to obtain relief by any form of
federal intervention ; the subject of marriage and divorce is one
of those that under our form of government are committed to
State action and control, and it cannot be transferred to the
sphere of federal jurisdiction without doing violence to the or-
ganic system on which the union of the States is based. One
mode of remedy only is possible : the States themselves must
by their joint action construct, and must severally adopt, a uni-
form code of marriage law. The redaction of such a code may
be accomplished by a national convention to be composed of
representatives from all the States, selected with reference to

ANTI-NATIONAL PHASES OF STATE GOVERNMENT. 99

their special adaptation to the task ; they must be men of large
juridical experience and of liberal spirit, competent to appre-
hend the precise points of conflict, and to act with a broad com-
prehension of national conditions and national wants.

The work of such a convention should extend over a far
wider field than the single subject of marriage and divorce ; that
is one only of the multiform instances of the conflict of laws.
The whole body of the statute law of the States needs to be
fused and moulded into a harmonious system. A really small
part of the legislation of a State is purely local and special in
its nature, and with that a national convention has of course no
concern ; but those general laws that affect the business and the
industry, the material and the moral interests of the people as a
nation, in regard to which the circumstances of no State require
a distinctive or isolated policy, should be framed by the united
wisdom of the nation, and should be, as nearly as possible, iden-
tical throughout all the States. Such a national code of laws,
digested by a joint convention, and then adopted and enacted
by each State, is the only effective substitute for federal cen-
tralization, and the only available solution of the present con-
flict of States.

In the judicial enforcement of a national code, differences
of interpretation would unavoidably be developed in the inde-
pendent courts of the separate States. To harmonize and au-
thoritatively settle these differences, power must be vested in
the Supreme Court of the United States to exercise an appellate
jurisdiction ; such power, if not already involved in the consti-
tutional right to decide “ controversies between the States,” is
not inconsistent with the spirit of those provisions of the Con-
stitution that define the functions of the federal judiciary, and
a constitutional amendment expressly conferring the required
jurisdiction would be wholly germane to the present system.

The enactment of a uniform system of State law, however,
while yielding temporary relief, would fail to establish any suf-
ficient guaranty for the future. No code can be made perfect
or remain stationary. Experience and the changed conditions
of progress would develop the constant need of amendment and
of extension; and the States, being supreme and acting sepa-
rately, would inevitably diverge as they have done in the past,

IOO

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

until the urgency of the conflict of laws again demanded the re-
sort to a national convention.

To avert this prospective conflict, the convention or council
of States must be made a permanent body, holding annual ses-
sions, and constituting an organ of official and diplomatic com-
munication between the States. The functions of the council
must be deliberative and advisory, without any power of coer-
cion, but having only the moral force that would attach to the
collective wisdom of leading minds from all the States. It is a
remarkable fact that while each of the governments of Europe
finds it advisable to maintain diplomatic representatives at the
seats of the other governments, in order to keep itself informed
of their movements and to secure a certain harmony of action,
the States of the Union, tho legally almost as foreign to each
other as the states of Europe and tho infinitely more affected
by the measures and the policy of each other, yet have no es-
tablished agency by which to exert any influence on such meas-
ures and policy or even to gain authentic information of them,
and they have no official means of communication with each
other. This want the council would effectively supply; its
members would be in close and constant relations with the leg-
islatures and judiciaries of the several States : defects in the
practical working of the national code, proposed new measures
of general legislation, new wants developed by the growing in-
terests of the nation, would be reported to the national council
from every district throughout the length and breadth of the
continent.

With these national and inter-State topics the council would
have permanently to deal ; and while its action would be limited
to recommendations which would not be legally binding on the
States until voluntarily adopted by them, the recommendations
would necessarily be invested with a great weight of authority.
The authority would attach not only to the august and national
character of the council, but it maybe reasonably hoped would be
inherent in the recommendations themselves ; for the council
would occupy a vantage-ground, above any possible State legis-
lature, in discussing a question of general polity. It would
have at its command boundless resources of facts gathered from
every corner of every State, it would be raised above local

ANTI-NATIONAL PHASES OP STATE GOVERNMENT. IOI

prejudices, and all its deliberations would tend to broaden its
views toward a national horizon. In recommending any public
measure or in stamping with its disapproval any discordant
State action, the council would at least send forth to the coun-
try a forcible presentation of facts and of argument, directing
public attention to the issue and enlightening the people as to
its bearings in a manner that would ultimately secure its adjust-
ment.

A single instance will illustrate the utility of such a body.
Nearly every session of a State legislature is marked by the
creation of one or more legislative commissions appointed to
investigate and report upon important subjects of statute regu-
lation— taxation, railroads, prisons, public charities. All the
topics thus referred to a#commission have bearings broader than
the limits of the State, and most of them involve interests that
can only be effectively protected by community and concert of
action between the States. The proposed council would be
eminently suited to conduct such investigations as a joint com-
mission for all the States; while, having resources wholly unat-
tainable by any local body, it would enjoy the unique advan-
tage (to which no State commission can ever aspire) of address-
ing itself authoritatively and officially to all the States alike. It
is difficult to conceive any other way in which the States can be
practically brought into uniformity and co-operation upon mat-
ters in which they all have really identical interests.

The practicability of the scheme itself here suggested turns
upon the possibility of inducing the States to unite in its adop-
tion. That is a matter of popular political education and dis-
cussion. The tendency toward federal centralization rests on a
substantial basis, and seeks to remedy a substantial evil ; those
who regard the tendency as a dangerous one, believing that
centralization imports the eventual breaking up of the republic
by its own weight into wholly separate and independent frag-
ments, must meet the tendency by the substitution of a new and
better remedy — they must neutralize the tendency by removing
the grounds on which its rests. It is possible that two or more
States may unite in the establishment of a joint convention for
the codification of the general laws of those States or of the
laws relating to a single topic. The advantageous results of

102

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

even such a limited convention, it is believed, would be so visi-
ble and striking as to induce the extension of its scope and the
participation of other States, until the movement once inaugu-
rated might grow into an established and universal system.

The great difficulty at present is found in the general lack
of information regarding the laws and institutions of the several
States, and in the prevailing ignorance touching the extent and
details of the conflict between them. Outside the limits of the
legal profession men know of this conflict only in a most vague
way, except as they are conscious of having themselves suffered
from some few instances of it. But a national council of the
kind suggested would be an efficient agency of political educa-
tion for the people, teaching them what grave wrongs are in-
flicted in the name of law, how their commerce is impeded and
their industry checked and their trade depressed or unduly
stimulated by inharmonious State laws — teaching them that,
while they are a nation in their temper and their interests, they
are legally a nation only outside their own country, but at home
are subject to the government of States foreign and in many
ways hostile to each other.

The full comprehension by the people of the incongruities
of our present methods of government by States will be surely
followed by an imperative demand for redress, and by the en-
forcement of some remedy ; whether the remedy adopted shall
proceed from the voluntary action of the States yielding to the
national demand, or be found in the simpler tho revolutionary
processes of federal centralization, is a question the future only
can determine. But on the solution of that question turns the
continuance or the downfall of the constitutional system of gov-
ernment inherited from the founders of the republic.

Eugene Smith.

THE PLACE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGI-
CAL CURRICULUM.

IT is natural that one should look with an eye of favoritism
upon his own department of study, and, in answer to the
inquiry as to what topics are of most importance in current
religious thought, that he should contrive to get his own sub-
ject pretty high up on the list. For this reason it is generally
safe to deduct something from the strong statements which
are so frequently made by enthusiastic specialists respecting
the burning questions in theological controversy. And yet
when we take into account the immense literature that is being
produced in reference to the philosophy of religion, as well as
the organization of societies in the interest of the Christian
evidences and the endowment of chairs of apologetics in our
theological seminaries, it can hardly be doubted that the bor-
der-land of science, philosophy, and religion is, and is likely to
be for many a day to come, the arena of great and growing in-
tellectual interest and activity. It is not a sign of the highest
religious condition for the church to be expending so much of
her energy in the work of defending her supernatural claims,
and for inquiries from within her communion to be made on
every hand respecting the value of her credentials. It is never-
theless a fact that the present is an apologetic age, and that the
apologetic method and spirit are visibly affecting all forms of
the church’s life. And while it would certainly be better if
truth were not challenged, it can hardly be denied that being
challenged it ought to be defended ; and it ought not t'o be
necessary at this late day to vindicate the wisdom of the church

104

TI1E PRINCETON REVIEW.

in giving apologetics a prominent place in theological disci-
pline. The question should rather be whether under the pro-
visions of this department all the work that is necessary for
the vindication of Christianity can be done. For the area of
apologetic is far wider than many suppose ; and it may well be
asked whether it is reasonable to suppose that the exceptional
qualifications that are needed for dealing with the difficulties
raised in Old Testament and New Testament historical criticism,
to say nothing of those which come from the side of physical
science and speculative philosophy, are to be looked for in any
one mind. The question arises then whether it will not be nec-
essary to carry the principle of division of labor a step farther by
entrusting the historical and the speculative sides of apologetic
to different hands. And if this were contemplated, as sooner
or later perhaps it will be, it should then be considered whether
this end could not be best effected by establishing a department
which should proceed by a method slightly different from that
which is commonly recognized as belonging to apologetic
proper. And inasmuch as there is a proper place for philoso-
phy in theology, and, moreover, the attacks upon the Christian
religion are to a large extent on the outgrowth of philosophical
principles, it may be fairly asked whether fidelity to truth does
not demand that, as a protection against the evil consequences
in all branches of theology of a false philosophy, we should
give a recognized place to philosophy in the theological curricu-
lum. It is a matter of minor importance how such a chair
should be designated. It may be called the chair of the rela-
tions of science, philosophy, and religion ; or simply the chair
of religious philosophy. In either case it would be easy to an-
ticipate what class of subjects would properly pertain to it; and
it would be apparent at once that, while making use of materials
that are common to dogmatics, ethics, and apologetics, the pro-
fessor in this department would proceed under an organizing
principle different from those which determine the departments
that have just been named.

To some it would seem that, as the apologete is the pro-
fessed advocate of Christianity, the occupant of a chair like the
one of which I am speaking might very properly act in the ca-

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. 105

parity of a judge. Accordingly he might be expected to enter
upon his duties with no foregone conclusions, and to divest
himself of all dogmatic bias in order that he might act with
scrupulous fairness toward the contending parties in a protracted
litigation. But this view of the matter results from* a miscon-
ception of the relations of dogmatic faith to free inquiry, and a
forgetfulness of the relations which nearly all theological semi-
naries sustain to definite confessional theology. It cannot be
said that the condition of fair investigation is antecedent and
universal scepticism. A man should be ready to see evidence
that contradicts his own opinions. But it is not necessary that
he should begin investigation without opinions. The scientific
man even is not asked to be such a thorough-going Cartesian in
his method as to give up every belief as the condition of pros-
ecuting with fairness a new subject of investigation ; and the
theologian should have as much liberty in this respect as the
man of science. If, therefore, he may enter upon his work in
possession of distinct and definite opinions, there is no reason
why he should not enter upon it believing in a complete system
of theology ; in other words, there is no reason why his avowal
of belief in a distinct type of confessional theology should hin-
der his quest of truth or prevent him from recognizing evidence
whenever he sees it. The fact, therefore, that our theological
seminaries are founded, as a rule, in the interests of the doc-
trine and polity of the communions which they respectively
represent, and therefore that professors in those seminaries
enter upon their work with foregone conclusions, is the occasion
of no real difficulty. For a man should have made up his mind
as to the place of Christianity in the world before taking the
position of a teacher in a school of divinity, and he can honestly
hold his place in an ecclesiastical organization only so long as
he is in sympathy with the ends for which the organization
exists. Assuming then that the professor of the department
to which reference is made comes to his work under the assump-
tions of a confessional theology, the work before him is one of
great amplitude. It will not be necessary for him to construe
the title of his chair in the terms of a minimism of theology,
and it would be quite correct to say that the whole area of dog-

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

matic, so far as it impinges upon philosophy and science, is
legitimately within his domain.

And this dogmatic attitude, as has been already said, is not
incompatible with the exhibition of a philosophic spirit. The
incumbent of this as of every chair should be expected to deal
fairly with adversaries ; to look difficulties in the face ; to make
honest concessions when they are needed ; to argue without
animus ; and to see both sides of all questions. No good can
come through calling hard names. It is argument that tells,
not indignation. These are not days of otiose acquiescence in
the doctrines of the church. This must be recognized. We
cannot compel belief nor punish doubt. We cannot shut up
our libraries nor suppress investigation. It is useless to veto
thought or write an Index expurgatorius. Fairness, patience, a
judicial temper, trust in God and reverence for his Word — these
are the qualities that should be conspicuous in the teacher of
to-day. And when all is done, it is not to his discredit to con-
fess that his case is stronger than the best defence of it can be,
and that the true “ grammar of assent” is learned by the child
of God in the school of Christ and under the teaching of the
Holy Ghost.

This is said, however, without any sympathy with some
current opinions respecting the argumentative status of Chris-
tianity. Indeed, one of the important functions of a professor-
ship like the one under discussion would be to show the defen-
sible character of the Christian religion. For it is of little
avail for the dogmatician to present the arguments in support
of his beliefs, or for the apologete to marshal the Christian evi-
dences, if by the decision of an antecedent question the system
of revealed religion is taken out of the range of argument alto-
gether. The defences of Christianity are valuable, but a defence
of the defences is needed too. It is a questionable service
which is rendered the cause of truth when one form of evidence
is magnified at the expense of another, and I have no confi-
dence in the philosophy that first throws the intellect into bank-
ruptcy and then pensions us on an allowance of faith. If God
exists, I wish to know the reasons for believing in his existence ;
and when I am told that I must be satisfied to believe without

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. IC>7

reasons, I simply repudiate the suggestion. If Christianity is
a divinely revealed religion, there should be evidence that will
accredit it ; and when I am told that it cannot be proved true,
but that it accredits itself to the religious consciousness, all I have
to say is that I have a poor opinion both of the piety and the
logic that shuts me up to any such conclusion. We know how
Sir William Hamilton undertook to aid faith by destroying
knowledge ; and we know too how he was met — by no one with
more power of logic and more clearness of thought than by
Dr. Charles Hodge, whose- famous chapter on the knowledge of
God stands as a magnificent parenthesis in the progress of his
theistic argument. The division of thought that followed the
publication of the doctrine of the conditioned is full of instruc-
tion, and should serve as a warning. Mansel thought he saw in
it the basis of a new defence of Christianity; and Spencer
pressed it into the service of agnosticism. The general opinion
is that while Mansel’s was the better cause, Spencer’s was the
better served. So true indeed is the remark of Hume’s most
able critic, that “ when the most pious philosophical purpose
expresses itself in a doctrine resting on an inadequate philo-
sophical principle, it is the principle and not the purpose that
will regulate the permanent effect of the doctrine” (Green : In-
troduction to Hume, p. 133). We are likely to have another
illustration of this truth in the discussions that are now before
the church.

It is no new thing to be told that we cannot favor the canon-
icity and inspiration of the Scriptures, and that historical testi-
mony cannot take us beyond probability. Roman Catholic
theologians have urged before to-day, and for the sake of shut-
ting us up to the infallibility of the church, what Protestant
theologians are urging at this moment, and for the sake of
shutting us up to the infallibility of a personal judgment which
they call the witness of the Spirit. The method employed has
the merit of appearing to honor the Spirit, and on this account
will commend itself to many minds. On this account, too, Dpd-
well’s “Christianity not Founded on Argument” was at first re-
garded with favor. But it turned out that Dodwell’s book was
written in the interest of scepticism, and the subjectivism that

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

is current, tho not chargeable with any sinister intent, will,
unless I greatly err, prove itself a most disastrous concession to
the enemy. To fall back upon faith in the thick of a great
conflict is to confess defeat. To declare that truths which are
not intuitions are at the same time incapable of defence save
by subjective tests is practically to retire from controversy and
leave the questions of debate to be settled by the quiet opera-
tion of the Spirit of God. Some would call this wise. To in-
voke any argument seems to such men like leaning on an arm
of flesh ; and the attempt to show that what we believe is be-
lieved for reasons that can be mediated to the understanding
of thinking men is considered by them as an unholy alliance
between philosophy and theology. It seems to be forgotten by
such men that while the witness of the Spirit is the ground of
indefectible certitude to the individual, it is hard, if it is not
impossible, to make our personal certitude the basis of argu-
ment with others. It is forgotten that the strongest reasons
for our own convictions are not always those of which we can
make the most use when dealing with other minds ; and there-
fore, so far from there being any incompatibility between ob-
jective evidence and subjective impressions originated by the
Spirit, the one is the proper complement of the other. But it
is difficult apparently for some to realize that fair debate be-
tween believers and unbelievers must proceed upon the basis of
common intellectual conditions and common objective evidence.
To support a position by a subjectivity peculiar to one party in
the discussion, and especially by a subjectivity that begs the
whole question in dispute, or to urge a historic bias as an argu-
mentative make-weight, is simply to argue unfairly. In a cer-
tain sense Protestantism is individualism. It affirms the right
of every man to read and think for himself, and therefore it
affirms his right to very considerate treatment in. debate. For
himself and in foro conscientice the individual Christian may
decide and does decide, in addition to external evidence, by
the witness of the Spirit ; but when he appears in debate and
aims at convincing another mind, he must make use of the
canons of certitude that other men employ. He may believe
that the Holy Ghost has borne witness to truth in the historic

«

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. IO9

life of the church ; but with the unbeliever this argument will be
of little avail : and with the believer even it must be used care-
fully, or else under the guise of a corporate Christian conscious-
ness we may bring back into the bosom of Protestantism the
doctrine of corporate infallibility, which was discarded at the
Reformation.

Nothing, however, is here intended that would disparage the
doctrine that the Holy Spirit bears witness to the Truth. God
undoubtedly will take care of his church. The Bible certainly
carries on its face the marks of its intrinsic majesty and divinity.
The Holy Ghost is the great Apologete. The increasing army
of Christian men is the great bulwark of the church against the
encroachments of infidelity. But it is true nevertheless that
Christianity can be defended, and ought to be defended, by
argument ; and instead of sympathizing with the cavalier treat-
ment of the older apologists, which is so common, I believe that
Principal Cairns gave utterance to golden words when he said
that “ Christianity is not promoted by changing either its type
of doctrine or its style of evidence” (Unbelief in the Eight-
eenth Century, p. 279). Argument is not unavailing. It
was useful in the deistic battle of last century ; it is needed
in the theistic battle of this. The church is not wasting her
resources when she equips her seminaries ; when she endows
her professorships of divinity and her lectureships in apolo-
getics.

There is a power even in her commanding attitude which
sometimes even her enemies will admit. “You cannot talk of
ignoring St. Paul’s Cathedral,” says Mr. Bradlaugh ; “ it is too
high.” Let the church so present the claims of the Gospel as
to extort concessions like this and make men say, We cannot
ignore the Gospel. We cannot ignore its arguments. We can-
not ignore the cathedral of Christian doctrine. It is too high.
Its solid walls, its stately towers, its storied windows, its shining
pinnacles arrest attention and command the admiration of the
world. This, however, imposes upon us great responsibilities.
We must defend, but we must have a theory of defence. We
must argue, but we must have an organon. We cannot postu-
late ultimates and put an easy end to controversy. We must

I IO

THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

be prepared to follow when the discussion leads, as lead it
assuredly will, to fundamental questions in the philosophy of
belief.

Of course there is a sense in which it is wrong to approach,
the Bible with foregone conclusions. It is not a treasury whence
men may cull appropriate mottoes for the garniture of their own
excogitations ; nor have they any right first to think out a doc-
trine and then, as the manner of some has been, prove that the
Word of God agrees with it. The old method of rationalistic
dogmatism is of course to be rejected. Yet there is, neverthe-
less, a place in theology for human thought. There is a phi-
losophy of defence. There is also a philosophy of organization.
The results of study are to be classified, and as there is no in-
spired system of classification the principles that are employed
in other inquiries must be turned to account. Moreover, tho
each doctrine of our faith is supported by its own array of proof-
texts, and may be separately proved by induction, it is equally
true that while the laws of thought remain as they are it will
be impossible to avoid the deductive process which, when one
proposition is given, leads through the mediation of a second to
its inferential relations to a third doctrinal statement. And as
it is impossible to receive contradictory statements as true, so
it is impossible to avoid the attempt to organize by deductive
logic the separate doctrinal inductions. In other words, if we
think, we must think in accordance with the laws of thinking,
whatever the subject of our thinking may be. We may organize
the teachings of the Bible after a genetic method and under
the category of time ; or we may regard the doctrines as co-
existing members of a great doctrinal system. And for the
sake of distinguishing these methods, we may call the one Bib-
lical, and the other systematic, theology ; but the latter is as
Biblical as the former, and the former is not less philosophical
than the latter. In both cases logic gives the form and Scripture
furnishes the matter. And when it is borne in mind that tho
logic may change relations it cannot invent facts, it will appear
that a Christocentric method in dogmatic, excellent as that
method is, can of itself make no change in our dogmatic sys-
tem. No doctrine can be added-; none can be obliterated ; no

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. Ill

change in the statement of doctrine can take place as the result
of transposing the several dogmatic units and changing their
relations in space. So far as doctrine is unaffected by order,
changing the order is a harmless thing; and so far as doctrine
conditions order, the doctrine must he abandoned or modified
before the order can be changed.

This seems so clear that I cannot avoid the impression that
behind the purely logical question respecting the order of prece-
dence in which doctrines should be presented there is an organ-
izing principle which determines it ; and that organizing prin-
ciple may involve a very serious modification not of the dog-
matic method, but of the matter of dogmatic as well. Both
Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians have been moving
away, as Rabiger shows (Theologik, s. 157), from the positions
occupied in the Reformation period. In both communions
there has been a strong tendency to find authority for speaking
in the present tense instead of appealing to tradition or the
letter of Scripture. Rome has found her organizing principle in
the perpetual miracle of papal infallibility, while the tendency
in Protestantism is to find it in the infallibility of the religious
consciousness. And whether this corporate and subjective
infallibility be formulated in the terms of freedom or depend-
ence, whether it be through the speculative intellect or the
religious consciousness that the attempt is made to centre the-
ology in the historic life instead of in the record of that life, the
effect is just the same : dogmatic theology ceases to be a fixed
body of truth to be ascertained by exegesis.

It becomes a historic life finding its highest expression in the
Incarnate Logos, but manifesting itself in the Christian con-
sciousness of the church, the interpretation of which is the chief
function of dogmatic, as a branch of theological discipline. It
is only by some such interpretation as this that I can understand
the distinctions which speak of orthodoxy and orthodoxism, the
schemes of dogmatic reconstruction, and the frequent assertion
that every age must have its own theology.

An author’s place in the great family of dogmaticians must
sometimes be understood before we can set a proper value upon
his words. For there is a great difference between the dogmatic

1 12

THE PRINCETON RE VIE W.

of ecclesiastical tradition, the dogmatic of papal infallibility, the
dogmatic of the religious feeling, the dogmatic of the specula-
tive intellect, and the dogmatic of Biblical exegesis. And as
foregone conclusions will shape the place of doctrines in a dog-
matic system, so also will they determine the place of dogmatic
itself in the system of theological discipline. And in view of the
rapid multiplication of theological essays, it is of great practical
importance that theological students should have a scientific
knowledge of theological encyclopaedia, by which is meant not
merely an ingenious distribution of the departments of theo-
logical study, but a scientific exhibition of the principles that
have controlled, as well as those which should control, theologi-
cal method. For men are giving us their conclusions without
their premises. They are giving expression to taking words
regarding Christian dogma which those who are filled with the
enthusiasm of new thoughts are trying to harmonize with the
old theology. They will find that they cannot add the new
cloth to the old garment. They will find that statements which
impressed them at first so favorably, and carried on their face
such professions of devotion to Jesus, require a far more sweep-
ing reconstruction of their theology than they dreamed of. It
is very important at this moment that the doctrinal affinities of
some of these new things that are brought to our ears should
be made plain. For if, as Prof. Ferrier has so brilliantly shown,
“ the only light of any truth is its contrasting error,” it is also
true that in order that error should be recognized as such it
must be seen in its relations to the system of which it forms a
part. There is a clear and fundamental distinction between the
dogmatic and the apologetic attitude. It is a mistake to say
that the Christian religion as a supernatural and revealed system
is incapable of defence save on the basis of an inspired and infal-
lible Bible, true and important as the doctrine of inspiration is.
But it is a far greater mistake to carry the method of apologetic
into dogmatic theology and say : “ Because this is all that is
needed for the defence of a supernatural theology, this, there-
fore, is all that is of value in belief.” This is to make the mini-
mum of apologetic, the maximum of dogmatic. And this is the
evil tendency of the hour.

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. 1 1 3

There is close affinity between the speculative thought and
the religious life of a people. The influence of a dominant phi-
losophy shows itself in theology. Aristotelianism, Cartesianism,
Kantianism, Hegelianism, and now positivism, have been in
succession the philosophic forces in theology. In this land the
influence of speculation on dogma has been conspicuous. To
write the history of the theology of New England is to write
the history of its philosophy. Its philosophic interest was de-
veloped out of theological exigencies ; its theological discussions
have flowed in the channels of philosophical speculation. And
with the memory of the evils that have followed the intrusion of
philosophy into theology before their minds, it is not strange that
men are suspicious of philosophy. No wonder, when they remem-
ber that speculation has destroyed the historic meaning of every
Scripture fact ; that confessional dogmas have been made the
categories under which a pantheistic philosophy has been rubri-
cized ; no wonder, when they think of the dreary homilies on the
decrees and disinterested benevolence, that the demand is heard
for a Biblical theology. By all means let the demand be met.
Let us have Biblical theology in the technical sense of the term ;
and let our dogmatic theology continue to be a theology of
exegesis and not a theology of tradition and speculation. The
fact, however, still remains that philosophy and theology have
uniformly sustained very close relations to each other; and the
history of these relations will teach some important lessons.
It will show that the philosophy of the college insensibly
affects the theology of the seminary ; that to shape the phi-
losophy of a people is to shape its jurisprudence, its ethics,
its theology, the ministrations of the pulpit, the teaching of
the Sabbath-school, and even the fireside instruction of the
home. It will show that between these great departments
there is an intimacy that ecclesiastical authority can neither
interrupt nor control. The pope may relegate us to Aquinas,
and Father Harper may write even more interestingly still
concerning the philosophy of the school, but whether Aquinas
or Spinoza will be the master-metaphysician of the next genera-
tion is something that lies beyond ecclesiastical control. It will
show us, too, that while a priori speculation has done injury

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IV.

1 14

to truth, there is nevertheless a place, if not for it, at least for
metaphysic in theology. In order to exhibit the proper rela-
tions of theology and philosophy, one must perform a double
duty. Speaking in behalf of theology, there is a long history of
invasion to be recited, conquered territory to be reclaimed, and
the right of theology to the unmolested enjoyment of her God-
given domain to be insisted on and defended. Speaking, on the
other hand, in behalf of philosophy, it will be his duty to show
the real service that she may render Christian truth, and, guard-
ing against the impression that her former faults are to be pun-
ished with perpetual banishment or penal servitude, to say in
the words of the reformed theologian Mursinna : Philosophia non
est ancilla scd potius soror theologies.

The word philosophy is used, however, in a somewhat broader
sense than that of a priori speculation, and, in antithesis to the-
ology, to mean the method that reaches truth through inference
and argument, as opposed to that which receives it by direct
divine revelations. In a broad sense, then, we say that Christian
theology is a matter of revelation and not of philosophy. And
yet our system of theology begins with a theistic conception of
the universe. There are a few who would say with Watson that
we owe our knowledge of God to the Bible, and who would
therefore depreciate the theistic proofs ; for there are some men
who always imagine that it is a mark of special respect for the
Bible to teach that we can have no knowledge of God without it.

But men honor the Bible most when they believe what it says;
and therefore believe that the heavens declare the glory of God,
and the firmament showeth his handiwork. There are few who
would wish to see the teleological and the moral arguments for
God’s existence taken out of the books of systematic theology.
Yet these arguments are not Biblical. They are as truly philo-
sophical as are the arguments that support any scientific hypoth-
esis. Here, then, we have a reasoned theism — a theory of the
universe which, however it originated, is at least defended by the
application of the laws of thought to the facts of the external
world. We have an inferential as opposed to an informational
knowledge of God ; and to this extent we have a philosophical
factor in our theological system.

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. 1 1 5

There is, then, an empirical and philosophical element in the-
ology, at least in so far as theology makes use of argument in
support of the belief in God; for just so far as theology finds
an argument for the existence of God in the facts of nature
does it give an interpretation to the facts of nature.

Reasoned theism has a subjective and an objective side — a
side that relates it to philosophy and one that relates it to sci-
ence. This would naturally be the place, therefore, to speak
of the relations of science, philosophy, and religion. And if I
sympathized with many who are so fond of referring to what
they call the “ conflict ” of science and religion, I should at this
point indicate that the work of a professor in the department re-
ferred to in this article would consist very largely in the attempt
to establish amicable relations between the three great powers
that have been named. But it must have already appeared that
the work pertaining to a chair of religious philosophy has a far
wider scope than that of drafting treaties of peace between person-
alized abstractions ; and it ought not to be a very difficult thing
to understand the reasons for those differences of opinion on
religio-scientific subjects which have given rise to what has come
to be known as “ conflict-literature.” Having two accounts
of the same phenomena, one empirical and the other revealed,
it is easy to see that through misunderstanding of Scripture or
premature generalization in science there may be an apparent
discrepancy between them. It will be pretty generally agreed,
I think, that in so far as science deals with facts in the phenome-
nal world false theories must be left to the slow dialectic of
time, or be dealt with by men who have a right to speak with
the authority of specialists in the several departments of scien-
tific investigation. And it is just as clearly recognized that be-
tween the facts of science and the metaphysical inferences that
are based upon them the difference is very wide.

The student of science who is aware of the unreached heights
and the unfathomed depths of his special department may fvell
resent the patronizing tone of omniscience with which the theo-
logian sometimes speaks of the facts of nature. But the modest
student of nature is also well aware that when he goes into
the arena of metaphysic he is occupying a position where his

THE PRINCETON RE VIE IK

1 16

knowledge of phenomena gives him no exceptional advantage.
It is not too much to say that the great questions of debate
between science and religion transcend the sphere of the em-
pirical, and that the great differences of opinions on religious
questions are those which lie at the roots of our intellectual life.
A sound metaphysic is therefore the presupposition and postu-
late of theology as it is the presupposition and postulate of sci-
ence itself. We are debtors alike to science and philosophy,
and we can as little afford to spare one as the other from our
theological curriculum.

The word Philosophy is used in this article with a great deal
of latitude, it must be confessed, yet with a latitude justified by
very good usage. It is used as the synonym of logic. It is used
to signify a method so that the exhibition of a system accord-
ing to its organizing principle would be the philosophy of the
system. It is used to indicate a priori or speculative reasoning,
and is applied specially to systems of thought that follow the de-
ductive rather than the inductive method. It is employed as the
antithesis of revelation, and refers to any mode of reaching truth
aside from the interpretation of Scripture.

It is sometimes the same as psychology, tho in the stricter
application of the word it is metaphysic ; that is, as Shadworth
Hodgson says, it is, “the ultimate subjective analysis of motions
which to science are themselves ultimate” (“ Philosophy of Re-
flection,” vol. i. p. 45). In all these senses of the word phi-
losophy, rightly or wrongly, has had and has to-day a place in
theology.

And there is yet another sense in which the word Philosophy
is used. For as it describes the primary, so it expresses the
final stage of knowledge. It is the name which men give to
their work when they undertake to articulate the facts of the
phenomenal world under some all-comprehensive generalization.
And so we have the philosophy of Hegel and the philosophy of
Comte. Nor have we a right to complain because such ambi-
tious attempts are made ; for some generalization there undoubt-
edly is that will express the totality of truth ; or in other words,
there is some explanation of the universe; — tho we make
bold to say that any philosophy is incomplete which does not

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. 1 1 7

recognize that the Almighty has left his footprints in this world
of things, and that the Lord of Glory has taken his place in the
sequences and successions of human history. Call this final
statement what we please, science, philosophy, theology, it must
proceed under a theistic conception of the universe ; it must be
shaped under the category of purpose ; it must have a place for
the Incarnation ; and it must take cognizance of the future of
the individual in the life to come as well as of the future of the
race in the “ life that now is.”

But the fact that the word Philosophy is used with such
breadth and diversity of meaning may suggest the difficulty of
defining its place in a theological curriculum. And a difficulty
there may undoubtedly be in determining the precise scope of
such a department, wdiether it be known as that of religious
philosophy, or philosophical apologetics, or the relations of
science, philosophy, and religion. There are, however, some
topics that call for special discussion, and that belong more
properly to the department of which we are speaking than to
any other. To the incumbent of a chair such as the one under
consideration it would fall to exhibit, at least in outline, the
historic relations of philosophy, science, and theology ; not in
the form of a history of doctrine, nor yet in the form of a history
of free thought; not with the minuteness of Zockler in his
history of the relations between theology and natural science,
nor yet after the fragmentary manner in which this work has
been so often attempted. It should embrace the age of the
Apologists and the influence of scholasticism. It should show
the formative principles of the era of the confessions ; the effect
of the Cartesian philosophy ; the anti-confessional drift, which
has been brought about by the Kantian and post-Kantian phi-
losophy ; and lastly, tho not of least importance, it should deal
with the special contributions to the history of opinion which
have been made in our own land.

But in addition to this historico-critical work there is an im-
portant constructive work to be done. And under this head
the philosophy of belief will occupy a very conspicuous place.
At the bottom of all belief or disbelief there lies a theory of
knowledge and belief. A philosophy of sensation will lead to

1 1 8

THE PRIXCE TON REVIEW.

atheism, but only because it will lead to universal unbelief.
The physicist has the same interest as the theologian in the con-
servation of the a priori elements of knowledge. For a sensa-
tional philosophy that will leave us an objective firmament as
the field of astronomical explorations, and an objective earth as
the arena of biological study, and objective other seifs whose
lucubrations I can read in the bimonthlies and the quarterly
reviews, but which undertakes, because it is a philosophy of
sensation, to eliminate God from the category of Being, is a
philosophy of unmitigated absurdity. It is with such a philoso-
phy that we have to deal. It tells us that our beliefs in cause,
substance, and moral obligation are generalized experiences, and
it is none the less objectionable because through the doctrine of
evolution it seeks to mediate between the intuitional and the
associational theories of knowledge by telling us that the same
idea may be both an intuition and an inference — an intuition
for the individual and an inference for the race. A great work
has already' been done in defence of our primary beliefs, and Dr.
McCosh has especially placed all the advocates of intuitional
philosophy under lasting obligation for his elucidation of this
subject. But we have not yet seen the end of controversy, and
it looks now as tho the discussions of the next generation
were to be as important as any that have preceded it. For the
free, finite, perdurable, personal self is the very citadel of truth.
We must defend the a priori elements of knowledge. We must
defend them not as relatively7 but as absolutely7 true. We can-
not hold an egoistic idealism. We cannot take some point of
vantage and, watching the phenomenal world march past in
grand review, exclaim : “ This after all is only’- the phenomenal
aspect of what I call my^self.” We cannot hold a philosophy
which to be consistent should go on to say that the silent stars
die out whenever I go to sleep ; and when dissolution comes, to
me comes then the funeral of universal Being. And if instead
of making the individual self we make the universal self the
basis of our philosophy, we shall still find that we have made
evangelical Christianity impossible. And when I am told that
along a purposive route and through the stages of historic
growth rising on itself in the ascent of life the universal self has

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. I ig

struggled for expression, until in thinking, praying man it comes
to recognize itself ; when the individual self, the self of analysis,
reaches out unto and realizes the universal self, the self of syn-
thesis,— it does not save me from the disastrous consequences of
such a faith to be reminded, as I am reminded by Mr. Wallace,
that this philosophy is a theology throughout. It makes no
difference how my personality is obliterated, whether by panthe-
ism or materialism, the effect is just the same. And when it
comes to the question whether Christian life shall be strangled
by the python of Hegelianism or the python of positive phi-
losophy there is but little to choose.

A valid defence of Christianity must be a defence of knowl-
edge as knowledge. It is bad enough to offer us an unauthorized
faith, but it is worse to give us our choice, as Mr. Balfour does,
between two inevitable doubts. No service is rendered either
science or religion by an attempt to show that there is no valid
reason for either, but that we are free to hold to them through
what he calls the “ practical need of both.” This, however, is a
large subject, and its development would involve not only the
discussion of fundamental truth, but also the processes of proof ;
the laws of evidence ; the province of analogy ; the influence of
authority; the ethics of belief; the distinction between probabil-
ity and certitude, and the place of both in religion. In short,
it would be the logic of theology. Next in logical order would
come the discussion of theism ; and we need not say how much
interest centres here. The constructive side of the theistic dis-
cussion has lost none of its importance in recent years ; for while
mere illustrations of design in nature cannot be said to meet
the exigencies of current debate, the discussion of the teleologi-
cal principle is becoming more and more important. And when
we find men admitting the teleological principle, but denying
the theistic conclusion to which it logically leads, it is impossible
to avoid the feeling that their anti-theistic utterances are after
all important concessions to the theistic position. But anti-
theistic literature abounds in these concessions, and when we
read of Matthew Arnold’s “Stream of Tendency,” Spencer’s
“Unknowable,” Schopenhauer’s “World as Will,” and Hart-
mann’s elaborate defence of finality as the product of uncon-

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THE PRINCETON REVIEW.

scious intelligence, we may well ask if the theists with their
belief in one personal God are not in possession of the only
hypothesis that can save the language of these writers from the
charge of meaningless and idiotic raving.

And it is easy to see how large an area of polemic the
theistic discussion involves ; for not only are objections to be
answered, but rival theories of the universe are to be examined.
There is the system of pantheism, which organizes the phenom-
enal world under the conception of God and denies the sep-
arate personality and freedom of finite minds. There is the
system that does not get outside of the phenomenal self, and
so finds its creed shrivelling into a barren agnosticism. And
there is, finally, a system that undertakes to articulate the
phenomenal universe in the terms of matter, and ends in giv-
ing us not only a mechanical world without, but a mechanical
mind within. It ends in automatism. It ends in explaining
the music of Beethoven, the painting of Raphael, the sculp-
ture of Thorwaldsen, and the catliedral monument of Sir Chris-
topher Wren as the purposeless play of blind material atoms.
And when it does this it commits suicide. When mind is re-
duced to automatism, schism is introduced into our conscious
life. You cannot, as Professor Herbert has so ably shown,
take intentionality out of matter without taking it out of mind.
The materialist cannot help purposing; he cannot help believ-
ing that his actions are the realization of purpose ; and yet pur-
pose is a word for which his theory of the universe has no use
and which it cannot explain. “ Consistent materialism,” says
Mr. Green, “ should be speechless.” And Mr. Green is right.
Consistent materialism is egoism. The self is the solitary

tenant of a lone universe. It has no logical right to call any
other self its companion, for of that other self it has no knowl-
edge. The soul is a caged bird. It is the function of a true
theory of Knowing and Being to open the doors of that gilded
cage, and when this is done, with little help from us, but under
the irresistible tendency of an instinct born in heaven, this poor,
pining, imprisoned thing will fly away to God.

Nor must we overlook the fact that the atheism of to-day is
possessed of great industry and intellectual activity. Remem-

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. 121

bcr that this world has been ruled by theistic conceptions. Its
literature has been written, its governments maintained, its
social institutions established, under the dominating influence
of this conception. If atheism is to succeed it has a great
revolution to accomplish. And there are sad indications that
the men who, like Professor Clifford, believe that the “ great
companion is dead ” already see the natural consequences of
their creed. They must reconstruct history and explain the
Bible according to the principles of naturalism. They must
have a system of criminal jurisprudence to match their automa-
tism. They must take obligation out of ethics and say with
Bentham that the word ought ought not to be in the dictionary.
Life with them is the life that now is, and it is a question
whether it be worth living. The poor man will make the best
of this world, and as matters cannot be much worse he will take
the chances of socialism, nihilism, and regicide. The man of
learned leisure will look out of despairing eyes upon a world
that gives no pleasure and a future that has no hope. Pessim-
ism will be his philosophy, consentaneous suicide his gospel of
peace for a suffering world, a “ calculus of hedonics,” to use Mr.
Sully’s phrase, that shall assure him of a slight surplus of pleas-
ure over pain, the one mitigating circumstance in the discom-
fort with which he looks upon the problem of life.

Theism on its philosophical side is a theory of the universe,
but on the side of our religious nature it is belief in a Being
whose personality is set over against our personality — a Being
upon whom we are dependent and to whom we are responsible.
It contains materials, therefore, that belong also to the depart-
ment of the philosophy of religion ; and yet the philosophy of
religion is a subject that especially at the present day deserves
separate treatment at least to the extent of what Pfleiderer
calls the psychology of religion. This is a question which the
evolutionists should not monopolize; for if religion is the fruit
of fear or superstition, or be a form of homage to dead ances-
tors, the religious feeling cannot be an ultimate fact irf our
nature, and cannot be appealed to in support of doctrine. We
are interested as Christians in showing that these interpreta-
tions of religion are wrong. And conceding even that the

122

THE PRINCETON RE PIE IP.

religious consciousness is an ultimate fact in our nature, or that
it is the inspiration of the Almighty that fills us with the
thoughts of the Infinite or with the feelings that find outlet in
prayer, the question still arises whether this divine influence
ever transcends the sphere of naturalism ; whether, that is to
say, there has ever been such an interruption of the uniformity
of nature that we can point to certain exceptional facts and
say : “ These are special, supernatural, miraculous exhibitions
of the divine presence.” The gravest questions are involved in
this inquiry. If with Kuenen and Tiele we answer No, we
must conclude that our Christian religion has reached its purest
form through successive stages not of progress merely, nor of
development merely, for this is true, but of a naturalistic de-
velopment— a development which compels us to reconstruct
history so as to show that the religious life revealed in the Bible
has in all its phases and in all its periods been conditioned and
determined by its antecedents and environments. If the essence
of religion is the religious feeling, how can we ever get out of
this circle of subjectivity, or say anything else of Christianity
than that it is one of the forms in which a universal religious
consciousness has been exhibited ? And believing that Chris-
tianity is exclusive and is entitled to paramount authority, we
must either say with Mulford that Christianity is not a religion,
or else we must say that knowledge as well as feeling enters
into its essence. Supernaturalism — I mean Revelation — is the
condition of an exclusive Christianity, and it is an important
element in the conservation of theism. I am far fr.om saying
that without a revelation there can be no religion of any sort,
and I am far from saying that without a revelation there can
be no knowledge of God. But when men give up revelation
they will find it easier to give up theism. This is not reasoning
in a circle, and at all events men need to be reminded that tho
reasoning in a circle may not be good, reasoning in straight
lines is intolerably bad. Arguments act and react on each
other, and it is the congruity of all arguments that constitutes
the best and final argument. Pure theism is not the solution
of the world’s problem. The man who has given up Christianity
is on the road to atheism. The man who is dissatisfied with

PHILOSOPHY IN THE THEOLOGICAL CURRICULUM. 1 23

the Christian religion is likely to find himself without any
religion at all ; and the logical outcome of no religion is no
morality. For this reason, were there no other, the discussion
of fundamental ethics should have a place in theological
studies. This, as we have been recently reminded, is just now
the “ whereabouts of philosophical activity” (. Journal of Specula-
tive Philosophy, April, 1881). The question in ethics is the
possibility of ethics. The question of the hour is not whether
God is the logical correlative of our consciousness of moral
obligation ; nor whether happiness or holiness is the chief end
of man ; nor whether conscience is intuitional or developed out
of a “ strong sense of avoidance.” It is not expressed in the
utilitarianism of Mill, nor in the altruism of Spencer. It does
not reveal itself in the paradoxes of Sidgwick, nor in the tran-
scendentalism of Bradley. It is the question whether there can
be any guarantee for the purity of home or the stability of the
social organism under a philosophy whieh makes man an
automaton. Mr. Frederic Harrison indicates his appreciation
of the religious problem when he speaks of “ the mighty assize
of religions which this generation and the next are to try out ”
( Nineteenth Century, August, 1881). He is right in supposing
that the time has come for the trial of the issue. We have had
enough of demurrers and continuances ; enough of answers and
replications; enough of rejoinders and surrejoinders. The time
has come when men must face the question of the possibility of
morals. They must decide between a metaphysic that leads to
an absolute vacuum in knowledge ; absolute irresponsibility in
morals, absolute mechanism in life ; and a metaphysic that \vill
secure the separateness, the sovereignty, the morality, the im-
mortality of the soul. With the soul assured, the way to God
is plain. If God is, a revelation of God may be. With the
possibility of revelation conceded, the proof is sufficient. And
with a proved revelation before us, it is easy to understand that
in God we live and move and have our being ; that the path of
history has been the unfolding of his purpose ; that the order
of nature is the movement of his mind ; that the work of the
philosopher is to rethink his thought ; that Christianity is the
solution of all problems ; that the blood of Christ removes the

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blot of sin ; that the church is the flower of humanity ; that
the Incarnation of the Logos is God’s great achievement ; that
Jesus is the brightness of his Father’s glory and the express
image of his person ; that in him are hid all the treasures of
wisdom and knowledge, and that by him all things consist.

Francis L. Patton.