Revaluations: historical and ideal

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

REVALUATIONS:

HISTORICAL AND IDEAL

REVALUATIONS:

HISTORICAL AND IDEAL

BY

ALFRED W. BENN,

ABTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH RATIONALISM IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY," " MODERN ENGLAND," ETC.

" Zarathustra has found no greater power on
earth than good and evil." — FR. NIETZSCHE.

[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]

LONDON :
WATTS & CO.,

17, JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1909

843

TO

VERNON LEE

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM (1901) - i

THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY ON GREEK POLITICAL

LIFE (1894) - 40

THE ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS (1893) - 80

THE HIGHER CRITICISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL (1895) - 126

PASCAL'S WAGER (1905) - - 151

BUCKLE AND THE ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE (1881) - 177

THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST— FRIEDRICII NIETZSCHE

(1908) - - 228

WHAT is AGNOSTICISM? (1900) - - 281

INDEX - - 313

PREFACE

THE title of this volume may possibly remind some
readers of an expression — " Umwerthungen," in
English " Transvaluations " — first brought into
vogue by Nietzsche ; the motto of the book is
taken from Nietzsche ; and one of the essays which
it contains is devoted to a criticism of Nietzsche's
ethics. Under less provocation than this, hasty
or superficial reviewers might be tempted to label
me as a Nietzschian. Under less provocation than
this, quite friendly reviewers have actually labelled
me as a Hegelian. If I know anything about my
own opinion, I am neither the one nor the other.
But, if I had to choose, of the two I had rather be
called a Hegelian. And anyone who takes the
trouble to read my study of the great im moralist
will find that he is treated from the point of view
of one who accepts in principle the traditional

morality —

As one compelled in spite of scorn
To teach a truth he would not learn.

t PREFACE

My re-estimates, in fact, where they depart from
the views generally accepted, relate not so much to
standards as to their application, and not so much
to things as to persons. Thus the paper which has
been put first, and which in some ways is most
diametrically opposed to the current common-
places, does not find the ethical value of Hellenism
in any opposition to the highest modern ideals of
conduct, but in its approach to or anticipation of
what we cherish as most essential to modern
civilisation. Of course, I am prepared to hear that
there is nothing new about what I claim for the
Greeks, that every scholar knew all this already.
It may be so ; but I am not aware that any scholar
has said it in so many words ; and I know one
scholar who, writing some time after the first
publication of my essay, dogmatically stated the
exact contrary. Professor De Sanctis, the most
recent Italian historian of old Rome, comparing
together the different branches of the Aryan race,
finds in the Greeks "a certain atrophy of the moral
sense." When a man who has access to Homer
and the tragedians can say this, neither would he
be persuaded though one rose from the dead. It
is not, therefore, in the vain hope of inducing
Professor De Sanctis to reconsider his verdict, but
because it may interest my less prejudiced readers,

XI

that I venture to lay before them some very
striking evidence on the subject derived from an
unexpected quarter — the recently disinterred
comedies of Menander. One of these, called The
Arbitration, has for its argument the following
story : —

Charisios, a young Athenian of good family, has
recently been married to Pamphila, a girl of his own
class. Four months after the wedding Pamphila,
unknown to her husband, gives birth to a child, of which
Charisios, although unaware of his paternity, is the
father. For in the course of a drunken frolic he had met
and done violence to his future wife one dark night in the
streets of Athens. Neither of them had seen the other's
face, but in the struggle Pamphila had possessed herself
of and retained a ring belonging to Charisios. On
discovering what he supposes to be her ante-nuptial
frailty, the young man separates from his wife and
returns to his former associates. One of these, a slave-
woman named Habrotonon, with whom he had once
cohabited, gets hold of the ring and uses it to persuade
Charisios that she has become the mother of a child by
him. Her story reaches the ear of Pamphila's father,
who, as some modern readers will be surprised to learn,
is so scandalised by this evidence of his son-in-law's
youthful misconduct as to propose that Pamphila, of
whose misfortune he is ignorant, should immediately
demand a separation. This, however, the young wife
refuses to do, declaring that it is her wish to stand by her
husband in good and evil fortune alike. Charisios
accidentally overhears the conversation, and is so
conscience-stricken by the contrast between his own
resentment and the generous fidelity of his wife as in his

xii PREFACE

turn to forgive her supposed lapse from virtue, even
before everything is happily cleared up by a disclosure of
the real facts of the case.

Professor De Sanctis places his countrymen at
the head of the whole Aryan race for the perfect
balance of their mental qualities, among which, of
course, moral feeling holds a leading position.
Now, the Latin comic poet Terence wrote for an
Italian audience, and, although Julius Caesar called
him a half Menander, we do not find in his plays,
charming as they are, the faintest trace of the
moral delicacy which is now shown to have been a
distinctive trait of his Greek prototype.

The instance quoted does not stand alone. In
another comedy, of which considerable fragments
have recently been discovered, Menander intro-
duces a girl, supposed to be of foreign birth,
who as a consequence of her inferior social
position has been living in concubinage with a
soldier, and, having innocently provoked his
jealousy, experiences very rough treatment from
him. Being subsequently recognised as of
Athenian parentage, her first impulse is to
exclaim, " Then I shall be reconciled " ; on which
her father observes :

I love that word " be reconciled,"
Proving in thee the right Hellenic strain —

PREFACE xiii

in which, as would seem, the forgiveness of
injuries was a leading trait.

Depreciation of Hellenism has been associated,
in such writers as Matthew Arnold and Ernest
Renan, with an exaggerated and distorted estimate
of Hebraism, of the values represented by Israel
as a factor in universal history. My essay on
" The Alleged Socialism of the Prophets " has for
its object to point out the very serious misstate-
ments of Renan on this subject. It is not offered
as a revaluation of my own, but as a criticism on
a revaluation which, in my opinion, is much more
remote from truth than the generally accepted
view. And I have tried to show in another essay,
largely based on the researches of German scholar-
ship, that Socialism is not a Hebrew but a Greek
idea, subsequently imported from Greek philosophy
into the teaching of the early Church — not, as
Renan thinks, taken up by the Gospel from the
prophetic tradition.

My essay on " Pascal's Wager " goes to prove
that the great Jansenist's celebrated defence of
Christianity is, as logic, utterly worthless ; and
that, as morality, it credits God with proceedings
for which the most audacious Jesuitical casuistry
would blush to apologise.

When the essay on Buckle first appeared, now

xiv PREFACE

more than a quarter of a century ago, I was
privately censured by an eminent living critic for
wasting my time in exposing the fallacies of a
philosopher whose memory only survived "in
half-educated German circles." The revival of
Buckle's fame and the diffusion of his wonderful
work in cheap editions during the last ten years
will, I hope, be found a sufficient apology for
reprinting what, I believe, is still the only
complete explanation of his system ever offered to
the public. I may mention also that, as the literary
executors of Lord Acton have recently thought fit
to republish two most bitter and pedantic articles
of his on Buckle, there ought to be room in
contemporary literature for a somewhat more
appreciative estimate of one who, if he did not
equal the Roman Catholic historian in some
branches of erudition, far surpassed him in
speculative genius.

A generation has passed since the word
"Agnosticism," originally created by Huxley, was
first put into general currency by Leslie Stephen.
But the full meaning of the term, instead of being
elucidated by constant use, has become ever more
obscured. I cannot hope to correct the evil ; but
I shall at least have the satisfaction of putting on
record in a somewhat more permanent form my

PREFACE xv

protest against the misuse of what, whether it
stands for truth or for error, serves at any rate to
mark off in contradistinction from older forms of
rationalism an interesting and, it may be, a
permanent phase of speculation.

A. W. B.

July, igog.

CORRECTIONS

P. 47 : " Nicias consummated the ruin of the Sicilian expedition
by postponing his retreat a whole month in consequence of an
eclipse of the moon." In point of fact, Nicias was compelled to
begin his retreat a few days after the eclipse ; but his wish and
intention was to put it off for a month, and the delay of a few
days proved equally fatal.

P. 86 : "Some such measure as the Licinian Rogations."

It is now the opinion of the most authoritative Roman historians
that the Licinian Rogations included no agrarian provisions.

P. in, note : For " Emmanuel " read " Emanuel." The passage
referred to occurs on p. 36 of Deutsch's Literary Remains.

REVALUATIONS

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

IF we are to judge by certain estimates current in
the popular literature of the present day, the ethical
value of Hellenism is either zero or a minus
quantity. The ancient Greeks were Pagans in the
sense that they were neither Jews nor Christians ;
and the word " Paganism " is commonly used to
connote the complete absence of moral restraints,
more especially of those which are imposed on
the sexual relations. An epigrammatic novelist
describes a group of young people, among whom
marriage seems to have been replaced by con-
nections of a more transitory character, as living in
a world of Christian names and Pagan morals.
Mr. Shorthouse, speaking through the mouthpiece
of John Inglesant, refers to "the old world of
pleasure and art — a world that took the pleasures
of life boldly, and had no conscience to prevent its
cultivating and enjoying them to the full." Appa-
rently John Inglesant had not read the Epistle to
the Romans. Another writer of fiction, Mr.
Benjamin Kidd, seems to think that altruism
was unknown before the Christian era. Mr.
W. D. Howells implies in one of his novels
that monogamy only dates from the same period.

2 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

And a far higher authority, Matthew Arnold,
has made the antithesis between Hellenism and
Hebraism common form in literature — Hellenism
standing for science and art, Hebraism for con-
duct; that is to say, for three-fourths of life.

Before inquiring into the justice of this summary
and wholesale condemnation, I would call attention
to the singular circumstance that a directly opposite
estimate of Pagan virtue prevailed all through the
Middle Ages. It might have been supposed that
during the centuries when Catholicism reigned
without a rival over the Western conscience, and
when the traditions of the regime which it had
displaced were fresher than among ourselves,
observers, especially ecclesiastical observers, would
have been still more deeply impressed by the moral
regeneration assumed to have been wrought by the
Church. Such, however, is not the case. Among
mediaeval authorities there seems to be but one
opinion as regards the moral superiority of classical
antiquity over their own contemporaries. " The
Gentiles," says Abelard, "who had no scriptural
law and heard no sermons, put us to shame by the
example of their virtue, by the excellence of their
precepts, and by the consistency of their lives with
their teachings. Their philosophers boldly rebuked
wickedness and suffered for truth's sake. Nor was
it their philosophers only who shone so brightly in
comparison with us. There is abundant evidence
going to prove that the same virtues were practised
by the worldly and the unlearned, and by women
as well as by men."1 It may be urged, and,

1 Opera, ed. Cousin, II., p. 409.

indeed, it has been urged, that Abelard was a
freethinking rationalist who sought to undermine
Christianity. A much-scandalised apologist refers
us to John of Salisbury for a very different view of
the matter.1 We turn to the pages of that excellent
prelate, and find, to our surprise, that he confirms
rather than contradicts his master's statements.
Examples of every virtue are to be found among
the characters of antiquity. The perfect model of
what a sovereign ought to be is furnished by no
Christian prince, but by the heathen Trajan. The
Socratic teaching is a well of morals undefiled. If
people find the Christian religion too severe, let
them go to the Greek philosophers for lessons in
chastity. And, indeed, if John is to be believed,
they were in sore need of such lessons, for nothing
so bad has been written about imperial Rome as
his descriptions of court society in the Europe of
the twelfth century. Doubtless the anarchy that
prevailed under Stephen is largely responsible for
the corruption laid bare in the PolycraticusS But
no such extenuating circumstances can be pleaded
for the ages of faith and chivalry when, a century
later, we find Roger Bacon repeating in more
definite and explicit terms Abelard's exaltation of
Pagan over Christian morals. If, says the great
Franciscan, we cannot emulate, or even understand,
the wisdom of the ancient philosophers, it is because
we do not possess their virtue. Wisdom is incon-
sistent with sin, and demands perfect virtue in its
professors. And of all sins the most fatal to

1 Reuter, Religiose Aufklarung, I., p. 317.
3 Polycraticus, Lib. III., cap. 13.

4 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

learning is unchastity, from which none but a very
few, and those by special grace, are exempt in their
youth. Nor is this a mere general statement. He
proceeds to relate how a number of professors and
students of theology had the year before been
expelled from Paris for the practice of unnatural
vices. Such was the state of morals shortly before
the death of St. Louis, at the very climax and
flowering-time of mediaeval Catholicism.1

I am not aware that any such clear and emphatic
testimony to the superiority of Pagan morals is
given by Dante, but it is at least suggestive of the
same leaning that he should ascribe what little
good Florence possessed to the descent of some
few of her citizens from the ancient Romans. And
we know from a brilliant chapter in the Conmtto
how highly he rated the virtues of the Romans,
referring them even to divine inspiration. Whether
he had an equally high opinion of the Greeks cannot
be positively affirmed, but there is a significant
passage in the Inferno pointing in that direction.
The motive to which Ulysses appeals when urging
his companions to sail beyond the Pillars of
Hercules is the remembrance that they were not
born to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and
knowledge. And to this appeal the Greek sailors,
according to Dante, readily respond.2

It may be objected that Dante was a poet and a
scholar, more in sympathy with the old than with
the new spirit ; Roger Bacon a man of science
sheltering himself under the Franciscan habit —

1 Compendium Theologia, ed. Brewer, pp. 398 seq.
1 Inferno, Canto xxvi., 118 seq.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 5

both, perhaps, Christians only under compulsion.
There is, however, one more authority, to which
no such exception can be taken — the authority
either of Aquinas or of one whose speculations
were permitted to pass under his name. This
writer, while confessing a preference for the
republican form of government, admits that it is
"only fitted for men living in the primitive state of
sinlessness, or so wise and virtuous as the ancient
Romans were"1 — clearly not for a society so
corrupt as the crusading chivalry of France.

To what cause shall we ascribe this extraordinary
revolution in Christian opinion as to the moral
value of classic civilisation ? A sufficiently easy
solution suggests itself at once. The mediaeval
scholars romanced about Pagan virtue because
they did not know what Paganism was. The
Greeks and Romans were to them what the
Chinese were to the philosophers of the eighteenth
century ; and they used them just like those philo-
sophers, as a stick to beat their contemporaries
with. The far more complete knowledge of Pagan
life and literature that we owe to the Renaissance
and to modern research has led to very different
conclusions, and it is on these that the estimates
quoted at the beginning of this essay are based.

But the suggested explanation seems insufficient.
If the schoolmen knew less than we know of Pagan
literature, the fact remains that for all practical
purposes they knew enough. If they had not read
Aristophanes and Plato, they had read Aristotle's
Politics^ Terence, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Suetonius;

1 Aquinas (?), De Regimine Principum, II., 9.

6 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

above all, they had read the first chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans ; nor does there seem the
smallest reason to believe that a wider and deeper
study of the Greek authors would have altered their
estimate of the Greeks, except, perhaps, to raise it
still higher, by making them more familiar with the
whole range of Greek virtue. The truth is that
their reading of classical antiquity was not biassed
as ours is by an apologetic interest. They accepted
Christianity because it was true, not because it
strengthened the hands of the social reformer, the
magistrate, and the policeman. Hence, there was
no particular motive for exaggerating its services
in that direction. Religion, no doubt, was useful,
but its utility consisted not so much in making
people better members of society as in saving them
from eternal damnation. Baptism gave a chance,
absolution in articulo mortis gave a certainty of
escaping from that dreadful fate ; and the posses-
sion of so precious a privilege was the great advan-
tage that the Christian possessed over the Pagan.
Otherwise, as we have seen, he had nothing to
boast of — rather the contrary. Whatever vices the
Church condemned had been condemned by Greek
philosophy. Whatever vices had been practised
among Pagans were repeated with aggravating
circumstances in the most famous seats of Christian
learning ; and those whose experience had familiar-
ised them with the cesspools of Paris and Bologna
listened with more blunted sensibility to the un-
savoury records of Thebes and Athens.

It might, indeed, be imagined that the appalling
penalties inflicted on such offences in this world,
and imagined for them in the next, bore witness to

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 7

an entirely new sense of their flagitiousness in the
mediaeval conscience. But no mistake would be
greater than to use the criminal jurisprudence of
the Middle Ages as a gauge of their moral sus-
ceptibility. Difficulty of detection for one thing,
and the supposed slight cast on the honour of an
earthly or heavenly sovereign for another, counted
for incomparably more in the assessment of punish-
ment than the actual wickedness of an offence as
measured by the animosity that it excited in the
public opinion of the times. Now, of that public
opinion no austerer representative can be quoted
than Dante ; and what Dante really thought about
the vice that is always brought up as the special
opprobrium of Greece is sufficiently indicated by
his extreme cordiality towards the lost soul of
Brunette Latini,1 and by the fact that he subjects
all sins of unchastity to an equal intensity of
torment in the cleansing fires of purgatory.2
Evidently the great Catholic poet was no more
of a rigorist than the Platonic Socrates whose
half-tolerant attitude so much shocked Professor
Huxley.

We must, then, look elsewhere than to a mere
increase of knowledge for an adequate explanation
of that great revolution in the historical conscience
which has led many of our contemporaries to
reverse the mediaeval view so completely that in
the popular imagination Paganism, or, more pre-
cisely, the Graeco-Roman spirit, has become identi-
fied with impurity, while Christianity has come to
be regarded even more as the chief instrument of

1 Inferno, Canto xv., 30 sqq. * Purgatorio, Canto xxvii.

8 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

moral reform than as the God-given means of
salvation.

So far as I know, the change began with Luther.
If in one way the Reformation was the last fruit of
the Renaissance, in another way it was a reaction
against the Renaissance. In returning to the
standpoint of primitive Christianity Luther and
his successors could not fail to become imbued
with the hostility felt by the first Christians, and
above all by St. Paul, towards the Pagan world ;
and all the more so as the worst vices of Paganism
were being resuscitated under their eyes in papal
Rome. Moreover, the dogmas that Luther attacked
had been bound up in a peculiar way with the
philosophy of Aristotle, and, therefore, the Aris-
totelian ethics became a special object of his
animosity. The doctrine of moral habits seemed
radically inconsistent with the doctrine of instan-
taneous regeneration. Men do not become just by
performing just actions ; they perform just actions
because they have been made just. Speaking
generally, Rome had apostasised from the purity
of. the gospel by incorporating with it much
that was Pagan in doctrine and ritual ; there-
fore with Paganism in all its forms war must be
waged.

Rome naturally enough refused to accept this
account of her parentage ; but it made her all the
more anxious to disclaim so compromising a con-
nection. Hence both great divisions of western
Christendom have united in vilifying the civilisation
to which mediaeval scholars looked back with fond
regret as an unattainable standard of excellence.
And before long their joint hostility was still

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 9

further aggravated by a new provocation. Unde-
terred by the double tide of reaction, the Renais-
sance continued to pursue its victorious career.
Taking up human progress at the point where it
had been let fall by Greek culture, the modern
mind set itself to replace feudal Catholicism by a
new art and a new science, a new morality and a
new State. Concurrently with this great enterprise
it carried on an unceasing criticism on the existing
regime, its institutions and its beliefs. Both pro-
cesses, the constructive and destructive, were power-
fully aided by principles and examples derived from
classical antiquity. All these efforts culminated in
the French Revolution, whose leaders avowedly
looked for their models to Greece and Rome. And
as the Hellenic spirit had shared in their momen-
tary triumph, so also it shared in the ruin and
disgrace that speedily overtook their cause. For
the first time since they came into existence the
products of the Greek genius were systematically
neglected and defamed by educated men ; recourse
being had to mediaeval art, literature, and politics for
new ideals to put in their place. The Romanticists
consciously ranged themselves behind the forces of
reaction in Church and State ; and it was not without
reason that Byron, the glorious standard-bearer of
European progress, directed against them his
fiercest attacks. So, too, the cause of Greek inde-
pendence for which Byron gave his life became
the battle-cry of resurgent Liberalism, and perhaps
helped to win back Canning, the future Liberal
leader, to the Liberal principles that had been his
first love. Conversely, the Holy Alliance thwarted
Greek aspirations to the utmost of its ability ; and

io THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

its literary agents carried the war into historical
literature. Writing in 1834, J- S. Mill observes
that " the most elaborate Grecian history which we
possess [Mitford's] is impregnated with the anti-
Jacobin spirit in every line ; and the Quarterly
Review laboured as diligently for many years to
vilify the Athenian republic as the American."1
Even greater bitterness was displayed by reac-
tionary theologians. The Abbe Gaume in France
and Dr. W. G. Ward in England joined in making
the grotesque proposal that the Greek and Latin
classics should no longer be taught in school, their
place being supplied by patristic literature.2

The leaders of the reactionary movement against
the French Revolution and the philosophy of the
eighteenth century were, in truth, anything but
Conservatives. They caught the spirit of innova-
tion from their opponents, and even sympathised
to a certain extent with their aims. Agreeing with
them that the world needed to be reformed, and
agreeing also that its reformation should be effected
by social reconstruction, by education, by popular
literature, by journalism — in short, by all the
machinery that the schools of enlightenment had
set in motion, they differed from them chiefly in
holding that all these instruments should be ani-
mated by religious ideas, used for religious pur-
poses, and wielded by the ministers of religion or
by laymen to whom their confidence had been
given. This is not the place to expatiate on that
vast movement, nor, indeed, has the time come for

1 Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i., p. 113.
a W. G. Ward and the Catholic Revival, pp. 114, 118, 194, and
454-

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM n

its history to be written. The important thing for
us to observe is that it led to a new interpretation
of Christianity, of the Church, and of the Bible.
In rivalry with the ideals bequeathed or inspired
by Hellenism, these also were represented as
embodying a scheme of social reform, an ideal
polity, a new reading of life. Thus it came about
that Pagan and Christian morals, ancient and
mediaeval civilisation, were ranged in an unreal
opposition and unhistorically contrasted as darkness
and light. And so strong was the prejudice gene-
rated by the unscrupulous assertions of the reac-
tionary party, so skilful were the rearrangements
by which facts were disguised or set in a false
light, that a generation taught to discard super-
naturalist metaphysics has continued to accept a
supernaturalist version of history, according to
which the highest elements of human nature, intel-
ligence and conscience, may exist and be developed
in complete isolation from one another.

So much has seemed necessary by way of pre-
amble in order to clear the ground for a candid
consideration of the thesis I am prepared to sup-
port, which is no less than this — that the ethical
value of Hellenism fully equals its intellectual and
artistic value ; that the Greeks were as great in
what belongs to the conduct of life as they con-
fessedly were in the creation of beauty or in the
search for truth. They were, what Huxley called
them, the real Chosen People, and that in a more
absolute sense than he would have dared to
maintain.

To avoid all possible misconstructions, I wish to
state at the outset that I accept the current English

12 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

and American estimate of morality. I have no
desire to be classed with the neo-Pagans — if the
persons calling themselves by that name still exist
as a class ; I detest their theories, and I believe
that in most ancient Greek communities they
would have been summarily lynched had they
tried to put those theories into practice.

It must be further understood that when I speak
of Hellenism and of the Greeks I speak of what
was highest and best in the race and in its bequest
to posterity. This amounts to no more than is
assumed in estimating the claims on our gratitude
of any other extinct race or civilisation, or of any
religion whether extinct or not. We really know
little more than this, nor does it concern us to
know more. The good lives on, the evil dies.
The point needs emphasising because it has been
particularly neglected in discussing the subject on
which we are engaged. Instead of comparing
Greek practice with the practice of other communi-
ties, Greek ideals with other ideals, we ignore the
ideals and compare the practice with our own
highest theoretical standards. I do not propose
that the question of practice should be left out of
account ; on the contrary, I wish that it should
figure largely in the estimate. An ideal to deserve
the name must sooner or later, and sooner rather
than later, influence conduct ; failing that, it
becomes worse than nothing, mere lying cant and
hypocrisy. At the same time, in default of other
evidence, it ought to count for something that a
particular ideal should have been entertained in a
particular society ; it must, we may argue, have
been suggested to our authority — poet, orator, or

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 13

the like — by some happy experience of his own or
by the tradition of a better age. And this is more
especially true when we are dealing with a frank
and sincere people, as the Greek, or at least
the Ionian race, will presently appear to have
been.

Another point also should be borne in mind. In
placing the ethical value of Hellenism on a level
with its intellectual and aesthetic value I am claim-
ing for it no chimerical perfection. The art of
Hellas was not perfect, nor was its philosophy ;
still less its science. In all three the Greeks have
been surpassed by the successors who, profiting by
their lessons and their example, have taken up
their tradition and carried it to a higher pitch of
excellence. And what is more to the point, other
races, working simultaneously with them, or at a
later period in complete independence of their
influence, have in some ways shown a more
delicate aesthetic perception, a truer sense of objec-
tive reality, a more penetrating reach of reflection,
a more successful ingenuity in devising methods of
calculation. So also with morals. The virtue of
chastity may have been better taught and more
generally practised among the Jews, self-devotion
among the Romans, personal loyalty among the
Germans, sympathy with all living things on the
banks of the Ganges. But just as no alien
philosophy and no alien art, taken altogether,
could compete with the philosophy and the
art of Hellas, so neither was the moral life of
any other people so rich, so well balanced, so
identified with its inmost nature, yet so capable
of a world-wide diffusion or of expansion

i4 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

and adaptation to altered circumstances in after
ages.

That the Greeks were so great in art and science
turnishes a certain presumption that they attained,
to say the least of it, some eminence in morality.
To part off the aesthetic life and the intellectual
life from the life of conduct, as Matthew Arnold
does, is a mere conventional abstraction. It would
be little to say that there is no hard-and-fast line of
demarcation ; there is, in fact, no line at all.
Conduct is co-extensive with activity, and falls
under different laws of obligation as its subject-
matter varies ; but it never escapes from obligation
altogether. As regards fine art, this truth is now
widely recognised, and finds expression in such
common terms as "good work," "conscience," and
"sincerity" in connection with the production and
the criticism of aesthetic objects. And as regards
scientific investigation it is almost too obvious to
need emphasising. Of course the artist and,
although more rarely, the philosopher may be
faithful to the duties of his special calling and
faithless to the ordinary duties of a citizen, like
Benvenuto Cellini or Francis Bacon. But the
same possibility of a high moral development in
one direction, combined with grave deficiencies in
another, runs through the whole circle of human
activity. There seems to be no solidarity among
the virtues. Sovereigns exemplary in their domestic
relations, and ready to undergo martyrdom for their
religion, have been false to their word like Charles
I., or false to their country like Louis XVI. And
conversely the highest public loyalty may co-exist
with gross private vices as in the case of William

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 15

III. A keen sense of beauty may have its tempta-
tions in the direction of sexual immorality ; and
the impersonation of Aprodite Anadyomene by
Phryne, so picturesquely described by Matthew
Arnold, may indicate a weak point of this kind in
Hellenism. But Puritanism, too, has its tempta-
tions in the direction, among others, of savage
cruelty towards women, abundantly illustrated in
the history of our own civil wars.

Intellectualism, likewise, may have its moral
dangers, among which want of common honesty
will probably occur to most readers as the chief. But
as this deficiency seems also to accompany every
degree of stupidity and ignorance, the connection
after all is very possibly accidental. However this
may be, love of knowledge, as represented by the
Greeks, has one great and characteristic virtue — the
love of truth. The claim will excite some surprise.
From Cyrus to Hobart Pasha the enemies of that
people have habitually spoken of them as liars. I
cannot say that my own small experience of the
modern Greeks has given me that impression. On
the contrary, they struck me rather as a frank and
straightforward race, very inaccurate certainly, but
without any intention to deceive. Our business,
however, is not now with the average Greek,
ancient or modern, but with the elite of the Pagan
period ; and of these it may be said, I think, that
they have set an example of truthfulness unequalled
except by those moderns who have been trained in
their school. " Hateful to me as the gates of
Hades is he who hides one thing in his breast and
tells another," says the Homeric Achilles ; and
Plato, with a still more exacting standard of veracity,

16 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

censures Achilles for uttering threats that he does
not mean to execute.1 Sophocles, in what is,
ethically at least, the noblest of all his tragedies,
makes Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles and the
guardian of his tradition, quite incapable of carry-
ing out the scheme of deceit into which he has
been reluctantly drawn. "Tell no lies" was a
maxim of Solon. Thucydides, himself a historian
of admirable sincerity, seems to cast a slight
shade of censure on the heroic Brasidas for making
a statement that was untrue, although useful from
the diplomatic point of view.2 Epaminondas was
famous for his strict adherence to truth ; and
Marcus Aurelius, known as Verissimus, ascribes his
hatred of falsehood to the teaching of a Stoic tutor.3
A Roman satirist has charged the Greek his-
torians with mendacity on a point where their
accuracy has been signally confirmed by modern
research.4 He might with more justice have ex-
tended the accusation to his own countrymen.
Early Roman history has been in many instances
deliberately falsified by national or family vanity ;
nor are the later portions altogether trustworthy.
We are told of Dr. Arnold that " the falsity and
corruption of the Latin historians was for ever
suggesting to him the contrast of their Grecian
rivals." And if Arnold had directed his studies
more systematically to what is called "Sacred
History," the same contrast might have suggested
itself in a more unpleasant form. If we are to
credit the Higher Criticism — which is the only

1 Hippias Minor, 370 A. a iv., 108.

3 Meditations, i., 15. 4 Juvenal, x., 174.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 17

honest criticism — whole masses of ancient Hebrew
literature are deliberate forgeries, in the sense in
which we speak of the forged Decretals of Isidore ;
and the incidents related in them are to a great
extent fictitious. Theologians tell us that the
fabrication of documents purporting to contain a
divine revelation did not at that period and among
Orientals imply the same guilt that a like proceed-
ing argued in the Middle Ages and would argue
now. If so, it seems rather audacious to refer us
to such a quarter for elementary moral instruction.
However that may be, we have to congratulate
ourselves on the fact that in Attica, at any rate,
public opinion had early risen to a stage at which
truth and falsehood were more accurately discrimi-
nated. Herodotus has preserved an anecdote that
well illustrates the contrast offered by Hellenism
and Hebraism in this respect. During the sixth
century B.C. a great religious revival, now known
as Orphicism, sprang up in the Greek world and
had Attica for its principal seat. One of the
leaders of the movement, a certain Onomacritus,
stood high in the favour of the Peisistratid Hip-
parchus, and seems to have been employed by
him in editing the prophecies of Musaeus, a some-
what mythical authority of the school. Having,
however, been detected in the act of interpolating
a prediction of his own in the collection, the
unlucky forger was summarily expelled from the
country by his indignant patron, one of whose
maxims, engraved where every passer-by could
read it, was, " Do not deceive thy friend."1

1 Herodotus, vii., 6.

i8 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

Hipparchus was not, in other respects, a model
of virtue, but it is fortunate that in this matter of
pious forgeries we have been brought up on his
principles rather than on Hilkiah's. But our
excellent training has its occasional inconveniences.
It makes some honourable persons too reluctant to
admit that forgery and fabrication on a great scale
were actually practised by holy men among the
Jews. Moving in a world of Hellenic sincerity,
and not without the simplicity that a wise Hellene
has called the principal element in a noble nature,
they have failed to realise the possibilities of
Hebraic duplicity. A typical example of this
uncompromising attitude is furnished by the
manner in which that great and high-minded
theologian, F. D. Maurice, was impressed by the
speculations of Colenso. " I asked him," writes
Maurice, " if he did not think Samuel must have
been a horrid scoundrel if he forged a story about
the I AM, speaking of Moses, and, to my unspeak-
able surprise and terror, he said ' No. Many good
men have done such things. He might not mean
more than Milton meant.' " 1 Most educated theo-
logians have come to agree with Colenso, except
that they would place the composition of the
Elohistic narrative considerably later than the time
of Samuel. But their whole tone as regards the
limits of truthfulness in religious teaching is such
as to inspire plain men with something of the
" surprise and terror " felt by Maurice.

It may be objected that Plato, a typical Greek
and the greatest of Greek moralists, took similar

1 Life of F. D. Maurice, II., p. 423.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 19

liberties with the truth, to the extent even of leaving
it doubtful whether he really believed in any God
or in any future life. The fact is so ; and his
warmest admirers must always regret that it should
be so. Such prevarications show the mischief that
comes of trying to combine mythology with philo-
sophy. But, at any rate, Plato knew what he was
doing. Unlike our modern theologians, he avoided
what he called the "lie in the soul," not deceiving
himself, however much he may have wished to
deceive the people. Even here we can see how
admirably well Ruskin has said of the Greeks,
"they have not lifted up their souls unto vanity."

From the consideration of veracity as practised
in Greece we pass to that part of conduct which is
more directly concerned with the mutual relations
of human beings, to the great interests of justice
and beneficence.

It is a familiar fact that the people of whom we
are speaking divided all mankind into Greeks and
barbarians. By the latter they originally meant
only those whose language they could not under-
stand. But in time barbarian came to mean much
more than this. With the Greeks, as with our-
selves, it stood for the opposite of civilised. But
the civilisation with which they identified Hellenism
was no mere material good. The barbarians might
have better roads, more accumulated capital, a more
highly developed industrial system, larger and even
better disciplined armies than theirs. In the eyes
of a Greek these things were desirable, but they
were not the one thing needful. That one thing
without which there could be no real civilisation
was the reign of law in opposition to the rule of a

20 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

despot on the one hand, and on the other to that
anarchical state of society where wrongs are
redressed, or rather perpetuated, by private
vengeance. It is a blessing, says the Jason of
Euripides, to live in a country that is governed not
by brute force, but by law.1 And the same poet
makes Tyndareus tell his son-in-law Menelaus, who
has been excusing the matricide of Orestes, that he
has become barbarised by living out of Greece so
long. Otherwise he would see that the right course
for Orestes was to bring his mother before a court
of justice on the charge of murdering her husband.
For when one homicide is requited by another the
blood-feud goes on for ever, to the total destruction
of orderly and peaceful relations.2 Let those who
expatiate on the moral superiority of Hebraism to
Hellenism remember that this barbarous principle
of blood-vengeance is sanctioned by the Priestly
Code promulgated by Ezra in the middle of the fifth
century B.C., and that it was in full force at the
very time when the noble verses of Euripides were
being recited before the assembled people of Athens.
And this suggests another contrast. Thanks to
the eloquence of Renan and the still more fervid
declamations of James Darmesteter, himself a Jew,
much attention was drawn ten years ago3 to the
passionate preaching of justice by the Hebrew
prophets. It was well that this should be done,
and done so well. It was well that devout readers
of Scripture should be made to' realise the fact
that the prophets of Israel had something else to
do than to mystify their hearers by discussing the

1 Medea, 536-38. * Orestes, 485 sqq. 3 Written in 1901.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 21

affairs of modern Europe between two and three
thousand years in advance. And it was well also
to remind pious company-promoters and guinea-
pigs that subscriptions to missionary societies
would not have purchased absolution for wholesale
robbery from Amos and Isaiah. All honour to the
preachers who, whether at Samaria and Jerusalem
or in London and Paris, identify religion with
justice and mercy rather than with dogma and
ritual ! But let not our recognition of their services
blind us to the still greater services of those who,
unaided by supernatural promises or terrors,
actually accomplished that for which the prophets
vainly strove — the legislators, magistrates, and
orators who established and carried on the
righteous governments of Greece under which
the poor working man could not be plundered
with impunity as he was plundered in the Holy
Land.

Certain historical errors die hard, and one has
just occurred to me against which it would be well
to enter a caution. I can imagine some readers
exclaiming, " There were no paid working men in
Greece ; the free Greek citizens were an oligarchy
living in idleness on the produce of slave labour."
Such, indeed, seems to have been at one time the
prevalent belief, and it may still survive in certain
circles. To assert that the Greek democracies were
not democracies at all in our sense of the word, but
aristocracies of a particularly oppressive kind, was
part of the reactionary and anti-Hellenic propaganda
carried on after the French Revolution, to which
reference has been already made. The assertion
is, however, untrue, and anyone may easily

22 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

convince himself by consulting the Greek litera-
ture of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. that the
bulk of the Athenian voters consisted of petty shop-
keepers, peasants, and day labourers. Slaves no
doubt there were, and a good many of them,
although their number has been enormously
exaggerated, as Professor Beloch shows in his
brilliant work on the population of the ancient
world.1 But slavery existed everywhere in
antiquity, in Judaea as well as in Greece. White
slavery, indeed, lasted far down into the Middle
Ages, with the partial approval of the Church, and
was finally extinguished by purely economical
causes ; while black slavery, after being actively
promoted by professing Christians, and attaining
portentous dimensions without a protest from the
Christian conscience, owed its final destruction to
a movement set on foot by freethinking philosophers
and then taken up by that most rationalistic of
Christian sects, the Society of Friends. But the
original impulse to abolitionism came, as will
presently be shown, from Greek thought.

Returning to the contrast between the Greeks
and other nations, it has to be observed that the
barbarians, too, had their laws — a fact of which we
cannot suppose Euripides to have been ignorant,
as it was already familiar to Herodotus. The really
important distinction was that, while the Greek laws
gave a far more effectual protection against the
arbitrary will of the rulers and against the passions
of private individuals, they did not become, as with

1 J. Beloch, Die Bevolkerung der griechtsch-romischen Welt, pp.
84 sqq.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 23

the Asiatics, an instrument of irremediable bondage.
Where men's habits of thinking took their whole
shape and colour from the traditions of despotism
the law itself could not be conceived but as a despot
armed with divine authority and raised above
criticism or emendation. There may have been
something of the same feeling in Greece also.
But at a comparatively early period it was met and
overcome by the idea of law as an expression of the
collective will, and therefore as something that
might be altered with the altered needs of the
community, or with the increase of general
enlightenment. Her teachers expressed this prin-
ciple in various ways, one by declaring that man
was the measure of all things, another by con-
tending that the measure was rather supplied by
nature, by the rules of conduct that experience
showed to be observed at all times and in all
places.

Either of these methods would serve to accom-
plish the step that first makes morality what it is,
the transition from the letter to the spirit of legal
obligation. We owe to Rome the word equity by
which that essential element of law is ordinarily
expressed ; but the notion is purely Greek. It is
that iirteiiceia — rather oddly translated " sweet
reasonableness " by Matthew Arnold — which
Aristotle has defined in a manner that leaves
nothing to be desired. He tells us that the
equitable man fulfils the intention of the legislator
in cases for which the legislator, being tied to
general terms, could not provide. In cases of
disputed right he will not grasp all that the letter
of the law gives him, but will take somewhat less

24 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

than his strict right. And as the laws must be
interpreted in the light of their original intention,
so also the merit of the obedience paid to them, or
the demerit of disobedience, must be measured by
the agent's intention. Involuntary transgressions,
according to Aristotle, are not deserving of punish-
ment, but of pardon, and sometimes of pity. That
anyone can justly be made to surfer punishment
for a wrong committed through no fault of his
would, from this point of view, have been abso-
lutely unintelligible. So also would be the theory
that crimes can be expiated by the sufferings of
the innocent. And at the present day such beliefs
are explicable only as survivals or recrudescences
of Hebraic barbarism, quite impossible in a com-
pletely Hellenised society.

A spiritualised morality relieves the individual
from all responsibility for actions not committed
intentionally by him or through any negligence
on his part. But within the sphere of individual
life it extends responsibility from overt acts to
thoughts and desires. A Spartan who consulted
the Delphic oracle on the desirability of appro-
priating a deposit that he had sworn to return
received for answer that his very question amounted
to a crime, and would be punished as such.1 When
the poet Sophocles dwelt somewhat too rapturously
on the charms of a beautiful stranger, Pericles
reminded him that the eyes of a general should
be as pure as his hands.2 And, in what is believed
to be a portrait of Aristeides, Aeschylus describes
him as wishing not to seem but to be the best.3

1 Herodotus, vi., p. 86. 2 Plutarch, Pericles, chap. viii.

3 Seven against Thebes, 588.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 25

An intention or wish may be made the subject of
human, or at least of divine, penalties, as we saw
in the case of the fraudulent Spartan, and may be
repressed solely through the fear of such. There-
fore, to complete the spiritualisation of morality it
must become wholly disinterested, or dependent on
none but internal sanctions. Greek philosophy
rose to this height. It pronounced the distinguish-
ing mark of a sage to be that he would act as
before if the laws ceased to exist. And Plato
pushed the principle to an extreme when he main-
tained that, even if the just man should live in
obloquy and die in torment, he would have chosen
wisely in preferring righteousness to prosperous
iniquity.1

The sanction of disinterested virtue lies in the
pain given by a wounded conscience to those who
violate its dictates. Both the notion and the name
of conscience are Greek creations, and first received
wide currency from the Stoic philosophy, whence
they passed to St. Paul and became so thoroughly
incorporated with Christian theology that, in the
opinion of many, the existence of such an inward
monitor was unknown to Paganism. But we find
it distinctly recognised by Isocrates 2 a century before
Zeno taught at Athens ; nor can we suppose that
a popular rhetorician was the first to formulate so
profound a thought. Indeed, the thing itself goes
back to Homer, in the character of whose Helen it
is a distinguishing trait. Alike in the supreme
triumph of her beauty on the walls of Troy and in
the dignity of her rehabilitated matronhood at

1 Republic, p. 361. 2 Demonicus, i., p. 16.

26 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

Sparta, the sense of forfeited female honour is ever
present to her thoughts, and that without the least
admixture of supernatural terror — for the goddess
Aphrodite is offended by her scruples — or of
shrinking from public opinion, for no voice is
raised against her but her own.

"In justice," says Phocylides, "is summed up
the whole of virtue." "Justice," says an unknown
Greek author, " is more beautiful than the morning
or evening star." But what, after all, did they
mean by it? Aristotle, who quotes these lyrical
expressions, gives no very helpful definition ; nor
does Plato, although his Republic was written to
develop the idea of justice. Here, again, we may
profitably consult Isocrates. That excellent teacher
tells us not to do to others what would make us
angry if it were done to us1 — the first and far the
more important part of the golden rule. The prin-
ciple is not enunciated as if it were particularly
new ; but Isocrates applies it elsewhere in a way
that was new to his contemporaries, that had not
occurred to anyone outside Greece, and that even
now is not universally recognised. He tells
husbands that they have no right to exact from
their wives what they do not give, and that the
fidelity which they demand is equally obligatory
on themselves.2 Monogamy had been a law with
the Greeks so far back as we can trace their history,
and they regarded polygamy with abhorrence
as a custom of the Barbarians 3 — a fact which
those should remember who set the Hebrews, a

1 Nicocles, p. 61. 2 Ibid, p. 40.

3 Euripides, Andromache, 177, 243, 464.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 27

polygamous people, on a higher moral plane. And
we see by this passage in Isocrates that some, at
least, among the Greeks were prepared to draw
the logical consequences of monogamy. Nor was
the principle here enunciated ever quite forgotten.
Plato also in his last period enjoins the same con-
stancy on husbands, though rather on grounds of
social utility than of justice;1 and although the
first Stoics, like some moderns, advocated free love
for both sexes alike, Epictetus, writing four centuries
later, returns to the same standard of conjugal
fidelity, with the recommendation, which is also
Platonic, of antenuptial chastity for men as well as
for women.2

According to the Greeks, the obligations of
equality and reciprocity rested on natural law.
The invariable return of physical phenomena at
equal intervals of time, the co-existence and mutual
limitation of the everlasting elements that make up
the universe, were so many object-lessons in justice,
so many silent protests against the abuse of
superior strength or the violation of sworn pledges
among men. And unmeasured indulgence in
sensual gratifications was similarly interpreted as a
derogation from the rationality by which nature
had expressly distinguished men from brutes.
Thus the maxim, Follow nature, came to be
accepted as the great constitutive principle of
morals. And it was not merely used as a general
sanction for the accepted code of conduct, but still
more as a potent engine of reform, as a protest
against inveterate abuses, or as an index to new

1 Laws, pp. 839-40. 2 Encheiridion, xxxiii., p. 8.

28 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

ideals of perfection. We have not now to discuss
the logical value of the physiocratic method. It
may be used at all times, and it was more than
once used at Athens, as an apology for anti-social
egoism on the part of individuals or of States.
Civilisation itself has been condemned as a depar-
ture from nature ; and, conversely, nature might be
denounced as the great enemy of civilisation, with
the further deduction that no artificial refinement
on our original pleasures should be tabooed merely
on the ground that it is unnatural. But good
causes are often supported by bad reasons ; and,
whether logical or not, the Greek appeal to nature
seems on the whole to have made for righteousness.
Certain detestable vices were once for all stigma-
tised as unnatural, and a constant warfare kept up
against them by the philosophers from Prodicus to
Plotinus, until the attack was taken over by Chris-
tianity to be prosecuted with more drastic methods,
although, if we are to believe Roger Bacon and
Dante, for a long time with no greater success.

Another application of the same principle led to
the denunciation of slavery as contrary to nature.
The cry was apparently first raised to justify the
revolt of Messenian Helots against their Spartan
masters, but it soon received a far wider applica-
tion. Certain philosophers struck at the root of
what was not then a " peculiar institution " by
declaring that all men were born free. This
assumption has been mercilessly criticised by
Bentham, and more recently on the same lines
by Huxley. As a question of logic, their triumph
is complete ; but the crudeness of the naturalistic
formula should not blind us to the truth that it

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 29

contains. To enslave a human being is to treat
him like a brute, or, in the still more degrading
phrase of Aristotle, like a living tool ; and no
reasonable being will, in the long run, submit to
such treatment, or regard it as anything but an
outrage. Reasonings of a more elaborate and far-
reaching character show that the exploitation of
one class by another leads to the ruin of the whole
community ; but nothing so surely rouses the
oppressed to revolt, or the brave and disinterested
to the championship of their cause, as an appeal to
this wounded sentiment ; and it is part of our
ethical debt to the Greeks that the appeal was first
made by them.

To assert one's own rights, and to respect the
rights of others, is much, but it is not all ; and,
human nature being what it is, a well-organised
community cannot rest on the single virtue of
justice. After law, and the spirit of law which is
equity, we must bring in the third and completing
element of morality, which is love. I am not sure
what is the current estimate of the Greeks in this
respect. Perhaps the same popular writers and
preachers who deny them morality and conscience
think of them also — ad majorem Dei gloriam — as a
heartless and selfish people, wrapped up in a sense
of their own superiority to the rest of the world.
Mr. Stillman, who stood up for the modern Greeks,
called their Pagan ancestors (or predecessors) a
cruel and bloodthirsty canaille. Burckhardt, with
more scholarship than Stillman, seems to have
arrived at pretty much the same conclusion. In
fact, they suffer from being so very modern. We
judge them not by comparison with the Jews or the

30 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

Romans, or even with mediaeval Christendom, but
by our own ethical standards.

Here again the antithesis between Hellenes and
barbarians may prove helpful. In English and
other modern languages " barbarous," as we know,
has the secondary meaning of inhuman and cruel.
But this association has come down to us from the
Latin, and was adopted by the Latins from the
Greeks. In Greek literature the instances where
" barbarous " is used in the sense of cruel are
certainly late and few, but they are sufficient to
show that cruelty was regarded as essentially alien
to the Greek character. Nor was the belief
unfounded. History and literature testify to its
validity, to the relative humanity of the Greeks,
and more especially of those among them in whom
the Hellenic type most perfectly realised itself.
Homer's Achilles was a merciful victor until the
death of Patroclus almost extinguished pity in his
breast, and even then it could be reawakened by
the tears of Priam. Euripides tells us that to slay
prisoners of war was against the laws of Athens.'
The Spartan Gylippus pleaded, though in vain,
for the lives of the captive Athenian generals at
Syracuse; and another great Spartan, Callicratidas,
declared that no Greek should be sold into slavery
with his consent.2 With the spread of philosophy
this feeling received a wider extension. Agesilaus
impressed on his troops the duty of treating their
Persian prisoners with humanity.3 Epameinondas

' Heracleidae, 961-66.

2 Grote, History of Greece, vi., pp. 179 and 387.

3 Op, cit., vii., p. 429.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 31

refused to participate in a political assassination.1
Dion, the pupil of Plato, declared that he had
learned in the Academy not merely to be loyal to
his friends, but to forgive injuries and to be gentle
to transgressors ;2 and we know from Plato's Laws
that this was really what the master taught. Philip
and Alexander too, though ruling over a semi-
barbarous people, and not without a deep taint of
barbarism in their personal habits, showed in their
hour of triumph a clemency hitherto unknown to
the possessors of irresponsible power.

These, it may be admitted, are no more than
individual instances of a merciful disposition. But
language may fairly be quoted in evidence of its
wide diffusion. The very word humanity is of
Greek origin, being a translation (through the
Latin) of QiXavOpwiria, which conveys the same
meaning with a somewhat warmer tone. And
there is the more direct evidence of Plato, who tells
us that one expects the inhabitants of a Greek city
to be good and gentle. Gentleness and humanity,
says Isocrates, are of all qualities the most highly
esteemed among men ; and the Athenians, at least,
liked to be complimented on their possession. But
the best proof of their prevalence is afforded by a
passage where it is quite incidentally and unin-
tentionally disclosed. In what is meant to be a
very satirical picture of democratic society,
obviously drawn from his own native city, Plato
mentions that the last extreme of popular liberty is
where "the slave is just as free as his purchaser."
Even allowing for exaggeration, where so much as

1 Op. cit., viii., p. 78. 2 Plutarch, Dion, p. 979, A.

32 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

this could be said slaves must have been very kindly
treated. And it is a fresh tribute to Athenian
humanity when Plato adds that " horses and asses
have a way of marching along [in the streets of a
democratic city] with all the rights and dignities of
freemen." He also mentions, what to many will
sound the most surprising thing of all, that under
an extreme democracy — i.e., at Athens, there was
complete equality between the sexes.1

To appreciate fully the humanity of the Greeks
we must compare them with the other leading
nations of antiquity. Little need be said of the
great Oriental monarchies. Of these Egypt seems
to have been the least barbarous ; yet Egyptian
sculptors loved to represent their most famous
kings in the act of butchering a crowd of defence-
less captives, and their labourers as fainting under
the taskmaster's stick. The Phoenicians, with their
crucifixions and human holocausts, may also be
summarily dismissed. If the early annals of the
Israelites as recorded in the Hexateuch were
authentic, we could no more ascribe any feeling
of humanity to such a sanguinary and fanatical
horde than to the Huns or to Abdul Hamid.
Happily, and to the no small satisfaction of
enlightened modern Jews, the wholesale atrocities
recounted with so much complacency by the
priestly historian are demonstrably fictitious. But
the fiction has a historical value. It shows what
were the ideals of the Jewish nation in the fifth
century B.C., and presumably of their descendants
for many centuries afterwards ; and the impression

1 Republic, via., p. 563 (Jowett's translation).

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 33

thus created is deepened by the testimony of the
equally fabulous book of Esther.

The only people of antiquity who can dispute
the moral supremacy of Greece are the Romans.
They had, no doubt, their good qualities ; but of
these humanity was not one. In reference to the
political struggles of the early Roman republic,
Macaulay has indeed credited them with a tender-
ness for the lives of their fellow-citizens unknown
to Greek factions.1 But Dr. Arnold has conclu-
sively vindicated the Greeks from this aspersion.
He points out that the bloodless struggles between
the Patricians and the Plebeians are more properly
paralleled by the equally bloodless contest of the
" party of the coast " at Athens with the Eupatridas ;
while the more sanguinary faction-fights of later
Greek history answer to the proscriptions of Marius
and Sulla, or of the Triumvirs.2

Apart from such episodical outbreaks of passion,
we have indubitable proofs of the inhumanity of
the Romans in the barbarous character of their
punishments — especially their custom of flogging
before executing, even in the case of prisoners of
war — and still more of their amusements. It must
indeed be admitted that through the contagion of
Roman example the gladiatorial games spread at
last over the whole Hellenic world. But Greek
philosophy kept up a steady protest against this
barbarity ; and, when it was proposed to introduce
the games into Athens, Demonicus the Cynic
called on the people to begin by pulling down the

1 In the Preface to his Virginia.
* Arnold's Thucydides, i., p. 519.

D

34 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

altar of pity. According to the modern writer who
has studied the civilisation of the Empire most
profoundly, this amusement was never popular
with any but the dregs of the people in Greece;1
and it was finally abolished in the West through
the heroic self-sacrifice of a Greek. Everyone has
heard how the monk Telemachus made his way
from the heart of the Eastern Empire to protest
against the cruel exhibitions still kept up at Rome;
how he descended into the arena of the Coliseum,
threw himself between the combatants, perished by
their swords, and produced such an effect by his
death that public opinion insisted on the abolition
of the gladiatorial games. But how few think of
this pathetic story except as redounding to the
glory of Christianity ! Assuredly the death of
Telemachus does honour to his religion. But it
also does honour to his race and to that philo-
sophical training which had been preparing it
through long ages to accept with enthusiasm the
new faith that was to give Greek philanthropy a
mystical consecration and a world-wide diffusion.

Before the advent of Christianity the diffusion, if
not the consecration, had already begun. Renan,
if I remember rightly, has said that the Greeks
despised the Barbarians too much to embrace them
in a single fraternity. But here, as elsewhere, the
great French critic betrays the ineradicable preju-
dices of a seminarist. No ancient race was so
generous to its neighbours or so beloved by them
as the Greeks. Already in Homer the note of
generous sympathy with a foeman is struck, and it

1 Friedlander, Sittengeschichte Roms, ii., p. 384, 5th ed.

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 35

never ceases to vibrate through the hearts of his
successors. Cyrus and Anacharsis were Greek
ideals ; even Xerxes obtained a meed of admira-
tion ; and Rome owes much of her glory to the
rapturous eulogies of Greek historians. It was
seen that the superiority claimed — and justly
claimed — over the Barbarians did not belong to
the Hellenic race as such, for in earlier ages there
had been no marked difference, and the primitive
barbarism still survived in some Hellenic tribes,
but was, as we should say, an evolution due to
favourable circumstances. Hellenism, in fact,
meant culture, and culture could be communicated
to all who desired it. In the language of Hippias,
the distinctions of birth are conventional ; by
nature all like-minded persons are kinsmen,
friends, and fellow-citizens.1 In the language of
Isocrates, the partakers of Athenian culture should
sooner be called Hellenes than those who were
merely of the same race.2 And in the same spirit
a doctrine of human collectivism was subsequently
preached by the Cynic and, with more elaboration,
by the Stoic school. Finally, Eratosthenes, followed
by Plutarch, proposed to abolish the distinction
between Greeks and Barbarians, and to replace it
by a classification based entirely on the contrast
between virtue and vice.3

Had more of the earlier Stoic literature been
preserved, we should, doubtless, have more such
generous sayings on record. As it is, the philo-
sophic writers of the Empire — some of them

Plato, Protagoras, p. 337. " Panegyricus, p. 51.

3 Quoted by Strabo, I., 9.

36 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

Romans — must remain our principal authorities
for the idea of a common humanity with its implicit
obligations of mutual service and love. But even
if Seneca and Marcus Aurelius did not directly
copy from the older masters, the spirit of their
teaching remains purely Hellenic, and is derived
by an unbroken tradition from the schools of
Athens.

Moral reform is the verification of ethics. If the
lectures delivered at Athens exercised no regenera-
ting influence on their hearers, then they were
what the enemies of philosophy called them, mere
chatter, sophistry, waste of time, at best an abstract
expression for what had been felt and done in the
uncorrupted prime of Hellas. And this is what we
are still — or were until lately — taught to regard as
the net result of speculative Paganism by theo-
logians who fail to see that as good a case might
be made out against Christianity if its enemies
employed the same logic. But the facts are begin-
ning to be more impartially studied and better
understood. A brilliant historian, to whom I have
already referred, Professor Beloch, points out how
much more humanely war was conducted by Greek
generals in the fourth century B.C. than in the fifth,
and what better ideas as to the position of women
were beginning to make their way in the society of
the same period. And he has no hesitation in
ascribing this improved tone to the new standards
introduced by philosophy. Nor can it be truly said
that this advance was paid for by a proportionate
decline in the manlier virtues. Courage and
patriotism continued to be displayed when circum-
stances called them forth. The defence of Athens

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 37

against Demetrius, against Antigonus, and, much
later, against Sulla, was not inferior to the deeds of
the Persian and Peloponesian wars; and numerous
examples of a like heroism are to be found in the
later history of other Greek states.1

Still more striking is the evidence offered by the
history of the third century A.D. Alone among the
inhabitants of the Empire the Greeks of that period
spontaneously took up arms against the Gothic
invaders and largely contributed to their destruc-
tion. This successful resistance is significant in
more than one way. It bears witness not only to
a revival of the old heroism, but also to the
existence of an abundant and vigorous population.
It would seem, then, that there had been a cessa-
tion or decrease of those immoral practices which
in the classic age of Greek civilisation made war
on family life. The improvement has been ascribed
to the spread of Christianity,2 but there seem to be
no grounds for such an assumption. It does not
appear from independent evidence that the new
religion had made the advances that would have
been necessary to account for so great a change ;
nor were its doctrines favourable either to family
life or to the military spirit. And, what seems
decisive, the most vigorous resistance to the
invaders was offered at Athens, the last city in the
Empire to be converted to Christianity. But even
were the contention true, it would detract little if
at all from the ethical value of Hellenism. Chris-
tianity could only convert the Greeks into heroic

1 Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, II., p. 441.

2 In Sir Richard Jebb's Modern Greece,

38 THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM

patriots by acting on the latent possibilities of the
Greek genius itself. It exercised no such magic
in Gaul and Britain.

If, indeed, the question of obligation be once
raised, we shall have to ask not so much what the
Greeks owe to Christianity as what it owes to them.
The answer has been already given by modern
criticism. Catholicism in its original and only true
sense is but the theological expression for universal
Hellenic humanity. The much-decried Tubingen
school has made good at least one point — that the
Church was first converted from a Jewish sect into
a world-wide society by the Hellenist St. Paul,
who in his turn owed his conversion to the martyr-
death of the Hellenist Stephen. And, quite apart
from the question of admission to church-member-
ship, the root-ideas of Pauline theology are only
intelligible when interpreted in the light of Stoic
metaphysics. In other words, where Christianity
differs most widely from Judaism it approaches
most nearly to Greek thought. And this applies
not only to faith, but to morals. The antithesis
between Hebraism and Hellenism still remains
valid, though in a sense different from that
assumed by Matthew Arnold. We do not exactly
go for lessons in veracity or in justice, in gentle-
ness or in breadth of sympathy, to the Jewish
Scriptures ; if we want them, we shall find them
given with incomparable charm in the literature of
the Ionian race. And so long as moral training
shall be imparted through Christian agencies it is
vitally necessary that those agencies should be
kept in touch with the sources whence the early
Church derived its most human inspiration. For

THE ETHICAL VALUE OF HELLENISM 39

present purposes, then, the ethical value of Hel-
lenism may be defined as its influence in fixing
attention on the purely moral side of the popular
religion, and in preparing men's minds for the
eventual reception of a morality independent of
religious sanctions.

THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY ON
GREEK POLITICAL LIFE

FOR nearly a century the theories of ancient
philosophy have been studied with an industry
and a sagacity that leave nothing to be desired,
and the results have been not incommensurate with
the effort put forth. We know early Greek thought
better than it was known to Plato and Aristotle ; we
understand Plato and Aristotle themselves better
than they were understood by their immediate
disciples ; we can enter into the mind of the Stoics,
Epicureans, and Sceptics better, perhaps, than
Cicero, Plutarch, or Sextus could. More recently,
also, attention has been drawn to the immense
practical influence of philosophy on the life of the
Roman Empire during the first two centuries of its
existence, as revealed in literature, religion, and
law. Not only in the declamations of its satirists,
but also in the decorations of its tombs ; not only in
the lives of its most virtuous, but also in the rescripts
of its most vicious rulers ; not only in heathen
polemics, but also in Christian apologetics and
dogmatics, the same all-pervasive spirit may be
traced. But what philosophy did for Greece,
except to destroy religion and to undermine public
life, is a question that has not been very deeply
studied. In these matters most of us bow to the
authority of Zeller, who is deservedly considered
the greatest master of the subject. From him we

40

PHILOSOPHY AND GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 41

have learned to look on Greek speculation as
tending to detach itself more and more from the
concrete realities of life, and particularly from
political life, as tending more and more to seek
refuge from the lawlessness and oppression of the
outer world in the inviolable sanctuary of the self-
possessed, self-enjoying spirit. This isolating
movement, begun during the Peloponnesian war,
is supposed to have been consummated after the
destruction of Greek liberty by Macedon, and to
have realised itself, under various forms, in the
doctrines of the Porch, the Garden, and the later
Academy. Except in the negative sense there can,
it would seem, be no question of any social influence
exercised by such a philosophy as this.

But the later ages of Greek history may have
been less degraded and hopeless than we imagine.
In estimating the relative importance of men and
things, our judgment is apt to be swayed by the
prepossessions of a classical education. To know
what happened in the sixth, and still more what
happened in the fifth, century B.C. is justly deemed
essential to liberal culture. That period is filled
with some of the greatest events in human history,
and illustrated by some of the most splendid monu-
ments of human genius ; to make them more
interesting, some of the events may be studied in
the narratives of eye-witnesses, and we may inspect
some of the monuments for ourselves. But after
the close of the great struggle between Athens and
Sparta our sources flow more scantily and their
purity becomes more suspected. The great stream
of lyric and dramatic poetry entirely dries up, archi-
tecture and sculpture become weaker in themselves

42 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

and are less definitely related to contemporary
life. Prose composition, indeed, attains the greatest
excellence it has ever reached, but the very beauty
of its masterpieces withdraws the attention of
scholars from their historical setting by lifting
them into a region of ideal and undated perfection.
-So, too, while the fourth century gives us some of
the foremost characters of all time, they seem
constructed on such a superhuman scale that we
cannot think of them as being what Themistocles,
Pericles, and Alcibiades had been, the leaders and
representatives of their generation. The impression
produced is that of a few colossal figures surrounded
by mediocrities, and projected against a background
of petty and sordid intrigue. So far from redeeming
their age, they seem to make its baseness more
evident, and the widespread conviction of its
degeneracy more credible. Indeed, the conviction
is one that originated with the philosophers and
statesmen of the time. Those who hold that
Greece succumbed to the Macedonian arms
through her own inherent viciousness may quote
Plato and Demosthenes in their support.

As we approach the third century matters become
far worse. If, as the late Professor Freeman used
to complain, many Greek scholars seem to think
that all history ends with the sacrifice of Tissa-
phernes, the number of those must be few who
pursue their studies beyond the Lamian war.
Henceforth we are almost entirely without the
guidance and stimulation of contemporary docu-
ments, and few modern historians have attempted
the ungrateful task of piecing together a connected
narrative out of the fragmentary materials that have

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 43

survived. Grote breaks off his work in disgust at
the beginning of the Hellenistic period. Thirlwall
carries his down to the destruction of Corinth, but
Thirlwall is out of print, and is supposed to be out
of date. Freeman's History of Federal Government
in Greece, though abounding in eloquent passages,
is, as a whole, unreadable. Droysen's Geschichte
des Hellenismus would, both for style and scholar-
ship, do honour to the literature of any country ;
but it has not, I believe, been translated into
English. Adolf Holm has recently gone over the
same ground in the fourth volume of his Griechische
Geschichte, an English translation of which has
appeared. He throws fresh light on some important
points, but his closely packed summaries will be
consulted by a very limited class of readers. And
the same remark applies to Professor Julius Beloch,
whose recently published volumes (Griechische
Geschichte, III. and IV.) represent the last word
of scholarship on this period.1

This lamentable dearth of information is the more
to be regretted because the Hellenistic period was a
time, not of decay and death, but of overflowing and
fruitful life. It saw the seeds of a higher civilisa-
tion scattered over a region extending from the
Ganges to the Atlantic. Nor did the universal
diffusion of Greek ideas mean, what the diffusion
of French and English ideas too often has meant,
the effacement of national differences, the world-
wide triumph of a single not very elevated standard

1 In writing the above I was not aware that Professor Mahaffy's
excellent work on Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the
Roman Conquest (and ed., 1896) supplied the English reader with
an account, at once popular and erudite, of the period in question.

44 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

of opinion, feeling, taste, and manners. On the
contrary, what was vital and original everywhere
sprang up into rejuvenated activity under that
electric stimulus. At the contact of Alexander's
armies all India united herself under a single chief ;
and, as a consequence of that union, Buddhism was
carried in triumph from the Himalayas to Ceylon.
Persia recovered much of her ancient energy, and
her religion first received a complete literary
expression under her Philhellenic Parthian kings.
Judcea, while clinging more passionately than ever
to the Thora, felt her imagination swept by a new
whirlwind of apocalyptic visions. A series of
colossal temples rose along the banks of the Nile,
reared by the munificence of the Ptolemies, as if to
show that the land they ruled was Egypt for the
Egyptians even more than Egypt for the Greeks.
After the visit of a single Spartan general, Carthage
enters on the most heroic period of her existence.
Rome first develops her whole potentialities of
greatness in the light of Hellenic thought.

Our own civilisation is more in touch with the
age of the Diadochi than with the age of Pericles.
The form of our tragic drama, the form and
substance of our comedy, the love-interest of our
novel, are derived from Menander. Our poets owe
more to Theocritus than to Pindar. Before the
present century the most admired statues in our
museums came, without exception, from the later
schools of sculpture. Above all, our science has
been but the resumption and continuation of
methods then first organised. Euclid systematised
the geometry of the straight line and the circle ;
Apollonius worked out the geometry of conies ;

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 45

Hipparchus taught men how to construct terres-
trial and celestial maps ; Aristarchus of Samos
discovered the heliocentric system of astronomy ;
Archimedes created rational mechanics.

While the artistic and intellectual powers of the
Greek genius were being exercised with unabated
vigour, her military and political ability had not
become extinct. Setting aside mythological char-
acters, one-third of Plutarch's Greek heroes belong
to the period after Alexander ; and there were
others whose lives he did not write. It seems
incredible that this could have been an age of
moral degeneracy, or that philosophy, possessing
such an organisation as it had never enjoyed
before, should not have been interested in the
systematic reconstitution of society, especially since
the revolutionary character of the times offered
boundless opportunities for experiment. My object
is to show that such an influence was actually exer-
cised, proceeding from the schools of Athens, above
all from Stoicism, as its source and centre. But to
make this intelligible it will be necessary to trace
briefly the relations that had connected philosophy
with life in the previous course of its evolution.

With the Greeks the liveliest curiosity about the
world was ever accompanied by the desire to make
that world a worthier habitation for man. Their
first thinkers were noted above all for a purely
speculative interest in the constitution and origin
of nature. Yet Thales, the acknowledged founder
of philosophy, was quite as famous in his day for
practical wisdom as for reach and daring of thought.
We are told that he advised the twelve Ionian cities
to form a confederation for the purpose of resisting

46 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

the aggressions of Croesus — advice which, un-
happily for themselves, they did not follow. If
Heracleitus withdrew in disgust from public life,
none the less did he recognise an identical law of
existence and of conduct, a wisdom that is common
to all things. " Those who speak with intelli-
gence," he declares, "must hold fast to the
common, as a city holds fast to its law, and even
more strongly ; for all human laws are fed by one
thing — the divine." * How he thought of nature as
governed by an essentially moral law is shown by
the saying that, if the sun were to transgress his
measures, the Erinyes — the avenging handmaidens
of justice — would find him out. In the same
manner his predecessor, Anaximander, had repre-
sented the transitoriness of all individual existence
as a vindication of eternal justice. Nor did the
more mystical form assumed by Greek thought in
Italy and Sicily lead to quietism or to paralysis of
the moral will. Empedocles headed the democratic
party in Agrigentum ; Zeno of Elea died in
attempting to deliver his native city from a tyrant ;
Melissus of Samos, who also belonged to the
Eleatic school, defeated the Athenians in a sea-
fight. Great uncertainty prevails about the history
and teaching of the original Pythagorean school ;
but thus much seems clear, that they combined an
attempt to explain the universe by mathematical
principles with an attempt to carry analogous
principles into education and social discipline.
Plato's scheme of social reform seems to have
been largely suggested by their example.

1 Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy, p. 139.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 47

In all these instances the leading inspiration was
evidently ethical. The organisation of the Greek
city-state gave men ideas of law and order which
they read into the physical world, conceiving it to
be animated by a spirit like their own. But, so
far, nature taught them no lessons that might not
equally be learned in the Agora and the Boule.
An independent action of philosophy on life sug-
gests itself to us for the first time in the relations
between Anaxagoras and Pericles. For one thing,
the new knowledge tended to clear the mind of
superstition — no trifling advantage, when we re-
member how Nicias consummated the ruin of the
Sicilian expedition by postponing his retreat a
whole month in consequence of an eclipse of the
moon. It is quite certain that Pericles, who had
learned the cause of eclipses from Anaxagoras,
would not have let his movements be hampered by
any such scruple. But, if Plutarch is to be trusted,
the mind of the great statesman was strengthened
in a higher and more positive sense by his inter-
course with the Ionian sage. The august spectacle
of a universe where Reason reigned supreme gave,
we are told, a certain inflexible majesty to the
character of the democratic leader, and raised him
above all subservience to the gusts of popular
opinion. Whether it be historically true of
Pericles or not, the idea remains important and
suggestive. It has often seemed to me that Posi-
tivism, with its Religion of Humanity, leaves the
individual insufficiently protected against the
tremendous pressure of the race. Adequately to
resist that pressure we need the conception of an
existence beside which humanity itself shrinks into

48 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

insignificance, but which, so far from crushing or
absorbing our own personality, fills and expands it
to infinity. The enthusiasm of humanity finds its
corrective and counterpoise in cosmic emotion.

Before Pericles was dead, a revolutionary idea,
of which neither he nor Anaxagoras ever dreamed,
had perhaps been already evolved from the Ionian
philosophy. This was the idea of Nature, con-
sidered not merely as the indefeasible order of
objective existence, but as the original and supreme
standard of social equity, the ultimate court of
appeal against whatever seemed arbitrary or
oppressive in positive law, custom, tradition, and
temporary fashion. Each speculative thinker had
sought, with undoubting confidence that it was
there and could be found, for a primordial reality
at the root of things, calling it water, air, fire,
the Infinite, and so forth, but meaning just what
persisted or periodically reasserted itself in a world
of change. This constant element was not neces-
sarily conceived as a single material substance ; it
might be a variety of substances, or simple exten-
sion, or a definite relation, or a process ; but it was
always what we call a phenomenon, never a meta-
physical abstraction or noumenon. In Kantian
language, it lay within the limits of a possible
experience. Opposed to it were the baseless,
unstable, illusory opinions of the vulgar. Such in
its first intention was the meaning of Nature, the
philosophical equivalent for the greater gods of the
old religion. As scientific curiosity extended itself
from the material to the moral world, to the human
race with its division into numberless nations,
each speaking a different language or dialect, and

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 49

characterised by infinitely varying institutions,
customs, and laws, yet in their dealings with one
another appealing to a common standard of reason-
ableness and rectitude, there arose the obvious
idea, Have we not here also to ask for a common
principle from which all partial and local customs
are so many ignorant, it may be mischievous, aber-
rations— in a word, for what exists by nature, as
opposed to what exists by convention or law ?

It is certain that the question was asked and the
distinction drawn between ^uo-teand vo/zoc, but when
or by whom the distinction was first drawn we do
not know.1 It occurs for the first time, unless I
am mistaken, in the Protagoras, a somewhat early
dialogue of Plato's, where we find it put into the
mouth of the Sophist Hippias ; and the evidence
of Xenophon's Memorabilia goes to prove that it
was associated with his teaching by others besides
Plato. Modern historians of philosophy speak as
if this distinction was the common property of all
the Sophists, and was used by all with the same
implications. In their opinion, the antithesis
between Nature and Law was a mere pretext for
invalidating the authority of Law, for releasing
men from their obligation to obey the ordinances
of the State, and therefore a powerful agent in the
work of public demoralisation, at least when the
oppression of the weak by the strong was defended
as a natural right. If we are to believe Thucydides
and Plato, such a justification of successful violence
was actually attempted at the time of the Pelopon-
nesian war ; but to make Hippias or any other of

1 It has been ascribed to Archelaus, the disciple of Anaxagoras,
on the very doubtful authority of Laertius Diogenes.

E

5o THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

the great Sophists responsible for such a perver-
sion of their teaching would be like making
Socrates and Plato responsible for the defence of
injustice for delivering which their successor,
Carneades, was expelled from Rome.

Let it be remembered that the only Sophists
about whom we have any right to speak are Pro-
tagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, and Hippias. The
last is the only one who is known to have directly
distinguished nature from law or convention. His
words, as reported or imagined by Plato, are : " All
of you who are here present I reckon to be kinsmen
and friends and fellow-citizens, and by nature and
not by law ; for by nature like is akin to like,
whereas law is the tyrant of mankind, and often
compels us to do many things which are against
nature. How great would be the disgrace, then,

if we -who know the nature of things should

quarrel with one another like the meanest of man-
kind."1 There is surely nothing sceptical, cor-
rupting, or anti-social about the sentiment here
expressed. Further, we have to note that arith-
metic, geometry, and astronomy are mentioned
among the subjects taught by Hippias2 — a fact
which seems to show that he studied the nature of
man in connection with the nature of things. So
far as we can make out, a somewhat similar method
was followed by Prodicus. With regard to this
teacher we have the precious, though scanty, con-
temporary evidence of Aristophanes, who, in the
Clouds, compliments him on his eminent wisdom
and learning, while in the Birds he playfully

1 Plato, Protagoras, p. 337 B. ; Jowett's trans.
' Ibid, p. 318.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 51

announces a new theory of evolution that is to
send Prodicus away howling — a clear proof of the
interest taken by the Ceian moralist in such
inquiries. How far he attempted to connect ethics
with physics must, in the absence of more detailed
information, remain uncertain ; but his own well-
known apologue, The Choice of Hercules, as reported
to us by Xenophon, affords some suggestive hints of
a tendency in that direction. The word "nature"
itself occurs three times over in a few lines ; and
throughout there is a genuinely naturalistic assump-
tion that pleasure is altogether censurable when it
has not been purchased by a corresponding outlay
of effort and fatigue. Here, for the first time, we
catch sight of a principle pregnant with momentous
and far-reaching consequences. For, by parity of
reasoning, it might be urged that no man has any
right to wealth that he has not earned by an
equivalent amount of useful work, which is the
root-idea of socialism ; or, again, that one class of
the community should not receive gratuitous
benefits at the expense of another class, which is the
root-idea of Spencerian individualism. Plato, who,
for reasons unknown, particularly hated Prodicus,
only mentions him to ridicule the pedantic
precision with which he insisted on the accurate
use of language.1 Altogether, we have here a master
of encyclopaedic range — physicist, philologist,
and moralist — with Hippias, the earliest precursor
of Stoicism and of modern university training.

1 Curiously enough, the late Mr. R. H. Hutton dwells on the
extreme accuracy and precision of the late Professor Maiden as
a trait of distinction between that scholar and the ancient Sophists
(in the Memoir prefixed to Bagehot's Literary Studies, p. xv.)«

S2 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

We gather from the report of Xenophon that
the moral censure of Prodicus was directed against
the vices of the rich and luxurious, special emphasis
being laid on their artificial, unnatural character.
The polemic thus begun would easily extend into
an attack on all civilisation considered as a depar-
ture from the state of nature, from the innocence
and simplicity of savage man ; and it would be
accompanied by a tendency to hold up as examples
for imitation the nations who had remained at or
near the primitive condition of mankind. We
generally associate this tendency with the philo-
sophy of the eighteenth century ; but it is now
known that Rousseau and Diderot were merely
taking up the tradition of Greek thought. Although
it may be traced back to Hesiod, the theory of a
golden age still partially surviving among savages
did not reach its full expansion before the middle
of the fourth century B.C.; but there is evidence
that it was already eagerly canvassed in the circles
which gathered round the great Sophists, and
could show that most satisfactory proof of vitality
which is afforded by the rise of an antagonistic
theory. To the glorification of nature was opposed
the glorification of progressive civilisation ; to the
study of astronomy and physics was opposed the
study of poetry, eloquence, modern history, and
political institutions ; to the ethical standards and
sanctions derived from the healthy balance of the
organic functions were opposed other standards
and sanctions derived from the exigencies of the
social state and the steady pressure of public
opinion. At the head of this humanistic school
apparently stood Protagoras ; and nothing can

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 53

better illustrate the sharp antagonism of the two
ethical methods than a remark put into his mouth
by Plato, so unlike anything else in the Dialogues
that we must accept it as characteristic, if not as
the reproduction of an actual utterance. " I would
have you consider that he who appears to you to
be the worst of those who have been brought up in
laws and humanities would appear to be a just man
and a master of justice if he were to be compared
with men who had no education, or courts of justice*
or laws, or any restraints upon them which com-
pelled them to practise virtue — with the savages,
for example, whom the poet Pherecrates exhibited
on the stage at the last year's Lenaean festival. If
you were living among men such as the man-haters
in his Chorus, you would be only too glad to meet
with Eurybates and Phrynondas, and you would
sorrowfully long to revisit the rascality of this part
of the world."1 A somewhat similar vein of
hostility to barbarism may, I think, be traced in
the introduction to the history of Thucydides. It
is significant, too, that, with many a tale of Greek
cruelty to relate, his strongest expressions of horror
are reserved for the savagery of the Thracians, and
particularly for their massacre of all the children
in a large boys' school at Mycalessus.

Greek thinkers habitually sought to clothe their
principles in the most paradoxical form they could
devise. Protagoras and Gorgias were not content
to advocate humanistic studies at the expense of
physical science ; they tried to destroy the idea of

1 Plato, Protagoras, 327 c (Jowett's Trans.). Robert Lowe
once quoted this passage with the keenest enjoyment.

54 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

Nature, root and branch. Protagoras taught that
" Man is the measure of all things "; in other words,
moral obligations and distinctions must be founded
on the needs of a progressive society, not on the
abstraction to which the physiocratic philosophers
appeal. Gorgias set to work in a still more radical
fashion. He wrote a treatise with the significant
title, On Nature or frothing, in which he main-
tained, first that nothing exists ; secondly, that if
anything existed it could not be known ; and
thirdly, that if anything existed and could be
known, the individual possessing that knowledge
could not communicate it to others. This, as the
worthy Tiedemann observes, was " going much
farther than common sense permits "; but the
Greeks, as I have said, loved paradoxical state-
ments ; and Gorgias probably meant no more than
Joseph de Maistre when he asked the apostles of
" la Nature," " Qui est done cette femme?" or than
Alfred de Musset, when he put the equally difficult
question, "Le cceur humain de qui, le coeur humain
de quoi?"

Like the opposing cosmologies of Heracleitus
and Parmenides at an earlier period of Greek
thought, the rival theories of the physiocrats and
the humanists each contained an element of truth,
and the future progress of ethics depended on the
recognition and combination of both. Since Pro-
tagoras a number of thinkers, among whom Pro-
fessor Huxley may be mentioned as the last, but
not the least, have shown that nature, apart from
man, is anything but a safe moral guide, and that
what she seems to inculcate is, in fact, the supre-
macy of brute force. On the other hand, the great

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 55

diversity of moral codes observed at different times
and in different places points to the necessity of
some objective principle by which they must be
tested, unless we are to resign ourselves to complete
scepticism on the subject of right and wrong.
Here physical science comes to the rescue by
teaching us to look at things rather than words,
and to follow the lines of demonstrative evidence
rather than the shifting currents of popular opinion.
But only the study of human interests as such can
tell us what things we should look at, and what kind
of proof the nature of the case demands. Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle, by creating the dialectic
method and applying it to ethics, made a good
start in this direction — so good, indeed, as com-
pletely to overshadow the predecessors whose ideas
they appropriated and combined. Worse than
this, some loose declamations of Plato and some
special attacks on the rhetoricians and oligarchs of
his own time have been construed into a distinct
charge of immoral teaching brought against the
great Sophists of the fifth century. Undoubtedly
the naturalistic and humanistic principles severally
admit of being pushed to anti-social consequences.
The claim of the strong man — or, as he would call
himself, the born ruler of mankind — to lord it over
his fellows, and to gratify all his appetites at their
expense, may be upheld as a natural right. A
misinformed or deluded public opinion may be
erected into the supreme standard of truth and
justice, while the art of misinforming and deluding
it may be inculcated as the first qualification of a
statesman. But the Socratic dialectic, with its
principle that the germs of truth exist in every

56 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

mind and in every belief, is also capable of disease
and corruption. We owe to it — beginning with
Plato, or, perhaps, even with Socrates himself — the
organised hypocrisy that defends the public pro-
fession and propagation of superstitious beliefs as
the only form under which philosophic truth can
safely circulate among the ignorant masses.

It would be a great mistake to suppose that the
teaching of the Sophistic schools^ based as it was
on principles of everlasting validity, possessed
merely negative or transitional significance.
There is reason to suppose, from incidental
references in Plato and Aristotle, that it continued
to win adherents through the two generations that
followed the death of Socrates. Above all, the
note of naturalism became increasingly dominant,
and powerfully affected the Socratic schools them-
selves. Plato's writings are a good example of
the tendency. His earliest dialogues are almost
entirely humanistic, with only slight or deprecia-
tory references to nature ; but in the Republic
physiocratic considerations are already prominent,
and in the Laws, a very late work, they meet us at
every step, in connection, be it observed, with a
very high and pure morality. Aristotle also refers
to nature as a moral standard, the validity of which
he recognises, although he cannot accept all the
consequences drawn from it by some other philo-
sophers.

Authorities are still divided on the question
whether the influence which we have seen to be
so potent in speculation was, or was not, mis-
chievous in practice. Most German historians
continue to believe that a decline in Greek morality

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 57

began with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war,
and continued without intermission down to the
advent of Christianity; and they make Sophisticism
responsible for at least the inception of the process.
Traditions are very strong in German universities,
and it has become a tradition in those seats of
learning that to take fees for lecturing and to throw
doubt on the popular mythology is very reprehen-
sible conduct — when practised by an ancient Greek.
It sometimes actually led people to believe in the
right of the stronger ! Fortunately there is one
German, Professor Julius Beloch, who, having the
advantage of living in Italy, has dared to think for
himself. This brilliant and original historian not
only vindicates the Sophists, as Grote and others
had done before him, but makes short work of the
whole charge of demoralisation brought against
the Greeks. There is no surer test of a nation's
moral standing than its conduct in time of war. If
there is a virtue admitting of ocular and statistical
demonstration, a virtue that can neither be
concealed nor assumed, that virtue is humanity.
Now Professor Beloch opportunely reminds us
that the Greeks of the fourth century were much
more humane than the contemporaries of Pericles.1
Such horrors as the slaughter of the Theban
prisoners by the Plataeans and of the Platsean
prisoners by the Thebans, of the Corcyrasan
aristocrats by the opposite faction and of the
Melians by the Athenians, for no other crime than
having refused to give up their independence, are
justly branded with execration ; but it is unjustly

1 Griechische Geschichte, I., p. 595.

58 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

forgotten that they find no counterpart in the next
generation. We do not again hear of prisoners of
war being shut up to die by thousands of slow
torture in the quarries of Syracuse, nor yet of their
being put to death by the more summary method
of Lysander at Aigos Potamoi. The historian
knows of only two cases in the wars of the fourth
century where the storm of a besieged town was
followed by the massacre of its male adult citizens
— the capture of Orchomenus by the Thebans and
the capture of Sestus by Chares.1 The outburst of
popular passion to which Phocion and his friends
fell victims, though lamentable enough, is not to
be compared with that which wreaked itself on the
victorious generals of Arginusae. Whether the
persecution and exile of so many generals and
statesmen, from Miltiades to Alcibiades, was due
more to ingratitude mixed with envy on the part of
the people, or to treason on the part of its leaders,
may be doubted ; in any case there was guilt of the
blackest kind somewhere, but guilt which we meet
with only under a greatly attenuated form in the
fourth century.

If we ask what was the cause of this wonderful
change, the only possible answer is, the great
revolution that philosophy had wrought in the
minds of men. The mere habit of looking at
things from a universal point of view has happily
a certain power to enlarge the sympathies. Thus
the rulers of Babylon, surrounded as they were by
a learned priesthood, seem to have been much
more merciful than the rulers of Assyria. Further-

1 Grtechtsche Geschichte, II., p. 441.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 59

more, the three great ethical schools characterised
above must, through their various principles, have
exercised a still more direct influence on the social
feelings. The physicists, by drawing attention to
the universal elements of human nature, helped to
break down the barriers of race, language, and
nationality that so powerfully foster feelings of
mutual hostility among men. The humanists saw
with perfect clearness that a state of nature meant
lawless violence ; but their object was by means
of systematic instruction still further to develop
the tendencies that make for peace, order, mutual
helpfulness, and elevated enjoyment. Such of
them as taught rhetoric or the art of persuasion
by words must have looked with peculiar horror
on the regime of brute force ; indeed, it is impossible
to study the writings of Isocrates, the chief teacher
of rhetoric in the fourth century, without recognising
through all the man's vanity, inconsistency, and
subservience to success a sense of justice and mercy
utterly alien to the tone of the Melian Dialogue.
Especially significant is the declaration of Isocrates
that Hellenism is a privilege not of race but of
culture, and therefore open to all mankind.1
Finally the Socratic school, with its willingness to
learn from every one, its appeals to the reason that
is actual or latent in every man and in every woman,
its exaltation of the soul above the body, and of the
higher over the lower psychic activities, must have
contributed largely to the good work of humanisa-
tion that was going on.

In attempting to trace the general influence of

See above, p. 35.

60 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

philosophy on the spirit of the age we have been
dealing with probabilities, of a high order indeed,
but not affording the satisfaction of absolute
certainty ; and in the dearth of documentary
evidence no more can be expected. But, on
passing to the study of philosophy as an influence
on the character of individual statesmen, we are no
longer limited to conjecture ; we have definite facts
to show. Here our whole case might be staked on
the name of Epaminondas, whom Professor Mahaffy
calls " far the noblest of all the great men whom
Greece ever produced, without a single flaw or
failing."1 This illustrious patriot was a pupil of
Lysis, the Pythagorean, and became himself, in
turn, a teacher of the whole state, devoting himself
for years to the moral and intellectual elevation of
his fellow-citizens. But what speaks most for the
moral earnestness of Epaminondas is his refusal,
after all those years of preparation for the deliver-
ance of Thebes, to take part in the secret
assassination of the oligarchs who were governing
her as the servile agents of Lacedaemonian oppres-
sion. Philosophy had taught him a delicacy of
conscience not only far in advance of the best
public opinion of his own time, but also in advance
of the sentiments entertained till a comparatively
recent period by some Christian moralists. Another
but inferior example of philosophy in action is
furnished by Dion, the friend of Plato, and the
first liberator of Syracuse. I am well aware of the
prejudice under which the memory of this unfortu-

1 Rambles and Studies in Greece, p. 227 (2nd ed.). I do not
agree with the last words quoted. See Plutarch, Eroticus, xvii.
15 ; Athenaeus, Deipnosophistce, xiii., Ixxxiii.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 61

nate patriot must suffer in the minds of all English-
speaking scholars. There is nothing in Grote's
History of Greece to equal for interest and pathos
his narrative of the two Sicilian expeditions of
Dion and Timoleon ; and the total effect of that
narrative unquestionably is to make the ill-starred
philosophic aristocrat play the part of a foil to the
higher and purer glory of the successful Corinthian
democrat. It is, however, only fair to remember
that Timoleon had the inestimable advantage of
coming after Dion, and of profiting by his mistakes.
We have also to note that the one blot on the fame
of the great liberator, his not interfering to save
the innocent wives and daughters of Hicetas from
the cruel vengeance of the Syracusans, was the
very last sin of which his predecessor would have
been guilty. When pressed to put a treacherous
enemy to death, Dion answered that his prolonged
studies in the Academy had for their object the
conquest of anger, envy, and all contentiousness ;
that it was not enough merely to reciprocate the
goodness of others, it was necessary also to forgive
injuries and to be merciful to the transgressor ; that
for the person who is first attacked to revenge
himself, though legally justifiable, is by nature no
less censurable than the attack, as springing from
the same root of ungoverned passion ; that human
wickedness, however savage, must at last yield to
the effect of unwearied beneficence.1 For us the
most interesting point to note is that, as Curtius

1 Plutarch, Dion, p. 979 A. The distinction between nature and
law seems to point to a much older authority than Plutarch,
probably a contemporary of Dion's. I have slightly paraphrased
this sentence in order to make it more intelligible.

62 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

says, the expedition of Dion was an enterprise
undertaken by the whole Academy in its collective
capacity — a fact quite irreconcilable with the
subsequent statement of the same historian, that
philosophers were at this time more and more
withdrawing themselves from the repulsive contact
of public affairs. Very significant also of the
increased power now exercised by ideas is the
desire shown by the younger Dionysius, and in
a less degree even by his detestable father, to stand
well in the opinion of Plato. So also is the selection
of Aristotle as the tutor of young Alexander.

Thus far we have seen philosophy occupied in
the work of systematising the moral law, reducing
it to simple principles, connecting it with the eternal
constitution of the universe, and developing it in the
direction of a more comprehensive humanity. We
have now to study it under the more stirring aspect
of a reforming and revolutionary force, as an
endeavour taken up by serious statesmen to
reconstitute society on a basis of economic justice.
In this connection the briefest reference to Plato
must suffice, as that master's searching criticism
of contemporary life and his twofold attempt to
reconstruct it from the bottom up are, or ought to
be, familiar to every student, if only for the un-
rivalled literary splendour of the writings in which
they are embodied. Moreover, the subtlety and
complexity of his genius raise Plato so high above
the age that he cannot be taken as representing its
general philosophical tendencies, although his
works may be used as affording valuable evidence
of the direction in which they pointed. The great
word of that age, as of our own eighteenth century,

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 63

was " Back to Nature ! " and then also, as with
Rousseau, the ordinances of Nature were interpreted
in a levelling, democratic, socialistic sense, quite
remote from the sharp class-distinctions of Plato.
We have seen how Hippias, whom the young
Plato made a butt for his ridicule, implicitly
proclaimed the natural brotherhood of mankind.
We learn from a fragment of Aristotle that a later
Sophist named Lycophron declared nobility of birth
to be a baseless privilege,1 while another Sophist,
Alcidamas, vindicated freedom as a natural right2
— a principle which, as we know from Aristotle's
Politics, was unhesitatingly pushed on to the
absolute condemnation of slavery.

Those who, like these generous philosophers,
have persuaded themselves that liberty, equality,
and fraternity are natural to man, easily come to
believe that this happy state was realised in the
primitive condition of the race. We get a glimpse
of their belief on this subject from the Laws of
Plato, who, as I have said, came very much under
their influence in his old age. He tells us that the
men who lived immediately after the Deluge were
"simpler, more manly, more temperate, and more
just " than his own contemporaries (Laws, 679 E) ;
and he attributes their superior virtue to their
undeveloped industrial condition, to the absence
alike of poverty and of wealth. The next step was
to look round for a people among whom these
delightful traits of primitive humanity had been
preserved. It was found in the Scythians.
Ephorus, a pupil of Isocrates, and the greatest

1 Quoted by Stobaeus, Florilegium , p. 494, 24.
2 Oratores Attici (Didot), II., p. 316.

64 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

historian of later Greece, seems to have constructed
a fancy picture of that barbarous race, which was
received with unquestioning faith through the
whole of antiquity, and in a revived form has even
affected modern thought. Justice was represented
as the most essential characteristic of these nomads ;
envy, hatred, and fear were unknown among them ;
such was their horror of taking even animal life
that they subsisted entirely on milk ; and they
lived in a state of perfect communism, holding
property, wives, and children in common, so as to
constitute a single united family.1

Various causes combined to familiarise Greek
social philosophy with the idea of communism.
To a certain extent it had no doubt prevailed among
the Hellenic tribes before they left the nomadic
state, and the tradition was never entirely lost.
When they settled in a new country the land would
be most naturally distributed in equal portions
among the conquerors, and any fresh territory that
was subsequently annexed would be similarly dis-
posed of. The rise of manufactures and commerce,
with the accompanying introduction of a metallic
currency, brought about a great inequality of
wealth, leading to violent political disorders, which,
in the case of Solon's legislation, necessitated a
forcible remission of debts by the State — a prece-
dent never afterwards forgotten. Democracy,
which at first meant deliverance of the poor from
the oppression of the rich, afterwards came to
mean a more or less disguised distribution of the
property of the rich among the poor, and of the

1 Pohlmann , Geschichte des antiken Kommunisntns, I. , pp. 1 1 7 sqq.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 65

tribute paid by the subject cities among all classes,
without any disguise whatever. Meanwhile a first
rough analysis of social phenomena had led philo-
sophers to the conclusion that covetousness was the
root of all evil, that murder, robbery, and other
crimes arose from the unequal distribution of
property, or rather from its mere existence, for, as
Menander said —

With naught to take no man would e'er be wicked.

From the prevalent view of marriage it followed
that wives, like any other kind of property, were to
be held in common. Strange as it may seem, the
idea of such a revolution, so far from being
regarded as a degradation, was welcomed with joy
by the women. When, in 392, Aristophanes took
communism as the subject of one of his wittiest
comedies, the Ecclesiazusce, he represented it as
the work of the Athenian women, who go to the
poll disguised as men, and change the institutions
of the State by a snatch vote ; and Epictetus,
writing five centuries later, attributed the enthu-
siasm of the Roman ladies for Plato's Republic
entirely to its proposal that there should be a
community of wives.1

Aristophanes is our earliest authority for the
existence of communism as a political ideal. It
has, indeed, been maintained that his exhibition of
it on the stage was intended as a satire on the
proposals of Plato. But it seems most unlikely
that even the first half of the Republic had been
completed when the philosopher was only thirty-
four ; unlikely also that Plato should not have been

* Didot, Fragmenta, p. 53.

66 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

mentioned by name in the play, if not actually
brought on the scene. Moreover, in the Republic
communism is carefully restricted to the governing
class ; not till long afterwards, in the Laws, is it
proclaimed as the ideally best arrangement for all
mankind. I have already called attention to the
remarkable fact that the Laws is saturated with a
naturalism quite foreign to the earlier dialogues.
What is the inference ? Plainly, that communism
(in both kinds) was a standing doctrine of the
naturalistic school, and that it probably originated
with the immediate successors of Hippias and
Prodicus. Most unfortunately, we only know that
such persons existed through incidental references
in Plato and Aristotle ; the Cynics, who bore the
same relation to the philosophic naturalists that the
Franciscans bore to the Dominicans, have com-
pletely superseded them in the notices of later
compilers. But, even in the scanty utterances of
Antisthenes and Diogenes, clear traces of a com-
munistic theory have been preserved ; and it
emerges full blown in what was practically by far
the most important of the ancient philosophies,
Stoicism.

We are apt to think of the later Athens as
divided among four or more equally serious or
equally frivolous schools of philosophy. But in
reality the Lyceum was devoted almost exclusively
to physical science ; the Epicureans were a small,
uninfluential group of recluses ; the Academicians,
after abandoning the mathematical mysticism of
Speusippus, contented themselves with a negative
criticism chiefly directed against the doctrines of
the Porch. This last alone gave a training at once

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 67

positive, encyclopaedic, and fruitful, mingling with
every honourable pursuit, delivering its message
to all men, and holding up, by the example of its
teachers, no less than by the rigour of its tenets,
such a standard of righteousness and purity as
none but the prophets of Israel had raised before.
So strong, indeed, are the traces of a Semitic
origin among the chief Stoics, beginning with its
founder, Zeno, that their moral earnestness has
been attributed to a peculiar quality resident in the
genius of the race to which the prophets also
belonged. But this seems a very fanciful explana-
tion of Stoicism. Taking them altogether, the
Semites have never been remarkable for a high
moral tone, least of all the Phoenician branch to
which Zeno belonged. If the foreign extraction of
the early Stoics betrayed itself at all, it was in a
certain absolute, unconditional, uncompromising
tone of thought common to all Asiatics, and due
less to any racial idiosyncrasy than to the habits
inbred by immemorial despotism. How little race
has to do with it is evident from the reappearance
of a precisely similar tone among the Russian
novelists of the present day, who have imbibed it
from the same environment. As a consequence of
this rigorous absolutism, the Stoics abolished the
distinction between mind and matter ; they placed
the world under the unconditional control of reason ;
they asserted the unbroken regularity of natural
law ; they substituted determinism for free will ;
they insisted, against Aristotle, that virtue con-
stituted not the leading element, but the whole of
happiness ; and they claimed for perception an
unerring certainty. But in every point of their

68 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

system they did but develop ideas long familiar
to Greek philosophy ; and in their love of para-
doxical statement, at least, they were entirely
Greek. As a means of drawing attention, their
paradoxes were perfectly successful, so much so,
indeed, that down to the present day public opinion
assumes almost without question that every philo-
sopher is indifferent to pain and inaccessible to
emotion ; that he knows everything and can do
everything, provided it be not of too frivolous a
character ; and that he is, or would like to pass for
being, impeccable and infallible — in other words,
that he answers to the ancient caricature of a Stoic.
In reality, the Stoics never professed or required
insensibility to pleasure and pain ; they merely
asserted, as we also do, the supreme and incom-
mensurable value of moral goodness ; and in
ascribing all manner of merits and accomplish-
ments to their ideal sage they merely demanded,
as some of us also do, the systematic application
of scientific principles to the whole field of human
activity. But that the ideal sage had ever been
realised on earth they did not believe ; and if their
principles suffered any sense of humour to survive
they must have smiled at the naivete of a Mace-
donian officer who, hearing that the wise man was
an excellent general, joined the school in hopes of
becoming one himself.1

At the moment when Zeno first proclaimed his
message under the painted portico of Athens it
seemed as if all free and noble public life had come
to an end in Greece. That fourth empire, so well

1 Plutarch, Arattis, xxiii., p. 1037 f.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 69

described by the Book of Daniel as "a beast terrible
and powerful and strong exceedingly with great
iron teeth, devouring and breaking in pieces and
stamping the residue with his feet," had devoured
her last patriots and trampled her liberties into the
mire. To the unexampled clemency of Philip and
Alexander had succeeded the terrorism of their
brutal generals. A successful military adventurer,
Demetrius Poliorcetes, remarkable not less for his
frightful profligacy than for his shining abilities,
was lodged in the Parthenon, and received divine
honours from the servile Athenians. All the most
virile elements of the community were drawn off
to Asia and Egypt by the lucrative prospects of
mercenary service. It would not have been sur-
prising if, in the circumstances, no lesson but that
of fatalistic indifference to outward events had been
learned by the degenerate youths who divided their
time between the boudoir of the hetaira and the
lecture-hall of the sage. Nevertheless, Zeno lived
to see the last great struggle for Greek indepen-
dence begin ; his successors saw its temporary
victory and its development into a movement that
seemed to promise the realisation of their own
social ideals.

In the year 280 B.C. a Gallic storm, like that
which had devastated Italy more than a century
before, broke on the Hellenic world. Macedonia,
whose proud boast it was to shield civilisation
against barbarism, succumbed at once to the
shock, and her usurping king, Ptolemy Keraunos,
fell in battle with the invaders. The human deluge
poured on, but was arrested and flung back by the
unsupported levies of central Greece. Their

7
o THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

heroism still lives for us embodied in the form of
the Apollo Belvedere, the marble copy of a bronze
statue erected to commemorate the repulse of the
barbarians from Delphi, and representing the god
in the act of shaking his shield in their faces.1
Other famous works of plastic art owe their inspira-
tion to the same desperate conflict, as it afterwards
raged in Asia Minor, such as the dying Gaul of the
Capitol ; the group of a Gaul supporting the body
of the wife whom he has just slain, and plunging a
sword into his own breast, in the Museo delle
Terme at Rome ; also, perhaps, those Pergamene
reliefs which are now the glory of Berlin. But it
was not merely in art that the victorious conscious-
ness of resurgent Hellenic life found expression.
Sparta exhibited all her ancient heroism in repelling
an attack made on her by Pyrrhus, the greatest
general of the age ; a few years afterwards Athens
made a desperate but unsuccessful effort to shake
off the Macedonian yoke. This, which Droysen
calls her last but her most honourable attempt to
recover her ancient liberty — an attempt first rescued
from oblivion in modern times by the great historian
Niebuhr — is known as the Chremonidean war from
its leader, Chremonides, a friend, perhaps a disciple,
of Zeno. Droysen has no doubt that the movement
was inspired by Stoicism, which had now been
taught for a whole generation at Athens, and was
diffused through all Hellas by the students who
had flocked from every quarter to the intellectual
metropolis, as well as by Arcesilaus, the high-

1 According to Beloch (III., p. 582), the Gauls actually took and
plundered Delphi ; but, as they were subsequently defeated by the
Greeks, the Apollo retains its symbolic value.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 71

minded scholarch of the Middle Academy.1 Not
that Zeno himself was an enthusiast for republican
liberty ; the tenour of his doctrine was rather
favourable to monarchy, and he was personally
the friend and confidant of King Antigonus
Gonatas, against whom this rising was directed.
But the lessons of moral earnestness and zeal once
learned cannot be appropriated by any political
party ; they can, however, raise partisanship to a
higher level by investing it with the authority of a
divine mandate or consecrating it to the service of
an impersonal ideal. Thus the modern Stoicism
of Carlyle2 gave fresh energy to aspirations that he
misunderstood or despised ; and at the moment
when the master was inditing his American Iliad
in a Nutshell many of his unknown disciples may
have been dying in order that human beings
should not be engaged as servants for life against
their will.

The Chremonidean war only served to rivet the
Macedonian yoke more firmly on the necks of the
Athenians. But the emancipating movement
spread like wildfire in the Peloponnesus. Two
disciples of Arcesilaus, Ecdemus and Demophanes,
slew the unlawful ruler of their native city Megalo-
polis, and restored it to freedom ; they then aided
Aratus in achieving the still more glorious deliver-
ance of Sicyon, and finally, at the invitation of
Cyrene, crossed the sea to give that great African
colony the blessing of an orderly republican

1 Geschichte des Hellenismus , III., pp. 228 sqq.

" Of course this is not to be understood as meaning that Carlyle
was a Stoic in practice.

72 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

government.1 Federation, an entirely new poli-
tical experiment, was tried with success by the
famous Achaian League ; its President, Aratus,
drove the Macedonian garrison from Corinth, and
gave Athens the independence that she could not
achieve for herself. How high the tide of
enthusiasm was running appears from the story
of Lydiades, a noble youth who, having possessed
himself of supreme power in Megalopolis, and
exercised it some years for the public good, volun-
tarily surrendered his autocracy and descended to
the rank of a private citizen, whence he was soon
raised by the free votes of the people to the presi-
dency of the Achaian League.

So far philosophy had done wonders, but its
greatest triumph still remained to win. This was
the reconstitution of the Spartan State. One of
the most curious chapters in the history of specu-
lation relates to the use made of Sparta and her
institutions in the schools of Athens. Professor
Edward Caird has called attention, from a Hege-
lian point of view, to the remarkable union in
Rousseau's mind of faith in nature with faith in
education.2 Just the same combination was ex-
hibited by Rousseau's Greek predecessors ; and as
they found a model of uncorrupted natural virtue
in Scythia, so they found an equally perfect model
of artificial training in Sparta. It was supposed
that the much-admired system which produced a
Leonidas and a Gorgo, an Argileonis and a
Brasidas, had been created in all its pieces by the

1 Polybius, X., 22. The reference is wrongly given in Droysen.
* Essays on Literature and Philosophy, I., 120 sqq.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 73

legislator Lycurgus and preserved intact during
several centuries after his death. But in truth the
educational and semi-socialistic romance that we
read in Plutarch, while it embodies some features
common to the more primitive Dorian tribes, was
in great part evolved out of their own moral con-
sciousness by several generations of philosophers.
Lycurgus is a pure myth, the human incarnation
of an old Spartan god ; I the equal division of land
attributed to him no doubt represents an actual
distribution of conquered territory among the
predatory warriors who had established themselves
by the Eurotas ; but we have no reason to believe
that a permanent equality of landed property was
legally provided for ; at any rate, in the historical
period we find the distinction between rich and
poor as sharply emphasised at Sparta as anywhere
else.2

The Greeks are a people who have always been
more influenced by memory or hope than by
immediate reality, and neither the complete over-
throw of Sparta by Epaminondas nor her subse-
quent isolation from Panhellenic politics detracted
anything from the traditional adoration paid her
by popular rhetoricians and philosophical historians
who continued freely adding to the picture of her
primitive perfection. At last the glamour that she
had so long exercised on others was reflected back
on herself, and the fictitious legislation of Lycurgus
was taken up in all seriousness by her more
educated children as a charter still claiming their

1 I am aware that an attempt has recently been made to vindi-
cate his historical reality.

2 Pohlmann, utantefp. 102.

74 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

obedience and support. A reform of some kind
was, indeed, imperatively needed, for the concentra-
tion of property in a few hands, everywhere a
pressing evil, had been carried further, perhaps,
in Sparta than in any other Greek state, and was
eating away what still remained of her defensive
military power. A modern historian has explained
this economic revolution by the peculiar position
that Sparta occupied as an emporium for what was
then a kind of merchandise in extensive request —
namely, mercenary soldiers.1 Then, as always,
the Peloponnesus supplied the best material of this
description, and the condottieri who dealt in it
brought enormous sums of money into the country.
But not many benefited by the traffic. While the
ruling class in Sparta had dwindled to seven
hundred families, only a hundred of these possessed
any property whatever. The young -king Agis
proposed to remedy this state of things by abolish-
ing debts and dividing the land among the poorer
citizens and the Pericecians. He led the way by
surrendering to the State his own vast estates,
together with personal property to the value of six
hundred talents (;£ 150,000). Some members of
the royal family and some leading politicians were
won over to the scheme, which at first seemed to
carry all before it. But Agesilaus, the young
king's uncle, was only anxious for the abolition of
debts, in which he was personally interested, and
found means to postpone the division of land, by
which he would have been a loser. Meanwhile the
Conservatives rallied their forces, a reaction set in,

1 Holm, Griechische Geschichte, IV., p. 287.

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 75

and Agis was seized by the Ephors and strangled
in prison, together with his mother and grand-
mother. His widow Agiatis, the richest heiress
in Sparta, was obliged to marry Cleomenes, son of
King Leonidas, the official head of the reactionary
party. But the noble Queen contrived to inoculate
her young husband with the ideas of the martyred
Agis ; and the teaching of his heroic mother
Cratesicleia was doubtless thrown into the same
scale. Nor was his mind only subjected to the
passionate impulses of feminine affection and grief;
a higher and steadier discipline lent its aid to the
great work.

If in the case of Agis we can only assign to
philosophy a remote and general influence, in so
far as his animating ideals were a creation of
thought, in the case of Cleomenes it becomes a
direct and demonstrable agency. One of Zeno's
most eminent disciples, a certain Sphasrus, was at
that time living in Sparta. He came from a Greek
colony on the northern shore of the Euxine, and
had grown up in the neighbourhood of those
Scythians whose primitive communism excited
such admiration in the schools of Athens. Among
his numerous treatises, one on Socrates and
Lycurgus and another on The Laconian Constitution
are mentioned. This man became the intimate
friend of Cleomenes, and assisted him in planning
the great reforms which the young king, on gain-
ing supreme power, pressed through with relentless
vigour. For details I must refer to the stirring
narrative of Plutarch. The agrarian reforms are
carried out in the teeth of all opposition ; a new
body of stalwart citizen-soldiers is created ; city

76 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

after city opens its gates to the champion of the
poor ; Sparta resumes* her old place as the leading
state in Peloponnesus, in all free Hellas ; her
victorious king hopes to supersede the clever but
cowardly Aratus as president of the Achaian
League. Then comes the fatal reaction. Those
who had hoped for a general abolition of debt turn
against the reformer whose measures were dictated
only by the public interest ; Aratus, to his eternal
shame, purchases the help of a Macedonian army
against Cleomenes by surrendering the Acrocorin-
thus to Antigonus Doson. Defeated in battle, and
already heart-broken by the loss of his adored wife
Agiatis, the Spartan king refuses to end his suffer-
ings by suicide. The sayings put into the mouths
of great men are generally apocryphal ; but the
sentiment attributed to Cleomenes on this occasion
is at least characteristic of the Stoic philosophy in
which he had been bred. When urged to choose
death rather than an ignominious flight to Egypt,
he answered, as Plutarch tells us, that it is dis-
graceful either to live or to die for ourselves alone.
But Egypt, as usual, proved a broken reed, and
Cleomenes perished in an attempt to rouse the
Greek population of Alexandria against its effemi-
nate tyrant. The reformed constitution of his beloved
Sparta had already been destroyed by Antigonus.

These events occurred between the years 243 and
221 B.C. Less than a century later a series of
events took place in Rome offering such a close
resemblance to the agrarian revolution in Sparta
that, were not the historical reality of both proved
by irrefragable evidence, we might almost suppose
the one story to be a replica of the other. I refer,

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 77

of course, to the reforms of Tiberius and Gaius
Gracchus. Again, we find a generous, enthusiastic,
and high-born young man seeking to rescue the
pauperised masses from their degradation by the
re-enactment of an obsolete law ; again, the first
reforming effort is stifled by illegal violence in the
blood of its originator ; again, it is resumed by a
younger and far stronger successor, the transition
being this time also effected through the instru-
mentality of a woman, the illustrious Cornelia ;
again, after a brief and brilliant period of success,
the democratic autocracy succumbs to an energetic
reaction of the propertied classes, passively aided
by a fickle populace. But what interests us most
of all is to observe that the Gracchi also were
prepared for their generous enterprise by a Stoic
philosopher, the Cuman Blossius, a pupil of the
great school of Tarsus — "no mean city" — whose
intellectual atmosphere was destined to exert an
incalculable action on the Apostle Paul. Here,
then, we have a signal corroboration of the his-
torical deduction that seeks in Greek philosophy,
and more especially in Stoicism, or more generally
in the physiocratic school, for a key to the sys-
tematic socialistic enterprises of antiquity.

It cannot be said that the result of those enter-
prises was in any way satisfactory. Discord,
bloodshed, anarchy, and despotism were their
most evident fruits. The movement set on foot
by Agis was followed by nearly a century of class-
warfare, that at last necessitated the armed inter-
vention of Rome and the reduction of the Pelopon-
nesus under her sway. In Rome itself the period
of civil wars dates from Tiberius Gracchus. In so

78 THE INFLUENCE OF PHILOSOPHY

far as they contributed to the foundation of the
empire, we have no reason to complain of the
result, but it was one that he never anticipated ;
while the distributions of cheap corn introduced by
his brother Gaius proved a permanent source of
demoralisation to imperial, as well as to republican,
Rome.

Socialism as we know it to-day is lineally con-
nected through French and German thought with
the socialism of the Greek naturalists. There is,
however, at least one marked distinction between
the two, corresponding to the different forms of
society that gave them birth. Ours is of the
industrial, theirs of the military type. Every
ancient city-state was more or less in the position
of a besieged garrison or of a predatory band, and
for the officers to appropriate most of the rations
and all the booty was not only unjust, but suicidal.
Cleomenes had for his sole object to restore the
military supremacy of Sparta ; the Gracchi must
certainly have wished to recruit the population, and
with it the armed strength of Italy. Hence, the
redistribution of land was their watchword, capital
being associated in their minds, not with the pay-
ment of low wages to the poor by the rich, but with
the payment of high interest to the rich by the poor.
The inference is obvious. If socialism failed to
make way under a regime with which it had a
natural affinity, its chances must be still weaker
under an industrial and capitalist regime.

The social influence of philosophy in Greece is
far from being exhausted by the humanitarian
tendencies of the fourth century and the agrarian
movement of the third century. The great part

ON GREEK POLITICAL LIFE 79

played by women in the Spartan revolution
belongs, I think, to a very much wider move-
ment, inaugurated and sustained by philosophy.
But this is a subject on which I am not now
prepared to enter.

THE ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE
PROPHETS1

M. ERNEST RENAN'S History of the People of Israel
is a disappointing work. Of course, it has great
merits. M. Renan can write well on any subject,
and any man of ability can write well about the
events recorded in the Old Testament. The book
contains eloquent passages, masterly sketches of
character, flashes of profound historical insight,
and renderings from Hebrew poetry, such as
might have been expected from the pre-eminent
translator of Job. Some at least of the results of
modern criticism are distilled into as easy reading
as the feuilleton of a Parisian newspaper. Above
all, the whole subject is treated with a freshness
and freedom that it would be vain to expect even in
the most unfettered theological professor. Still,
we expected something more from M. Renan. As
a Semitic specialist, a historian, and a philosopher,
he might have added somewhat to our knowledge
of Hebrew life and thought. Not only has he
added nothing, he has not shown himself on a
level with the best knowledge of the age. Accord-
ing to Professor Robertson Smith, he "simply
ignores the more modern criticism."2 A notion
has somehow got abroad that the author of the
Vie de Jesus represents the extreme of negation

1 Written in 1893.

a The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 2nd ed., p. 392.
80

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 81

in questions connected with the Biblical narratives.
In fact, the leanings of M. Renan, like those of his
countrymen generally, are to the conservative side.
It will be remembered how through a dozen editions
of the Vie de Jesus he upheld the apostolic author-
ship of the Fourth Gospel, and I do not know that
he has ever given up the passage about Jesus
Christ in Josephus. There is in truth a good deal
of eighteenth-century rationalism about this author,
a summary a priori rejection of the miraculous
element combined with a rather uncritical acceptance
of the narratives in which miracles occur ; hence
the effort to explain miracles as natural events, and,
where this method cannot be successfully applied,
the tendency to charge the narrators of such events
with sheer, deliberate fraud.

It is not, however, of what M. Renan has left out
that we have to complain so much as of what he has
put in ; or, perhaps, the less admirable side of his
work might be summed up in a single phrase,
"playing to the gallery." His audience consists
very largely of persons whom I desire to mention
with all respect — persons of the brightest intelli-
gence, and, at least in the things of the intellect, of
the most delicate taste. To their exacting demands,
to their keen appreciation of what is excellent in
style and brilliant in ideation, we owe the lucidity
of French prose, the ingenuity and grace of French
literature. Their opinion of a new play or a new
novel is most valuable, and even on subjects
requiring a certain amount of scholarship it is
not to be despised. But you must not tell them to
take much trouble ; they like to think that their
author is deeply read and laborious, but the result

G

82 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

must be put before them in a finished form, and it
is only in their appreciation of form that they are
severe. Inaccurate or inconsistent statements are
allowed to pass under cover of epigrammatic
phrases, and the critic that exposed them would
forfeit his reputation for good breeding.

For the last thirty years M. Renan has been
falling more and more under the influence of such
a public as I have described. His first popularity
was won by no unworthy acts ; it came to him
unsought, and, one fancies, as a not altogether
agreeable surprise. As a seminarist he had learned
to despise the lay public, and he has recently let us
know that his sentiments towards them still savour
of sacerdotal scorn. As a professor of Hebrew he
has never, like some of his colleagues, laid himself
out to attract the large mixed audiences that infest
the lecture-rooms of Paris. It was not his fault if
he wrote in a style of unrivalled delicacy and
distinction, or if his profoundly disinterested
historical studies supplied new weapons to the
anti-clericalists with whom he sympathised rather
less than with their opponents. But no man can
be popular with impunity ; common politeness
seems to require one to take into consideration the
tastes and wishes of one's most numerous admirers.
M. Renan has never, I think, quite equalled either
in expression or in thought the essays published a
few years before his Vie de Jesus, and then only
known to a select few. In comparing the later
with the earlier volumes of his great work on the
history of primitive Christianity, can one escape
the impression of an increasing vulgarity, a
growing sensationalism, and a tendency to enlarge

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 83

on scenes of lubricity and horror ? The unfortunate
series of dramatic attempts beginning with Caliban,
and culminating in U Abbes se de Jouarre, are only
explicable on the theory that the great religious
historian wished to win the applause of a class for
whom the liveliest work on religion is not exciting
enough. In the work of which I write, the History
of Israel, the desire to please les honnetes gens, as
they are called in France — not, by any means,
necessarily " honest people," but rather what we
call " nice people," accomplished men and women
of the world — has produced the most mischievous
results. Unlike Carlyle's horse, M. Renan thinks
that his first duty is to say clever things, and his
efforts in this direction are not always very fortunate.
At his best, no one has ever shown such perfect
delicacy of touch, but he exercises this gift only on
the condition of treating serious subjects in a serious
manner. The gay Voltairean mockery that he
sometimes affects does not seem to come natural
to him ; it sounds like the light talk of a heavy
man ; often flippancy has to do duty for wit.

This, however, is a mere matter of taste, and has
little to do with the intrinsic value of the work.
What the reader has to complain of is a thorough-
going perversion of history in the interest of a flimsy
theory. One might have expected from M. Renan
a satisfactory treatment of the prophets of Israel.
He is fully alive to their importance. He fully
accepts the modern view of their teaching as the
veVy soul of Hebrew history, and its highest
documentary evidence as the first proclamation of
absolute monotheism, the first ethical interpretation
of religion, the immediate and adequate antecedent

84 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

of Christianity. To many his account of the
prophets came as a revelation. Professor James
Darmesteter tells us that even the boulevardiers
were, for a moment, thrilled by the vision of those
Titanic figures with their awful denunciations of
idolatry and oppression, of selfish luxury and
shameless vice. But I fear that the historian of
Israel caught the ear of the boulevardier by accom-
modating himself freely to the language and
sentiments of that cheerful and pleasure-loving
personage, the modern Parisian equivalent of " the
man about town." M. Renan has elsewhere told
a certain story about a country cure who preached
on the Passion of Jesus Christ in such moving
terms that the whole congregation were melted into
tears. " Do not weep, my children," exclaimed the
kind old man, in much concern at their grief; "all
this happened a long time ago, and perhaps it is
not quite true either." It sometimes looks as if he
had taken a leaf out of that excellent cure's book.
The boulevardier must not make himself too
anxious. Let him bear in mind that the prophets
were very uncivilised persons, without a notion of
politeness, who wrote a long time ago, "when
morality needed to be affirmed and established."
It will relieve him to hear that moral rigorism,
although, after all, it was once of use, " now does
humanity nearly as much harm as good."1
Professor Darmesteter, who is a friend and
admirer of M. Renan, might profit more by the
master's example. He actually quotes Jeremiah's
fierce sarcasm about "every man neighing after

' HI., P. 155.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 85

his neighbour's wife " as " an excellent description
of the drama and fiction of our own day."

Not only did the prophets live a long time ago
(before morality became superfluous), but the
boulevardier may be comforted by the assurance
that what they said was not quite true. " There is
great exaggeration in the picture drawn by Amos
of the crimes committed in the palace of Samaria.

His ideas about rich scoundrels, thieving

merchants, men of business, and monopolisers of
corn, are those of a man of the people without any
knowledge of political economy"1 One cannot
help being reminded of the same writer's remarks
on the first chapter of St. Paul's Epistle to the
Romans explaining the apostle's terrible picture of
heathen vices, by his complete ignorance of good
society.2 St. Paul, we are told, entertained much
the same absurdly exaggerated ideas about the
debaucheries of the higher classes that an honest
and simple-minded Socialist working man entertains
now. I should not give much for the morals of
good society in our own time if they at all resemble
what we know to have been the habits of Grseco-
Roman society on the evidence of writers who had
every opportunity for observing and not the
slightest motive for maligning it. The secular
literature of Samaria has perished, nor do we know
what sort of songs those were that her nobles sang
on their ivory couches ; but the testimony of the
other prophets, some of whom mingled freely in
court-circles, goes to confirm the denunciations
of Amos.3 When the shepherd of Tekoa raises

1 II., p. 432. z Les Ap&tres, p. 309.

3 Cf. Hosea iv. and Isaiah xxviii.

86 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

his voice against the oppression of the poor, he is
silenced in the same off-hand manner. What he
describes as monstrosities are, it seems, simply the
plainest social necessities — lending money on
security, payment of debts, and taxation. To the
boulevardier, living under tolerably just laws
tolerably well administered, the answer may seem
conclusive ; but a scholar and an Eastern traveller
ought not to be so limited in his ideas. M. Renan
must surely know that taxation may be so adjusted
as to become an instrument of the most hateful
oppression, and that, though it may be a social
necessity, it has over and over again endangered
the very existence of society. We know no more
of Ephraim than Amos and Hosea tell us ; but,
fortunately, we are in a position to study the early
history of Athens and Rome, the late history of
the Roman Empire, the antecedents of the French
Revolution, and the contemporary administration
of Asiatic despotism — notably of Egypt before the
English occupation — in the light of information
that is above suspicion. From the Eupatrides to the
pashas, every governing class invested with
absolute power and unrestrained by moral scruples
not only drains the people of their life-blood, it also
brings the State to destruction unless it is saved by
some such measure as Solon's partial cancelling of
debts, the Licinian Rogations, or the Revolution
of '89. For the indebtedness of the poorer classes
is a direct consequence of the exorbitant taxes
levied on them by the rich, to meet which they
have to borrow money at usurious interest, at first
to the no small profit of their oppressors, who con-
tinue to grow richer, while their subject grows

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 87

poorer, until the weakening of the foundation
involves the whole edifice in ruin. Thus the
artisan or peasant sees his tools and household
goods wrung from him bit by bit, while the fruits
of his industry, exchanged for foreign luxuries, are
wasted in unproductive expenditure. The political
economist would be faithless to common honesty
if he condoned the rapine, whether lawless or
legalised, by which the wealth of the Ephraimite
nobles was acquired, and faithless to the principles
of his own science if he sanctioned the vulgar
ostentation and the vile sensuality to gratify which
it was wasted. Luxury has been defended in
modern times on the ground that it checks the
growth of population. The practices described by
Amos and Hosea would assuredly have that effect;
but to check the growth of population was simple
suicide among a handful of highland clans
struggling for existence against the armies of
Damascus and Assyria.

So far there is no difficulty in understanding the
attitude, of the prophets towards the rich and
powerful class. An elementary knowledge of
history explains it, and a deeper knowledge can
but confirm the explanation. But M. Renan is
quite put out by this attitude ; this is not exactly
the language that he or his friend the boulevardier
would hear uttered in a fashionable Parisian
pulpit. Strange to say, the spokesmen of God
did not think twice before they damned persons of
that quality. But a solution of the mystery is
forthcoming. " The most deeply rooted idea of
those old times," he informs us, "is that there are
poor people because there are rich people wealth

88 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

being always the fruit of injustice. " x Only a single
fact is cited in proof of this sweeping assertion.
Travelling in the East, M. Renan was once
particularly struck by the goodness of the inhabi-
tants of a certain village where he had spent the
night. "It is because they are poor," explained
his dragoman.3 Probably the dragoman was right.
One may experience the same contrast without
going beyond Southern Europe. But to say that
wealth produces wickedness is not to say that
wickedness produces wealth. Of all authorities,
the Hebrew Scriptures, with their not very refined
doctrine of material and temporal rewards and
punishments, seem least to sanction such an idea.
The Book of Job, that admirable compendium of
Hebrew philosophy, furnishes us with an excellent
test-instance. Job has fallen from the greatest
prosperity into extreme destitution and suffering.
His friends are most anxious to prove that the
catastrophe is due to some fault of his own. What
then, on M. Kenan's principle, would be more
natural for them to urge than that the very fact of
his having been so rich proves him to have been
a public robber? Now it is true that Eliphaz the
Temanite advances an argument (Job xxii. 5-10)
tending this way ; but Job victoriously asserts his
innocence against this as against all the other
purely constructive accusations of his friends.
Alike in the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph,
written down shortly before the appearance of the
first literary prophets, and in the character of the
virtuous woman,3 composed after prophecy had

1 II., pp. 424, 425. 2 in., p. 38.

3 Proverbs xxxi. The character of the successful woman of

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 89

died out, we find the same intimate association
between wealth and worth.

If the East can supply no parallel instances of
such wanton attacks on the established social order,
such denunciations of the rich simply because they
are better off than other people, as the oldest
written prophecies are here interpreted to be, the
West comes to the rescue with illustrations of a
kind peculiarly intelligible to a Parisian reader.
The prophets were " radical and revolutionary
journalists, declaiming their articles in the street.

The first chapter of Amos is the first opposition

leader that was ever published," and Amos himself
the father of all such as contribute to the subversive
press.1 Like the modern Nihilist, the Hebrew
thinker held that if the world cannot be just it had
better not exist.2 But by justice the prophets mean
Socialism, and " Socialism is of Hebrew origin. It
has regard above all things to strict justice, and to
the happiness of the greatest number."3 It is a
point of honour with M. Renan to contradict
himself frequently, and isolated phrases of his
must not be taken too seriously ; but here he carries
on the same idea from volume to volume, and when
the scene changes from Samaria to the Southern
kingdom we are again assured that " mutatis
mutandis Socialism comes to us from Jerusalem."4
"The Jahvism of the prophets of Judah is essentially
a social religion ; its object is the reformation of
society in accordance with justice."5 "The Judaism

business, in that very bourgeois novel, Ohnet's Serge Panine, seems
to have been taken straight from this Judaic ideal.

1 II., pp. 422, 425. * 2bid., p. 438. 3 p. 54I.

« III., p. 2. S Ibid., p. 9.

90 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

of the eighth century was a theocratic democracy,
a religion consisting almost entirely in social
questions."1 " The party that supported this ideal
of religious Puritanism was hostile to the secular
power (I'etat la'tque), opposed to military prepara-
tions, and would hear of nothing but social and
religious reforms."2 "Jeremiah was much less
interested than his predecessors in the social
question,"3 but he certainly contributed his share
to its solution if, as the historian bluntly expresses
himself, he was " the soul of the fraud " by which
Deuteronomy was palmed off on Josiah and the
people as the last Tora of Moses4 ; and Deutero-
nomy was an attempt to put the new ideas into
practice, "the programme of a sort of theocratic
Socialism, merging the interest of the individual
in that of the collective mass."5 I cannot say
whether we are to understand the Levitical law,
framed during the Captivity, as a contrast to or a
continuation of Deuteronomy, when we find its
object stated to be " the happiness of the individual
guaranteed by the social group to which he
belongs";6 nor, again, is it easy to see how the
Semitic thirst for justice implies egoism,7 if ignor-
ing the individual was a part of its programme
under Josiah ; but this is possibly a specimen of
the noble daring with which a man of genius sets
himself above logic.

It seems, indeed, very hard to study the prophets
in a disinterested, historical spirit. For a long

1 P. 41. * P. 96. s P. 154. 4 P. 209.

s P. 229. The exact words are: " procddant par la solidarity,
ignorant I' individu. "

6 P. 427. 7 P. 496.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 91

time exegesis was thoroughly perverted by the
attempt to read into them a complete system of
Christology, including both the biography of Jesus
and the metaphysical doctrines of his followers.
Then followed a period, the last days of which
some of us can remember, when their pages were
ransacked for predictions of a future that never
came and never will come, or when the events of
modern history were read out of symbols that find
their adequate interpretation in reminiscences of
the prophet's own experience. It is said that
Wilberforce, the anti-slavery statesman, having
ascertained to his own satisfaction that the little
horn in Daniel meant Bonaparte, rushed into Pitt's
cabinet with the exciting intelligence. " Good
God, sir," exclaimed the much-tried Minister, " do
you call Bonaparte a little horn ?" More recently,
in accordance with that law by which supernatural
beliefs become ever more degraded and grotesque
as they are abandoned to a lower class of believers,
.we have witnessed that monstrous product of
ignorance, fanaticism, and delirious racial vanity,
the derivation of the Anglo-Saxon people from the
lost tribes of Israel, presented as the clue to
prophetic literature. Scarcely less preposterous,
and, considering the scholarship of its author, still
more astonishing, is the view that parallels the
preaching of righteousness with the utterances of
that sinister press which begins with Henri
Rochefort and ends with Ravachol. No doubt
there are analogies between a chapter of Amos or
Isaiah and an anarchist article. Both are short,
and both contain violent denunciations of the rich.
But while the resemblances go no farther, the

92 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

contrasts are nearly inexhaustible. Let us begin
with the most obvious, though not the most impor-
tant. To the journalist the very condition of
success is that his paper shall be popular. The
prophet, too, had to draw an audience, and, as
M. Renan points out, he sometimes attracted it by
sufficiently strange methods of self-advertisement.
But he depended neither on their plaudits nor on
their pence, and therefore, unlike the democratic
journalist, he could speak the whole truth, or
what seemed to him the truth, without adulteration
or reserve. In this respect the Neapolitan capuchin,
to whom M. Renan also compares him,1 occupies
an equally independent position ; but there is the
enormous difference that the capuchin belongs to
a vast organisation of immense antiquity. He
occupies a place in its hierarchy, and is amenable
to his official superiors ; he fights for their aggran-
disement, and his successes score as points in their
game. In a less degree the same remark applies
to the revolutionary journalist. He also has an
organised party behind him, who shelter him in
adversity and give him a share of the spoils when
they win. Any day he may be carried into place
or power by a wave of popular feeling as Rochefort
was in 1870, as he would again have been had
General Boulanger triumphed in the elections of
1889.

The great prophets were essentially independent
of all such corporate obligations and party ties,
and above them. It was the fashion not long ago,
and still is in certain quarters, to speak of them as

1 It, p. 423.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 93

an organised body in the Israelite or Jewish com-
munity, actuated by a spirit of jealousy towards
the priesthood, and forming a centre of opposition
to its claims. All such ideas have been finally
dispelled by the great critical discoveries of the
last generation, which prove that the priesthood
itself as a powerful hereditary corporation did not
exist until after the return from Babylon, and was
then rather the creation than the opponent of
prophetism. Schools of the prophets there un-
doubtedly were, but they seem to have resembled
the dancing dervishes of our own day rather than
the great writers to whom we now give the name,
and who, indeed, included them in a common
denunciation with the corrupt nobles and priests.
Speaking for himself, Amos indignantly repudi-
ated all connection with the guild. When
Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, bade him " flee
away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread,
and prophesy there " — turn an honest penny by
lecturing, as we should say — he answered : " I
was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son ;
but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore
trees, and lahveh took me from following the
flock, and lahveh said unto me, Go, prophesy
unto my people Israel." In like manner Isaiah,
Jeremiah, and Ezekiel describe themselves as
receiving individual, unexpected, and even
unwelcome calls. No doubt, like the journalist,
the capuchin, the socialist agitator — one may
perhaps add the temperance lecturer — they spoke
and wrote as the mouthpieces of a cause infinitely
higher and greater than themselves. The vital
difference was that they bore no party banner, that

94 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

they preached no partial reform. They were
animated and borne up in death-defying courage
and faith by the vital, victorious spirit of Israel as
a nation without distinction of class or tribe, and
— mounting higher, further still — by the spirit of
the world as a whole without distinction of imperial
or vassal states.

Hence follows another fundamental contrast.
The journalist is almost always, from the nature
of his calling, a revolutionist — sometimes of the
mild and sleepy type that prefers lying on the left to
lying on the right side, or vice versa; sometimes
of the violent and furious type that would turn the
house upside down ; but always a revolutionist in
the sense of desiring a transfer of power. We are
all unhappily familiar with the method employed for
accomplishing this end — a perpetual, microscopic
criticism of the words and actions of the office-
holders for the time being, varied by corresponding
puffery of their rivals, and promises of the great
things they will do when their innings comes, and
seasoned by appeals to the lowest passions of
human nature, to the impulses of destructiveness
and greed. Far otherwise was it with the prophets.
Like true Orientals, they recognise only one form
of government, an absolute monarchy, and their
evident wish is that it should be transmitted by
hereditary succession. I speak only of the writing
prophets, not of those earlier half-legendary seers
— Samuel, Ahijah, Elisha — who were always
pulling down one king and setting up another.
How different was the spirit of Hosea ; with what
feelings he contemplated the treacherous massacres
that accompanied the overthrow of the house of

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 95

Omri — massacres evidently condoned or approved
by Elisha — may be seen from the name given to
his child : " Call his name Jezreel ; for yet a little
while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon
the house of Jehu." The experience of two
centuries had taught the prophets the uselessness,
and worse than uselessness, of merely replacing
one dynasty by another ; and they were deeply
impressed by the tranquillity of Judah under the
legitimate sceptre of the house of David. Nor did
they believe much in a change of ministry. Only
on a single occasion did Isaiah interfere to effect
the substitution of one high official for another.
Being much displeased with the conduct of a
certain Shebna, who was so confident of holding
office for his whole lifetime as to begin hewing out
a sepulchre for himself, apparently within the
precincts of the royal palace, the prophet, speaking
in the name of lahveh, recommended that he
should be replaced by Eliakim. M. Renan refers
invidiously to this passage as a puffing advertise-
ment (reclame) of Eliakim ; yet he candidly admits
that, if Shebna had not been counterbalanced by
Isaiah, Jerusalem under Hezekiah would probably
have shared the fate of Samaria. We shall have to
consider later the importance of the part played by
the prophets as political advisers. We are dealing
now with their general attitude towards the com-
munity and the state. Here Isaiah's interference
on behalf of Eliakim is, as I have said, a solitary
exception to the rule they generally observed of
leaving the constitution of society as they found it,
while inculcating on all classes the same principles
of purity, justice, and mercy. To speak of their

96 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

ideal as in any sense democratic betrays a thorough
confusion of Western with Eastern, of modern with
ancient modes of thought and action. Amos and
Isaiah had no notion of setting class against class,
or of putting themselves at the head of a popular
faction to redress the wrongs of the oppressed. M.
Renan does indeed fancy that he has discovered
the existence of such a faction under Hezekiah,
calling themselves the anavtm, or poor and needy ;
he quotes long passages from the Psalter, giving
expression to their enmities and their griefs j1
but here, again, we see the danger of ignoring
the results of criticism. In the opinion of the
best judges the Psalms referred to, so far from
belonging to the age of Isaiah, date from a
period not less than two hundred, and possibly
three or even four hundred years later. Indeed,
M. Renan himself, with his usual candour, reminds
us that the word anavim is never used by Jeremiah
and Ezekiel.

Nothing can well be imagined more wearisome
and profitless than an old newspaper article ; in
many instances nothing could seem more hollow
or insincere. To this rule the articles of an
irreconcilable French journalist offer no excep-
tion. How artificial is the indignation ! How
shameless the misrepresentation of facts ! How
poisonous the misconstruction of motives ! The
words of the prophets, on the other hand, have
continued through all ages as fresh as when they
were first uttered, and even now, when we no longer
regard them as magical revelations of the unseen

1 III., pp. 41,45 sqq.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 97

world, they are studied with unabated interest.
This is a point on which I need not enlarge,
as their claim to a superhuman origin is now
most frequently rested on their marvellous power
over the conscience and the imagination. They
have earned an immortal life because the men who
uttered those words rose far above all the petty and
partial and transitory antagonisms by which the
ingenious French historian would explain their
activity.

M. Renan urges that the prophets resemble the
radical journalists of our day in the vagueness of
their charges and the violence of their decla-
mations.1 Some of their charges sound distinct
enough, and are reproduced with amplifications by
himself. " The administration of justice was the
greatest curse of the age ; false witness was the
commonest thing in the world ; thus the dominant
party held the lives of its adversaries in its hands."
Very true ; but observe what follows : " The
fanatical party (Isaiah and his friends) did not fail
to use this means of ridding themselves of their
enemies."2 Not a tittle of evidence is adduced in
support of this accusation, which I quote only
to show the animus of the writer. On two
occasions Jeremiah specifies the grievances of
the oppressed poor plainly enough. At a time of
utter destitution and imminent danger of complete
national ruin, when Pharaoh Necho had stripped
the country of its gold and silver, King Jehoiakim
found nothing better to do than to build a new
palace of the costliest materials and on the largest

1 II., p. 493. * in., p. 124.

H

98 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

scale. He either employed forced labour, or
refused to pay his workmen their stipulated wages,
thereby bringing down on himself a stern and well-
merited rebuke from Jeremiah. It seems incredible,
but it is a fact that the effeminate tyrant finds an
apologist in the philosophical historian, to whom
ruinous luxury seems meritorious as a protest
against moral rigour. M. Renan is good enough
to admit that " if Jehoiakim left his workmen
unpaid he was certainly in the wrong," but hastens
to add that, " when we find those that now give
work to the people habitually spoken of as robbers
by the organs of the democracy, we become cautious
about putting faith in such allegations."1 This
new method of writing history savours somewhat
of reasoning in a circle. First the prophets are
likened to radical journalists, and then they are
assumed to speak according to the same standards
of veracity and good sense. The contrast drawn
by Jeremiah between Jehoiakim and his father, the
great reformer Josiah, gives his critic occasion for
a not very creditable sneer. " Did not thy father,"
says the prophet, " eat and drink and do judgment
and justice? Then it was well with him. He
judged the cause of the poor and needy ; then it
was well." How, it is asked, can Josiah be called
happy when he was killed at Megiddo ? Strange
that a Frenchman of Athenian culture should call
any life unhappy that ended with a heroic death on
the battlefield.

Despite repeated warnings from Jeremiah, who
alone had courage and foresight enough to speak

1 III., p. 274.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 99

unwelcome truths, Zedekiah revolted against his
lawful suzerain, Nebuchadrezzar, and speedily found
his capital invested by a Babylonian army. The
Jewish king, in his terror, proclaimed the emancipa-
tion of all the Hebrew men and women who were at
that time held in bondage. It appears that this
was no more than the remedy for a grievous wrong,
for the year of Jubilee was passed, and by the
Deuteronomic law they were entitled to their
freedom ; which, however, on this occasion seems
to have been only granted on condition that
they should join in the defence of the city. The
decree was obeyed ; but soon afterwards Nebu-
chadrezzar raised the siege, and the freedmen were
again reduced to slavery by their former owners.
Then the avenging voice of the prophet made itself
heard in accents of terrific sarcasm : "Thussaith
lahveh : Ye have not hearkened unto me to pro-
claim liberty, every man to his brother, and every
man to his neighbour; behold I proclaim unto you
a liberty, saith lahveh, to the sword, to the pesti-
lence, and to the famine And I will give the

men that have transgressed my covenant when

they cut the calf in twain and passed between the
parts thereof, the princes of Judah and the princes
of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, and the priests, and all

the people of the land I will even give them

into the hand of their enemies, and of them that

seek their life : and their dead bodies shall be for
meat unto the fowls of the heaven and to the beasts
of the earth " (Jer. xxxiv. 17-20). It is admitted
that this time the indignation of the prophet was

' III., p. 358.

ioo ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

perfectly justified.1 Yet one fails to see how, on
M. Renan's principles, the whole story is to escape
suspicion, or why the breach of faith should not be
excused on grounds of State necessity. Meantime I
must ask the reader to bear in mind the latter part of
the quotation, as it will be referred to in the sequel.

If, however, it could be shown that the prophets
were Socialists — if, that is to say, their quarrel was
not with the abuses and corruptions, but with the
very structure and foundation, of civilisation as
they knew it — then, indeed, our estimate of their
trustworthiness, of their ethical value, and of their
historical importance would be seriously affected.
More than this, we should have to frame a new
philosophy of history, race, and religion — a philo-
sophy that would claim for Judaea, for the Semites,
for monotheism, what has hitherto been claimed
for republican Athens and Rome, for the Aryans,
for free Hellenic speculation. So great a change
in opinion could be justified only by the strongest
arguments. But M. Renan, after his manner,
produces no arguments at all — gives us nothing
more than repeated assertions. If he should live
to write the history of Greece, we may expect to
find him making assertions of a directly opposite
tendency, which will then have the advantage of
being true. For we are in a position to show that
the prophets were not Socialists in any sense of the
word ; that Socialism had never dawned on their
horizon ; that it was, on the contrary, a creation of
the Greek genius, and an outgrowth of democratic
institutions.

Socialism is now generally understood to mean
the abolition or restriction of private property, in

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 101

order to the more equal diffusion of wealth and
happiness through the entire community.1 The
question whether such an arrangement is practicable
or desirable need not delay us here. The important
thing is that we should distinguish it from all legis-
lation directed towards the protection of the poor
against the fraud or violence of the rich, and
against administrative oppression, as well as from
all exhortations to private charity. A very little
consideration will enable us to perceive that
Socialism, so understood, can be developed only
at a late stage of civilisation. Property must have
come to be clearly distinguished from its owners —
not such an easy process as some may imagine ;
attention must have been called to the moral evils
arising out of its appropriation by a few, a high
ideal of disinterestedness must have been framed, if
it is hoped that the rich will voluntarily surrender
a part of their superfluities ; or a high degree of
concerted action must have become possible among
the poor if it is expected that they will possess
themselves by force of what is wanting to them.
By a still harder effort of abstraction, men must
have learned to distinguish the community as a
whole from its component members, and they must
have had long experience of a centralised adminis-
tration successfully managing the affairs of the
nation, before they feel disposed to trust it with the
office of regulating industry and distributing its
fruits where they are needed. Only in the centres
of Western civilisation has such an elaboration of
ideas ever been possible. An equally important

1 Written in 1892. The word most generally used now is
" Collectivism."

102 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

consideration is that entertainment of them implies
a transformation of theological beliefs wholly incon-
sistent with Eastern habits of thought. Men must
have convinced themselves that the social organism
is a machine that they have created for themselves,
and can alter at their own discretion, rather than
a divine creation to be altered only at the good
pleasure of God. The more primitive faith has
hopes of its own, but they are not hopes that take
the direction of Socialism. God can create wealth
to any extent ; therefore he can supply the wants
of the poor without depriving the rich of their
property. According to the Messianic visions of
the prophets, this is exactly what he will do at
last. Meantime they invoke his retributive justice
to punish the rich for depriving the poor of their
property. For there comes a period in the history
of every community when this worst of all iniquities
is habitually perpetrated — when the suppression of
it is the one engrossing problem of human thought.
On the diverging methods adopted for its solution
the future courses of theology and politics once
depended.

The pinch of poverty makes itself felt at an early
stage of social progress. But the remedy first tried
is the occupation of more fertile land — a process
generally accompanied by the destruction or en-
slavement of its previous possessors. When the
simultaneous expansion and mutual pressure of
the various tribes has restricted each within certain
limits, government and religion become organised.
Kings and gods are then looked on as a refuge for
the distressed, and are freely exchanged for others
when they fail to give satisfaction. After a time

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 103

the notion of law becomes dissociated from its
human enactors, and is placed under the guardian-
ship of superhuman beings, who are credited with
the origination of this as of every other institution.
The divine power, being plastic to reason, is thought
of as perfectly just ; while sad experience shows
that human powers are too often the contrary.
When the military class has become differentiated
from the industrial class, and governmental
functions are monopolised by the former, their
increased authority is pretty sure to be exercised
for their own profit, and the more so as the king,
whose weight is ordinarily thrown on the side of
the people, sees himself overshadowed or reduced
to a puppet by the nobility, and his jurisdiction set
at naught by their lawless violence. As appeals
were formerly carried against the chiefs to the king,
so they are now carried against both to the gods,
or to God conceived as the supreme ruler of the
world. Such was the stage of social evolution,
and such also the moment of reflection reached
almost simultaneously by Hesiod in Bceotia and
by the older prophets in Samaria and Jerusalem.
There was this difference, however : that, as the
shadows of actual iniquity were probably much
darker in Palestine, the splendours of idealised and
personified justice were there more intense, the vision
of impending retribution more imminent and appal-
ling than in Hellas. But in both alike oppression
seemed the one great evil ; and no more appeared
to be needed to make men happy than that every
one should possess what his fathers had left him,
and be permitted to reap the fruits of his labour in
peace.

104 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

After this the paths of the two races rapidly
diverge. In the elegies of Solon we find much the
same story of social antagonism as in Amos, with
the same protests against the rapacity of the rich.
Solon's touching lamentations over the Athenian
citizens who were sold away from their homes
vividly recall the organised white slave trade
between Israel and Tyre.1 But the remedies
adopted differed as widely as the European differs
from the Asiatic character. Solon passed an ordin-
ance relieving the oppressed debtors from a con-
siderable portion of their liabilities; and, by giving
the people a large share in the government, he
guaranteed them against injustice for the future.
So much for M. Renan's assertion that " social
questions were severely eliminated in the Greek
city-state."2 Had such been the case, Greece could
not have "furnished the complete model of a civilised
society."3 It might more reasonably be maintained
that in Greece the social question took precedence
of every other. The whole object of a Greek
democracy was first to secure the poorer classes
against oppression, and then to provide for them
a larger share of material advantages. In Athens
not only was the principal weight of necessary
taxation thrown on the rich, but at last, under the
pretence of payment for the performance of public
functions, the poor were subsidised out of the
exchequer and supplied with amusements free of
charge, besides being frequently settled as colonists
on conquered territory. Complete Communism
was the logical outcome of such tendencies ; and

1 II., p. 427. » III., p. 43. 3 Ibid, p. 91.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 105

accordingly we find Communism ironically sug-
gested by Aristophanes, and most seriously adopted
by Plato as part of a comprehensive scheme for the
reformation of society.1 Religion was also the
subject of Plato's most anxious consideration — a
fact which M. Renan must have forgotten when he
rashly declared that " social and religious questions
escaped the infantile serenity " of the Greek mind.
Neither is it true that no protest against slavery
came from Greece.2 On the contrary, we know,
by the evidence of Aristotle, that certain Greek
philosophers said what no Hebrew prophet had
said before them, what no Christian apostle said
after them : Slavery is wrong, because all men are
naturally free. If we cannot so peremptorily
answer the allegation that " Greece did not, among
her other great achievements, create humani-
tarianism ; she despised the barbarians too much
for that,"3 it is simply because the evidence in her
favour, if adequately presented, would fill a volume.
Here I need only observe that the Greek contempt
for barbarians opposed no insuperable obstacle to
their admission into the ranks of Hellenism ; for,
according to Isocrates, what made a Hellene was
not race, but education. Our own use of the word

1 I am aware that in the Republic Communism is limited to the
guardians of the State, who are necessarily but a small minority
of the citizens ; but in the Laws, while recognising private
property as the only practicable arrangement in the actual con-
dition of civilisation, Plato pronounces Communism in the most
absolute sense to be the ideally best constitution. And Plato's
scheme is always criticised by Aristotle in reference to its
universal applicability.

* III., p. 91. I am not quite sure whether Renan's words imply
as much. In form they are limited to the Homeric age.

3 Ibid, p. 504. Cf. the first Essay in this volume.

106 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

"barbarous, "as synonymous with inhuman, shows
how we identify the opposite of barbarism, which
is Hellenism, with humanity itself.

The history of the social question in Rome runs
for a time much the same course as in Athens.
There is at first the same oppression of the poor by
the rich,1 the same redress of grievances through
the instrumentality of political institutions, and
subsequently the same wholesale maintenance of
the necessitous classes at the public expense, the
chief difference being that what was done by a
democratic assembly in the one State was done by
a democratic despot in the other.

Far different was the method followed in Judaea.
There the prophets sought for salvation by purify-
ing the lahveh religion from every vestige of poly-
theism and idolatry, from every intermixture with
the cruel and licentious orgies of Syrian super-
stition. M. Renan does full justice to the enlight-
ened, beneficent, and progressive character of the
war waged against heathenism by the noblest
spirits of Israel.2 " In no Greek city," he observes,
"was the struggle against idolatry and against
selfish priestly interests carried on with such
originality as at Jerusalem." At the same time,
it should be remembered that nowhere in Greece
were those evils so rampant or so noxious. How-
ever this may be, the share taken by Jeremiah in
the great conflict of the higher against the lower
forms of religion might, one would think, have
saved him from the outrage of being compared, at

1 This remains true of the age of the Gracchi, whatever we
may think of the stories told in Livy and accepted by Niebuhr.
9 III., pp. 180-81.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 107

least for one side of his character, to an implacable
Jesuit.1 But the experience of the boulevardter,
and indeed of most modern Frenchmen, stands so
far from the prophetic spirit that any attempt to
illustrate the one from the other must be hopelessly
misleading.

Monotheism in the abstract is, as F. D. Maurice
observed, a mere negation, and not more refreshing
than any other negation. The first commandment
of the Decalogue, in dough's cynical version, is a
particularly easy one to obey : —

Thou shalt have one God only ; who
Would be at the expense of two ?

The real value of monotheism lies in its relation to
ethics. Unity of person and power implies unity
of will. A plurality of gods may pull different
ways, what is a virtue to the one being a vice to
the other. This, as Mr. Shadworth Hodgson has
well observed, gives peculiar interest to the Hippo-
lytus of Euripides, where the hero is punished by
Aphrodite for his obedience to Artemis. A single
supreme ruler can have only one law — a law which
tends to uphold the order that he has created, and
which, so far, must make for righteousness. The
Creator of the universe is also conceived as omni-
potent, and therefore able to enforce his decrees
by irresistible sanctions. Thus to the prophets
every calamity that befell their own people, or the
world in general, was a punishment for sin. Nor
is this all. Monotheism promotes, as no other
religion can, the idea of a common humanity, or
at least of a common nationality, with its accom-
panying obligations of mutual kindness and mercy.

1 in., p. 350.

io8 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

Among the Greeks Zeus was looked on as the god
of suppliants and fugitives. The lahveh worship
supplied a common ground where rich and poor
could meet. The foreign cults introduced from
Damascus or Assyria, the revivals of Canaanite
heathenism, or the survivals of ancestor-worship
in old Israelite families, would have no such recon-
ciling influence. It is not to be supposed for a
moment that this association between the religion
of lahveh and the practice of righteousness was the
result of any conscious reasoning in the minds of
the prophets or of their disciples. They preached
what we call monotheism, not because it was bene-
ficent, but because it was true, and because its
observance was imposed on Israel by the strongest
obligations of gratitude for the great deliverance
from Egypt.1 But a connection was established by
the logic of feeling, more potent than the logic of
thought, when he who loved lahveh with his whole
heart was drawn through that high affection to
love his neighbour as himself.

In all this there was nothing, and could be
nothing, that we call socialistic. To an Israelite
thinker the institution of property must have
seemed a primordial ordinance of God, and so also
must the inequality of its distribution among men.
In fact, what the prophets condemn is not wealth,
but wealth procured by violence or fraud. The
Deuteronomic legislation is generally admitted to
have been compiled under prophetic influence,
however alien its ritualistic prescriptions may have

1 I am not assuming that the Exodus was historical, but only
that it was believed to be historical when the great prophets
wrote.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 109

been to the spirit at least of Jeremiah. Deuter-
onomy assumes at every step the existence of
private property and the distinction between rich
and poor, and virtually sets on them the seal of
divine approbation. M. Renan, as we have seen,
has the hardihood to call it the programme of a
sort of theocratic Socialism ; but we need not go
beyond his own pages for a contradictory instance.
He refers with approval to the commandment
bidding the employer pay the hired labourer his
wages before sunset, " for he is poor, and setteth
his heart upon it."1 Evidently the Judaic working
man had no thought of abolishing the capitalist, or
of claiming a share in the profits exactly equal to
the amount of wealth created by his labour ; he
was only too thankful if his small wages were
punctually paid. Nor did the Deuteronomist fore-
see any termination to this state of things. " The
poor," he tells his hearers, "shall never cease out
of the land" (xv. n); and, accordingly, sundry
provisions are made for relieving their wants —
provisions which few would call socialistic, even
if they were enforced by the authority of the State,
whereas in this instance they were more probably
rules laid down for the guidance of private charity.
Had there been any germ of Socialism in Deuter-
onomy, we should expect to find it still further
developed in the Priestly Code. Such, however,
is not the case. The Levitical legislator sanctions
private property to the full extent of permitting it
to be inherited ; he regulates sacrifices according
to the means of the person offering them ; he allows

1 Deut. xxiv. 14, 15 ; Renan, III., p. 230.

no ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

the very poor to sell themselves to the rich, pro-
vided they are not kept in perpetual bondage ; and,
reviving a very ancient recommendation, he bids
the judges "not respect the person of the poor"
any more than they are to " honour the person of
the mighty " — a clear proof that the poor were
not to be released from the duty of fulfilling their
legal obligations (Lev. xix. 15). The section con-
taining this passage is supposed to date from the
time of Ezekiel, or not much later, and therefore
ought to show more immediate traces of prophetic
influence than the rest of the Priestly Code. In
the oldest collection of laws the rule runs: " Neither
shalt thou favour a poor man in his cause " (Exod.
xxiii. 3). The Deuteronomist omits it, possibly
because in his time there was no danger of any
such partiality.1

That a learned, acute, and candid historian
should pervert, or at least miscall, patent facts to
such an extent is a phenomenon demanding some
explanation. One cause of M. Renan's aberrations
is, as I have already said, his growing appetite for
popularity. Maurice spoke of the Vie de Jesus
as a translation of the language of the Gospel
into the language of the boudoir. We have it
now supplemented by a translation of the lan-
guage of the prophets into the language of the
boulevard. But other causes have also been at

1 It is a curious instance of learned ignorance that Emmanuel
Deutsch, the great rabbinical scholar, should have credited the
Talmud with the subtle observation that judges are liable to be
prejudiced in favour of the poor. Readers of Charles Reade's
novel, A Simpleton, will remember how a London magistrate,
taken from the life, will not listen to a charge of theft against a
servant-girl, though supported by the clearest evidence.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS in

work to bias the judgment of the eminent writer.
Regarding as he does, with perfect correctness,
the ethical teaching of Jesus as springing directly
from the teaching of the older prophets ; and re-
garding as he does, with less correctness, primitive
Christianity as Socialism put into practice, he
naturally looks for a germ of the later in the earlier
morality, and, looking for it, he finds it.

But it is by no means certain that the early
Christians had their goods in common, or con-
demned the possession of wealth. No such idea
is to be found in the writings of our earliest con-
temporary authority, St. Paul ; in the oldest Gospel,
that of Mark, it only appears on a single occasion
— the story of the young man seeking salvation ;
while the third Gospel and the Acts, in which it
becomes prominent, are considered by good
authorities to be idealising works of later date.
Granting, however, that the early Church was
communistic, we have to ask under what inspira-
tion the tendency arose ; and the answer at once
suggests itself that here, as in other points, the
influence of Essenism is apparent. Now, Zeller
has, with great plausibility, traced the Communism
of the Essenes, as well as some other practices of
theirs, to a Pythagorean — that is to say, to a
Greek — source.1 And, although frequently dis-
puted, this derivation has been recently fortified by
the adhesion of no less a scholar than Professor
Schiirer.2 Thus the Socialism of Christianity,
questionable enough in itself, affords no ground

1 Zeller, Philosophic der Griechen, V., pp. 325 sqq. (yA ed.).
* Geschichte des jiid ischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, II.,
pp. 491 sq. (and ed.).

ii2 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

for ascribing any such doctrine to the prophets of
Israel.

Perhaps another and still stronger consideration
operated to suggest to M. Renan what seems so
utterly mistaken an interpretation of Hebrew pro-
phecy. It may have seemed to him that the
demand for justice so powerfully expressed by
Amos, and, in a less degree, by the prophets of
Jerusalem, necessarily carried with it a condemna-
tion of the existing system of property, with its
resulting inequalities of material happiness. We
do hear it sometimes urged that for one man to be
rich and another poor, when the former works no
harder than the latter, or, as frequently happens,
does not work at all, is unjust on the face of it.
Again, it is urged that it is unjust to pay the
labourer less than the exact pecuniary equivalent
of the wealth he creates, or to ask interest for a
loan. Such arguments may be good or bad ; I
have no wish to enter into a discussion of their
validity. As a matter of fact, very few Individu-
alists would accept them. Certainly the chief
philosophical representative of Individualism,
Herbert Spencer, far from admitting the abstract
iustice of Socialism, would call it the negation of
justice. But on this point M. Renan occupies a
very peculiar, perhaps I may say a unique, position.
He evidently looks on Socialism as being at one
and the same time perfectly just, perfectly humane,
and perfectly inexpedient. Such a paradox is quite
in keeping with his general philosophy, if we can
dignify with that name his cheerfully ironical way
of looking at things. The world, he has told us
elsewhere, is essentially unjust (Vinjitstice meme),

"3

and the thought does not seem to cause him much
distress. Perhaps it will be set right some day ;
perhaps not. Meantime the brilliant intellectual
culture, the decorative adjuncts, the charm of high-
bred manners that make life worth living for him,
are rooted in social inequalities. But Socialism
also has its aesthetic side, and appeals to romantic
imaginations. Thus through his very culture he
can admire while he condemns the fanatics who
would replace it by a measured and monotonous
happiness.

Fortunately, we are relieved from entering into a
discussion of this alleged antinomy between justice
and civilisation ; for to the prophets, at any rate,
justice did not mean the equalisation of social con-
ditions. It meant that every one should continue
to possess his own in peace, his own being what
law and custom entitled him to. It seemed no
hardship to Nathan that one citizen should have
exceeding many flocks and herds, and another only
one ewe-lamb ; the injustice began when the rich
man robbed his poor neighbour of that solitary
possession. Elijah did not propose to nationalise
Ahab's ivory house, but only that the royal family
should not seize Naboth's vineyard, and do its
owner to death through the agency of perjured
witnesses. Jeremiah would not have grudged
Jehoiakim the pleasure of a new palace if he had
paid the masons and carpenters for building it.
However strange it may seem to the present
generation, the prophets, and indeed all good
Israelites, held that to keep one's word was an
essential element of justice, or rather its very
foundation. To the Psalmist the man who " walks

i

ii4 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

uprightly and works righteousness " is also the
man who "swears to his own hurt and changes
not." Let me add that he does not take usury ;
but on this point Aristotle, the great anti-Socialist
thinker, would have professed the same opinion.
Looking back now to Jeremiah's denunciation of
the faithless nobles who re-enslaved their eman-
cipated bondsmen, we are able to appreciate the
full significance of their crime. They had broken
a contract made according to the most ancient
Semitic custom, by cutting the sacrificial victims
in two, arranging them in parallel rows, and walk-
ing between the severed halves. This was called
" cutting a covenant," and the parties so pledged
invoked on themselves the fate of the slaughtered
and divided animals should they be faithless to
their contract. Next to kinship, this was the
firmest bond of moral obligation between man and
man, and eventually it seems to have assumed a
higher sanctity even than the ties of blood ; for,
while all other duties were placed under the sanction
of religion, the binding force of religion itself rested
on the duty of fulfilling the covenant made on Sinai
between Israel and lahveh.

Emerson has finely observed that it is the
privilege of the intellect to carry every fact to
successive platforms. The things of the intellect
have no more distinguished living representative
than M. Renan.1 Let us, then, grant him this
privilege to its utmost extent. Let us not take it
amiss if he smiles with tolerant, good-humoured
irony at our attempts to tie him down pedantically

1 Written in 1892.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 115

to the accepted meanings of words ; if he attributes
our excessive logical punctiliousness to a lingering
strain of the Puritanism that we profess to have
disregarded in theology. A Socialist, he may
observe, is not necessarily. a Communist, with a
cut-and-dried scheme for handing over land and
capital to the State ; nor did he ever represent the
prophets as so many Fouriers and St. Simons.
It is enough that they give a somewhat dispro-
portionate share of their attentions to the sufferings
of the poor, and that the earlier prophets at least
treat religion and government mainly as instru-
ments for redressing the wrongs of the oppressed,
to the neglect or disparagement of other, perhaps
more important, considerations, such as the national
defences, the adornment of life, and the study of
pure truth. By this concentration on a single class
of interests, and by the violence of their language,
they differ from the Greeks, while to the same
extent they resemble the modern irreconcilable
journalist. Agreeing to use the word " Socialism "
in this extended sense, I must still demur to the
application. For what we call the social question
did not even exist for the prophets. What they
demanded was the enforcement of the ordinary
criminal law, the expediency of which is no longer
a question, except perhaps among the irrecon-
cilable journalists. The rest of us, at any rate,
hold it to be the first condition of existence to a
civilised community, and it is fairly well fulfilled
by the modern State. Such brigandage as the pro-
phets describe, if practised at all now, is practised
by members of the poorer classes. But experience
shows that social order, ever so well maintained,

n6 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

leaves an enormous mass of human misery un-
touched ; the problem how to get rid of this misery
is precisely what we call the social question. That
it should be asked at all presupposes a rather high
standard of morality ; it assumes that the well-to-do
classes are seriously interested in the welfare of
their less fortunate fellow-citizens. But neither
morality nor religion will tell us how to solve it,
any more than they can tell us how best to reform
the Government, or to organise the national
defences. Rather must social organisation help
morality, if it be true, as some insist, that our
present commercial system makes honesty impos-
sible. In other words, the problem is not moral,
but intellectual, because the question is not one of
ends, but of means. All admit that the welfare of
the masses is supremely desirable ; what inquirers
differ about is the way in which to set to work in
order to obtain it. The Socialist has one scheme,
the Individualist another ; the party politician says
that he has more pressing business to look after.
The Hebrew prophet, could we consult him, would
tell us to be very good and religious, and lahveh
would make everybody happy. He saw the end,
but not the means.

Thus, if we cannot say, with M. Renan, that
the abuses denounced by the prophets are social
necessities,, neither can we say, with M. James
Darmesteter, that their teaching, reinforced by
modern science, suffices to meet our present needs.
In the first place, the simple injunction of morality,
even when backed up by any amount of super-
natural terrors and hopes, seems scarcely enough
to make men good ; and, in the second place, even

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 117

if men were all individually to become good, the
working of the whole industrial machine as at
present arranged would not necessarily become
beneficent in its operation. We must either come
to recognise a large residue of misery as inevitably
resulting from the constitution of things in them-
selves, or we must devise a scheme for getting rid
of it by some great concerted series of associated
actions. In either case it will be the tradition of
Greek philosophy, not of Hebrew prophecy, that
we shall continue. Philosophy teaches us to under-
stand the eternal concatenation of causes and effects,
and this leads to resignation ; or to practise the
successful adaptation of means to ends, and this
brings about reform.

The prophetic view of life was what the Germans
call " unvermittelt " — unmediated — or, to use a
barbarous but expressive word, unmachined ; and
the void the prophets left was destined to be fatally
supplied, first by the priests, and afterwards by the
Scribes and Pharisees. But as a moral programme
it was complete. No one virtue is favoured at the
expense of the rest. Recent critics have dwelt,
with excessive emphasis, on their inculcation of
justice and mercy ; but the prophets give quite
as much prominence to truthfulness, temperance,
and purity. If we do not find exhortations to
courage and patriotism, the reason is that these
virtues could take care of themselves. Like all
the other Semites, the Hebrews were ready to fight
for their country to the last drop of their blood ;
the duty of wise counsellors was rather to restrain
than to urge them on.

We pass to the charge most often brought or

n8 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

insinuated by M. Renan against the prophets,
that they were bad citizens — factious fanatics, who
habitually obstructed the Government in providing
for the national defence. Let us remember what
was the position of Judaea during the last century
and a half of her existence as a kingdom. She was
for the whole of that period, with one brief interval
of subjection to Egypt, a vassal State of the great
Mesopotamian monarchy, under the headship first
of Nineveh, and afterwards of Babylon. She owed
this position to the pusillanimity of Ahaz, who,
contrary to the advice of Isaiah, had sought the
protection of Tiglath-pileser against the combined
forces of Israel and Damascus, consenting in return
to become his tributary. The yoke thus volun-
tarily assumed seems to have been very galling —
at least to the Judaean nobles, who were constantly
endeavouring to shake it off. As Judah was evi-
dently far too weak to resist Assyria single-handed,
their invariable policy was to call in the help of
Egypt. This step was resolutely opposed by the
prophets, who well knew into what a decrepit con-
dition the once formidable monarchy of the Nile
had fallen, and how untrustworthy were any
promises from that quarter. We may well believe
also that, subjection for subjection, they preferred
the rule of their ancient kinsfolk on the Euphrates
to that of their ancient taskmasters in the Delta.
At any rate, their advice was eminently judicious,
and it even extorts the reluctant approval of M.
Renan, who allows that, " on the whole, Isaiah
was right, notwithstanding the strangeness of his
arguments. Egypt was not a solid support."1

1 III., P. 14.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 119

But Isaiah was no advocate of peace at any price.
When Sennacherib insolently, and it would seem
in defiance of sworn treaties, demanded the sur-
render of Jerusalem, and when the hearts of her
defenders were failing, the prophet at that decisive
moment confronted the emissaries of the great con-
queror with a defiance still haughtier than their
own, and saved the future of religion by his timely
assurance. Here, again, M. Renan admits that
"the conduct of Isaiah seems to have been most
correct."1 On another occasion, when Baladan,
king of Babylon, sought to draw Hezekiah into a
compromising alliance, the prophet is said to have
uttered a significant warning of the danger involved
in such a scheme ; and once more his policy is
coldly commended by the historian.2

The part imposed on Jeremiah a hundred years
later differed in some essential respects from that
played by his great predecessor. He had not to
rouse the nobles of Judaea from a state of careless
frivolity or of mournful apathy, but rather to dis-
countenance their overweening confidence and
spasmodic energy. It would seem that the lahvistic
movement, with its accompanying conception of
Zion as the chosen dwelling-place, the holy and
inviolable temple of Judah's God, had already taken
such a hold on men's imaginations as to inspire
them with a belief in its impregnability to attack.
On the other hand, the overlord of Palestine was
no mere conqueror, no blind destroyer like Sen-
nacherib, but probably the greatest and wisest
ruler that the East has yet seen. Nebuchadrezzar

1 in., p. 107.

2 " Isaie fut encore inspir£ par un politique assez sage " (p. 1 18).

120 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

united distinguished military abilities to an equal
eminence in the arts of peace; all that later genera-
tions attributed to the mythical Semiramis was
really done by him. For an Oriental despot he
showed exceptional clemency, or at least excep-
tional moderation. M. Renan, indeed, says that
the chief men of Judah were scalped after the
fashion of Red Indians in the presence of Nebu-
chadrezzar before they were put to death at Riblah.1
The Biblical narrative gives no support to this
assertion. The only evidence adduced in its favour
is a figured representation on an Assyrian bas-
relief — as if the Babylonians had the same customs
as their savage northern neighbours!2 There is
every reason to believe that Nebuchadrezzar wished
to leave Jerusalem standing as an ornament and
bulwark of his empire. In such circumstances the
repeated attempts of her nobility and priesthood to
shake off the Babylonian yoke were sheer madness,
closely akin to the revolt of the Zealots against
Rome long afterwards ; their faith in divine assist-
ance was inspired by the same obdurate fanaticism.
Jeremiah, alike by his counsels of submission
and by his proclamation of a purely spiritual reli-
gion independent of sanctuaries and priesthoods,
showed himself the true predecessor — more than
that, the master and model — of Jesus. Yet M.
Renan is so misled by false modern analogies that
in this sober, sagacious, far-sighted prophet he
can see nothing better than a howling fanatic, half
a Felix Pyat, half an implacable Jesuit — a monkish

• ill., P. 365.

2 For a juster appreciation of the great Chaldaean king see
Eduard Meyer's admirable Geschichte des Altherthums.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 121

soul without an idea of military honour. In order

to understand him, we are told to imagine a French

political writer in July, 1870, calling the Prussians

the ministers of God.1 The letters that passed

between the Jewish captives in Babylonia and the

remnant left in Jerusalem are compared with what

we may suppose the correspondence between the

transported Communists in New Caledonia and

their friends in Paris after 1871 to have been.2

Most probably the letters from a Parisian Socialist

to his more unlucky fellow-conspirators beyond the

sea were filled with hopes of a fresh revolution, of

a speedy and triumphant return to France, of signal

vengeance on the bloody Versaillese. There were,

indeed, some among the captive Jews who cherished

such hopes of deliverance, and there were some

among the priests and prophets of Jerusalem who

encouraged them. These, however, were the bitter

enemies of Jeremiah, and nothing incensed them

more than the true prophet's advice to settle down

quietly in their new country, building houses and

planting gardens, as they and their posterity were

to live there for seventy years, but, above all, to

behave as law-abiding citizens. Consulted by

Zedekiah, during the final siege, about the best

course to pursue, Jeremiah advised, what was in

fact the only rational plan, immediate surrender ;

as if, says M. Renan, military honour was nothing!

The historian ought to know that honour in our

sense was then undiscovered, and that even now

honour does not require that an untenable position

should be held at the risk of utter destruction.

1 III., p. 289. 2 Ibid, p. 319.

122 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

Zedekiah's motive was really not honour of any
kind, but moral cowardice — the fear of being ridi-
culed by the Jews who had already gone over to
Nebuchadrezzar. After all, M. Renan honestly
admits that " Jeremiah's fierce declamations, had
they been listened to, would have prevented fright-
ful massacres ";* but his supposed case of a French-
man foreseeing and announcing the disaster of
1870 is not an instructive parallel. France was no
weak vassal State, bound by solemn engagements
to pay tribute to the king of Prussia, but an inde-
pendent Power, and, as many thought, fully the
equal of Germany in military strength ; nor was
there any danger that Paris, in the event of capture,
would incur the fate of Jerusalem.

To represent Jeremiah as a religious enthusiast,
opposed to the lay element, the military and
political leaders of the Jewish State, is an entirely
mistaken view. No such distinction then existed,
for the simple reason that all parties were imbued
with religious ideas ; the only difference was in the
relative purity and enlightenment of the faith held.
The party of resistance a outrance was represented
not merely by selfish and treacherous oppressors
of the poor, but by prophets who vehemently pre-
dicted that the foreign yoke would be broken and
the sacred vessels brought back from Babylon
within a year, by priests who kept shouting that
lahveh would not permit his temple to be destroyed.
In answer to their chimerical expectations of divine
assistance, Jeremiah was obliged to keep on repeat-
ing that a people so plunged in immorality and

1 I"., P. 333.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 123

superstition would deservedly be abandoned to the
doom their own folly had incurred. But he was
not, as seems to be popularly supposed, a mere
prophet of evil. Taking up and giving a still
higher development to Isaiah's great idea of the
Remnant that was to be saved, he trusted — as the
event proved, with perfect correctness — to the puri-
fying influences of exile for the filtering out of a
new people that had been " poured from vessel to
vessel," not "left standing on his own lees" like
Moab, whose " taste remaineth in him and his
scent is not changed." Thanks to those prophets
whom we are now asked to look on as a subversive
and dissolving force, working only for individual
happiness and indifferent to great public interests,
Israel again became a united and heroic nation
when the ruin which they foretold had already
long overtaken Edom and Moab, Philistia, Tyre,
and Damascus — if by ruin we may understand the
forfeiture of their political existence. To say that
" the Hebrew thinker, like the modern Nihilist,
holds that if the world cannot be just it had better
not be at all," I presents an unmeaning alternative.
The Hebrew thinker held that justice was the
foundation of all stable existence ; that when the
divinely commissioned forces, ever operating for
the destruction of iniquity, had done their work of
denudation, an everlasting core of righteousness
would remain to be the centre of a new world of
life and light and joy.

One more charge remains to be noticed. It is
said that the victory of the pietists under Josiah

1 II., P. 438-

124 ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS

was followed by a literary decline ; that no more
such works as the Song of Solomon, Job, and
Proverbs were produced.1 Here, too, we see the
fatal effect of ignoring the results of modern
criticism. There is a growing consensus of opinion
in favour of placing Job and Proverbs long after
Jeremiah ; and more than one critic would assign
as late a date to the Song of Solomon. In fact, we
have to thank the monotheistic movement for a
great literary revival succeeding to a century of
almost utter sterility. No nation could have gone
on for ever producing such wonderful works as the
old heroic and patriarchal legends, the cycle of
prophetic narratives, and the earliest written
prophecies. An age of reflection could do nothing
better than give us what the perfected lahveh
religion actually gave, the visions of Ezekiel, the
nameless voices of the Exile and the Return, the
Psalter, and — pace M. Renan — the Book of Job.

This, then, is the result of our inquiry. The
prophets no more anticipated the problems of
modern society than they predicted the events of
modern history ; but if we desire a fitting modern
parallel to their spirit and influence, it must be
sought among the wisest, calmest, and best
balanced, rather than among the flightiest and
most feverish heads of our time. Balance and
harmony are, in truth, the most pervasive charac-
teristics of their teaching, by whatever tests it is
tried, with whatever order of interests it has to
deal. In the existing remains of their discourses
the directly anti-social actions are not more severely

• III., P. 250.

ALLEGED SOCIALISM OF THE PROPHETS 125

condemned than the vices whose deleterious opera-
tion is less obvious and immediate. The rights
of the poor are vindicated, but without prejudice
to other rights on which the future of civilisation
depended. There is nothing in the religion of the
prophets that the purest morality can condemn ;
there is nothing in their morality that the most
prudent or patriotic statesman need ignore. They
wrote both for an age and for all time, using the
utmost exaltation of imaginative sublimity, the
keenest arrows of sarcasm, the tenderest entreaties
of wounded yet unconquerable affection, and the
most concentrated energies of language as an
embodiment and expression of the highest spiritual
verities then attained. No minds were ever, in
T. H. Green's sense, more truly organic to the
eternal consciousness. None ever placed the
divine so far above the human, but none ever
wrought more surely for the reunion and recogni-
tion of both as interdependent elements of a single
absolute existence.

THE HIGHER CRITICISM AND THE
SUPERNATURAL

THEOLOGICAL orthodoxy, even orthodoxy of the
most rigid type — the orthodoxy of the Roman
Catholic Church — has made its peace with physical
science. The nebular hypothesis, the antiquity of
the earth, the antiquity of man, the development
of our race by natural selection from purely animal
ancestors, the intimate connection between psychic
and nervous processes — whatever, in short, we sum
up under the convenient name of evolution — may
be accepted and taught without prejudice to the
religious belief, whose very foundations such
theories were but lately supposed to threaten. A
cynic might observe that, if it takes two to make a
quarrel, it also takes two to make peace, and that,
so far, science has received the overtures of her old
enemy very much as the overtures of Darius after
the battle of Issus were received by Alexander.
Let us assume, however, that the conflict is at an
end, or that the abandonment of a few indefensible
outworks has left the ecclesiastical citadel more
secure than ever against assault. Still, the con-
flict, so happily concluded, may not be without its
warnings. Was it not, to say the least, ill-advised
on the part of theology to provoke such a conflict
at all, and still more so to stake her very existence
on points as to which, by her own admission, she
was quite in the wrong ? Is the present moment a

126

HIGHER CRITICISM & THE SUPERNATURAL 127

well-chosen one for renewing the conflict in another
quarter, with at least an appreciable chance of seeing
it terminated by another humiliating surrender?

These are questions that answer themselves ;
yet, from the tone habitually employed by the
accredited defenders of orthodoxy in reference to
what is called the Higher Criticism, one would
imagine that they had never been asked. With
some honourable exceptions, it is a tone marked by
the same curious mixture of fear, contempt, ridicule,
and ignorance that characterised the official denun-
ciations of Darwinism in the last generation, and
of geology in the generation before the last. To
make the parallel more complete, just as certain
timid or jealous or retrograde specialists were
acclaimed by the religious and conservative press
as the only genuine or authoritative representatives
of physical science, so in our own time scholars
who uphold the traditional opinions are habitually
spoken of by the same press as if they had a
monopoly of learning, honesty, and good sense.

But among the controversial devices most freely
used to discredit the results of the Higher Criticism
there is one not paralleled in the old warfare against
advanced physical science. While no one with any
pretensions to culture ever supposed that Laplace,
Lyell, Darwin, Helmholtz, Claude Bernard, and
Berthelot constructed their scientific theories in a
spirit of hatred to natural religion, and in order to
dispense with the necessity of a Creator and an
immortal soul, it is assumed, not only by the
vulgar ruck of apologists, but also by many among
the most learned and highly-placed teachers of
official orthodoxy, that men like Baur and Renan

lag THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Kuenen and Wellhausen, have spent their lives in
the study of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures
only that they might destroy the documentary
evidence of revealed religion, although from their
point of view the disproof was wholly unnecessary.
For these critics, it is said, start with a conviction,
based entirely on a priori reasoning, that the super-
natural does not exist, or cannot be known. Divine
omnipotence never intervenes to change the course
of nature ; divine omniscience never discloses the
secrets of futurity to man. So, when the exercise
of such miraculous powers is authenticated by
historical evidence that would be enough to satisfy
the most exacting in the case of any ordinary event,
the evidence is rejected as insufficient, or as anony-
mous, or as of late date, or even as a deliberate
fabrication. The most arbitrary hypotheses are
put forward to explain how the narratives came
into existence, while the documents embodying
them are taken away from their reputed authors
and assigned in part or wholly to late dates, with
no other warrant than the individual caprice of the
critic. As fast as one such hypothesis is refuted,
another succeeds it, and is proclaimed with equal
confidence. Their production is limited only by
the ingenuity of unbelief, which, however, exhausts
itself in vain efforts to undermine the "impregnable
rock " of traditional faith.

Such is the uniform reply made to the Higher
Criticism by all its assailants, lay and clerical,
Catholic and Protestant. One and the same note
sounds through the grave and guarded admonitions
of Leo XIII., the smug insular self-satisfaction of
Bishop Ellicott, the mild jocularity of Dr. Salmon,

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 129

the truculent misrepresentations of Dr. Wace, the
tortuous evasions of Mr. Gladstone, the super-
cilious man-of-the-worldism of Mr. Arthur Balfour,
and, I am sorry to add, through the efforts, only
too successful, of the dying naturalist, Romanes,
to sophisticate away his own scientific conscience.
Grant, they contend, the credibility of the super-
natural, and the Higher Criticism is ruined, the
credibility of the Biblical narratives restored.

One must wonder at the moderation with which
so irresistible a weapon has been employed. It
might be wielded with equal effect in other fields
than that of Biblical criticism. Was not the
acceptance of evolution a little hasty? Let us see
whether the ground abandoned to physical science
may not yet be regained.

The nebular hypothesis, as originally framed by
Kant and Laplace, is now, I believe, universally
abandoned. A spherical body, containing the
same amount of matter as our solar system,
and filling up the orbit of Neptune, could not
revolve on its own axis nor throw off those succes-
sive rings out of which the planets were once
supposed to be formed. Indeed, the so-called ring
of Saturn, which first suggested the hypothesis, is
now known not to be a ring at all, but a collection
of minute satellites. Nevertheless, astronomers
continue to hold a nebular hypothesis of some sort
— that is, they believe that the stars and planets
were originally formed by the aggregation of
smaller bodies. Here, then, is an excellent oppor-
tunity for the theologian to intervene and to taunt
the physicist with having recourse to the most
desperate shifts in order that he may escape from

K

i3o THE HIGHER CRITICISM

the unpalatable alternative of admitting that the
celestial orbs, as we now behold them, were the
work of a Divine Hand, which, in the poet's
words, "bowled them flaming through the dark
abyss."

Turn we now to geology. It is no secret that
the authorities on that science are at sixes and
sevens with regard to the antiquity of the globe,
its actual consistency, and the nature of the forces
by which its crust was shaped. But all are agreed
in assuming that its age must be counted by
millions of years, and that during the whole of
that immense period none but material agencies,
such as fire, air, water, and ice, have been at work
beneath or above its surface. Here, again, there
seems to be an admirable opportunity for our
orthodox friends to come to the rescue. I can
imagine them exclaiming : " You are struggling
with difficulties of your own creation ; accept the
miraculous, and they will disappear by enchant-
ment. Only prejudice forbids you to believe that
God made the world in six days. The story of the
Deluge is perfectly in harmony with the catas-
trophic theory of Cuvier, which you abandoned for
the uniformitarianism of Lyell merely because it
necessitated an occasional intervention of Divine
omnipotence." I can imagine such a speech, but
I do not hear it.

Many of my readers will remember the contro-
versy that raged some time ago between Herbert
Spencer and Dr. Weismann on the question whether
natural selection alone is sufficient to account
for the origin of species, or whether it should be
supplemented by the transmission of acquired

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 131

parental qualities. The controversy was con-
ducted with conspicuous ability on both sides, and
other physiologists took part in the discussion,
scarcely, if at all, inferior to the original disputants
in knowledge and reasoning power. Which party
got the better of the argument is out of my power
to decide, and, indeed, it is not yet concluded ; but
one point struck me very forcibly as having been
established beyond the reach of doubt, to judge by
the unanimity with which it was assumed by all
who expressed an opinion on either side. No one
seemed to question for a moment that, however
species originated, they were brought into exist-
ence by purely natural causes. Again, the super-
naturalistic philosophers had an opportunity for
urging the insufficiency of a mere physical hypo-
thesis, the unreasonableness of rejecting miracles
where their aid appeared most necessary ; and
again the opportunity was missed, or so feebly
used that public opinion remained uninfluenced
by the reminder.

Among various explanations of this strange
anomaly that might be offered, the following seems
the most probable : Physical science is understood
to proceed solely by the method of induction, and
it is as a result of induction that the theory of
evolution has been accepted as applicable to the
whole range of physical phenomena. Facts
guaranteed by observation and experiment go to
show that the heavenly bodies either are, or have
been, in a state which can be fully accounted for
only as a result of the aggregation of diffused
matter moving in obedience to the law of gravita-
tion, while opinions may well differ as to the

i32 THE HIGHER CRITICISM

precise manner in which the aggregation took
place. An examination of what is going on over
the earth's surface shows it to be subjected to
processes of upheaval, subsidence, denudation,
erosion, and accumulation of fluviatile deposits ;
the prolonged action of these processes would
account for any changes known to have ever
occurred. Other inductive evidence justifies us in
concluding that such action was actually exercised
in the past; although the modus operandi in any
particular instance leaves room for considerable
diversity of opinion. Finally, ascending to
biology, the anatomy and physiology of contem-
porary plants and animals, and the stratigraphical
arrangement of extinct species, as demonstrated by
geological research, carry home the conviction
that, since the first dawn of life, no species has
ever come into existence except as the offspring of
some different and older species ; and all that
Darwinism, or any rival theory, attempts is to
account for this admitted fact. To put the point
somewhat differently, in those sciences that deal
with the material universe naturalism holds the
field ; supernaturalist explanations only begin
where our knowledge ends, and perpetually give
way as it progresses. On the other hand, in the
case of documents embodying the record of a
revelation — assuming that a revelation has actually
been given — the relation is reversed. Here super-
naturalism occupies the positive pole, and natural-
ism the negative pole ; the reference to ordinary
causation only comes in when our faith ends, as
the expression of an abstract possibility, the
blank form of a scientific explanation where the

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 133

theological explanation has been arbitrarily re-
jected, and nothing definitely convincing can be
put in its place.

Let us assume that the conservative theologians
would accept such a vindication as I have here
suggested of their very tolerant attitude towards
physical science, contrasting so vividly with their
contemptuous repudiation of the Higher Criticism ;
and I have tried to put the case for them as strongly
as I could. Observe what its adoption implies.
Simply this, that when criticism employs the
methods of induction it is entitled to the same
respect as any other inductive science. Now, in
point of fact, the Higher Criticism uses no other
methods and makes no larger assumptions than
any physical inquirer, while it takes much less for
granted than the conservative theologians them-
selves.

So far I have spoken of the Higher Criticism as if
the meaning of the term were universally under-
stood. But, in truth, there are many worthy
people to whom it conveys nothing more than a
vague emotional association of mingled dread and
contempt. Very often we find the mysterious
bogey shut up in a cage of quotation marks, as if
it were a detected impostor, not fit to go at large.
Whether it is intended to cast doubt on the
adjective or the substantive, or both, does not
appear. We may talk without offence of the higher
education and of the higher mathematics — nay,
even of the higher theism or the higher pantheism;
but not, it would seem, in any serious sense, of the
higher criticism. Yet, what the unfortunate name
denotes is, after .all, something very simple and

i34 THE HIGHER CRITICISM

very necessary. It merely means an inquiry into
the composition, authenticity, and date of ancient
documents. Such criticism is called " higher " in
contradistinction to the "lower" or more elementary
criticism which deals with correct readings and the
exact meanings of words. No claim to superior
dignity or difficulty is necessarily implied, only
that the one criticism rests on and presupposes the
other, just as the upper story of a house rests on its
ground floor.

All ancient literature is amenable to the Higher
Criticism ; although, from the language sometimes
employed, one would think that it had never been
heard of except in connection with the Bible. The
Vedas, the Zend Avesta, Homer, Hesiod, the
Platonic Dialogues, and some patristic writings,
are favourite subjects for its exercise, often with
results completely subversive of pre-conceived
opinions. Certain Biblical critics have distin-
guished themselves in profane as well as in sacred
literature. Eduard Zeller, the great historian of
Greek philosophy, and Albert Schwegler, one of
the greatest authorities on early Roman history,
both belonged to the much-decried Tubingen
School. Within the range of Biblical studies,
even the humblest believers must sometimes
become higher critics in their own despite, at least
if they care to know when the Book of Job was
written, or who was the author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews.

The Book of Job suggests considerations highly
relevant to our subject. It will scarcely be pre-
tended that the results reached by a critic who sets
himself to determine the date and authorship of

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 135

that wonderful drama need in any way be affected
by his opinions about the supernatural. Miracles
are related in it ; but the most rigid conservatism
does not insist on our believing that they actually
happened. The story may be a parable, and not
literally true. Accordingly, when the higher critics
bring it down to the Persian period, or even later,
the bitterest intolerance cannot pretend that they
are actuated by sinister motives. Whether we
assign it to the age of Moses or to the age of the
Maccabees, its doctrinal value remains unaltered.
So with regard to the alleged interpolations. It
would be monstrous to assert that the critics who
consider the speech of Elihu to be a later addition
of workmanship inferior to the rest of the poem, do
so because they find that it stands in the way of
their private theories. The question is one of pure
literature, of artistic taste, not of theological
dogma at all. Of course, a similar remark applies
to the other condemned passages, such as the
descriptions of the mines, of Leviathan, and of
Behemoth.

Another good instance is supplied by the Book
of Ecclesiastes. Not long ago nearly everyone
believed that this caustic satire was what it pro-
fesses itself to be — a genuine work of Solomon.
Thackeray would have been greatly surprised to
hear that his favourite Vanitas Vanitatum was not
really written by " King David's son the sad and
splendid." Yet few scholars would now care to
dispute the critical verdictwhich assigns Ecclesiastes
to a date at least six centuries later than the time
of Solomon. Here again no rationalistic or
a priori principle was involved. Inductive

136 THE HIGHER CRITICISM

evidence alone decided the question, above all
the late and debased Hebrew in which the book is
written.

All the Hagiographa have in like manner been
brought down to post-exilian times, and we might
go through them all without finding a single
instance to confirm the charge brought against
criticism of arbitrarily rejecting whatever testifies
to the supernatural, until we come to the Book of
Daniel. Here, certainly, are miracles and prophe-
cies of the most astounding description which must
be given up as discredited fictions if Daniel is,
what free inquiry has ever since Porphyry's time
pronounced it to be, a Maccabean forgery. To
a Rationalist the prophecies are of course in them-
selves decisive. But the inductive evidence is quite
strong enough to carry conviction without the
rationalistic argument, and, were it not for theo-
logical prejudice, would long since have been found
convincing. The charge of forgery is brought
home to pseudo-Daniel not by his true prophecies,
but by his false history ; by his false prediction of
the coming judgment ; by his corrupt Hebrew ; by
the silence of every witness who might have been
expected to allude to him from Ezekiel to Eccle-
siasticus.1

Travelling backwards through the Hebrew Bible,
we find ourselves in the second great division
known as the Prophets, and embracing, besides
the writers now exclusively so-called, Judges,
Samuel, and Kings. Here, also, the Higher

1 The reference in Ezekiel is not to a contemporary, but to
a very ancient celebrity.

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 137

Criticism has played havoc with old traditions, but
only one of its achievements has excited much
attention or called down much obloquy on its
representatives. I refer to the assignment of many
portions of Isaiah, and more particularly of chapters
xl.-xlvi., to exilian or post-exilian authors. Here,
at first sight, the apologist has an easy game,
and can triumphantly carry an uninstructed
audience along with him. "You look up and
down the book," he will say, "for predictions of
the fall of Babylon and of the Return from the
Captivity, and wherever you find them you pro-
nounce the whole chapter or section containing
them to be a late interpolation or addition. That
may be what you call scientific criticism. We,
for our part, call it arbitrary, unscrupulous, and
' tendentious,' to use a word invented by your
German friends." Those who use such language
assume the possibility or, rather, the actual occur-
rence of miracles which not merely transcend the
experience of life, but also transgress the laws of
probability and reason. If God ever interferes
with the order of nature to the extent of revealing
the course of events in the distant future, it must,
one would suppose, be as a warning or as a
consolation for those to whom the vision is vouch-
safed, not as a theatrical exercise of superhuman
power. But the contemporaries of Isaiah knew
Babylon only as a subject city of Nineveh and
a possible ally of its enemies, not as the conqueror
and despoiler of Judah ; to be assured of its down-
fall some two centuries later would neither have
purified their morals nor strengthened their faith,
even supposing them to have listened to the

138 THE HIGHER CRITICISM

prophet, which they most certainly would not have
done. But what gives the Higher Criticism a solid
inductive basis is the evidence of language, and by
this it is prepared to abide in every instance where
a received date has been changed.

In the Hexateuch we have a series of narratives
swarming with miracles and prophecies, while in
the higher criticism of the Hexateuch we have
results of the most revolutionary character that
Biblical inquiry, or indeed any branch of ancient
history, has ever known. But neither in this
instance can it be shown that the criticism was
prompted by a desire to get rid of the miracles and
prophecies, nor if they were reduced to the pro-
portion of ordinary occurrences would the con-
vincing force of the new views be appreciably
diminished. The literary analysis into three
distinct series of documents running through the
whole compilation would still hold good ; the
evidence of Hebrew historians and prophets would
still prove that the series constituting the Priestly
Code was unknown till long after the Return from
Babylon, and that the Deuteronomic series was
unknown before Josiah and Jeremiah ; the analogies
of legend would still render it overwhelmingly
probable that the patriarchs of the earliest narratives
were eponymous heroes who never existed ; physical
science and ancient history would still prove to
demonstration that the stories of the Creation, the
Fall, the Deluge, and the Tower of Babel are
simple myths. If it be once granted that these
results have been obtained by a trustworthy method,
it is not, I think, assuming too much to say that
such prophecies as the Blessing of Jacob and the

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 139

Song of Moses were composed after the event, and
may be used for dating the passages in which they
occur.

When Bishop Colenso entered on his epoch-
making examination of the Pentateuch and the
Book of Joshua, he expressly disclaimed any inten-
tion of assailing the credibility of the miraculous
narratives as such. At the time a very clever
woman observed to the present writer that the
Bishop resembled a man who should say, " My
dear little fish, you need not be afraid of me, I
don't want to catch you ; I am only going to drain
the pond in which you live." At the present
moment the water is very low not only in the
Hexateuch, but throughout the Old Testament ;
most of the fish are dead, and the rest are gasping
for breath. Starting, as we have seen, with no
prejudices whatever on the subject, the Higher
Criticism has proved far more fatal to super-
naturalism than that old-fashioned rationalism
which was content to strike out or explain away
the miraculous portions of Biblical history, while
leaving their reputed authorship and general
authenticity intact. Rather I should say that the
Higher Criticism, without departing from the
prudent reserve with which it began, has furnished
ample materials for an authoritative judgment to a
still higher science for whose sake alone it is worth
studying — the science of historical evidence. This
science refuses to accept any story not intrinsically
probable, except on the testimony of eye-witnesses,
or, at the very least, of contemporaries. If a
narrator is proved to have made false statements
on matters of ordinary experience, his testimony to

i4o THE HIGHER CRITICISM

extraordinary occurrences has no value. If such
occurrences are not mentioned by older and
apparently more trustworthy narrators of the same
history, then the probability that they did not take
place becomes extreme. If two narratives of equal
value give inconsistent accounts of the same
alleged occurrence, the improbability of its having
taken place in the manner described is propor-
tioned to the extent of their divergence. One need
only apply these canons to the Hexateuch, Judges,
and Samuel, as they now may be studied in the
light of the Higher Criticism, for the consequences
to become at once apparent. The oldest and best
" Mosaic " narratives are probably at least five
centuries later than the events that they relate ; the
most recent are nine centuries later. The Priestly
record is a deliberate wholesale fabrication ; the
Deuteronomist, where he does not copy his prede-
cessors, is a pious romancer ; the Elohist and the
lahwist differ from one another, in some respects
rather widely ; the lahwist document itself shows
signs of being a disjointed amalgam. The story
of Balaam is made up of at least two contradictory
versions, and one of these versions excludes the
incident of the talking ass, which belongs to the
lahwist. Let who will believe in the abstract
possibility of that performance : can anyone
seriously believe that an ass was endowed with a
human voice in order to rebuke her master for
doing a thing which he had been divinely com-
manded to do, and which, when he did it, redounded
to the glory of Israel and of Israel's God ? Literary
analysis, when applied to the story of Gideon, leaves
it in its original form a series of perfectly natural

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 141

incidents; and the same may be said of the story of
Saul's election to the kingdom. Professor Cheyne
has shown in his last work on Isaiah how the story
of the moving back of the shadow on the dial — one
of the very few miraculous incidents in the history
ofjudah — was gradually built up in three succes-
sive redactions. Of the Elijah and Elisha group of
miracles we can only say that they are unsupported
by evidence as good as might be quoted for the
most extravagant stories of the mediaeval saints.

With regard to prophecy in the sense of super-
natural prediction, little need be said. As we have
seen, the Higher Criticism shows by inductive
evidence that the Second Isaiah and Daniel spoke
not of future but of contemporary events ; the same
is true of the Pentateuchal prophecies ; many
alleged predictions of the literary prophets were
not offered as such by their authors, but owe their
traditional character to a perverted exegesis ; while
the announcements, certainly numerous enough,
of Israel's redemption and glorification have been
signally falsified by history. As to the pretended
"Christology of the Old Testament," it has long
been dissipated by such a sober interpretation of
the texts as would be admitted without dispute in
the case of any other document.

I fear that before this some of my readers may
have been getting a little impatient. They have
perhaps been saying to themselves : " Yes, of
course this is all very true of the Old Testament,
and we knew every word of it before. But the real
question, the only interesting question, is about
the New Testament, and especially about the
Gospels. They stand on quite a different footing

i42 THE HIGHER CRITICISM

from the Hexateuch and Judges. There are certain
stories in the latter that we are not sorry to get rid
of. The revelation of Jesus Christ is quite another
matter. We neither wish nor are we obliged to
part with it. And why should we? Because some
stories are mythical does it follow that all are?
Because the heroic legends of Greece and Rome
are worthless as history, does it follow that we are
to lose all confidence in Thucydides and Julius
Caesar, in Demosthenes and Cicero? Ought not
the evidence that suffices to prove an ordinary
event suffice to prove a miracle where miracles
were to be expected, as in this instance they were?
For Christianity is itself the standing wonder, only
explicable by reference to the personality of Christ
as set forth in the Gospels. And then " — But
this is not a dialogue, and I am not a thought-
reader. Let me recall the question to its original
limitations. Our object was to inquire into the
truth of a grave charge brought against the Higher
Criticism — the charge of preferring a less to a more
probable explanation of the same facts, because
the more probable explanation would involve the
admission that miracles may happen. I have
tried to show that, so far as the Old Testament
goes, this charge is unfounded. So complete an
acquittal of the critics in respect to so important a
branch of their activity furnishes at least a strong
presumption that in dealing with the documents of
early Christianity they have not thrown scientific
method to the winds. Sometimes the same men
have cultivated both fields, as Ewald, Reuss, and
Samuel Davidson ; in all cases they have been
trained in the same schools and are animated by

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 143

the same spirit. Suppose it true that they have
sometimes gone too far in their negations, or at
least farther than a cautious conservatism would
approve: their temerity may be easily paralleled in
the labours of classical scholarship where hostility
to the supernatural cannot be supposed to bias the
inquirer. No aspersion is ever cast on the scientific
honour of a Hellenist who holds that the speeches
in Thucydides are entirely manufactured by that
historian, or that Socrates never uttered a single
sentence that is put into his mouth by Plato, or
that several of the Platonic Dialogues are spurious.
Not long ago Xenophon's Memorabilia was
generally accepted as a genuine account of the
Socratic teaching. Several portions of it are now
suspected to be very far from deserving that
character, yet no outcry has been raised.

Again, it is entirely unwarrantable to assert, as
Dr. Salmon does,1 that critics who disbelieve in
the supernatural are on that account interested in
denying the authenticity of the books where
miracles are related. I should like to ask Dr.
Salmon, or any other orthodox Protestant divine,
whether he believes in the miraculousness of that
extraordinary series of cures related in full detail
by St. Augustine at the end of his treatise De
Civitate Dei, and, if not, whether his incredulity
has ever inclined him to reject the treatise itself, or
this particular part of it, as a forgery. I have little
doubt that he would manage to combine the most
absolute disbelief in the miracles as such with the
most unhesitating acceptance of the record as

1 Historical Introduction to the Books of the New Testament, p. 8.

144 THE HIGHER CRITICISM

coming from the pen of the great Father. At any
rate, if I cannot answer for Dr. Salmon, I can
answer for the higher critics. If the evidence of
eye-witnesses could convert rationalists to a belief
in miracles, incredulity on this point would long
ago have ceased to trouble the apologist, and
Protestantism would have ceased to trouble Rome.
But, as I have said before, there are miracles
that the Higher Criticism does reject in a very
summary manner — miracles that would be wonders
without being signs ; miracles that, so far from
being of any evidentiary value, would, if they were
established, be the destruction of all logical evidence
whatsoever ; miracles that are a derogation, not
from the course of nature, but from the laws of
reason. Now these are miracles that apologetic
orthodoxy accepts, and attacks the critics for not
accepting. If the story of the Virgin-birth were
true, how could two such inconsistent accounts of
it as those given by the first and the third Evan-
gelist both be current in the early decades of
Christian history? How could St. Paul not know
it ; or, knowing, not allude to it? If the raising of
Lazarus is a historical event, how could it escape
the notice of the Synoptics? How could the same
teacher deliver to the same audience during the
same period discourses differing so widely, both in
form and matter, as the speeches of Jesus in the
First or Third and those in the Fourth Gospel?
How could one so gifted with supernatural pre-
science as to foretell the circumstances of the siege
and capture of Jerusalem in the minute detail of
the Third Gospel, be so utterly mistaken as to
declare, in the words of the Second Gospel, that

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 145

the end of the world would come within the life-
time of some who were then born (Mark xiii. 30) ?
Surely modern criticism is entirely within its rights
when, just as in the case of Daniel, it uses these
two predictions, one fabricated and the other falsi-
fied, to place " St. Mark " and " St. Luke " at such
a distance from the events they record as to take
them out of the category of eye-witnesses, or even
of those who derived their information from eye-
witnesses.

The question whether the Fourth Gospel was or
was not written by St. John is often ignorantly or
wilfully confused with a quite different question —
the value of Baur's theory as to the evolution of
primitive Christianity. In reality the two are quite
distinct. First, the untrustworthiness of the gospel
was proved. Then and only then did there arise
the necessity of asking when and where and by
whom was it written. It would no doubt be highly
satisfactory if these points could be cleared up.
But no constructive solution of the problem could
add to the real strength of the destructive criticism
which it necessarily presupposes, nor can the
fragility of any particular solution take away from
that strength. As to the Tubingen theory, it
probably retains as much value as any other
scientific theory that has now been before the
world for fifty years. Let it not be supposed that
science alone shares with woman the privilege of
changing her mind. Orthodoxy changes also.
Compare Lux Mundi with Aids to Faith; compare
the present attitude of Rome towards the higher
criticism of the Old Testament with her attitude
in Kenan's youth. Of course I know what

L

:46 THE HIGHER CRITICISM

orthodox theologians will say. They have dis-
covered that propositions once supposed to be de
fide are really open questions. But that is enough.
The definition of faith changes with startling
rapidity, and perhaps we have not yet reached the
limit of its transformations.

We have seen that the higher criticism of the
Old Testament, although it did not begin by deny-
ing the miraculous, ended by denying it, or rather
by leaving the science of historical evidence free to
deny it. What, then, it may be asked, is the result
towards which New Testament criticism points?
It seems to me that the final verdict must be the
same. That miracles should go on increasing in
magnitude, the farther we go from the place and
time of their alleged occurrence, is a circumstance
that cannot fail to awaken suspicion. Now the
miracles of the Fourth Gospel are the most astound-
ing of all, and are related with the strongest
emphasis on their supernatural character and on
their evidentiary value as manifestations of the
divine omnipotence. There is something particu-
larly Hellenic about the writer's consciousness in
this respect — his extreme anxiety to differentiate the
miraculous sign from the ordinary course of nature,
and to surround it with every guarantee of authen-
ticity. What we find is a wise economy, not, as
with the Synoptics, a rank profusion of marvels.
There are no cases of diabolical possession, because
the Fourth Evangelist, believing though he did in
a supreme power of evil, belonged to a society that
was too philosophical to explain epilepsy and
hysteria, as the lowest savage might, by the
presence of malignant spirits. Now it is just this

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 147

gospel that criticism, for quite other reasons,
considers last in order of time, and in the order
of ideas most remote from Jewish or Palestinian
habits of thought.

Criticism has disengaged from the Acts of the
Apostles a contemporary document of high value,
supposed to be written by a companion of St. Paul,
and known as the " we-source "; it has also sub-
jected the earlier portions of the book to a searching
comparison with the parallel narratives contained
in the genuine epistles of St. Paul himself. Con-
fining our attention to the supernatural, we find
least of it (if, indeed, there be any) in the "we-
source," and most in the legendary narratives
bearing marks of a comparatively late origin ;
while the Pentecostal gift of tongues, which in
Acts offers such an extraordinary spectacle of
divine power, shrinks in St. Paul to a performance
very much on a level with the phenomena of the
Irvingite church.

On grounds of literary analysis, criticism declares
the Second Gospel to be the oldest of the Synoptics.
But this document has nothing about the virgin-
birth of Jesus, and, when freed of later additions,
nothing about the Ascension. According to it,
Jesus died with an exclamation of despair on his
lips quite incompatible with the prevision of his
speedy return to life. His reported refusal to work
miracles is probably authentic, as there would have
been no reason for inventing it at a time when
thaumaturgic powers were freely attributed to him ;
and we can still see how his appeal to the " sign of
the prophet Jonah " was afterwards apologetically
corrected into a prediction of his own death, burial,

148 THE HIGHER CRITICISM

and resurrection. The words " three days and
three nights in the heart of the earth," by the way,
point to a variation of the resurrection-story not
otherwise recognised in our gospels.

My object in the foregoing pages has not been to
defend the methods and results of the higher Biblical
criticism, nor even, except in the briefest manner,
to recapitulate them. Nor have I attempted to
discuss the general problem of the supernatural in
its relations to the order of nature. My object has
been to show the hollowness, if not the insincerity,
of a plea put forward for the purpose of suppressing
discussion by denying the right of rationalistic
critics to speak at all about subjects to which they
have devoted their lives. At the same time, I have
suggested the motive that lies at the bottom of this
discreditable attempt. Beyond doubt, many,
perhaps most, of the higher critics disbelieve in
miracles and supernatural predictions. I will go
further still and freely grant that with some of
them, such as Strauss, Renan, and Mr. Walter
Cassels (the author of Supernatural Religion), the
denial is based on philosophical considerations.
But Renan, at any rate, combined for many years
with his absolute disbelief in miracles a belief that
the gospels were written by the men whose names
they bear ; and when he partially abandoned this
position, it was under the stress of historical, not
of philosophical, arguments. Now this is just what
the enemies of criticism find so irritating — that the
evidence of history is turning against them ; that
the documents, when scientifically investigated,
should, as it were, of themselves, fall into a pro-
gressive series exhibiting more and more of the

AND THE SUPERNATURAL 149

supernatural the farther removed they are from the
original events, and a decline of truthfulness going
along with an increase of intellectual culture in the
narrators the farther removed they are from the
original eye-witnesses. Such is the power and
flexibility of modern philosophy that, once released
from the necessity of verification, it can be made
to prove or disprove anything. So the modern
apologist flies to speculation whenever he has the
chance, in the hope that his ark of faith may ride
triumphant on a deluge of scepticism.

Verachte nur Vernunft und Wissenschaft,
Des Menschen allerhochste Kraft,
So hab' ich dich !

said Mephistopheles a hundred and twenty years
ago. The new Mephistopheles, disguised as an
angel of light, sees in historical reason and historical
science alone the barrier that separates him from
his victims. "Thank heaven we have got rid of
history !" a Jesuit Father is reported to have
exclaimed when Papal Infallibility was voted. His
Protestant brother would gladly get rid of it also.
As good a device for the purpose as any other is to
damage the reputation of the laborious inquirers
who clear the way for true history and accumulate
the materials for its edifice ; to substitute for the
decisive issues of experience the interminable
wrangles of metaphysics ; above all, to convert an
appeal to reason into an appeal to authority.
Perhaps there would be a good case for anyone
who chose to maintain that there is a greater weight
of learning and ability and disinterestedness on the
progressive side. But we have no wish to exchange
one bondage for another. Our object is not that

ISO HIGHER CRITICISM & THE SUPERNATURAL

the Higher Criticism should be reverenced, but that
it should be read. Doubtless the official apologists
will say that in this respect they have done their
duty. Let them then prove their familiarity with
the arguments of their opponents by fair statements
and fair replies, not by confusing the outcome of
an inquiry with the assumptions from which it sets
out.

PASCAL'S WAGER1

A CERTAIN rustic moralist in Mr. Thomas Hardy's
Far from the Madding Crowd gives his opinion
about the relative chances of salvation contingent
on attending church or chapel in the following
homely but telling terms : —

" We know very well that if anybody goes to
heaven they [chapel-folk] will. They've worked
hard for it and they deserve to have it, such as 'tis.
I'm not such a fool as to pretend that we who
stick to the church have the same chance as they,
because we know we have not. But I hate a feller
who'll change his old ancient doctrine for the sake
of getting to heaven."

So far the excellent Coggan, for such is the name
of Mr. Hardy's pot-house philosopher. Whether
churchmen or dissenters should be credited with
the better chance of salvation is a deep question
in which I do not now propose to enter. The
Conformist and the Nonconformist conscience may
safely be left to take care of themselves. But the
ingenuous confidences of this particular churchman
suggest a problem of wider interest on which I

1 A remarkable passage in Dr. McTaggart's work entitled
Some Dogmas of Religion (pp. 213-16) presents so close a parallel
with one of the arguments put forth in the following pages that
I might incur the charge of borrowing without acknowledgment
were the fact not mentioned that my essay was originally
published in the International Journal of Ethics for April, 1905,
a year before the appearance of the work referred to, and that
Dr. McTaggart had certainly read it, as is proved by the
quotation from Pascal on p. 213 of his book.

iS2 PASCAL'S WAGER

propose to offer a few remarks. Is there any
method of salvation that may be called distinctly
mean ? I believe there is at least one such, and I
am sorry to say that it is a method recommended
by no less an authority than Pascal.

What the French call " le pari de Pascal" — in
English, Pascal's wager or bet — forms the theme
of one of the most celebrated passages in his
fragmentary defence of Christianity, published
after his death and universally known as the
Pensdes. A very elaborate edition of this work,
filling three large volumes in the great series of
French classics, which is one of the glories of
French bibliography, has recently appeared.1
Nearly the whole of the first volume is occupied by
an elaborate Introduction, in which all the literary
facts necessary for the full understanding of
Pascal's position are brought together. Then
comes a presumably immaculate text accompanied
by an ample array of critical and explanatory notes,
the Thoughts themselves being so arranged in
sections as to exhibit themselves to the best logical
advantage ; and the whole is completed by what is
rare in French books, an excellent index. So far
as externals go, we cannot expect that this splendid
and sombre genius will ever make a better appear-
ance before the world than in M. Leon Brunschvicg's
edition.

Pascal's apologetics are as obsolete as his satire
on the Jesuits is fresh and living. The Higher
Criticism has ruined his theory of Christian
evidences. Evolution has ruined his theory of the

1 The references in this essay are to this edition.

PASCAL'S WAGER 153

Fall. And what some modern mathematicians
defend with arguments no more solid than his
would not have been recognised by him as the true
faith. But one, at least, of his points has secured
an undying literary interest from the extraordinary
energy and passion with which the case is put
rather than from any peculiar ingenuity or origin-
ality in the thought itself. This is the argument
of the wager to which I have already referred.

It runs as follows. Speaking by the light of
nature, says Pascal, God, supposing him to exist,
must be out of relation to ourselves. Being
without parts or limits, he is infinitely incomprehen-
sible. We can neither know what he is, nor even
that he is. This admission goes beyond that form
of modern Agnosticism according to which we
can say with certainty that the Unknowable exists,
but not what it is. And, of course, it goes very
far beyond Herbert Spencer's affirmation of an
Unknowable which is infinite, eternal, an energy,
and the cause of all things. But we are not to
take so sceptical a confession as defining Pascal's
own position. Being a Christian, he has other
sources of information than the light of nature.
His supposed sceptic — who turns out to be a very
real sceptic with a place in French literary history
— has none. But the sceptic's ignorance cuts both
ways. It leaves the non-existence of God as un-
certain as his existence. Reason supplies no
means of choosing between the two alternative
possibilities. Nevertheless, we are obliged to back
one side or the other, to play at a game of hazard
in which, at an infinite distance, heads or tails will
turn up. " But," answers the sceptic, " I do not

154 PASCAL'S WAGER

want to play at all ; in such a doubtful case as what
you describe prudence bids us abstain." To which
Pascal replies : " You must bet ; you are in for it ;
it does not depend on your will." For as his Port
Royalist editors put it, in an elucidatory addition
to the text, " Not to bet is to bet for the non-
existence of God."

Plato observes, in the Republic, that he " hardly
ever met a mathematician who could reason "
(531 E). So, at least, Jowett translates the passage
— not, perhaps, without a spice of malice. Accord-
ing to some, the word he uses (StaAeKrticot) does
not exactly imply what we mean by ability to
reason. But I think it will be admitted to imply
the power so signally displayed by Plato himself
in the Parmenides — the power, that is, of exhaus-
tively enumerating the possible issues in a given
question, and of deducing the necessary conse-
quences in each instance. And it seems to me
that, whatever may be the case with modern
mathematicians as a class, Pascal shows himself
remarkably deficient in that sort of dialectical
ability — so much so, indeed, as to ruin the basis
of his whole argument at the very start. The
deficiency may or may not be connected with
his great mathematical genius ; anyhow it is
there.

Why must I bet ? No reason whatever is given,
but it needs only a very slight acquaintance with
the dogmatic Christianity of Pascal's time to supply
what he leaves unsaid. To be saved man must
believe positively in the existence of God ; to leave
it an open question is to incur the same penalty as
complete atheism — that is, eternal damnation.

PASCAL'S WAGER 155

Here we come at once on a flagrant self-contra-
diction, which, even if it stood alone, would leave
the sceptic triumphant. Pascal began by saying
that God, as infinite, is unrelated to us (il n' a nul
rapport a nous). But, if so, he can neither save
nor damn us : our future fate has nothing to do
with his existence or non-existence, still less with
our opinion or absence of opinion on the subject.

I do not profess to know much about the turf ;
but I strongly suspect that anyone who had such
loose notions as Pascal about the laws of betting,
if he acted on them, would soon be cleared out of
every penny he possessed — that is, supposing his
ignorance to be real ; while, if it were assumed for
the purpose of eluding payment, he would before
long find himself turned off every race-course in
England.

However, we will let that pass. We will
suppose that the words " out of relation " slipped
in by an unfortunate oversight, and would have
been deleted had the author lived to see his work
through the press ; noting, however, that they
were allowed to stand by the logicians of Port
Royal, who otherwise made free enough with his
manuscript. Let it be granted as not impossible
that the infinite Being, if he exist, is no other than
the God of Catholicism. But there is a long way
from possibility to certainty, and Pascal himself
has warned us that the knowledge, if any, of God's
existence is quite distinct from the knowledge of
his attributes. Assuming there to be a God, that
bare fact leaves us in absolute ignorance about his
character. Now it might fairly be contended that
the number of different characters which may

156 PASCAL'S WAGER

possibly be ascribed to an infinite being is infinite,
and even infinite in the second degree on account
of the possible permutations and combinations of
attributes. Accordingly, the conditions of the
wager must be altered. Pascal has appealed to
the light of reason, and to reason he must go.
Apart from objective evidence, of which there is
at present no question, the chances against his
theology's being true are at least infinity to one.

It is, however, on the cards that Pascal, admit-
ting so much, might still maintain that a man of
sense was justified in staking his life on the exist-
ence of God. In order to make this clear we must
examine the conditions of the wager.

" If you win," he tells us, " you win everything ;
if you lose, you lose nothing." In the more con-
crete language of religious belief, if there is a God
and you have faith in his promises you gain ever-
lasting felicity ; if there is no God, death ends all.
It is not precisely explained what is meant by
staking your life; but, as Pascal is addressing him-
self to a careless worldling, he must be supposed
to mean what such a person would call " life " — that
is to say, an existence of sensual and social enjoy-
ment. The author of the Thoughts would not admit
that the abandonment of such a life involved any
real sacrifice ; and so far the serious moralist of
any religion or of no religion would not be disposed
to quarrel with him. But in fact, as we shall see
presently, there is much more involved — certainly
more than the sage who finds life "very tolerable
without its amusements " is prepared to give up.

Of course no Christian, and Pascal less than
another, believes that eternal felicity can be won as

PASCAL'S WAGER 157

the fruit of such a cold-blooded calculation, such
brutal cynicism, to use M. Sully Prudhomme's
blunt phrase,1 as would seem to be implied by the
aleatory proceeding recommended. Simply as a
bet it would, to the Searcher of all hearts, be no
more than the celebrated short prayer, " O God, if
there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul !"
In fact, it is only the first step towards acquiring
a genuine conviction. And Pascal does not leave
us in doubt about the second step. His sceptic is
made to reply : " I fully acknowledge the force of
your reasoning. But is there no way of seeing the
faces of the cards?" "Yes, there are the Scrip-
tures, etc." " But what if I am so constituted that
I cannot believe?" "Do what others in your
position have done before. Act as if you believed ;
take holy water, attend Mass, etc. The natural
effect of all that will be to make you believe, and
to stupify you (vous abetira)." " But that is just
what I am afraid of." " Why so? What have you
to lose?"

I do not think that such a method would com-
mend itself to the ingenuous mind of Mr. Hardy's
rustic. I fear Coggan would " hate a feller " who
submitted to such a degradation " for the sake of
getting to heaven." Even the Port Royal editors
were ashamed to print this precious advice, soften-
ing it down into a harmless recommendation to
imitate the conduct of believers. Victor Cousin
was the first to publish the words as they were
originally written. That brilliant rhetorician was
neither a deep nor a sincere thinker ; but he still

1 In his article entitled " Le Sens et la Port^e du Pari de Pascal,"
in the Revue des Deux Mondes of November i5th, 1890.

1 5« PASCAL'S WAGER

retained some respect for truth and reason. He
asked, Was that, then, the last word of human
wisdom, and can we only approach the supreme
Intelligence by the sacrifice of our own? But
nowadays, among orthodox Frenchmen, Victor
Cousin would pass for a dangerous character — an
"intellectual." M. Brunschvicg defends Pascal
by putting a sense on his words which they will
not bear. S'abetir, he tells us, means no more
than that we should get rid of the prejudices which
stand in the way of faith. Surely, if so great a
writer wanted to say this, he had command enough
of the French language to say it for himself. A
course of dogmatic theology, however disagreeable,
would, one might suppose, be more effective against
rationalistic prejudices than a course of holy water.
Pascal was a shrewd observer, and understood the
effect of mechanical devotion better, perhaps, than
his apologist. One need only study the faces in a
Bavarian Corpus Domini procession or at a Breton
Pardon to see what " abetissement " means.

Besides a natural if sinful objection to part with
his reason, the sceptic has still a difficulty. The
hope of salvation is all very well, but against the
happiness it gives we have to set the fear of hell.
To which Pascal replies, sensibly enough from his
point of view : Which has more reason to fear it,
he who remains in ignorance if there be a hell,
with the certainty of being damned if there is one,
or he who is certainly persuaded of its existence,
with the hope of being saved if it does exist?

This is a very important passage. Both Ernest
Havet, in his notes to the Pensees, and M. Sully
Prudhomme, in his essay on the wager, have

PASCAL'S WAGER 159

assumed, as not needing discussion, that backing
the wrong side involves not only the loss of eternal
felicity, but also the positive payment of an infinite
penalty under the form of everlasting torment. A
more recent critic, however, repudiates their inter-
pretation. The eminent philosopher M. Lachelier,
writing in the Revue Philosophique* declares per-
emptorily that hell has no place in the wager. As
the terms are first stated it certainly is not men-
tioned ; but to insist on the omission seems more like
a lawyer than a philosopher. And even from the
strictly legal point of view M. Lachelier's contention
seems unjustifiable. In drawing out the full signi-
ficance of the wager we have a right to interpret
its conditions in the light of its author's known and
unconcealed opinions about the future fate of un-
believers. To say that I am obliged to bet must
mean that my refusal would entail the same conse-
quences as if I betted against God's existence and
lost. And that must be more than the mere priva-
tion of eternal felicity, for so much the sceptic is
already prepared to face with equanimity. Besides,
when he asks to see the faces of the cards played
Pascal refers him to Scripture for information ; and
we know that in the eyes of a seventeenth-century
Catholic Scripture consigns the infidel to eternal
torment.

One is almost ashamed to labour so obvious a
point. But it is a question of some interest why
the chance of damnation is left to be inferred when
it might have been made to figure with such
tremendous effect in the wager as originally stated.

1 June, 1901, p. 625.

160 PASCAL'S WAGER

I apprehend that the reason is one of simple polite-
ness. Pascal, as Walter Pater reminds us,1 was a
gentleman ; and the sceptic for whose benefit he
started the whole idea of making the supreme
verities a subject of betting was also a gentleman
and a dear friend of his, the Chevalier de Mere, a
man of the world, and apparently, like others of the
kind, a gamester. That is why Pascal addresses
him in terms borrowed from the favourite amuse-
ment of his class ; and that is also, I suggest, why
he spares him words not suited to polite ears.
Both, however, understand perfectly what the truth
of the Catholic theory would imply. A losing
bettor not only misses infinite happiness, but has
to pay the stakes by suffering infinite misery. And
with great tact the first reference to this unpleasant
aspect of the wager is put into the mouth, not of
the Christian advocate, but of the hesitating sceptic.
Mere, not Pascal, is made responsible for intro-
ducing it into the discussion. To convince our-
selves that the softening down of the risk incurred
by infidelity is a mere concession to the rules of per-
sonal politeness, we need only turn to the passages
where Pascal has to deal with mankind in general.
Here the loss of felicity is not mentioned as a
motive for belief. With his usual and incompar-
able splendour of rhetoric, he describes death as
infallibly destined to place the impious and in-
different under the horrible necessity of submitting
either to eternal annihilation or to eternal misery,
without knowing which of these eternities has been
prepared for them for ever.2 And this alternative,

1 Works, VIII., p. 63. » II., p. 121.

PASCAL'S WAGER 161

such as it is, must not be thought of as existing
objectively in the nature of things, or rather in the
unknown purposes of Providence, but subjectively
in the reasonable apprehensions of the doubter.

Judged by Jesuit or modern Ultramontane
standards, the author of the Provinciates and the
Pensees may have been a heretic. But he was far
too good a Catholic to entertain for a moment the
idea that hell could mean annihilation. He speaks
ad hominem. If you are right in your unbelief,
you will cease to exist at death ; if you are wrong,
you will certainly be tormented for ever.

So much being established, let us return to the
wager and its implications. It was presented under
the form of an even chance, with nothing to lose
(except one's reason) on the one event, and every-
thing to gain on the other. One is struck by the sus-
picious resemblance to a plea sometimes advanced
for trying a quack remedy. It may do good, and
it can't do harm. Now, in the case of a drug about
which we know nothing — for the modesty of that
" may do good " is really a confession of complete
ignorance — the possibility of harm is precisely
measured by the possibility of benefit. For us the
chances are equal, because neither event is any-
thing more than a chance. And an attentive
examination shows that Pascal's reasoning suffers
from the same fatal flaw.

From respect for so great a name two enormous
assumptions have been let pass. We withdrew
our objection to the logical impossibility that a
Being out of all relation to man can affect man's
future fate. And we accepted as an even chance
the infinitesimally small probability that an infinite

M

162 PASCAL'S WAGER

personality, supposing it to exist, has exactly the
character of the God in whom Jansenist Catholics
believed. But our concessions must end here.
What security has Mere that in accepting the
wager he sacrifices no more than his reason and
the healthy enjoyment of life? " You have," says
his friend, " the word of God." Is that so certain ?
or is it a sufficient guarantee ? It will not do to
call the question blasphemous, for our moralist has
imbued us with the idea that truth is a matter of
geography, and we know what the Nicene Creed
would be called across the straits of Gibraltar.

Here we have the nemesis of agnosticism as a
method of faith. A universal solvent is created
and then poured into some consecrated chalice in
the ingenuous expectation that the holy vessel will
resist its corrosive action. In a series of brilliant
aphorisms congealing the loose and lazy scepticisms
of Montaigne into a hailstorm of diamond-pointed
epigrams, Pascal had denounced the supposed
eternal laws of human morality as a set of arbitrary
expedients, varying from country to country, and
merely intended to win respect for the authority of
their princes. From such a discordant medley of
customs no fixed moral standard or natural system
of ethics can be elicited. Still less can our ideas
of what is right and good be applied to the criticism
of God's ways with man. Anterior to revelation
we cannot predicate morality, more than any other
attribute, of the infinite Being ; nor can a self-
revealing Deity be expected to act in conformity
with human notions of right and wrong when those
notions are not conformable with one another.

Pascal accepts the consequences of his sceptical

PASCAL'S WAGER 163

theology with cynical candour. " What," he
exclaims, "can be more opposed to our wretched
rules of justice than the eternal damnation of a
child without any will of its own for a sin in which
it seems to have had so little share that it was com-
mitted six thousand years before the said child
came into existence?"1 In fact, moral distinctions
are created by God ; and " the sole reason why sins
are sins is that they are contrary to his will."2
Were the whole human race to be eternally damned,
God would stand acquitted of injustice.3

Nevertheless, with an inconsistency not un-
common among sceptics Pascal recognises one
kind of moral obligation as universally binding,
so much so as even to impose itself on God in his
relations to man. And that is the obligation of
keeping a promise. It is mentioned quite naively
as a self-evident truth, valid apparently on both
sides of the Pyrenees. " There is a reciprocal duty

between God and man God is bound to fulfil

his promises."4 If we have backed the winning
card, the stakes will be honestly paid.

I know not what answer the Chevalier de Mere
made to the aleatory apologetics of his illustrious
friend ; but his conversion was delayed so long as
probably to have been effected by considerations of
a different order. He might well have required a
better security for the divine fidelity than Pascal's
guarantee. It seems rather rash to infer that,
because a gentleman keeps his word and pays his
debts of honour, the Jansenist God will. A Being
who is wholly unaccountable may mean something

1 II., p. 348. 2 in., p. 104. 3 I., p. 125.
* in., pp. 277-8.

164 PASCAL'S WAGER

different from what he says, or the exact opposite,
or nothing at all. An irresponsible despot is
generally not less remarkable for perfidy than for
cruelty. He who predestines little children to
eternal damnation may quite possibly be reserving
the Sisters of Port Royal for the same fate. We
were told that the whole human race might justly
be sent to hell, and how do we know that the full
divine right may not after all be exercised. " We
have the word of a King for our Church, and of a
King who was never worse than his word." Such
was the confident answer of the English Bishops to
those who suspected the intentions of James II.
History tells how their credulity was rewarded.

What is more, Pascal's interpretation of Scripture
goes to prove that deceit and treachery are among
the revealed attributes of his God. A particularly
nauseous quality of that personage is that, not
content with exercising his undoubted privilege of
damning human beings at sight, he tries to manu-
facture a colourable pretext for their condemnation
by introducing difficulties into the Bible. " There
is obscurity enough to blind the reprobate, and
clearness enough to make them inexcusable."1
" Do you suppose that the prophecies quoted in
the New Testament are mentioned to make you
believe? No, it is to prevent you from believing."1
The whole Jewish people were purposely blinded
to the real meaning of the Messianic prophecies in
order that their rejection of Jesus Christ might
render them unsuspected witnesses to the authen-
ticity of the evidentiary documents committed to

1 in., P. 23- • HI., P. is-

PASCAL'S WAGER 165

their charge. Had they accepted the gospel, it
might have been said that they had forged the
predictions by which its supernatural origin is
attested, and of whose antiquity their word is the
sole guarantee.1

It would surprise me to learn that there was any
greater distortion of truth and justice in the
casuistry of Escobar than in the sophistry of his
Jansenist satirist. And the Jesuits, if they erred,
had at least the excuse of erring on the side of
mercy. They constructed fire-escapes where Pascal
opens oubliettes.

Our only knowledge of God, our only proof that
there is a God, comes through the Messianic
prophecies of the Old Testament and their fulfil-
ment in Jesus Christ. But it is of the very essence
of these prophecies to be ambiguous and mislead-
ing. We asked to be shown the cards with which
that awful game for our soul's salvation is being
played "at an infinite distance," and our wish has
been gratified : the cards are no other than the
pages of Scripture. And now we learn that their
colour and value depend entirely on the inscrutable
will of the dealer. He can call black red and a
king a knave. He can change trumps at pleasure
and count an ace as eleven points or as one. That
is how his antitype, Napoleon, played chess,
moving the pieces just as he liked, regardless of
rules. Our Ariel-souled thinker constructs a God
meaner if not more malignant than the Setebos of
Caliban, in that wonderful study of Robert Brown-
ing's which is also such a scathing satire on the

1 II., p. 16 ff.

166 PASCAL'S WAGER

creed of his youth. Granting that such a person
exists, our conduct cannot be affected one way or
the other by the fact. Being unable to take his
word for anything, we are exactly in the same
position as if he had never spoken. Perhaps after
all he is less amenable to the charms of adulation
and submission than his more abject adorers would
have us believe. Our moral superiority over him
may at last make its ascendancy felt. Possibly in
that case his first impulse would be to wreak
vengeance on the reptile souls who sought to
stupefy their reason by the copious use of masses
and holy water. Then we who never stooped to
that degradation will intercede with the converted
Moloch for the shivering wretches, who may
escape with no worse penalty than transmigration
into the bodies of apes.

Briefly, then, the existence of an infinite Being
out of relation to ourselves cannot possibly influence
our future fate. In the absence of positive evidence
it remains infinitely improbable that an infinite
Being actively related to us should have a character
identical with that of the Jansenist deity. Assum-
ing such a deity to exist, the chances are precisely
equal that he will or that he will not behave towards
us in any particular manner. Therefore, so far as
theology goes, Mere is rationally justified in adopt-
ing the line of conduct that seems most agreeable
to his own desires. When the door of death opens
it is even betting whether the lady or the tiger will
receive him.

Metaphor apart, no revelation can be of any
practical value unless it is assumed to come from a
person whose word we can trust. But the veracity

PASCAL'S WAGER 167

of God is only guaranteed by his general moral
perfection, and such perfection can only be con-
ceived as the consummation of human goodness.
But goodness includes justice as known to us by
earthly examples, and these, according to Pascal
himself, forbid us to believe that innocent little
children can merit eternal torments — or, we may
add, that Mere could merit them for honestly using
his reason to find out the truth, or even the judges
of Galileo for suppressing it. In theology the
method of Descartes is a surer guide than the
method of Montaigne.

The idea of accepting Christianity (understood in
an orthodox sense) as a probability which seems
safer to believe than to disbelieve has been traced
back to Arnobius, from whom Pascal is supposed
to have derived it through Raymond Sebond, whose
Natural Theology he had certainly read. But the
after fortunes of the argument are more interesting
than its origin. It had the singular good fortune
to be taken up by Butler and made the very
keynote of his Analogy, whence it passed to the
leaders of the Tractarian Movement, betraying
its inherent weakness by the conflicting interpre-
tations respectively put on it by Newman and
Keble.

I do not know whether Butler had or had not
read Pascal ; but his theory of probability as applied
to the evidences of Christianity is a distinct improve-
ment on the wager, in so far as it encourages
instead of abolishing the use of reason. On the
other hand, his appeal to the most degrading of all
" pragmatic " motives is considerably more explicit,
and will hardly be denied even by the most

168 PASCAL'S WAGER

unscrupulous of apologists. After detailing the
arguments for revealed religion based on the per-
formance of miracles and the fulfilment of
prophecy, he shows an uneasy consciousness of
their insufficiency, but urges as a make-weight
that " a mistake on the one side may be, in its con-
sequences, much more dangerous than a mistake
on the other."1 Butler alleges, it is true, that he
gives this ominous warning, not to influence the
judgment, but the practice, of his readers. The
distinction, however, is not easy to grasp, nor is
any attempt made to illustrate it. If his sole object
was to strengthen the motives for virtuous action
irrespective of creed, he ought to have made his
meaning plainer. Many of the Deists would have
agreed with him in recommending a high and pure
standard of morality, while deprecating the attempt
to compromise it by a reference to selfish hopes or
fears. In any case, judgment and practice cannot
be isolated from one another, nor made amenable
to different orders of motives, least of all when we
are discussing a creed most of whose advocates
consider that a man is morally responsible for his
belief. It is difficult not to think that Butler knew
this, although he avoids committing himself to an
open use of the argument ad terrorem. Nor will
any reservation make his theoretical assumption
anything but a gross fallacy. There is no safe
side in religion, for there is no experience to show
where safety lies. To seek safety may, for aught
we know, be the most dangerous, as it is certainly
the most pusillanimous, of choices.

1 Analogy, Part II., chap, vii., sub fin.

PASCAL'S WAGER 169

In the controversy between theology and ration-
alism it requires a greater effort of abstraction than
most minds are capable of to grasp this possibility,
and to appreciate its bearing on the aleatory method
of belief. And as between Roman Catholicism and
the various Protestant sects all doubt would vanish.
The superior safety of belonging to the Church
which alone claimed to monopolise the means of
salvation was constantly urged as a motive for sub-
mitting to its pretensions, and proved, in fact, a
most efficacious method of proselytism. Henry of
Navarre is said to have put the argument in a
particularly pointed form. The Protestant divines
whom he consulted on the subject reluctantly
admitted that he might be saved if he became a
Catholic. The Catholic divines told him without
hesitation that he would certainly be damned if he
remained a Protestant. He therefore chose that
side which, by universal agreement, offered the best
prospect of escaping from perdition. What the
great King had offered, more than half in irony,
as an excuse for his politic apostasy was accepted
in deadly earnest by many persons of quality in
England under Charles I. as a reason for deserting
the cause of the Reformation. Charles II. 's death-
bed conversion was probably dictated by the same
motive ; and, if so, it offers a crowning example of
the adroit opportunism by which his whole life was
guided. In this as in other respects the ablest of
all the Stuarts bore a close resemblance to his
grandfather, the ablest of the Bourbons. When
Butler wrote the danger from Rome had greatly
diminished, but had not wholly disappeared, as we
learn from Neal's History of the Puritans (1732)

170 PASCAL'S WAGER

and Middleton's Free Inquiry (I747).1 It is there-
fore rather surprising that he did not observe what
consequences might be drawn from an argument,
perhaps derived from Pascal, in favour of Pascal's
creed.

If English churchmen did not draw the logical
consequences of their greatest champion's apologetic
method, their escape is due not only to the happy
inconsistency of the theological intellect, but also
to the pervasive influence of eighteenth-century
rationalism, extending as it did far beyond the
small circle of avowed freethinkers. Whatever
else Englishmen might believe, their own Deists
and the Voltairean movement abroad gradually
convinced them that Popery was a superstition too
absurd for even a Frenchman to accept — destined
to speedy extinction, Horace Walpole thought, if
the ill-advised abrogation of our penal laws had
not given it a new lease of life. It would have
surprised the dilettante of Strawberry Hill to hear
that his own experiments in Gothic architecture
had rather more to do with the dreaded revival of
mediaeval faith than the repeal of some obsolete
statutes. Anyhow, by accident or otherwise, he
proved a true prophet. Whether as grim wolf or
good shepherd, two centuries after Lycidas Rome
once more put in play the arts against which
Milton had raised his warning voice. Or rather
the natural magnetism exercised by the larger on
the smaller body acted without the help of any
direct proselytism on the part of Jesuits or others
to disintegrate the Church of England and to draw

1 The date of the Analogy is 1736.

PASCAL'S WAGER 171

its detached fragments into the central orb of
Christendom.

Now it is interesting to note that in this process
the method of Pascal and Butler played an im-
portant part, and was appealed to with confidence
by both parties, by those who clung to the Via
Media of Anglicanism and by those who scorned it
as an illogical compromise between the right way
and the wrong.

Cardinal Newman briefly refers to Butler's
doctrine of probability as the guide of life as that
whence his own theory of faith took its rise. Keble
treats it at much greater length, and in particular
connection with the issue on which he and his
greater friend parted company in a very interesting
but little read document, the preface to his Sermons,
Academical and Occasional, published in 1847,
soon after Newman's secession.

The principle in question is stated as follows :
" In practical matters of eternal import, the safer
way is always to be preferred, even though the
excess of seeming evidence may tell in any degree
on the opposite side. Thus, if one mode of acting
imply that there is an eternity and another con-
tradict it the tremendous, overwhelming interest

at stake ought to determine a man's conduct to the
affirmative side. He should act, in spite of seem-
ing evidence, as if eternity were true."1

Keble had not the same lingering regard for
truth as such that still distinguished Butler ; and
the context clearly shows that " acting" means not
merely conformity to Christian ethics, but also that

1 Op. tit., p. 6.

i72 PASCAL'S WAGER

adhesion to the Catholic creed which, in the
supposed circumstances, some, among whom the
present writer is one, would call, in plain language,
cowardly and deceitful.

Fortunately, or rather inevitably, systematised
immorality is suicidal ; and a recent incident has
reminded us that when sailors fall into a panic they
are apt to fire into their own ships.1 Keble very
frankly admits that " the principles of Butler and
Pascal " cannot be limited to " the controversy with
unbelievers."2 And if personally he had been
disposed so to limit them, Newman would not have
allowed him to stop short. So he proceeds to
state the argument for going over to Rome in
terms which I shall not transcribe, as they are
substantially identical with the Bourbon argument
(white plume argument, let us call it) already
quoted.

Keble's way of getting out of it is amazing, and
practically amounts to an abandonment of the
whole principle. It is that " the argument put in
this form proves too much, for it would equally
show that Puritanism or Mahometanism, or the
ancient Donatism, or any other exclusive system,
is the safer way."3 And he also goes on to remark,
rather late in the day, that there seems to be some-
thing "cold and ungenerous" about the method —
in short, what we call mean. Accordingly, it is to
be reserved for the exclusive benefit of unbelievers,

1 The reference is to the Dogger Bank incident of October
22nd, 1904, when Admiral Rozhdestvensky mistook the Hull
trawlers for Japanese torpedo-boats. On that occasion some of
the Russian ships are reported to have suffered from the mis-
directed fire of their consorts.

* Op. cit., pp. 7, 8. 3 Op. tit., p. 14.

PASCAL'S WAGER 173

and not mentioned in controversies among Chris-
tians. But we have seen that as against un-
believers the probabilist method is quite invalid.
When the factor of inscrutable and irresponsible
omnipotence has been introduced into our calcula-
tions the adoption of one particular alternative
becomes no more advisable than the adoption of
another. Whatever creed we profess or reject, the
chances of our being saved or lost remain precisely
equal. For a Being who is morally capable of
damning us at all is capable of damning us for
taking him at his word. Nor has the orthodox
believer any right to charge those who advance
such an argument with irreverence or flippancy.
To the God whose existence he assumes their
reasoning mayappear perfectly reverent and serious.
Pascal's method was destined to one more
singular development before it silently took its
place among the obsolete weapons of religious
controversy. With the collapse of the Tractarian
Movement the rationalistic movement which it had
temporarily arrested returned in a flood, and before
many years had passed became predominant at
Oxford, at least among her more serious and intel-
lectual residents. To meet this new danger Mansel
delivered his famous Bampton Lectures in 1858.
He does not, I think, ever mention the argument
ad terrorem, but he follows Pascal in denying that
our moral distinctions are applicable to the pro-
ceedings of an infinite Being about whose real
nature we are totally ignorant ; and he follows
Butler in contending that every other system is
open to as many objections as Christianity, or rather
as his own particular version of Christianity.

174 PASCAL'S WAGER

Mansel was hailed by his admirers as a second
Butler ; but the reception of his work by the intel-
lectual public generally showed that such methods
had passed out of date. I question whether, in the
controversy that it provoked, a single name of dis-
tinction is to be found on his side. Against him were
such writers as F. D. Maurice, James Martineau,
R. H. Hutton, and Professor Goldwin Smith.
Herbert Spencer, accepting his premises, pushed
them to the length of an Agnosticism which
absolutely excluded belief in revealed religion, and
reduced natural religion to the most attenuated of
abstractions. But the most resounding stroke of
all came from John Stuart Mill. In the course of
his destructive attack on the philosophy of Mansel's
teacher, Sir William Hamilton, the great thinker
and moralist, then at the very height of his fame
and power, turned aside to tear up the flimsy
pretences under which the Bampton Lecturer on
the Limits of Religious Thoughts had attempted to
eliminate morality from religion. Pascal is not
named ; but here at last Pascal's method receives
its final quietus. Convince me, says Mill, that the
world is ruled by an infinite Being of whom I
know nothing except that his proceedings are
incompatible with the highest human morality,
" and I will bear my fate as I may. But there is one
thing he shall not do : he shall not compel me to
worship him. I will call no being good who is not
what I mean when I apply that epithet to my
fellow creatures ; and if such a being can sentence
me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go."1

1 Examination of Sir W. Hamilton** Philosophy, p. 124 (3rd ed.).

PASCAL'S WAGER 175

Mansel sneeringly forbore " to comment on the
temper and taste of this declamation."1 But what
he said or did not say mattered equally little. The
ghastly idol had fallen and fallen forever.

It has been said by some who are in full sympathy
with Mill's contention that the sentiment here
expressed, however admirable, is irreconcilable
with his utilitarian ethics. I am not so sure of
that. The moral degradation of worshipping an
omnipotent demon through eternity might con-
ceivably be more painful than any punishment in
the demon's power to inflict. Or, on finding him-
self defied, he might "tak' a thought and men'" —
to the great increase of the general felicity. But
there seems a sort of pedantry about such con-
siderations. If the supreme ironies are partly
serious, supreme seriousness may well be a little
ironical. There is such a phrase as " I bet you all
to nothing," and as the language of the gaming-
table has once been introduced it may here be
appropriately used as best describing Mill's position.
There is no more than an infinitesimally small
chance that Mansel's non-moral theology may be
true ; but neither on that chance nor on any other
will a high-principled human soul forfeit its self-
respect.

My object has been to show that to incur either
intellectual or moral degradation on a calculation
of selfish interest would be not only mean, but
unavailing. For with the limitation of our know-
ledge assumed by the theologians who appeal to
such motives there is no safe side, the chances

1 Philosophy of the Conditioned, p. 168.

176 PASCAL'S WAGER

either way being precisely equal whatever attitude
towards the hidden arbiter of our destiny we
assume. It remains, then, that our conduct should
be determined by considerations equally applicable
whether the supernatural does or does not exist.

BUCKLE AND THE ECONOMICS OF
KNOWLEDGE

IT seems at first sight like a satire on the teaching
of Henry Thomas Buckle that, nearly twenty years
after his death,1 public interest should be more
attracted by the pettiest details of his personal life
than by the intellectual achievements but for which
those details would never have been recorded, or,
had they been recorded, would never have been
studied. It might be urged that this was just the
sort of gossip from which he desired to set history
free, and to substitute for it an inquiry into the
general laws by which men's actions in their totality
are determined. Yet many of these details strik-
ingly illustrate a peculiar and neglected aspect of
his philosophy. For he held that moral and affec-
tional motives are all-powerful with the individual,
although exercising an inappreciable influence on
masses of men acting together. Accordingly he
considered that much which ought not to find a
place in history might very properly be relegated
to biography, regarding the latter, indeed, as not
susceptible of scientific treatment. His life, then,
if it does not verify his entire philosophy, at least
does not contradict it. It may also be taken as
confirming and deepening the personal impression
made long ago on his more sympathetic readers.
There are passages in the History of Civilisation

1 Written in 1880.

'77 N

i;8 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

which show plainly enough that Buckle was full
of deep tenderness and ardent enthusiasm. But
without Mr. Huth's biography1 we should not have
known how thoroughly good a man he was. Every
page exhibits him to us as a genial companion, a
judicious adviser, a devoted friend. But we learn
little more about his peculiar cast of intellect than
that he had a memory even greater, if possible,
than Macaulay's. For the rest, nothing that Mr.
Huth has published tends to elucidate the causes,
whether general or special, which made his philo-
sophy what it was. Fortunately, however, the
information required for that purpose is easily
accessible. Next after his country, parentage, and
early associations, Buckle's true antecedents and
environment are to be found in the school of
thought to which for the most part he belonged.
The object of this essay is to show what tendencies
he represented, and in what particular directions
he attempted to work them out.

The English thought of the last half century, so
far as it is really English and not a revival of old
dogmas or an importation from the Continent, has
been, under its most general aspect, a philosophy
of freedom, individuality, spontaneity, experiment-
alism. Foreign observers often take it, superficially
enough, for mere empiricism — the fit expression of
a national character which they persist in regarding
as narrow, selfish, and materialistic, incapable of
wide ideas or of lofty aspirations. That such a
people should also have created the richest poetic
literature of modern times is an anomaly which

1 Life of T. H. Buckle. By Alfred Henry Huth. Two vols.
London, 1880.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 179

they do not feel called upon to explain. Perhaps
a little reflection would show them that our art and
our philosophy, so far from being opposed, are
products of the same imaginative genius working
in different directions. It would then be under-
stood that, if we appeal to experience, the enlarge-
ment and not the limitation of knowledge is what
we have most at heart ; and that our utilitarianism
is not the substitution of a low for a high standard,
but of a progressive for a stationary, a social for a
personal morality. Moreover, the English habit
of individual liberty combines with the restless
English imagination in leading our foremost minds
to adopt whatever abstract theories offer the widest
scope to spontaneity, to freedom of enterprise, to
variety of choice. It was his thorough compre-
hension of this tendency and the consistent manner
in which he brought it to bear on speculation that
qualified John Stuart Mill to be for so many years
the leader of English thought. His Essay on
Liberty only expresses more briefly and clearly the
fundamental aim of his larger works, which was
to show that existing beliefs and customs, resting
as they did on experience, might be superseded
by a wider experience. He has told us himself
that this was the aim of his Logic ; and the drift
of his Political Economy is evidently to exalt as
much as possible the part played by free and
conscious human agency in the distribution of
wealth. That the system of Herbert Spencer is
from beginning to end a philosophy of liberty
and individualism need only be stated to be per-
ceived. We know from his own declaration that
the whole series of works composing it were

i8o BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

undertaken with a view to its ethical conclusion, and
we know also that his ethical ideal is a society
where the component parts interfere to the least
possible extent with one another. Thinkers of a
more limited scope are dominated by a similar
tendency. Charles Darwin has, so to speak, pro-
jected the experimental method into nature, and
shown that it is the condition not only of scientific
progress, but of all vital progress whatever. Spon-
taneous variation and natural selection correspond
exactly to repeated trial and failure followed by
eventual success ; and among animals also those
families prosper most where there is most diversity
developed — in other words, where originality is
least trammeled. The same idea is present in
Alexander Bain's theory of voluntary action, which
offers a parallel to Darwin's theory of organic
evolution the more remarkable from its having
been worked out before the latter was published.
According to it, all sorts of movements are spon-
taneously set up by young creatures, and only
those muscular combinations survive in memory
that experience proves to be associated with
pleasurable feeling, or with relief from painful
feeling. Another instance of the prominence given
to experimental freedom by English thought is the
place which Stanley Jevons assigns to hypothesis
in his Principles of Science, particularly in the
chapter on " The Character of the Experimentalist,"
where it is very clearly explained that scientific
discoveries are not made by divination, but by
repeated guesses, most of which are utterly wrong.
The two greatest works of modern English his-
torical literature, Crete's Greece and Macaulay's

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 181

England, are both, but the former more especially,
pleadings in favour of political liberty. Even those
writers who, like Carlyle and Ruskin, on the whole
approve of despotism rather than of democracy
cannot avoid doing homage to the English spirit.
For the attraction of arbitrary power to Carlyle was
that it enabled exceptionally gifted individuals to
carry out their designs without let or hindrance ;
and Ruskin protests against machinery because it
destroys the personality of the workman, his free
initiative and spontaneous energy. Even the breezy
criticism of Matthew Arnold may be mentioned in
this connection as a help to the emancipation of
thought from routine methods and from party ties.
Finally, the English Positivists, while accepting
a Continental philosophy, distinguished for its
animosity to many forms of liberty, are so far faithful
to the traditions of their own country as to lay
special emphasis on that part of Comte's doctrine
which demands the liberation of the spiritual from
the temporal power.

This general tendency of English thought was
most fully accepted by Buckle. As a writer, love
of liberty was his ruling passion ; as a philosopher,
the idea of liberty was the centre of his system.
Although a devoted student, he preferred it even to
knowledge.

Liberty [he exclaims] is the one thing most essential
to the right development of mind and to the real
grandeur of nations. It is a product of knowledge
where knowledge advances in a healthy and regular
manner ; but if, under certain unhappy circumstances, it
is opposed by what seems to be knowledge, in God's
name let knowledge perish and liberty be preserved.
Liberty is not a means to an end, it is an end itself. To

182 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

secure it, to enlarge it, and to diffuse it should be the
main object of all social arrangements and of all political
contrivances.1

But the necessity for choosing between know-
ledge and liberty was not likely to present itself to
him in a practical form. Each was conducive to
the other ; each in its way was a realisation of
mind, an expression of inward spontaneous energy.
He conceived that the love of knowledge was,
equally with the love of wealth, inherent in man,
and was adequate to the production of all progress
when allowed free play by the presence of favourable
material conditions and the absence of artificial
restraints. This notion was, in truth, a generalisa-
tion from his own peculiar circumstances. The
elder Buckle had been engaged in business, and
had bequeathed a competence to his son which
enabled the latter to devote his whole time to
intellectual pursuits. Although averse from office-
work, he kept up the traditions of business and
carried them into philosophy. Political Economy
supplied a natural connection between the basis
and the superstructure of his existence. From that
science as from a centre all his other studies
branched out, and from it he borrowed the method
by which they were arranged. It was, then, quite
natural that he should look on Adam Smith as the
greatest man that Scotland had ever produced, and
on the Wealth of Nations as the most important
book ever published. He himself aspired to be
the Adam Smith of a still more comprehensive
science, and to found the Economics of Knowledge.

1 Miscellaneous Writings, I., 44-45.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 183

Buckle's opinions were formed at a time when
laisser-faire was the undisputed law of political
economy, and his early manhood coincided with
the stirring period of agitation for free trade — an
agitation in which we are told that the young
student was intensely interested. Thus at a very
early period his speculations were biassed by a
strong prejudice against governmental interference;
and his plan for extending the laws of wealth to
knowledge required that something analogous to
the protective system should be discovered in the
intellectual sphere. This is why Buckle tries to
bring bad government of every kind under the
heading of protectionism, and why he looks on
churches in particular as associations invested
with a kind of speculative monopoly, to the
great detriment of scientific industry. Anti-clerical
rather than anti-theological, his attitude is, in this
respect, exactly the reverse of that taken up by
Auguste Comte, who highly approved of ecclesias-
tical organisation, but wished to utilise it for a new
sort of teaching.

But, over a large part of the globe, human
intelligence had to contend with an even more
formidable enemy than the protective spirit — an
enemy, indeed, to whom the unconquerable perti-
nacity of that spirit was, in most instances, due.
Such was the point of view from which Buckle
regarded Nature. He speaks of her as carrying
on a perpetual warfare with man, sometimes
victorious, sometimes vanquished, but always
tending to thwart and drag him back to her own
level. It is astonishing that one who formulated
this fundamental antithesis so sharply, and who in

184 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

other respects has so frequently expressed his
adhesion to the popular metaphysics of the 'fifties,
should ever have been charged with materialism.
A notion has somehow gained currency that Buckle
proposed to deduce the history of every country
from its physical geography. Nothing could well
be more unlike the truth. He distinctly marks off
the regions where, in his phraseology, nature was
subordinated to man from those where man was
subordinated to nature ; and it was with the former
that, as a historian of civilisation, he was almost
exclusively concerned. The idea that human
beings and human societies are themselves natural
products had apparently never occurred to him.
This, however, was not for want of acquaintance
with the theory of evolution, the basis of which he
had fully accepted. Writing some years before the
appearance of the Origin of Species, he alludes to
fixity of species as an " old dogma " on which
successful attacks had already been made ;' and in
the same passage he assumes that phenomena of
every order have always been determined by their
own laws without any interference from without.
But he was averse from accepting the absolute
dependence of mind on brain, nor could he well
have done so consistently with his passionate faith
in its immortality. Hence his scornful doubt that
the human mind could be handed down like an
heirloom ;2 his opinion that the intellectual and
moral faculties do not improve ; and his deliberate

1 History of Civilisation in England, Vol. I., p. 806, note. The
references throughout this essay are to the original edition in two
volumes.

* Miscellaneous Writings, I., 17.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 185

omission of race from the physical conditions which
a historian has to consider. Even where he does
admit physical influences they are of a very indirect
character, and they are just those which would be
picked out by the economist and the literary student
rather than by the physiologist. Nature wars
against political liberty by producing over-popula-
tion, and so enabling landlords and capitalists to
concentrate all power in their own hands. She wars
against intellectual liberty by the multiplication
of extraordinary and terrifying phenomena which
stimulate the imagination at the expense of the
understanding. Buckle seems to have confounded
an originally rapid rate of increase in population
with its final increase up to or beyond the limit
of subsistence. Over-population is theoretically
possible under any conditions of climate, food, and
soil ; and it is not necessarily involved in one rate
of increase more than in another. The existence
of vast plains isolated from the rest of the world,
whether fertile or barren, seems a likelier cause of
despotism than any other that can be named ; while,
conversely, whatever geographical circumstances
are favourable to the development of several inde-
pendent national centres, near enough for active
intercourse with each other, but protected by natural
frontiers against mutual aggression, and similarly
situated with regard to the world at large — such
regions, in short, as Greece, the basin of the
Mediterranean, and Western Europe generally —
are also favourable to liberty. It would seem also
that the aspects of nature have much less to do with
superstitious beliefs than Buckle supposed. For
such beliefs were originally diffused over the whole

186 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

earth under very similar forms ; they have not
remained constantly associated with awe-inspiring
scenery ; and where such an association does exist,
as for instance in South America or the East Indies,
it can be better explained by difficulty of communi-
cation with the centres of enlightenment than by
any direct influence exercised on the imagination.

My object, however, is not so much to criticise
Buckle's views as to show in what modes of thought
they originated. And here we have a remarkable
verification of the guiding principle laid down
at starting. Following the true English method,
our philosopher construes universal history, not as
an organically connected whole, but as a great
collection of spontaneous experiments on the possi-
bility of human progress. Mind is scattered broad-
cast over the whole earth, but in only a few
instances does it meet with conditions favourable
to its development. Everywhere outside Europe
civilisation has been arrested, either because wealth
could not be accumulated at all, or because it could
not be diffused so widely among the masses as to
enable them to understand and act on the ideas put
forward by men of genius. In Europe a new set
of forces, historical instead of geographical, come
into play, and a series of eliminations bring
us at last to England as the only country where
mind has been able to manifest its inherent powers
of expansion on a scale wide enough to furnish
materials for determining the natural law of all
progress. By an equally ingenious train of reason-
ing Guizot proves that civilisation can best be
studied in France ; a country which Auguste
Comte, on quite different grounds, also erects into

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 187

the normal type of intellectual evolution. No
doubt the patriotic bias spoken of by Herbert
Spencer has something to do with these prefer-
ences ; but a deeper reason will be found in the
character impressed on every philosophy by the
social conditions under which it is framed. A
thinker who translates the ideas of his own nation
into abstract formula? will naturally find that this
same nation best satisfies the requirements of his
particular system. He may even extend the method
to particular periods, and imagine that the world
was never so enlightened as when his theory of
what it ought to be first became fixed.

Besides his patriotic feelings, there was probably
another strong motive which induced Buckle to
select a single country for the application of his
new method. This was the desire to simplify the
hypothetical science of history, which, but for some
such artifice, threatened to become unmanageably
complex and difficult. The same consideration
throws some light on his celebrated rejection of
morality as a factor in the progress of civilisation.
None of the author's theories provoked so much
hostile criticism at the time of their first publica-
tion, nor were any of them supported by such weak
and inconsistent arguments. It will perhaps be
worth while to glance at the principal assumptions
which those arguments involve. They are as
follows : (i) The innate moral dispositions do not
change ; (2) Moral truth is not progressive ; (3)
Innate disposition and knowledge between them
account for the whole of moral conduct ; (4) Moral
forces exercise no great or lasting effect on human
affairs. Of these four propositions three are refuted

i88 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

by the history of slavery alone. It was not always
known that slavery is wrong, nor, in fact, was it
always wrong ; the perception of its iniquity was
made more active by religious feeling ; and its
abolition was in great part due to the excitement
thus produced. With regard to the alleged station-
ariness of the innate moral dispositions — by which
term of course nothing more than sympathy need
be implied — everything goes to prove that on the
average civilised children are born with a better
nature than savage children, or than their own
remote ancestors. It is, however, conceivable that,
conceding the existence of moral progress, more
may have been done for human happiness by
purely intellectual progress. One great example
of a benefit due entirely to the latter is, according
to Buckle, the comparative infrequency of war in
modern times. His argument is a perfect nest of
fallacies. The stimulus given to war by intellectual
causes, such as individual genius and the adoption
of new beliefs by whole nations or sections of
nations, is entirely ignored. It is taken for granted
that the invention of gunpowder localised the
military spirit in a separate class and thereby
weakened it, whereas the localisation seems to
have been greater before gunpowder came into
general use;1 nor was it likely that war should
become less popular when its risks were confined
to a particular class than when they were shared by
the whole community. That national quarrels are
discouraged by the diffusion of sound economical
doctrine is doubtless true ; but the false doctrines

1 See Macaulay's Essay on Machiavelli.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 189

from which those quarrels formerly sprang were
equally intellectual forces, only made possible by a
great development of reflection. Buckle gives as
a reason for neglecting the influence of legislation
on progress, that the best laws are those which
have been passed for the repeal of bad ones ; he
does not consider how easily the same argument
might be turned against his own favourite theory
of social dynamics — a remark which applies equally
to that other great intellectual triumph, the decline
of religious persecution. For, so far, it is the most
intellectual religions that have been the most in-
tolerant ; and modern thought in winning liberty
has only won back what ancient thought enjoyed
everywhere except at Athens. Nor is this all.
Another influence adverse to war is, we are told, the
great increase of travelling due to the extension
of locomotion by steam. Different nations are
brought into closer contact with one another, their
mutual esteem is thereby increased, and their
hostile feelings are proportionately diminished.
Now, what is this mutual esteem if not a moral
motive, brought into play, indeed, by intellect, but
itself the determining antecedent? And, to make
the self-contradiction worse, we learn that the
reason why men's respect for each other grows
with their mutual intimacy is that the good in
human nature considerably outweighs the bad.
If so, what becomes of the position that virtue and
vice exactly balance and neutralise each other's
effects ?

Apart, however, from these obvious objections,
there is a deeper objection to the theory, which, so
far as I know, has never yet been pointed out —

190 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

namely, the indistinctness of the whole antithesis
between moral and intellectual laws. Buckle saw
clearly enough that duty is partly a matter of
knowledge, without seeing that all knowledge
must, as such, be intellectual ; and he altogether
failed to observe that the pursuit of science must
equally, as a mode of action, come under moral
laws. A life's devotion to the pursuit of truth
demands no inconsiderable amount of temperance
and courage ; while candour in dealing with the
opinions of others, and readiness to test one's own
opinions thoroughly, imply a degree of fairness
and disinterestedness not inferior to that which may
be displayed in the performance of any other duty.
In estimating the influence of religion, literature,
and government on civilisation, Buckle finds his
task greatly simplified by the previous elimination
of morality ; the immediate effects of these three
agents (to which art should have been added as a
fourth) being exercised on action rather than on
knowledge ; while, again, the consciousness that
morality depends upon such complex conditions
was a further motive for leaving it out of account
altogether. Yet even so the questions raised in
this connection are most inadequately treated in
the chapter specially devoted to them. So far as
literature is concerned, Buckle himself subsequently
took up a totally different position, expatiating
eloquently on the stimulus which poetry gives to
scientific discovery, and on the importance of
keeping the intellect in perpetual contact with the
emotions ;' for which purpose, as need hardly be

1 II., p. 502.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 191

observed, literature is our most valuable auxiliary.
His remarks on this head remind us of what Pro-
fessor Tyndall has since said ; and a little farther
reflection might have led him to anticipate what
the same authority has stated with respect to the
moral basis of intellectual work.

Such considerations would, however, have been
inconsistent with that thoroughgoing parallelism
between knowledge and wealth, between logic and
political economy, which our author was bent on
establishing ; for the laws of material industry, as
he had learnt them, were completely dissociated
from morality and from disinterested emotion. It
is not a little curious that two other English thinkers,
Darwin and Herbert Spencer, should almost simul-
taneously have been carrying economic principles,
the one into zoology, and the other into all philo-
sophy. For the " struggle for existence " is
avowedly based on the Malthusian law of popu-
lation ; and the formula of evolution grew out of
an attempt to place the doctrine of laisser-faire on
a truly scientific foundation. Buckle uses both
principles, although on a much more limited scale ;
he explains the tropical civilisations, as we have
already seen, by the advantage which an unre-
stricted multiplication of human beings gave to
land and capital over labour ; he explains the
European civilisations as a constant struggle
between governmental interference and the natural
development of intellect ; and we shall presently
see that he forces deduction and induction into an
analogy with the production and distribution of
wealth.

It sometimes happens that a philosopher errs,

i92 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

not by following his own ideas too far, but by not
following them far enough ; and I cannot help
thinking that Buckle would have been better
inspired had he pushed his parallel one step
further, and introduced the theory of exchange into
his intellectual economics. He would then have
seen that the importation of knowledge from one
country into another is the very condition of its
progress ; that for the community as well as for
the individual isolation means death ; that no
nation, however gifted, can subsist on its own
mental stores; and that truth acquires an altogether
new power when transferred to a fresh soil. He
would not then have held that the laws of intel-
lectual or any other progress are best ascertained
by studying their action in a country secluded, so
far as possible, from external interference. And
he would also, perhaps, have perceived that the
decay of the great tropical and sub-tropical civili-
sations arose partly from this very seclusion,
partly from the reaction of the barbarism by which
they were surrounded on every side, entailing as
it did an ever-increasing preponderance of the
military spirit, together with a crushing burden of
taxation within. As it is, he unconsciously bore
witness to the truth whose full force he failed to
recognise. England, which he declares to be the
one country least affected by foreign influences,
does in reality owe much of her intellectual great-
ness to those very influences. The circumstance
that we did not formerly travel much abroad for
pleasure, or receive many visitors from the
European Continent, is comparatively insigni-
ficant. We traded round the world ; we received

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 193

books, inventions, discoveries, and ideas from all
quarters.

When Buckle began to write the Renaissance
had not yet attracted the universal attention it was
destined to receive a few years after his death ;
still, its immense importance in the life of reason
had already been pointed out before his time, and
no one can now1 help noticing what a void is
produced by its total absence from the pages of
this historian. He seems to think that, towards
the close of the sixteenth century, men suddenly,
and for no particular reason except the negative one
of ecclesiastical decay, began doubting what they
had hitherto believed, and that modern enlighten-
ment sprang as spontaneously from their doubts.
The truth is that they questioned one set of beliefs
because they had become familiarised with another
and contradictory set, embodied in the classic litera-
ture of Greece and Rome. Nor was the intellectual
life of England dependent only for its first awaken-
ing on an external stimulus ; it was sustained
through the whole seventeenth century by con-
tinual contact with the minds of other nations ;
while no sooner was their influence partially with-
drawn, as happened in the eighteenth century, than
it fell into a speedy decline. Buckle has noticed
the dearth of speculative genius which followed the
deaths of Locke and Newton, but he has failed
adequately to explain it. Curiously enough, too,
the explanation which he does offer is inconsistent
with his own principles. According to him, it
arose from the diversion of the national genius

1 Written in 1880.

194 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

partly into practical pursuits, partly into political
contests.1 Here, then, are two most serious dis-
turbances, totally unconnected with the protective
spirit, not allowed for in his general philosophy of
history, and all the more dangerous that they are
likely to gain instead of losing strength with ad-
vancing civilisation. That, however, he exag-
gerates their effect during the period referred to
will become evident when we consider how much
greater their activity has since become, without
proving incompatible with a brilliant revival of
science and philosophy. If we ask what was the
cause of that revival, Buckle will himself supply
us with the answer. He attributes it first to the
influence of the Scotch school, and then to the
" sudden admiration for German literature of which
Coleridge was the principal exponent."2 Only
prejudice could have prevented him from acknow-
ledging our obligations to France as well.

When we turn to other countries, Buckle
furnishes fresh evidence of the same truth — the
intellectual interdependence of nations. He tells
us that France, enervated by the despotism of
Louis XIV., was only saved by a wholesale impor-
tation of English ideas ; and that the German
intellect was raised to an even abnormal activity by
contact with those eminent Frenchmen who flocked
to the court of Frederic the Great.3 English and
Greek literature had, by the way, much more
to do with that extraordinary fermentation than
Maupertuis and his colleagues ; but, as Buckle
unhappily did not live to sketch the history of

1 I., p. 808. » Ibid, p. 809. 3 p. 2,7.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 195

German thought, I need not press the point.
Another striking illustration is offered by the history
of Spain. Nothing in his whole work is more
interesting than those condensed and vivid pages
in which Buckle shows how, after having been
brought to the lowest ebb of misery by her priest-
hood and her government, that unhappy country
was restored to something of her former prosperity
by the efforts of a foreign dynasty. Yet, strange
to say, he seizes on this opportunity to push home
the lesson that " no progress is real unless it is
spontaneous."1 That Spain temporarily fell back
from the position won for her by Charles III. may
be true enough. But did she become again what
she had been a century before ? And has she
made no progress since then ? The revolution of
1868 was, comparatively speaking, a failure, as
indeed the revolutions of England and France at
first seemed to be also ; but at any rate it revealed
the existence of a sceptical feeling diffused through
the entire Spanish nation, and an utter decay of
the old loyalty, which, according to our philo-
sopher, are the most essential requisites of progress ;
and this scepticism, whatever may be its value, is
altogether an importation from France and Ger-
many— in other words, it results from a movement
first set on foot by the reforming zeal of the Bour-
bons. The derivation of Scotch philosophy from
England and France is not noticed, although the
influence of France at least had already been pointed
out by Carlyle in his essay on Burns.2

1 II., p. 99.

1 In one passage Buckle speaks of " that interchange of ideas
which is likely to become the most important regulator of

196 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

The preference shown by Buckle for home-grown
over imported knowledge may have been suggested
by Adam Smith's analogous preference of agricul-
ture to manufactures, and of native industry to
foreign trade. But when he declares the protective
spirit in Church and State to be the great enemy of
intellectual progress, and therefore of all civilisa-
tion, the very form of the expression places its
economical derivation beyond a doubt. Here he
is quite at home, and here his whole soul is thrown
into the work. The polemic against protection
occupies the larger portion of his history, and it
was this that won for it such a far-reaching and
resonant success. From a literary point of view
that success was well deserved. I, at least, know
of nothing in any work of the kind marked by such
intense, sustained, victorious passion — the passion
without which, as Hegel says, nothing great can
be achieved, and which, in this instance, is ren-
dered more formidable by the imposing array of
facts brought up to support it at every step. To
us of the present generation Buckle's words have a
more individual distinctness and a more immediate
interest than to his own contemporaries. For,
since they were written, there has been a revival
of the protective spirit under a new form, and in
many quarters it is proposed that the old authori-
tative methods should be used to consolidate and
extend reforms initiated by very different means.
Endowment of research, endowment of Catholic
professorships, compulsory education, compulsory

European affairs" (I., p. 223). Bui he omits to notice that it has
always been their most important regulator.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 197

temperance, compulsory thrift, interference with
freedom of contract, and Socialistic velleities of
every kind — these are but the various parts of a
system against which Buckle, had he lived, would
have protested not less energetically than Herbert
Spencer.1 It behoves us then to examine with
especial care the arguments by which his thesis is
supported, and the historical examples by which
he has endeavoured to verify them.

The protective spirit, as has been already
observed, is twofold. It may either interfere with
men's actions, or with their beliefs, or with both.
In France it chiefly took the direction of political
tutelage, in Scotland of ecclesiastical intolerance,
in Spain of both combined ; the consequence being
that in the last-named country progress was com-
pletely arrested, while in the other two it has been
irregular and unhealthy. The French Revolution
was a reaction against the protective spirit, and its
destructive violence was due to the rigour of the
repression which provoked it. Few liberal thinkers
will deny that Buckle's criticisms on the past and
present condition of the countries just enumerated
contain a large amount of truth. It is quite
another question whether the wide generalisations
founded on his historical survey are equally to be
trusted. To begin with, it seems to me that the
assumption of a fixed antithesis between the people
and their rulers is eminently misleading. A country
may be governed by a foreign race, possibly for its
own good, but at any rate without its own consent

1 Written in 1880, when the agitation against Free Trade was
only just beginning.

198 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

or co-operation, like India at the present moment ;
or again it may be dominated by a priesthood
sprung from its own ranks and speaking its own
language, but to all intents and purposes the
soldiers of an alien power, and quite out of
sympathy with its real opinions ; but apart from
these exceptions every government is really repre-
sentative, even when it is not created by the
popular vote, and merely gives a sharper expres-
sion to the collective will or to the prevalent beliefs
of the people. Sometimes the rulers will be a little
in advance of their subjects, and sometimes a little
behind them ; but, to use a favourite formula of
our author's, deviations in one direction will be
compensated by deviations in another. Here the
government will be too interfering, and there too
remiss ; but in either case the error will be attended
by counterbalancing advantages ; and probably each
nation will have something to learn from the other.
Everywhere there will be obstacles to progress ;
but they will arise far more from the natural
inertia of the human mind, varying with race and
geographical position, than from the distribution
and application of political power ; and they will
equally affect all classes of society.

Again, Buckle seems to confound under the
common name of political protection five distinct
ideas : (i) Despotism of any kind ; (2) the concen-
tration of power in a few hands ; (3) the favouring
of one class at the expense of others ; (4) inter-
ference with individuals for their own good ; and
(5) the feeling of personal loyalty towards a here-
ditary chief. He even goes so far as to identify
what is called a paternal government with a

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 19$

"government in which supreme power is vested in
the sovereign or in a few privileged classes."1 Yet
surely the government of Turkey is not paternal ;
nor is the development of democracy unfavourable
to benevolent interference with private interests,
as the present tendency of legislation in England
proves. Buckle also associates economic protec-
tion with political absolutism and centralisation,
although in the United States it flourishes under
conditions the very reverse of these ; while only a
few years after the publication of his first volume
free-trade was imposed on France by a despotic
ruler.

Undoubtedly there are countries where the prin-
ciple of authority is highly developed, and others
where it is restricted within very narrow limits ;
but to say that the former are necessarily animated
by a spirit unfavourable to scientific progress is
probably more than Buckle would have ventured
to assert in so many words ; although, on putting
his various expressions together, this is the only
interpretation that they will stand. Yet it is
notorious that science has received great en-
couragement from many absolute rulers both in
ancient and modern times. In France it made
great progress under the old regime. In Germany
it has co-existed with a complete absence of political
freedom. Perhaps he would have held that mere
knowledge was an insufficient return for the sacri-
fice of individualism and spontaneity ; but we
have only to deal with his clear and categorical
assertions — (i) "that the progress of mankind

1 I-, p- 557-

200 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

depends on the success with which the laws of
phenomena are investigated, and on the extent to
which a knowledge of these laws is diffused " ;
and (2) "that the great enemy of this movement
is the protective spirit."1 Now, I maintain that,
whatever else the history of France proves, it
does not prove the second of these propositions.
Let us consider what arguments it suggests to
Buckle. He does not, indeed, discuss the endow-
ment of research put in practice on a large scale
by Louis XIV., but he censures the encouragement
given to literature by that monarch on grounds
which, if they are worth anything, must equally
apply to science. As usual, the principles invoked
are purely economic. We are told that—

Every nation which is allowed to pursue its course
uncontrolled will easily satisfy the wants of its own
intellect, and will produce such a literature as is best
suited to its actual condition. And it is evidently for the
interest of all classes that the production shall not be
greater than the want — that the supply shall not exceed
the demand. It is, moreover, necessary to the well-being
of society that a healthy proportion should be kept up
between the intellectual classes and the practical classes.
It is necessary that there should be a certain ratio between
those who are most inclined to think and those who are
most inclined to act. If we were all authors, our material
interests would suffer ; if we were all men of business,
our mental pleasures would be abridged. In the first
case, we should be famished philosophers ; in the other
case, we should be wealthy fools. Now, it is obvious
that, according to the commonest principles of human
action, the relative numbers of these two classes will be
adjusted, without effort, by the natural, or, as we call it,
the spontaneous, movement of society.3

1 II., p. i. " I., pp. 628-29.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 201

The obvious fallacy lies in supposing that literature
is useless when those who are engaged in its pro-
duction cannot live on the sale of their works.
The idea of doing anything for posterity is quite
ignored. And we are vainly left to imagine how
the book-market is to provide needy philosophers
not only with the necessaries of life, but also with
the instruments of research, such as libraries, obser-
vatories, laboratories, and collections of natural
objects, in the absence of state-aid, and even of
private munificence, for that, too, must be excluded
if we are to apply the law of supply and demand
with complete consistency. To suppose that such
aid, even when granted on a liberal scale, would
impoverish the rest of the community is absurd,
especially when we consider how largely scientific
discoveries contribute to the national wealth. Nor
can it be contended that the energies of scientific
men are weakened by the receipt of public assist-
ance (as those of other producers might be), so long
as it does not exceed their real wants. Had our
author lived to write his promised sketch of
American civilisation, he would perhaps have found
that the want of accumulated knowledge — which,
according to him, is a serious obstacle to the pro-
gress of the United States— may be traced to a
want of endowments for the support of learning in
that country.1

Buckle, however, in the chapter to which I have
been referring, evades the real issue by speaking
at one time as if the interests of science or philo-
sophy were identical with those of literature, and

1 I., pp. 220-21. It will be understood that the reference is
to a state of things existing fifty years ago.

202 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

at another time as if the two were opposed. The
former view is expressed in the passage just quoted,
the latter in his subsequent arguments. We are
told that Louis XIV., by encouraging art and
poetry, arrested the great intellectual movement
which had been in progress before his accession to
power. It may be doubted whether any courtier
ever attributed such omnipotence to a monarch as
this republican historian. Here, again, an econo-
mical analogy is falsely applied. Because capital
can be readily transferred from one employment to
another, it does not follow that the same is true
of brains. It is, indeed, evident from the facts
furnished by Buckle himself that, before Louis XIV.
assumed the direction of affairs, the French intellect
was already executing the evolution ascribed to his
mischievous interference with the natural course
of thought. For " the poets, dramatists, painters,
musicians, sculptors, architects, were, with hardly
an exception, not only born, but educated, under
that freer policy which existed before his time."1
A fortiori, their career must have been already
decided before his majority. That epochs of scien-
tific and of artistic excellence should alternate with
one another is, in truth, a regular law of history ;
and the same phenomenon has repeated itself at
other periods when the cause, whatever it may be,
evidently lay deeper than the vicissitudes of Court
favour. It is another question whether the intel-
lectual sterility which marked the latter half of
Louis's reign is to be attributed to the protective
system. Looking at our own Victorian age as it

1 I., p. 648.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 203

now is, compared with what it was twenty years
ago, and at the present wretched state of French
literature as compared with the generation of 1830,
I am inclined to think that here also we are in
presence of some mysterious rhythm, according to
which many more great writers are born at one
time than at another.1

Passing from the protective spirit in politics to
the protective spirit in theology, I must again call
attention to the confusion of ideas lurking under
a style of exemplary clearness. The somewhat
heterogeneous forces represented by clericalism,
asceticism, intolerance, and superstition are lumped
together under a single heading ; while the last of
these terms is sometimes used to denote super-
natural beliefs lying outside theology, and some-
times any amount of supernaturalism going beyond
Buckle's own theistic creed. Sometimes the clergy
are dangerous because they teach certain doctrines ;
at other times the doctrines are only dangerous
because of the authority which they give to an
organised class whose interests are opposed to
progress. Sometimes the study of theology is
attacked as a waste of power, because theology
deals with subjects not admitting of any certain
information ; at other times because it propounds
theories inconsistent with experience. Undercover
of such ambiguities, the Scotch and the Germans
are equally spoken of as being more superstitious
than the English ; although most of the faults with
which Scotland is reproached are present in England
to a considerable extent, and not present at all in

1 Things have got much worse since the above was written.
Compare the concluding chapter of my Modern England,

2o4 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

Germany. Moreover, the evils indiscriminately
associated with the protective spirit in theology, so
far from being always combined, are often found
to be inconsistent with one another. Asceticism
is not the rule of established Churches, but of those
religious teachers who are thrown for their support
on the voluntary contributions of the people. It is
also notorious that the latter class, precisely because
they are not protected— that is to say, not educated
at the public expense, nor admitted to the society
of the higher orders — are generally distinguished
by the greater illiberality of their sentiments.
Again, a real theology, however largely intermixed
with error it may be, is widely removed from the
mere popular and spontaneous superstitions with
which Buckle habitually confounds it, by the sys-
tematic cohesion of its dogmas, and by the severe
intellectual effort implied on the part of those whose
duty it is to assimilate and to defend them. It is
no accident that so many savants should be the
children of Protestant clergymen, and that so many
philosophers should have been theological students
in their youth. Even as a formidable enemy,
Catholicism may have rendered valuable services
to freethought, by nerving its advocates to the most
strenuous efforts, and obliging them to find counter-
solutions for the great problems to which the Church
had already provided an answer. Buckle knew
well that industry does not attain its highest
development in regions where the wants of life are
most easily supplied. He might have inferred from
that significant circumstance that the intellectual
energies gain fresh strength from the obstacles
against which they contend. It would have been

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 205

worthy of an English philosopher to point out that
in the intellectual sphere also competition is needed
to secure efficiency ; that great thought has always
been aggressive and defiant ; and that the weaken-
ing of its antagonist may dangerously react upon
itself.

After considering the causes by which knowledge
is impeded, we pass to its own laws, to the condi-
tions under which it is extended. Here the analogy
between intellectual and industrial economics, which
throughout has been our guide, is completed. We
are taught to consider knowledge, like wealth,
under the two heads of accumulation and diffusion.
By the former progress is made possible ; by the
latter it is actually effected. Had Buckle been
really, what so many writers fancy he was, a
disciple of Auguste Comte, he would here have
availed himself of the results already reached in
the Positive Philosophy. The law of the three
stages was ready to hand, together with the classi-
fication of the sciences according to their logical
and historical order of evolution. His true master,
however, among contemporary thinkers is not
Comte, but Mill ; he combines the System of Logic
with the Principles of Political Economy ; he looks
on deduction as the great instrument by which
knowledge is accumulated, and on induction as the
great instrument of its diffusion.1 We have to
lament that his whole case is not before us, for it
was in the unwritten chapters on Germany and
America that these two processes were to have been
more particularly studied. I believe, however,

1 I., p. 224; II., pp. &<)sqq.

206 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

that the method chosen was a mistaken one, and
that its inadequacy may be demonstrated from the
portions which he lived to complete.

It would appear, to begin with, that Buckle had
either no clear idea of what is meant by induction
and deduction, or ideas which were the reverse of
true. And here let us pause to observe that our
philosopher, while professing to discard the methods
employed by metaphysicians for investigating the
laws of mind, and setting very little value on the
positive results which they have attained,1 has in
fact borrowed the whole framework of his system
from these very metaphysicians, without acknow-
ledgment and without criticism. He justly censures
Reid for multiplying unproved assumptions. Yet
he had a common-sense system of his own ; only
he never got so far as Reid ; he never consciously
formulated it to himself. Preoccupied with the
idea of general laws as the one great object of
knowledge, he forgot that, before laws can be even
looked for, a preliminary mental analysis is needed,
sometimes of infinitely greater difficulty and im-
portance than any subsequent part of the inquiry.
But, as nobody can move an inch without such an
analysis, he takes for granted the distinctions of
common language and common thought, without
perceiving their purely relative and provisional
value. It is only by studying the history of these
distinctions that we can free ourselves from their
tyranny. Buckle, apparently, had never done so,

1 He mentions as the sum-total " a very few of the laws of asso-
ciation " (one would like to know how many there are altogether),
" and perhaps I may add the modern theories of vision and of
touch" (I., p. 151). Yet out of these materials nearly the whole
of a new psychology has been constructed.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 207

and, not having mastered them, they have mastered
him. They are perpetually misleading, or tripping
him up, or gathering in a hopeless tangle about
his steps. So it is with the antithesis between
nature and man derived from the Greek Sophists ;
the antithesis between the intellectual and the
moral derived from Aristotle ; the Socratic con-
fusion of dutifulness with knowledge ; and the
assumption of an immemorial, unchanging moral
code, smacking strongly of intuitionism. Then,
again, we have the scholastic separation of the
imagination from the understanding ; and on it is
superimposed a theory that art is due to the one
and science to the other. This supplies him with
a ready explanation of the disproportionate develop-
ment of art in Italy and Spain ; the imagination
being stimulated to excess in those countries by
the more imposing aspects of nature as compared
with Northern Europe. It seems to have escaped
his notice that in art the Belgians far surpass the
Swiss, while in science the relation is reversed.
Elsewhere, as I have already observed, he does
justice to the scientific uses of the imagination, but
straightway proceeds to confound imagination
either with a knowledge of the emotions or with
the emotions themselves. These, he incidentally
declares, " are as much a part of us as the under-
standing " — which has never been denied — and
adds that " they are as truthful " and " as likely to
be right " ;T a doctrine which, if it has any meaning
at all, would immediately reopen the floodgates of
superstition, and reverse the conclusions elsewhere
maintained by its author.

1 II., p. 502.

208 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

But of all the ideas that Buckle has borrowed
from the "metaphysicians," he has used none so
freely as their theories concerning the distinction
between induction and deduction ; nor is his want
of philosophical training anywhere more painfully
evinced, and this in three different directions : (i)
as regards their abstract nature ; (2) as regards
their historical exemplification ; and (3) as regards
their connection with the accumulation and diffusion
of knowledge. His account of the two methods is,
at first starting, sufficiently accurate, though rather
vague. " Induction is from particulars to generals,
and from the senses to the ideas ; deduction is from
generals to particulars, and from the ideas to the
senses."1 But, on proceeding to explain what are
the general propositions from which deduction sets
out, he makes the following extraordinary asser-
tion : —

The deductive thinker invariably assumes certain
premisses, which are quite different from the hypotheses
essential to the best induction. These premisses are
sometimes borrowed from antiquity ; sometimes they are
taken from the notions which happen to prevail in the
surrounding society ; sometimes they are the result of a

man's own peculiar organisation ; and sometimes

they are deliberately invented, with the object of arriving,
not at truth, but at an approximation to truth.

To which he adds that —

a deductive habit, being essentially synthetic, always
tends to multiply original principles or laws ; while the
tendency of an inductive habit is to diminish those laws
by gradual and successive analysis.

Yet we had been previously told that—

the inductive philosopher is naturally cautious, patient,

1 II., p. 419.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 209

and somewhat creeping ; while the deductive philosopher
is more remarkable for boldness, dexterity, and often
rashness.1

One need only look at the mathematical sciences,
which are universally admitted to be deductive, to
see the absurdity of all this. To ascend from the
part to the whole must always be cceteris paribus a
more daring and hazardous process than to descend
from the whole to the part. The truth is that what
Buckle had in his mind throughout was not the
opposition between two kinds of reasoning, but
between reasoning on the one hand and observa-
tion and experiment on the other. For he
mentions America as an extreme instance of the
inductive spirit, and Germany of the deductive.
Now, the Americans are well known to be excellent
observers, but they have not contributed much to
our stock of generalisations, either by the discovery
of new or by the resolution of old laws ; while
German philosophy is remarkable for its habit of
challenging current assumptions, and for its con-
stant endeavour to construct systems out of the
fewest possible first principles. Yet this interpre-
tation, although it gives an intelligible meaning to
some passages, is irreconcilable with others which
seem to confound induction with the general prin-
ciple of all reasoning, the demand of a proof; while
deduction is represented as the submission of reason
to unsupported authorities. Accordingly, the one
method is characterised as theological, and the
other as anti-theological.2 The distinction cannot,
in my opinion, be maintained. Particular facts
may be, equally with general propositions, taken

1 Loc. cit. 2 Ibid., pp. 411 sqq.

P

210 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

for granted or accepted on faith, and theological
systems not only may be, but have been, built up
out of such alleged facts, with no more aid from
general assumptions than is necessary to any
inductive process whatever. And the errors of
such a system, or of any system, may often be
most effectually overthrown by showing that it
involves a contradiction, either of its general pro-
positions with each other, or of those propositions
with their logical consequences — that is to say, by
deductive reasoning. It has even been held that
the function of syllogistic logic is essentially
negative, that it only amounts to the complete
elimination of self-contradiction from thought.
Buckle most unfairly opposes the rigorous and
scientific employment of the one method to the
loose and popular employment of the other, thus
altogether missing the close connection which
recent logicians have shown to subsist between
them.

When Buckle proceeds to illustrate the different
types of reasoning by a survey of the literatures
where he supposes them to be exemplified, his
original misapprehension is continued and rein-
forced by other misapprehensions in the interpreta-
tion of those literatures. The Scotch intellect in
the eighteenth century is chosen as an example of
the deductive spirit ; and the tendency of Scotch
metaphysicians to assume the existence of ultimate
principles in the human mind is given as an
especial instance of its operation. An historian
might perhaps be equally justified in taking Hume,
Adam Smith, James Mill, and Thomas Brown,
who all pursued the contrary method, as the

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 211

genuine representatives of Scotch philosophy.
But, passing over this objection, is it not obvious
that we have here a confusion of psychology with
logic ; that to insist (whether rightly or wrongly)
on the indecomposable character of certain mental
phenomena ; to maintain even that we have
internal sources of knowledge independent of
experience — is an entirely different thing from
preferring one kind of demonstration to another?
It might as well be said that the chemist who
believes in the indecomposable character of the
so-called elements is more deductive than he who
seeks to resolve them all into a single substance,
as that the a priori psychologist is so distinguished
from his analytical rival. Indeed, of the two I
should say that he who evolves all the manifold
varieties of consciousness from the combinations of
a few simple feelings, approaches nearest to the
mathematical, and therefore to the deductive,
method. The common-sense school, as their very
name implies, were not reasoners at all ; they
never went beyond a superficial description and
classification of the mental phenomena.

In dealing with the origin of this so-called philo-
sophy, Buckle is equally at fault. According to
him, its method is theological, its results are secular
and liberal. The truth, however, is that Hutcheson,
the founder of the school, borrowed his innate
principles from Shaftesbury and Butler, who, being
English, ought, on our author's view, to have
taught the contrary system ; while the habit of
assuming their existence, once introduced, found
high favour with orthodox Scotchmen, because it
seemed to make for the spirituality of the soul and

212 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

the supernatural origin of conscience ; thus furnish-
ing a welcome support to those dogmas by which
they were still powerfully affected. We are told
that in Scotland the intellectual classes have long
been remarkable for " boldness of investigation
and freedom from prejudice."1 I believe all
continental critics will agree with me in thinking
that they have been, comparatively speaking, much
more remarkable for narrowness and timidity.

It is quite in accordance with his singular view
of method that Buckle should declare Hume's
metaphysical essays an exception to the generally
deductive character of Scotch philosophy. For
Hume was both the most sceptical of all thinkers
and the one who carried the experiential system
farthest. Yet, looking not at the matter, but
at the logical form of those essays, I do not see
how they can be distinguished from his other
writings. For reasons already suggested, I should
be inclined to consider them better examples of
deduction than of induction. But, properly speak-
ing, there is a stage at which speculation is so little
developed that it cannot be brought under any
strictly defined type of reasoning at all. Its method
is then that of analogy, a rough attempt to interpret
the unknown in terms of the known. The Natural
History of Religion is a good example of this
process. Hume, without investigating the evidence
furnished by travellers, declared that polytheism
was the natural religion of savages. Does it follow
that his conclusions were evolved out of his own
mind ? By no means. He argued from the widest

1 I., P. 225.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 213

experience that the more abstract and universal a
notion is, the more difficult is it to grasp ; and that
the higher manifestations of mind follow, instead
of preceding, the lower. In fact, he argued from
all that was already known by experience of
children, of uneducated persons, and of savages,
to what still remained to be known of these last.
To collect the facts about savage belief, and then
to restate them in abstract terms, would not have
been induction, because it would not have been
reasoning of any kind, but simply description.

Buckle's account of Adam Smith is open both to
these and to other criticisms. The works of that
great thinker are represented as a perfect type of
the deductive method. The Theory of Moral Senti-
ments and the Wealth of Nations are interpreted as
complementary portions of a single science, having
for its object the reduction of human nature to law.
The peculiarity of the scheme is that the two grand
motives of human action are separately considered,
and treated apart from each other's disturbing
action. These two motives are sympathy and
selfishness ; the one is discussed in the Moral
Sentiments ', the other in the Wealth of Nations.
By a logical artifice, each in turn is assumed to be
the whole factor in human conduct ; although, in
reality, their effects are always conjoined. Buckle
exemplifies what he supposes to have been the
method of Adam Smith by a singularly unlucky
illustration from geometry. Real lines, he tells us,
always have both length and breadth ; but the
geometrician, in order to avoid insoluble compli-
cations, assumes that they possess the former
attribute only. We are not informed whether he

2i4 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

subsequently rectifies his omission by postulating
lines which have breadth without length ; but to
complete the parallel he certainly ought to do so.
A much more pertinent illustration would have
been furnished by dynamics, which really does
begin with the effect of forces taken singly, and
afterwards proceeds to study them in combination.
I conceive, however, that no such idea ever entered
the head of Adam Smith as is attributed to him by
his admirer. His two great works would, indeed,
according to Buckle's theory, serve, not to complete,
but to contradict and upset each other. For, be it
observed, they do not study simple tendencies, but
actual concrete facts of history and every-day life.
To say that whatever men feel and think and do is
the effect of their sympathies, and then to say that
it is the effect of their selfishness, would, if these
two forces were necessarily opposed to one another,
be simply an unintelligible paradox. But the
Theory of Moral Sentiments is, as its very name
implies, an inquiry into the origin of certain
feelings, which are nowhere assumed to exercise a
paramount influence over human conduct ; nor,
although they are derived from sympathy, do they
exhaust its manifestations. Neither do sympathy
and selfishness, in Smith's view of them, either
divide the whole field of human nature, or recipro-
cally exclude one another.1 The tendency to give
and to seek for sympathy does not, in its original
form, imply any self-sacrifice, and, in its more
complex manifestations, is eminently favourable to

1 That is, according to the present use of terms, which is also
Buckle's. Adam Smith says that sympathy is not a selfish
principle, using selfish in a much narrower sense than ours,

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 215

that desire for wealth which Adam Smith regards
as the principal cause of economic progress. Thus
the Wealth of Nations, so far from taking up a
psychological position opposed to, or lying outside,
that of the Moral Sentiments, simply assumes the
existence of desires which, in that work, had been
explained, whether rightly or wrongly, as a par-
ticular manifestation of our social feelings. More-
over, even if its reasonings were based on the
supposition that selfishness (in its narrowest sense)
is the sole spring of action, they would not give a
complete account of it, but only of so much as is
concerned with the production of economical pheno-
mena ; while, again, the analysis of those pheno-
mena embraces a variety of topics with which the
science of human nature, properly so called, has
nothing whatever to do.

But if Adam Smith's works do not, when taken
together, constitute a deductive psychology, can it
be said that each of them singly is an example of
the deductive method? Certainly not according to
Buckle's own definitions. For the Theory of Moral
Sentiments makes no unsupported assertions ; it
perpetually appeals to experience ; and, instead of
multiplying ethical principles, seeks to reduce them
to one. Neither does the Wealth of Nations reason
down from causes to effects, but, contrariwise,
ascends from effects to causes, which, we are else-
where informed, is a process characteristic of
induction.1 We begin with the division of labour,
and are gradually led on to exchange, to the circu-
lating medium, and to the different elements of

1 H., P- 5'5-

216 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

price. Our modern systems are arranged on the
opposite plan ; they follow the objective order of
things, not the subjective order of thoughts. It is
true that Adam Smith does not obey the rules of
induction laid down by Bacon ; but then no science
ever was, or ever could be, constructed in accord-
ance with those rules. The same remark applies
to Scotch physical philosophy. No doubt, it was
largely hypothetical, conjectural, and not imme-
diately verified by experience. But when was
there ever a physical philosophy of which the same
could not be said ? Buckle does, indeed, draw a
very marked distinction between the literatures of
Scotland, on the one hand, and of England and
France on the other. The former alone, according
to him, was deductive ; the latter two were inductive.
But, had he taken pains to analyse the productions
of English and French philosophy from the logical
point of view, he could hardly have failed to notice
how little they differed, in that respect, from the
Scotch systems. He admits that Harvey and
Newton used the deductive method. But Harvey
and Newton between them represent half the scien-
tific English intellect of their century ; and if we
add Hobbes, who assuredly reasoned from generals
to particulars quite as much as, if not more than,
Adam Smith, the balance will incline heavily
against induction. Observation and experiment
were, it is true, the favourite occupations of English
science in the eighteenth century ; but these are
only subsidiary operations, not to be confounded
with the generalising process itself.

With regard to the French philosophy of the
same period, only a preconceived theory could have

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 217

made anyone blind to its predominatingly deductive
character. To prove this, I need only quote what
M. Taine, a most competent authority, has stated
on the subject : —

Suivre en toute recherche, avec toute confiance, sans
reserve ni precaution, la mdthode des mathematiciens ;
extraire, circonscrire, isoler quelques notions tres-simples
et tres-ge"n£rales, puis, abandonnant 1'expe'rience, les
comparer, les combiner, et du compost artificiel ainsi
obtenu, de"duire par le raisonnement toutes les consd-
quences qu'il enferme : tel est le proc£d6 naturel de 1'esprit
classique. II lui est si bien innd qu'on le rencontre e'gale-
ment dans les deux siecles, chez Descartes, Malebranche
et les partisans des ide"es pures comme chez les partisans
de la sensation, du besoin physique, de 1'instinct primitif,
Condillac, Rousseau, Helve" ti us, plus tard Condorcet
Volney, Sieyes, Cabanis et Destutt de Tracy. Ceux-ci
ont beau se dire sectateurs de Bacon et rejeter les id£es
inn^es ; avec un autre point de depart que les Carte"siens,
ils marchent dans la meme voie, et comme les Cartesiens,
apres un leger emprunt ils laissent la I'expe'rience.1

It may be added that pure mathematics and astro-
nomy, of which the former had always been deduc-
tive, and the latter had recently become so, were
the sciences most successfully cultivated by French-
men at this period ; that Haiiy, the great mineral-
ogist, was, according to Buckle himself, indebted
to deduction for his famous discovery ; and that
the igneous and aqueous hypotheses in geology,
which are given as instances of the same method
when respectively employed by a Scotchman and a
German, had already been similarly employed by
Buffon, a representative French thinker. But the
syllogistic character of the French intellect is so

1 I* ' Ancien Regime, I., pp. 262-3.

2i8 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

notorious that to illustrate it at greater length would
be a waste of words.

Such a profound misconception of the logical
methods, whether considered in the abstract or the
concrete, either produced or originated with an
equally profound misconception of their socio-
logical function. In order to carry out his parallel
between the economics of industry and the economics
of intellect, Buckle, as we have already seen,
associated the accumulation of knowledge with the
use of the deductive method, and its diffusion with
the opposite procedure. Greece, Scotland, and
Germany 'are examples of the former ; England,
France, and America of the latter. The nations
belonging to the first group are remarkable for
great breadth and boldness of speculation, but also
for the deep gulf left between the intellectual classes
and the mass of the people ; while, in nations
belonging to the second group, fewer great thinkers
have arisen, but enlightenment has been more
widely diffused, and, in England at least, a more
regular development of civilisation has been secured.
Three distinct grounds are offered in explanation
of this alleged fact. Deductive reasoning rests on
unproved assumptions. So also does theology,
the great obstacle to intellectual progress ; therefore
it cannot be overthrown by a method partaking so
largely of its own spirit. I have already taken
occasion to show that this argument is invalid.
The assumptions of science, not being accepted
on authority, cannot favour authority ; and false
assumptions may be dialectically, as well as experi-
mentally, overthrown. I have now to add that,
granting the French philosophy of the last century

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 219

to have been both deductive and sceptical, the
possibility of a close connexion between the two
characteristics is demonstrated ; and a further proof
will be found in the circumstance that English
scepticism has always flourished most when deduc-
tion has been most generally employed.1

Buckle's second explanation is much more plau-
sible. Where philosophers are removed from con-
tact with the people, they will remain less affected
by popular prejudices and less concerned about the
consequences of their teaching. For that reason
the physical schools of Ionia and Magna Graecia
were far more daring in their denials than the
ethical schools of Athens. Nevertheless, when the
people have once become thoroughly sceptical their
sympathy and support will give a fresh impetus to
advanced thought among their teachers. That is
just what is happening in Germany now.2 On the
other hand, where the people are both educated
and bigoted, such a mere trifle as logical method
will not prevent them from exercising the sternest
control over their university professors. Hence
the official science of Scotland is remarkable for
its orthodoxy. Even Adam Smith was obliged to
show of what edifying religious applications his
moral theories admitted ; and the conservative
tendencies of the " common-sense " school have
already been mentioned.

So far the respective influence of the two systems,

1 In 1840-60 it was associated with the first entrance of German
philosophy ; in 1860-80 with deductive theories of evolution ; and
in 1880-1900 with the Hegelian logic.

2 Since these words were first written the purely intellectual
evolution of German thought has been hampered by the efforts
of the rich to place their property under the protection of a
rehabilitated Christianity.

220 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

as viewed by Buckle, is negative rather than positive.
The one, according to his theory, does, and the
other does not, remove the causes of popular super-
stition. The one does, and the other does not,
leave the foremost minds completely free to work
out the remotest consequences of their speculations.
We now pass to the positive reason why induction
should contribute more powerfully than the rival
method to a general diffusion of knowledge. We
are told that this is because the observations on
which it rests, being accessible to a far greater
number of minds, are proportionately better appre-
ciated and more readily accepted than the abstract
reasonings of deduction. Possibly our author may
have had in his mind various passages where
Aristotle describes induction as clearer, more per-
suasive, and more popular than the syllogism,
which, on the other hand, is more cogent, and
corresponds better to the order of natural causation.
Such a distinction, however, applies rather to the
loose illustrative induction of the Greeks than to
the rigorous observations and experiments of
modern science, where the facts are often much
more abstruse than the inferences founded upon
them. What these facts are can only be known to
a few ; the vulgar either remain ignorant of their
existence, or else take it on trust ; and, when faith
is once admitted, all kinds of conclusions may
profit by it equally, irrespective of the evidence on
which they rest. Again, when Buckle says that
" for one person who can think there are at least a
hundred persons who can observe, "'he forgets that

1 ji., P. 582.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 221

induction, being a process of reasoning, is neces-
sarily a process of thought. Nor has the greater
or less difficulty of understanding and practically
applying a principle when once discovered anything
to do with the kind of investigation by which it has
been reached, or with the kind of proof by which it
has been established. It might also be easily main-
tained that, while the tendency of generalisation is
to lead us away from experience, the tendency of
deduction is to lead us back to experience. A new
truth may easily commend itself to the popular
mind by explaining a multitude of phenomena
which never would have suggested it to the original
discoverer. Nothing serves to extend a knowledge
of scientific theories so much as the inventions by
which they are utilised. But both the making and
the explaining of inventions are essentially deduc-
tive processes ; they are the application of general
laws to concrete facts. The truth is that, while all
knowledge tends spontaneously to spread, the
means by which its diffusion can be hastened have
little or nothing to do with the order of investiga-
tions by which it was first obtained. The remark
may seem commonplace, but popular education is
not a question of logical method at all. It depends
primarily on scholastic machinery, and more
remotely on religion, literature, and government —
that is to say, on agencies which Buckle has sum-
marily excluded from his scheme of intellectual
progress.

The theory of logical economy equally breaks
down when we come to examine its historical verifi-
cation. It is not true that Greek philosophy had
no power to diminish popular superstition. One

222 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

need only compare Euripides with ^Eschylus, or
even Xenophon with Herodotus, to appreciate its
effect. Without it, indeed, the conversion of the
Roman world from a naturalistic polytheism to an
ethical monotheism could never have been accom-
plished ; without it Roman jurisprudence could not
have been rationalised ; without its revival mediaeval
darkness could not have been so speedily dissipated.
The case of Germany is still stronger. No doubt
the state of German middle-class education leaves
much to be desired, and, by all accounts, is rather
deteriorating than improving. No doubt, also,
there is a deep division between the intellectual
classes and the rest of the people. But this is due
far more to the literary peculiarities of German
philosophy than to its method of research. The
public are repelled by speculative treatises, not
because they reason from first principles, but
because they are detestably written. A profoundly
speculative work like the Philosophy of the Uncon-
scious will run through several editions, if its style
be but tolerably good. For the same reason
Buckle's own book has had a great success in
Germany — greater even than in England — although
its method is rather deductive than inductive. But
whether German philosophy be popularly studied
or not, the scepticism now diffused through every
class in Germany bears witness to the immense
influence which it exerts on public opinion. If it
is to be taken as a symptom of superstition that the
Scotch churches are " still filled with devout and
ignorant worshippers,"1 it must surely be taken as

MI., pp. 589.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 223

a symptom of the contrary that the German churches
are so scantily attended. Whatever Buckle says of
Scotland is just what a continental critic would say
of England, and, if so, every such charge would
redound to the discredit of the inductive method
which is supposed to have regulated our civilisa-
tion. Again, one would suppose from Buckle's
language on the subject that the northern and
southern divisions of Great Britain were sundered
either by a difference of language or by an im-
passable frontier, instead of reading the same
books, profiting by the same discoveries, and
carrying on an uninterrupted exchange of ideas.
Whatever our literature has done for ourselves, it
ought to have done, although perhaps not to an
equal extent, for the Scotch.

A less ingenious theorist than Buckle would
probably have been contented with a more obvious
explanation of whatever bigotry still survives in
Scotland. Having once struck deeper root, the
theological or puritanical spirit has naturally
remained stronger in that country than in England
or France ; but there seems no reason for believing
that Scotland compares with them, in that respect,
more unfavourably now than at any time during
the last three centuries. Granting that she is not
yet on a level with them, it does not follow that she
has not made equal progress in the same period.
And if, as will hardly be denied, she is no longer
(for good or evil) in the religious condition of the
seventeenth century, why should not the change be
attributed, at least in part, to her philosophy? It
is no little matter that she should have produced
two such writers as Burns and Scott, at once so

224 BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE

national, so popular, and so filled with the secular
and humanistic spirit of modern civilisation.
Surely their appearance, coming when it did,
together with that of the numerous minor lumi-
naries who surrounded them, was not unconnected
with the triumphs already won by their prede-
cessors in the more abstract spheres of thought.
And if Scotch literature cannot truly be said to
have exercised no influence on the national spirit,
neither can it be said to have received none in
return.1 If the Scotch thinkers, with one excep-
tion, let theology alone, this was not from any
incapacity on their part to call in question its
fundamental assumptions, but because they either
shared its beliefs, or were deterred by the strength
of public opinion from openly assailing them.
And the solitary exception, Hume, differed from
his contemporaries not because he employed the
inductive method, but because he lived a good deal
abroad, and never held a university professorship
at home.

We have seen, then, that the philosophy of
individualism, when carried from the economics of
material industry into the more complex economics
of mental energy, gives rise to misconceptions and
inconsistencies at every step. After the whole
weight of human progress has been thrown on
advancing knowledge, the basis of knowledge itself
is so isolated, so narrowed, so weakened by internal
disintegration, that the resulting strain terminates
in a complete collapse. Where the analogy of
material industry might have been profitably

ML, pp. 586.

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 225

employed, it is neglected. Where the laws regulating
production, distribution, and governmental inter-
ference are inapplicable, they are forcibly imposed
on the phenomena. Standing by the ruined edifice,
we ask ourselves on what other plan it could have
been built. The answer is that, first of all, the
materials which our architect pushed aside must
be properly utilised. We must not isolate from
each other forces which are only different aspects
of a fundamental unity, inseparable in the com-
pleted idea no less than in the living fact. We
must overcome these scholastic antitheses of nature
and man, morals and intellect, imagination and
understanding, emotion and reason, induction and
deduction. We must cease to look on the govern-
ing classes as eternal blunderers and bullies. In
the history of our race, everything is natural, every-
thing is human, everything emotional, imaginative,
and moral. I will even say that, using the word
" religion " to denote the provisional synthesis of
these various agencies, and extending the word
"government" to all forms of co-operation, whether
spontaneous or permanently organised, everything
is religious and governmental. Still more, if
possible, must we recognise within each depart-
ment a necessary consensus of functions. What-
ever makes for the accumulation of knowledge
makes also for its diffusion, and reciprocally.
Without hypothesis there would be no induction,
and without experience no deduction. The one
process, as Stanley Jevons has shown, is an inver-
sion of the other. Moreover, the generalisations
with which our inquiries begin are partial and
precarious ; their growth in solidity and in sweep

Q

is proportioned to the number of particulars succes-
fully explained by their application. Neither can
the intellect of any nation continue to advance
without perpetual excitement from its neighbours ;
and it is here, I think, that we can learn the most
valuable lessons from Buckle. He was right in
assigning a distinct scientific genius to each of the
great civilised peoples ; but the narrowness of his
own economic scheme prevented him from discern-
ing what were, in each instance, the differential
characteristics. I firmly believe, however, that
such a comparative psychology is possible, and
that even now its outlines might be traced. For
example, at the beginning of this essay I have
attempted to show that there is a unity of com-
position running through the most divergent
manifestations of our modern English philosophy.
But this is a vein of thought which cannot be
worked out any farther within my present limits.

It would have been impossible to tell beforehand
what view of history would be taken by the studious
son of an English merchant, whose opinions were
formed during the great agitation for free-trade.
But, when we know by experience what view he
actually did take, the theory seems to be in perfect
harmony with a social environment of which it was
the most interesting, though not the most highly
organised nor the most enduring expression. In
endeavouring to represent Buckle's philosophy as
something more than a mere product of individual
genius, I have been faithful, amid all differences,
to that most general principle which it shares with
every philosophy worthy of the name, and which it
has contributed so powerfully to enforce. Twenty-

BUCKLE'S ECONOMICS OF KNOWLEDGE 227

five years ago the idea of law, universal and
unbroken, was almost a paradox. It is now almost
a commonplace ; and among those by whose efforts
so vast a change in public opinion was accom-
plished must be placed the name of this noble
thinker, whose learning and eloquence have not
often been singly equalled, and, in their combi-
nation, have never, to my knowledge, been
approached.

THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

GERMANY, so rich in every other kind of philo-
sophical literature, has not contributed much to
ethical thought. Innumerable Sittenlehren have
doubtless flowed from the laborious pens of her
professors ; and her great writers have given utter-
ance to many casual thoughts on the problems of
good and evil, virtue and vice. But, with the
single exception of Kant's categorical imperative,
she has produced nothing that the world in general
has accepted as comparable to the achievements
in the same field of Greece, Rome, and Britain.
Fichte and Schopenhauer come next to Kant for
interest and value. They cannot, however, be
said to have produced much impression outside
Germany ; and their morality is, or at least claims
to be, so closely bound up with their metaphysics
as inevitably to suffer by detachment from their
illusive interpretations of existence. And even
Kant really did no more than emphasise and pre-
cisionise the idea of moral obligation, utterly failing
in his subsequent attempt to fill up the blank form
with a specific sum of moral prescriptions.

This speculative weakness, assuming it to exist,
is not easy to explain. It certainly is not connected
with any admitted deficiency on the practical side.
The Germans yield to no other great nation in
moral seriousness and dutifulness ; such triumphs

228

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 229

as they have achieved in war and peace would have
been impossible to a selfish, a frivolous, or a self-
indulgent race. Nor has the disposition to theorise
on what they do ever been lacking among them ;
if anything, it is present to excess. In fact, what
one misses is not ethical theorising, but originality
and life in the theories.

It may be that the extreme liberty of theological
speculation in Germany, combined with the want
of political liberty, accounts for this anomaly,
as the reverse conditions account for the extra-
ordinary development of ethical thought in the
schools of Athens and in Great Britain. For at
Athens always, as among ourselves until quite
recently, the popular religion perverted metaphysics
into an abstract mythology ; while the popular
respect for personal liberty gave free play to real
or ideal reconstructions of life. Plato is nearly as
cautious as Mill when he touches on the ultimate
realities of nature ; Mill is nearly as bold as Plato
when he sets up ultimate standards of conduct.
Whatever freedom of thinking for ourselves in
cosmic science we possess is due to Germany.
Whatever freedom of social action the Germans
possess they owe to us. Their Frauenbewegung is
there to prove it.

Within our own memory Germany has for the
first time produced a truly ethical genius — a thinker
with whom problems of conduct constituted from
beginning to end the supreme, if not the sole,
interest of life. It may seem strange that I should
say so much of the daemonic and tragic figure
whose name stands at the head of this study.
For Friedrich Nietzsche habitually posed as an

230 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

immoralist, an emancipator from moral restrictions,
speaking of what he called " moraliri " as a deadly
poison. Nietzsche's friends, however, a most
respectable set of people, were not in the least
appalled by such language, nor need we take it in
very deadly earnest. They saw in it no more than
a strong way of saying that much of what passes
for absolute right and good is only true within
certain very narrow limitations, and that there are
impulses, supposed to be very virtuous, which tend
on the whole to do mankind more harm than good,
as well as impulses, supposed to be vicious, that
tend to exalt it in the scale of real value.

In giving this paradoxical form to his morality
Nietzsche was merely following the constant tradi-
tion of German philosophy. We are accustomed,
and for that matter his own countrymen are accus-
tomed, to look on Hegel as a quite exceptional
instance of what may be done in the way of setting
common sense at defiance. But Hegel, with his
immanent dialectic of self-contradictory positions,
reconciled in a higher synthesis, only brought to a
point what had been more or less the method of all
his predecessors, and was destined to be the method
of his chief successors also. Kant naively supposed
that he was dissipating Hume's scepticism by an
audacity of negation before which Hume would have
shrunk back appalled ; and, not content with that
performance, he proceeded to integrate Free Will
with a system which, literally to all appearances,
left Determinism master of the field. Fichte, after
reducing the non-ego — that is, the whole objective
world — to an assumption of the ego, sets the ego the
task of negating its own negation, which is at the

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 231

i" -4
same time the condition of its existence, with the

comfortable assurance that a consummation which
would be fatal to both parties needs all eternity for
its achievement. More impatient than his master,
Schelling boldly identifies the two under the names
of " object " and " subject," and the world goes on
as before — indeed, according to him, always has
gone on precisely because it always knew that there
was no difference between them. Schopenhauer,
after disdainfully rejecting the systems of his fellow
metaphysicians as so many absurdities, sets up a
new absolute, which, after willing -itself out of
nonentity into existence, learns from sad experience
the desirability of willing itself back from existence
into nonentity again. And to this contradiction,
which lies at the very basis of his system, he adds
another not less serious contradiction in working
out its details. While asserting the substantial
identity of all our individual wills with one another
and with the universal will of which they are so
many partial manifestations, he yet limits the self-
negating power of each will to itself. On entering
into Nirvana I redeem myself alone ; the infinite
anguish of the world goes on as before. Yet at
the same time the short cut of suicide is barred to
me by the solemn warning that self-inflicted death
amounts to a rebellious reaffirmation of the will
which it seems to deny.

This immanent self-contradiction of German
thought, although it first became open and scan-
dalous in Kant's criticism, is older than Kant.
To go no further back, it already afflicts the
monadology of Leibnitz. Those minute individual
existences of which the world consists have no

232 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—

windows opening on the world, nor do they receive
influences of any kind from one another ; but all
go on developing at the same pace, each by virtue
of an evolutionary principle peculiar to itself.
Thus, although every monad reflects the universe
at an angle of its own, it has no reason to believe
that this phantasmagoria represents an objective
reality, for its whole experience would be the same
supposing no such reality to be present ; and
although, by the hypothesis, solipsism is not true,
there seems to be no evidence of its untruth.

It appears, then, that a German moral philo-
sophy, to be thoroughly native and smacking of
the soil, must at once affirm and deny morality.
We shall, therefore, not be surprised to find that
Nietzsche, while offering a brilliant exception to
the rule that his country does not breed pure
moralists, confirms the rule that her philosophies
willingly assume the form of a square circle — that
bold construction which Professor Meinong, no
doubt on the strength of long experience, has
recently declared to be quite conceivable.

Furthermore, it is necessary, or at least tradi-
tional, that a German philosopher, to be original,
should not only end by contradicting himself, but
that he should begin by contradicting another
German, preferentially his own master. And we
shall find that the author of Zarathustra was quite
up to the mark in this respect also. The teacher
to whose school he first belonged, and who after-
wards became the chief object of his attacks, was
Schopenhauer. Nietzsche was twenty years of age
and a university student when, in 1865, he first
came across the great pessimist's writings, at that

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 233

time only in the first dawn of their popularity.
What chiefly attracted him seems to have been
their high literary merit and the sincerity of their
author — a sincerity displayed above all in his
attitude towards theology. Schopenhauer really
stood no farther from the central beliefs of Chris-
tianity than Hegel, if as far ; but he never bowed
down in the temple of Rimmon to the extent of
passing himself off as an orthodox Lutheran or other
Churchman of any kind. He venerated the figure
of Christ ; but there could be no doubt that his
metaphysics excluded the notion of a God and of a
future life just as much as they excluded the possi-
bility of a happy life on earth. And that was why
the bankruptcy of Hegelianism after 1848 left the
system of Kant's rival continuator in a position
no better than before. For to the pietistic and
obscurantist reaction that succeeded the abortive
revolution free thought was as hateful under the
form of atheistic pessimism as under the form of
optimistic pantheism. We are apt to look on
Germany as the great emancipator from super-
stition, and I have already acknowledged the great-
ness of our own indebtedness to her delivering
example ; but in this instance, as in the early
eighteenth century, she seems to have been led
out of darkness by light from the West, by the
influence of Buckle and Darwin, and by Kenan's
Vie de Jesus, followed up as this was by Strauss's
second Leben Jesu. At any rate, a far more liberal
tone prevailed in the sixties than in the previous
decade ; and Schopenhauer's philosophy profited by
the new spirit, which it also stimulated in the highest
degree, to achieve a rapid and dazzling success.

234 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

Nietzsche was the son of a Protestant pastor,
and belonged on his mother's side also to a clerical
family. Brought up on strict religious principles,
he had learned to set a particular value on veracity,
regarding it, rather oddly, as a specially Christian
virtue, whereas, in theory at least, it is more Greek
than Christian. He also was, or believed himself
to be, descended from a noble Polish family exiled
on account of their religion early in the eighteenth
century ; so that in his case the obligation of
fidelity to truth was heightened by the conscious-
ness of representing an aristocratic and martyr
tradition. Finally, Nietzsche had chosen classical
philology for his profession, and had obtained a
chair at Basel when still under twenty-four, so that
for some years afterwards his life was chiefly devoted
to the study of Greek literature and philosophy.
Now, while giving, as I have said, more credit to
Christianity than it deserves as a discipline in
truthfulness, he still acknowledges that "the Greeks
had the faithfulness and the veracity of children."1

At a much later period our immoralist loved to
maintain that the sincerity which, as a religious
habit, revolts against the profession of a false
religion is, as a moral habit, destructive of the
morality which is no more than a convention.
And he also maintained, in contemptuous reference
to George Eliot, that to believe in Christian morality
apart from Christianity is a weak inconsistency.2
It was both ungracious and unjust to taunt our

1 WW., IX., p. 104 ; written in 1871. In the references
W W. — Nietzsche's Werke, Leipzig-, 1895, 1904, large 8vo ed. ;
W. a. M. — Wille zur Macht, Leipzig, 1901, small 8vo ed.; Leben
=Das Leben Fr. Nietzsches, von Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche.

> WW., VIII., p. 120.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 235

great ethical novelist with being characteristically
English or womanish in this respect; for Schopen-
hauer, who was Continental and virile, had made
the same mistake, if mistake it is, and Nietzsche
had at first followed his master's example. Accept-
ing pessimism to this extent, that the search for
happiness must be abandoned as a chimera, in his
work on The Origin of Tragedy (published 1872), he
tells us that a chief note of tragic culture is "an
attempt to make the sufferings of the world our own
by an effort of sympathetic love."1 Greek tragedy
preaches a gospel of universal harmony, whereby
everyone feels himself not merely united, fused,
and reconciled, but absolutely one with his neigh-
bour.2 And in a subsequent work on The Study of
History, among the redeeming representatives of
humanity, he names not only those who have
passed through existence in pride and strength, or
in profound meditation, but also those who have
come " to pity and help."3 Later again he tells us
that " there is not enough goodness and love in the
world to let them be wasted on imaginary objects."4
And he had previously made the perfectly sane and
sufficiently obvious remark that goodness and pity
fortunately do not depend on the decay and growth
of religion ; although "practical morality will suffer
by its collapse." At the same time, this depen-
dence of action on religious sanctions deprives it,
in his opinion, of all ethical value.5

Returning to Schopenhauer, it is noticeable that
Nietzsche accepted his teaching not only on the

1 WW., I., p. 128. 2 Ibid., p. 24. 3 ibid., p. 2c

4 Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, p. 129; WW., II., 133.

5 WW.. X.. o. 214.

236 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

ethical, but also on the metaphysical, side. His
work on The Origin of Tragedy is a bold attempt to
read the philosophy of pessimism into the Greek
tragic drama. It arose, according to him, from a
combination of the worship of Dionysus with the
worship of Apollo. The one god represents the
element of Will and the other the element of Repre-
sentation in his master's great work. Dionysus
stands for " that original and eternal pain which is
the sole substance of the world," " the true reality
and primordial One with its eternal suffering and
self-contradiction, seeking for deliverance by the
creation of beautiful appearance — the Apolline
element of Greek tragedy."1

Schopenhauer had conceived music as a direct
interpretation of that suffering Will which is the
true substance of the world, whereas the other arts
have for their material the series of Platonic Ideas,
the forms and forces of nature which are one degree
farther removed from its absolute reality. And
Nietzsche conceives Greek tragedy as having
originated from music precisely because it furnishes
such an artistic revelation of the awful secret at the
heart of things. Now, Richard Wagner had long
before him enthusiastically adopted a theory so
flattering to his own art ; and, partly, no doubt, on
the strength of their philosophical agreement, he
and the young professor of philology at Basel had
become fast friends, the two frequently spending
their week-ends together at the house of the great
composer near Lucerne. Indeed, Wagner is so
glorified as a modern ^Eschylus in The Origin of

' WW., I., pp. 34 and 35.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 237

Tragedy that, rather to its author's annoyance, the
general public regarded that work chiefly as a
rapturous panegyric on the music of the future.

As an interpretation of Greek art The Origin of
Tragedy has no value, and was very properly con-
demned by one destined to become in after years
the foremost Hellenist of his age, Wilamowitz-
Mollendorff. With regard to Wagner, no more
need be said than that Nietzsche soon came to form
a very different opinion of his performances, giving
music a much lower place among the means of
culture, and a much lower place among musicians
to that particular composer. But in a general way
Wagner's influence proved of decisive importance
for his philosophical development. Combined with
the study of Schopenhauer and of the Greeks, it
led him to conceive the promotion of genius as the
highest form of moral effort. This, as we shall
see, was by no means identical with his subsequent
theory of the superman, although it led the way to
that theory ; nor was it at first inconsistent either
with pessimism or with the common morality.
Assuming that the contemplation of beautiful and
sublime objects is the chief, if not the sole, refresh-
ment available in a world of universal and incurable
misery, the power of creating beauty, which we call
genius, is a valuable asset for humanity, and ought
by every means to be encouraged.

Unfortunately, the moral end of genius has,
so far, been very imperfectly fulfilled. " Artists
undoubtedly create their works for the benefit of
other men ; and yet none will ever understand and
love their works as they did." It would have been
a better arrangement had the relation been reversed,

238 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

so that the effect should far exceed the cause.1
Such blunders are, however, to be expected.
" Nature always wills the common good, but is
incapable of choosing the best means for that
purpose. She shoots philosophers like arrows at
the human race, in the hope that they will strike
and stick somewhere " — whereas they are mostly
wasted.2

Nature, then, must be taught better — she must
receive a more intelligent direction ; and here
morality intervenes, although not quite according
to the highest ideals now prevalent. " The goal of
human endeavour has hitherto been sought in the
happiness of all men or of the majority, or in the
development of great communities ; and under this
false persuasion people will be found ready enough
to give their lives for the State ; whereas they
would hesitate to make the sacrifice were it
demanded, not by the State, but by an individual.
As if value and significance were to be determined
by counting heads!" A much mistaken view,
thinks our author, with the old bias of a university
teacher. " Humanity must be ever working at the
production of great individuals : that, and nothing

else, is its task a consideration suggested by

every species of animal and plant."3 In our case
education must supplement nature. Young men
should be taught to compensate for their own
imperfection and failure by contributing to the
development of something higher and more human
than themselves.'4 But the hope thus awakened
soon droops. " It is hard to produce such a state

1 WW., I., p. 467 sq. * Loc. cit.

3 Ibid., p. 442. « P. 443.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 239

of mind, for love alone can inspire the conscious-
ness of one's own imperfection ; and love cannot
be taught."1 Indeed, things are tending in a
directly opposite direction. Writing in 1874,
Nietzsche tells us that " the world was never more
worldly, never poorer in love and goodness."2 A
common view is to value culture as a means for
procuring its possessor the greatest possible amount
of earthly happiness.3 Or again, the selfishness of
the State demands that all culture shall be made
instrumental to its service and aggrandisement.
Christianity in particular, which began as one of
the purest expressions of the impulse towards
culture, " has been diverted from the production of
saints into a means for the manufacture of useful
citizens."4 Science offers no help; it is " cold, dry,
loveless ; it ignores the deep sense of dissatisfaction
and longing."5 And " such is the hatred for origin-
ality now prevailing that Socrates could not have
lived among us, or at least not lived to seventy."6

It will be seen from the above extracts that, up
to the age of thirty at least, Nietzsche still accepted
those altruistic ideals which in later life he was
never weary of denouncing. In this respect he
followed Schopenhauer, who contrived to combine
the most absolute disinterestedness in theory with
the most absolute selfishness in practice. A really
consistent pessimism would remain neutral as
between egoism and altruism, since the furtherance
of life is of equally little value to myself and to
others. But Nietzsche had never been a pessimist
in the complete or Hindoo sense of cultivating the

' P. 444. » P. 42I. 3 p. 447.

* P. 448. s P. 4S3. & P. 462.

24o THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

will not to live, regarding such an aspiration as
self-contradictory, or at least unthinkable. And,
apart from logic, his personal experiences were
such as to disgust him with the master's ideal of
pleasure as what alone makes life worth living.
While still a student at Leipzig the Prussian
military law obliged him to serve for a time in the
artillery. His career as a gunner did not last long,
for a rupture of the thoracic muscles, caused by the
attempt to mount a restive horse, resulted in an
illness that incapacitated him from continued service
in the ranks, and a short attendance with the
ambulance corps before Metz in 1870 had a still
more ruinous effect on his constitution. But even
so much of a soldier's life, chiming in well with
the aristocratic and fighting instincts of his Polish
blood, gave the young professor a new idea of the
possible value of life. If existence yielded no
happiness, it still afforded the joy of victoriously
resisting the assaults of pain ; and from that heroic
conflict, continued in after years through intense
agonies of suffering, he came forth an optimist,
continuing in his faith to the end.

Hellenic studies no doubt contributed to his con-
version. In his first work, when still under the
influence of Wagner and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
had falsely interpreted Greek tragedy as a pessim-
istic manifesto, and, by a strangely perverted reading
of literary history, he had ascribed its dissolution
to the opposite teaching of Socrates and Euripides.
We have already come across a passage indicating
a much more favourable view of Socrates ; and in
another passage, written about 1877, a good time
is looked forward to when Xenophon's Memorabilia

NIfiTZSCrfE 24f

will be substituted for the Bible as a manual of
rational morality.1 Earlier still the age had been
referred for its models to the old Greek world, " so
great, so natural, and so human."2 It was through
the higher power of their moral nature that the
Greeks were victorious over all other civilisations.3
Familiarity with Hellenic ideals inevitably drew
our philosopher away from Richard Wagner's
romanticist views of art and life. The breach
between them began at the Bayreuth festival of
1876, when some traits of petty vanity and selfish-
ness in the master's character first became painfully
apparent to his young admirer. What made it
irremediable was a question of morality and religion.
Up to 1874 Wagner had been a declared and un-
compromising atheist. During the last years of
his life he developed a sort of mystical Christianity,
in which the ideas of a human fall and recovery
through atonement played the most conspicuous
part. His opera Parsifal was intended to illus-
trate the new departure, and the plans for its
composition formed the subject of frequent con-
versations between himself and a group of friends
at Sorrento in the autumn of 1876. Nietzsche,
who was one of these, listened with dismay and
disgust to what he considered an insincere betrayal
of the convictions they had once held in common,4
all the more offensive because it was symptomatic
of a general pietistic reaction set up by the higher
classes in Germany, with a view both to consoli-
dating the new Empire and resisting the spread of
Socialism.

1 WW., III., P. 248. 2 ww., I., P. 352.

3 Ibid., 384. « Leben, II., p. 857.

R

242 THE MORALS O£ AN IMMORALIST—

Wagner's apostasy seems to have had the effect
of driving Nietzsche into an attitude of more open
hostility towards Christianity, and, indeed, towards
all theism. Since religion could exercise such a
fatal effect on the intellectual integrity of genius, it
was not only false, but dangerous, and ought to be
destroyed. His next work, Menschlich.es, Allzu-
menschliches (So Very Human), appeared in 1878,
the centenary of Voltaire's death, and is dedicated
to his memory. It consists of loose critical notes
couched in the aphoristic form which the writer
afterwards came to handle with such supreme
mastery, and which alone suited his disconnected
and irresponsible mode of thinking. The general
trend of reflection offers a series of striking con-
trasts to the writer's earlier points of view ; although
an attentive consideration shows that the transition
was already being silently prepared towards the close
of the first period. In dealing with so very per-
sonal a writer we shall best understand the evolu-
tion of his ideas by constant reference to the events
of his life.

It will be remembered that in embracing pessi-
mism our moralist had also embraced the ethical
ideal of universal benevolence associated with it by
Schopenhauer and the Hindoos ; and how, under
the concurrent influence of Wagner and the
Greeks, he had sought to concentrate the passion
for disinterested self-devotion on the systematic
culture of genius. Unfortunately, the only two
great men that he recognised as such in recent
history had both proved false guides ; and this
seems in the first instance to have made him
distrust genius as a social danger. Its worship,

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 243

he remarks, is a survival of the adoration formerly
given to gods, and to kings as their representatives.
" The elevation of individuals into superhuman
beings encourages the idea that large sections of
the people are baser and more barbarous than they
really are."1 Genius even "acts as an enemy of
truth by keeping up an intense ardour of conviction
and discouraging the cautious and modest tone of
science";2 while "never to have changed one's
opinions is the sign of having remained in a
belated stage of culture."3

As a consequence of the new departure, science,
so lately denounced for its coldness and dryness,
now takes the place of art as the leading means of
culture. Before the breach with Wagner signs of
a growing preference for pure knowledge had not
been wanting. We had been told in a truly
positivist spirit that " the proper question for philo-
sophy is to determine how far things are unalter-
able ; the task of improving them, in so far as they
can be improved, may then be fearlessly under-
taken."4 The note of moral enthusiasm will not
be overlooked. It had already been associated
with a higher standard of intellectualism in the
reminder that " the most fearful sufferings have
been brought on mankind by the impulse to be
just without judgment ; so that nothing is more
requisite for the general welfare than the widest
possible dissemination of judgment."5

Wagner was intensely German, intensely anti-
French ; and Nietzsche, when he wrote about the

1 WW., II., p. 340. 2 Ibid., p. 41 1.

3 ibid., P. 407. 4 ww., i., P. 514.

s Ibid., p. 329.

244 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

origin of tragedy, shared his patriotic views. He
then looked forward to " the regeneration of the
German soul by the elimination of every Latin
element under the external stimulus of the last
war, and inwardly by the example of Luther,
together with all our great poets and artists."1
His expectations were not fulfilled ; at any rate,
Germany was not regenerated, but the contrary ;
and it is remarkable that, on looking back in 1878
to the period after the war, what most offended him
was the moral corruption of his countrymen.
Their notions of right and wrong were unsettled ;
their rage for luxury and enjoyment knew no
bounds ; their sensuality was disgusting ; nearly
every German had become a degree more dishonest,
sycophantic, avaricious, and frivolous than before.2
A general lowering of intellectual standards is also
complained of, but this is only another symptom of
moral decay. With Wagner the last hope failed,
and Nietzsche turned to foreign countries, especially
to England and France, for what Germany could
not supply.

In the writings of the second period the refer-
ences to England are particularly complimentary.
She is "now [1877-1878] unmistakably ahead of
all other nations in philosophy, natural science,
history, discoveries, and the spread of culture."
This is due to the strength of individual character,
resulting from a long national inheritance, enjoyed
by her great men of science, and from their in-
dependence of learned association.3 Furthermore,
" we must allow English writers the credit of having

' WW., I., pp. 164-65. * WW., XL, pp. 94-95-

3 Ibid., p. 68.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 245

made admirable contributions towards an ideal
scientific literature for the people. Their hand-
books are the work of their most distinguished
scholars — men of whole-minded, rich, and generous
natures."1 Nor is it only among men of learn-
ing that this strength of character is exhibited.
" English artisans work hard at their trade not
merely for profit but for power, and not merely for
power but for the utmost freedom and individual
distinction."2 Schopenhauer is now praised for
the appreciation of hard facts, the determination to
be clear and reasonable, that often make him seem
so much of an Englishman and so little of a
German."3

Everything written at this time bears what on
the Continent is called a positivist impress.
Nietzsche does not seem to have read Comte, but
he refers admiringly to him as "that great and
honest Frenchman with whom no German or
English thinker can compare for comprehension
and mastery of the exact sciences," while totally
rejecting the religious and constructive element
of his teaching.4 For himself our philosopher
professes to know little about the results of science ;
" but that little has been inexhaustibly serviceable
in clearing up obscurities and abolishing former
modes of thought and action."5 As the quintes-
sence of our positive knowledge three propositions
are stated : (i) There is no God ; (2) there is no
moral world — i.e., no retribution for good or evil
conduct ; (3) good and evil are determined by the

1 WW., III., p. 102. * WW., II., p. 357.

» WW., V., p. 130. * WW., IV., pp. 348-49.

s WW., XL, p. 402.

246 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

ideals and directions of life, the best part of these
being inherited, but with a possibility that the
resulting judgments may be falsified by the
demands of our actual ideals.1 With the disap-
pearance of theism pessimism ceases to have any
meaning. The world is neither good nor bad ;
such notions apply only to human beings, and in
their ordinary acceptation cannot rightly be applied
even to these.2 For "free will is an illusion";3
" that intelligible freedom " under cover of which
Schopenhauer sought to rehabilitate moral respon-
sibility is a fable;4 and "the thing in itself" an
illegitimate inference from phenomena.5 In fact,
Schopenhauer's metaphysic was simply a revival
of mediaeval Christianity, due to want of scientific
knowledge.6

At first the new ardour for destructive criticism
extends to morality, which we are told in so many
words is annihilated together with religion by our
way of looking at things.7 But the reason given
is merely that science can admit no motives except
pleasure and pain, usefulness and injury.8 Such
an arbitrary restriction seems itself to be a survival
of theology ; and, in fact, it is traceable to the
French freethinking literature of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, which Nietzsche was now
studying with delight. He observes truly enough
that " in the metaphysical sense there are no sins,
but also no virtues,"9 without remembering that
metaphysical values have been abolished. His
aphoristic method had the advantage of making

1 WJF..XI., p. 134. * W W., II., p. 46. 3 ibid., p. 36.

4 P. 63. 5 Pp. 3, sq, 6 p ^

i WW., II., p. 52. • Loc. cit. 9 Ibid., p. 77.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 247

composition easy for himself and fruitful of easy
reading for others ; but, combined with the passion
of the higher German intellect for self-contradiction,
it involves him in hopeless confusions of thought.

In accordance with this mental habit the destruc-
tive criticism of morality is interspersed with
appeals to moral motives and standards, or is even
carried on with their aid. As a conclusive argu-
ment against unselfishness we are told that " to be
always acting for others is almost as mischievous
as to act against them : it is a forcible intrusion on

their sphere of action Not to think of others,

but always to be acting most strictly for one's self,
is a high sort of morality. The world is imperfect
because so much is done for others."1 An ex-
gunner might have remembered that the way to
hit a distant mark is not to aim straight at it. A
false and fussy altruism is not the alternative to
taking exclusive care of number one. " Love man-
kind ! But I say, rejoice in mankind, and there-
fore help to produce the sort of people in whom we
can rejoice ! The right morality is to seek out and
encourage those who delight us, and to fly from
the others. Let the wretched, the misshapen, and
the degenerate die out. They should not be kept
alive at any price."2 Our fastidious friend must
have come across many unlovely sights when
serving in the ambulance corps before Metz ; we
may assume that they did not impress him as a
reason for shirking his duty. It may be said that
wounded soldiers are frequently strong, healthy
men, capable of returning to their work after

1 WW,, XI., pp. 310-11. a Ibid., pp. 313, 314.

248 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—

proper treatment. But the same is true of many
patients in our civil hospitals whose services would
be lost to the community but for modern philan-
thropy. No hard-and-fast line can be drawn
between those cases and the case of those whose
continued existence is altogether undesirable.
What we know is that the passion of pity, on the
whole, subserves race-interests, and that it cannot
be kept up at full strength unless, as with other
passions, there is enough to overflow and go to
waste. It is a question whether Nietzsche himself
was not a degenerate ; it is certain that he had to
give up his work as a professor, owing to ill-health,
in a few years ; and that his literary work could
hardly have been continued without the help of a
small retiring pension from the university. Let
me add that he had been a singularly devoted
teacher, among other things gratuitously preparing
students "from the interior of Switzerland " for their
examinations in philosophy. In private life his
character was gentle, kind, and sympathetic — to a
greater extent, indeed, than he personally would
have liked it to be — and his attacks on altruism
were, perhaps, inspired by a consciousness of the
injury it had done his health. We may also
attribute to his unfortunate personal experiences
the prophecy that hygienics will be a prime interest
in the society of the future.1

Throughout the second, or scientific period,
morality continues a paramount preoccupation.
There is no antithesis between increase of know-
ledge and increase of human welfare ; on the

• ww., XL, p. 69.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 249

contrary, they are mutually subservient. Faith in
the supreme utility of science and of its possessors
should take the place of faith in mere numbers.1
But the observations out of which science is built
are themselves conditioned by sincerity and recti-
tude. " Even in the region of sense-perception
there are none but moral experiences."2 "The
history of science exhibits the victory of noble
impulses ; there is much morality concerned in its
pursuit."3 " It is a mistake to estimate philoso-
phers as artists, leaving out of sight their justice
and self-control."4 " Unfortunately we shall never
know the best thing about genius, the self-control and
self-discipline exercised in bringing its powers into
play."5 " Hurrah for physical science, and a double
hurrah for the honesty that forces us to study it ! "6
As may be gathered from some of the passages
just quoted, general utility is the end of moral
action. But morality need not therefore be imper-
sonal. On the contrary, we best serve our true
advantage by moral action.7 Benevolence and
beneficence make up the good man — but they
should begin with himself.8 The greatest wonders
of antique morality, Epictetus for instance, knew
nothing about that altruism which is so fashionable
nowadays.9 Nietzsche as a professional Hellenist
was fascinated by Greek ethics, and the influence
of its masters is shown in more than one refer-
ence. Epicurus counts among the greatest of
men ;10 we have not advanced beyond him, but his

1 WW., III., p. 155. » WW., V., p. 155. 3 WW., XL, p. 204.
* Ibid., p. 408. s WW., IV., p. 357. 6 WW., V., p. 258.

^ WW., II., p. 96. 8 WW., IV., p. 336. 9 Ibid., p. 133.

250 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

dominion has been infinitely extended.1 Aristotle
is not named ; but we find his doctrine of moral
habit passionately reasserted as against Luther's
doctrine of justification by faith.2 And it is made
a charge against our system of classical education
that we are exercised in no single antique virtue
as the ancients were exercised in it.3 As the
consolations of Christianity evaporate the con-
solations of ancient philosophy are revived in new
splendour.4

Ours is, indeed, an age of comparison and
selection, an age which, discarding all provincialism
in conduct as in art, bids us look round among the
historic civilisations with a view to constructing a
higher morality from the forms and habits offered
to our choice.5 Now it is precisely the adherence
to an unreasoned tradition that mankind have
generally regarded as the distinctive note of
morality ; so that when Nietzsche first called
himself an immoralist, what he meant to emphasise
was his defiance of tradition as such, his demand
for a reasonable basis of action. Such a basis is
not supplied by an appeal to our moral feelings,
for these are nothing better than inherited judg-
ments. To trust them is to trust your grandmother
and her grandmother rather than the gods within
you, your reason and your experience.6

All this sounds commonplace enough to a reader
of Bentham and Mill ; just as Descartes and
Montesquieu may have sounded commonplace to
the readers of Bacon and Locke. And when
Nietzsche proclaimed the supremacy of England in

1 WW., XL, p. 168. " WW., IV., p. 30. 3 ibid., p. 187.

l.,p. 168. s JFJF.,II.,p.4i. 6 WW.,IV.,P. 41.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 251

philosophy it was probably to English ethics that
he referred. Universalistic hedonism is not, I
think, anywhere stated in terms, but its elements
are freely scattered through his notes. There is,
he tells us, no instinct of self-preservation ; every
action interpreted as evidence of such may be
explained by the search for agreeable and the
avoidance of disagreeable sensations. Speaking
generally, we only wish for objects because they
are associated with agreeable states of feeling in
ourselves.1 Men might be estimated by the degree
of happiness they are capable of experiencing or
communicating.2 One of the charges brought
against " morality " is that it has represented self-
delight as offensive, self-torment as acceptable to
the deity.3 On the other hand, culture is an
expression of happiness.4 The joy felt in absorb-
ing new ideas should be carried so far as to out-
weigh all other kinds of pleasure.5 Noble and
magnanimous natures experience some feelings of
pleasure and pain so strongly that the intellect is
either silenced or made instrumental to them.6
Nor is happiness by any means so rare as
pessimists would have us believe. The world
abounds in good will; and the constant little every-
day manifestations of this impulse, taking the
form of good humour, friendliness, and unaffected
courtesy, contribute enormously to the happiness
of life.7 " It needs a life full of pain and renuncia-
tion to teach us that existence is saturated with
honey."* In short, " there is no life without

1 WW., XL, pp. 253 and 292. * Ibid., p. 367.

3 P. 263. * P. 316. s p. 403. 6 WW.,V., pp. 39, 40.

i WW., II., p. 71. 8 WW., XL, p. 154.

252 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

pleasure ; the fight for pleasure is the fight for
life."1 This view does not exclude morality, for
each one is called good or evil according to the
way in which he carries on the fight ; and that
depends on the degree and quality of his intellect* —
a saying elucidated by the remark made elsewhere
that no honey is sweeter than the honey of know-
ledge ; so that he who has spent his life in its
acquisition first discovers in old age how well he
has obeyed the voice of Nature, the Nature that
governs all things by pleasure.3

We saw how Nietzsche at first looked on the
discovery that action depended absolutely on
pleasure and pain as destructive of morality. But
he did not long hold to that crude interpretation
of ethical science ; for we find a passage belonging
to the same period, and much more consistent with
its general tone, in which he tells us that joy must
exercise a healthy and reparative influence on man's
moral nature, or why should the moments when we
bathe in its sunshine be just those when the soul
involuntarily pledges herself to be good and to
become perfect?4 And, as a substitute for religious
exercises, he proposes immediately on wakening in
the morning to think how we may give pleasure to
at least one human being in the course of the day.5

Assuming happiness, understood as pleasure and
the absence of pain, to be desired by all — to be,
indeed, the only thing desirable — it would seem
to follow that utilitarianism is the only rational
method of ethics ; and it might have been expected
that Nietzsche, speculating as he did under the

1 WW., II., p. 107. * Loc. dt. 3 p. 267.

« WW., III., p. 166. s WW., II., p. 385.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 253

combined influence of Greek and English thought,
would have frankly accepted its principles, pre-
serving, of course, complete liberty with regard to
the adjustment of details. What prevented him
from taking that step was the pervadingly sceptical
and negative cast of his intellect, aggravated, as in
the case of Coleridge, of whom otherwise he often
reminds one, by the use of deleterious drugs and
by solitary habits. According to him, there can
be no moral law binding on all mankind unless we
can prove that there is some universal end of action ;
and such an end does not exist. Pleasure will not
supply it, for the pleasures of sensitive beings vary
with the degree of their development,1 and happi-
ness is pursued by opposite paths.2 Oddly enough,
the second of these considerations is directed by
name against Spencer, than whom none would
have more cordially accepted it. Soon afterwards
the most complete development of individuality is
proposed as an end, characteristically enough
without reference to the priority of Spencer and
Mill in this direction. It is true that Mill had
certainly, and Spencer probably, taken his cue
from Wilhelm von Humboldt; but Nietzsche never
betrays any acquaintance with that thinker, and
the way in which he associates his own indi-
vidualism with the theory of evolution seems to
place Spencer's leading beyond a doubt.3

After all, the effort to get rid of a moral law
speedily results in its rehabilitation. For, as a
means for increasing the number of those happy
accidents on which future developments depend, it

' WW., IV., pp. 102 sq. * XL, p. 233.

3 Ibid., pp. 238 and 330.

254 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST

is recommended that we should maintain the utmost
variety of conditions under which human beings
can exist ;' and this would surely necessitate a code
of social justice to begin with, as Spencer pointed
out long ago in Social Statics, and as Professor
Juvalta, of Pavia, is never weary of insisting on
at the present day, although his theory, unlike
Spencer's, is penetrated with socialistic ideas.

Nietzsche himself, when he has to combat
socialist demands, is not slow to quote justice as a
recognised social obligation. Admitting that the
present distribution of property results from in-
numerable acts of injustice and violence in the
past, he deprecates the repetition of similar acts in
modern times, setting his hopes rather on a general
increase in the sense of justice, and a diminution of
violent impulses all round.2

As a last homage to the received morality, a note
dating from the year 1880 may be mentioned, in
which Napoleon is called the greatest of men, if
his aim had been the good of humanity.3

Not long after abandoning the cultivation of
genius as a universal end, Nietzsche seems to have
taken up and substituted for it the idea, so prominent
in his last period, of breeding a superior race.
Here, again, the Hellenic influence is prominent.
In a fragment dating from 1876 the Greeks are
quoted as an example of what may be done in the
way of intellectual stimulation by the self-conscious-
ness of such a race in the midst of a barbarous
population.4 English science and philosophy, for
which so much enthusiasm is expressed, would no

1 P. 239. * WW., 1 1., pp. 334*0.

3 ww., xi., P. 387- 4 P. 33-

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 255

doubt act powerfully in the same direction through
the doctrine of evolution, which is known to have
interested Nietzsche intensely at this time. In this
connection much has been made of his debt to
Darwin ; but, as he never understood the theory
of natural selection, it seems more likely that the
decisive influence came from Spencer, whose psy-
chology he certainly accepted to the extent of
describing knowledge as a nervous modification
produced by the action of external objects on our
organs of sense, without any co-operation from the
mind.1 Now, Spencer from the beginning was
interested in evolution much less as an explanation
of the past than as a promise of the future — as a
pledge that human life might rise to a far more
perfect harmony between organism and environ-
ment than any yet attained ; and on this side his
philosophy would appeal strongly to Nietzsche, as
also on its individualistic side, with which we have
seen him to be in complete agreement. Indeed, he
brings the two into direct association by asking :
" Is not every individual an attempt to reach a
higher species than man?"2 It is here, rather
than in the youthful worship of genius, which his
disgust with Wagner led him to repudiate, that we
can lay our finger on the genesis of the superman.

It has been disputed whether the superman was
intended by his prophet to stand for a new animal
species, or for a new and improved variety of
human being, or, finally, for a sporadic type of
individual excellence, cropping up occasionally in
the existing state of civilisation. So far as the

1 P. 275. * P. 238.

256 THE MORALS dF AN IMMORALIST-

ftame and notion have become popular, it seems to"1
be generally understood in the last sense. The
superman is commonly identified with a coxcomb
whose opinion of his own superiority to the rest of
the species is only equalled by his contempt for the
ordinary obligations of morality. Such pretensions
are not new ; and it would be strange if Nietzsche
had no higher ambition than to re-edit them under
a more pompous appellation. In fact, it very much
disgusted him to find that the watchword of his
philosophy should be used to procure admittance
for degenerate types, with whom he sympathised
even less than with the unregenerate Philistine.
Nothing like the superman had ever turned up in
his own experience ; whether history had offered
any examples of his ideal remains doubtful. On
this point the language of Zarathustra is perfectly
explicit, and if taken alone would settle the ques-
tion. According to the prophet under whose name
Nietzsche speaks, when the greatest and the
smallest are stripped and compared they show
themselves too fatally alike, and both of them all
too human. In a later work Napoleon seems to be
mentioned as an exception, but an exception that
proves the rule, being a combination of the super-
man with the brute.1

Napoleon, in fact, embodied the formidable alter-
native confronting us at the present day. The
human race represents a transitional stage of
unstable equilibrium. We must either go back
to the brute or on to the superman.2 And the
choice is not doubtful. Our very first article of

1 WW., VI., p. 133, and VII., p. 337. " WW., XII., p. 210.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 257

faith is the duty of not relapsing into a savage and
anti-social state.1 Therefore, the new beings can
only be conceived as a multitude ; goodness can
only be developed among equals.2

It remains to be decided whether we are to
conceive the superman as a new animal species,
differing not less from the actual human species
than that differs from the anthropoid ape, or merely
as a new race, related to the modern European
somewhat as the Greeks were related to the
barbarians among whom they settled. This seems
to be a point on which, as on various others, our
prophet had no scruple about changing his mind
without caring to acknowledge the change either to
others or to himself. To my mind at least, there
cannot be the faintest doubt that when he wrote
Zarathustra his wish was to represent the super-
man as a new animal species to be evolved by
artificial selection from man. I know that his
sister and biographer, Madame Forster-Nietzsche,
refuses to accept this interpretation ; but it is signi-
ficant that she can only get rid of the relevant
texts by explaining them away as poetical meta-
phors. Unfortunately for her interpretation, when
Nietzsche talks in parables he makes them unmis-
takably parabolical. We find ourselves among a
motley assemblage of rope-dancers, lions, adders,
tarantulas, kings, beggars, and other mythical
properties needless to enumerate. But every now
and then this rather wearisome entertainment is
relieved by the expression of plain ideas in plain
language, quite familiar to us from their recurrence

1 WW., XII., P. 52. * P. 210.

258 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

in the author's other works, where, as Cassandra
says, the oracle looks out not like a bride behind
her veil, but like wind-driven waves against a
rising sun. And foremost among these is the idea
of a new species, a superman to be evolved from
man, or, in the still more telling phrase once let
fall, a super-race from the race.1

We have not now to discuss the feasibility of the
idea. What has to be pointed out as the most
interesting and attractive element in the work
where it first appeared is the fire of moral
enthusiasm burning through the prophecies from
beginning to end. " Zarathustra has found no
greater power on earth than good and evil."2 But
as yet this power has been wasted, because it was
not directed towards the attainment of a single ideal.
" There have been a thousand aims because there
have been a thousand peoples. Humanity is still
without an aim. And to be without that is to be
without itself."3

That all men should combine for one end is not
hopeless, for they already combine in smaller
groups. " Regard for the interest of the herd or
the community is older than self-interest. The
individual is a most recent creation. So long as a
good conscience represents the herd, only the bad
conscience says 'I.' Truly the sly and loveless
self that seeks its own profit in the profit of others
is not the beginning but the end of the herd."4

At no time of life did his Hellenism make
Nietzsche an admirer of the modern State ; and at
this period he positively foams at the mouth with

1 WW., VI., p. ii i. " Ibid., p. 84.

3 P. 87. 4 p. 86.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 259

hatred for it. The people and the herd may be fit
objects of faith and love ; never the State, although
it impudently claims to be the people, which is not
deceived, but hates it as " a sin against morals and
rights." There are many languages of good and
evil, but it lies in them all. " All that it says is a
lie, and all that it possesses has been stolen." Even
those who vanquished the old god fall a prey to
the snares of the new idol that promises to give
them all if they will worship it ; " so it buys the
splendour of your virtue and the gaze of your proud
eyes." The State must cease to exist before real
manhood can begin ; much more, before the way
to the superman can be prepared.1

What is the justification of this violent language ?
We may assume that the State discourages the
growth of individuality; and as, according to Zara-
thustra, it was invented for the benefit of the
" superfluous classes," it is apparently made respon-
sible for their continued existence, while they in
turn naturally support it.

Evidently, however, what Nietzsche most dreads
and detests is not the mischief done by the modern
State in suppressing individualism and favouring
the survival of degenerates, but the fact that as a
real, living, visible, attractive unity it enters into
formidable competition with the glorified indi-
viduality of his imaginary superman. Michelet
has pointed out that the giant Gargantua was
nothing less than the New Monarchy of the Renais-
sance ; and one has only to think of him as coming
into conflict with Cassar Borgia, whom Nietzsche

1 Pp. 69-72.

26o THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—

regards as the highest individual product of that
age, to see which party would win. Indeed, the
Duke of Valentinois, like another and greater
Caesar, was, from his German admirer's point of
view, a traitor to the individualistic cause, the
great ambition of his life having been to establish
the New Monarchy in the Pontifical States, if not,
as Machiavelli hoped, over the whole of a reunited
Italy. Neither he nor Alcibiades nor any other of
the same class has ever been content to "exist
beautifully "; nor do they seem inclined to tolerate
the existence of any other such paragons by their
side.

Here, then, at first starting, we find the idea of
the superman afflicted with an immanent self-con-
tradiction in the best Hegelian style. Conceived
as an individual, he at once establishes a levelling
despotism, thus sublating the very type that he
represents. Conceived as a class, he perishes by
internecine strife.1 And close behind this comes a
second self-contradiction, afflicting the means pro-
posed, or rather suggested, for bringing the ideal
into existence. As already mentioned, they consist
in an appeal to moral motives, in the proposal to
create a new enthusiasm of humanity, uniting and
directing towards a single end all the tremendous
forces that now work for a multitude of conflicting
ends. Now, this demand assumes the existence in
the human race, as a whole, of such passionate
self-devotion, combined with such cool, unerring
judgment, as no example of has been found in the

1 The condottieri whom Caesar Borgia treacherously massacred
at Sinigaglia were " higher men " of a sort, though not so high
as he was.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 261

past. For it must be a devotion capable of sacri-
ficing every other end to the achievement of this
one end — an end, too, of which as yet there has
been no experience, and an end involving, as no
other thing sought after has ever involved, the
total disappearance of the race that has brought it
about. And the judgment called into play for
that purpose must find the means for evolving a
new animal species — a task to which human
ingenuity, operating on the most passive and
plastic materials, has never yet found itself equal.
Surely, a race so splendidly endowed with the
noblest capacities of intellect, heart, and will as to
answer Zarathustra'scall would deserve a better fate
than such self-annulment, would itself have antici-
pated the superman, and would require all the
running it could make to keep in the same place.

It so happens that we can lay our finger on the
initial error whence these monstrous consequences
arose. Much as Nietzsche hated Germany, he
hated England more ; and with the rather dis-
creditable object, I fear, of depreciating England
and her great naturalist, he tries to show that
without Hegel there would have been no Darwin.
For, according to him, the German philosopher,
by teaching that specific notions were evolved out
of one another, prepared the scientific intellect of
Europe to entertain the idea of organic develop-
ment.1 Historically there is, of course, no founda-
tion for such a claim. Evolutionism was hereditary
in the Darwin family, and goes back to a time
before Hegel ; while Hegel himself took the idea

1 WW., V., p. 300.

262 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—

of development from Schelling, who in turn owed
it to the naturalists of his time. What I wish to
point out, however, is not the historical error, but
the profound misconception of organic evolution
that it betrays. Hegel's theory of logical develop-
ment is determined by the idea that the lower notion
suffers from an inherent self-contradiction, in con-
sequence of which it falls to pieces and spon-
taneously gives birth to the higher notion. With
Darwin, on the contrary, the decay and death of
the old species are not the antecedent, but the con-
sequence, of its having given birth to the new
species, with which it is unable to compete. And
this very internecine strife is another point of dis-
tinction between the two processes. Hegel's notions
only perish in an ideal sense. In the actual life of
logic they survive and continue to play a useful
part in the economy of thought.

Applying the result to Nietzsche's philosophy,
we now see how, under an illusive show of Dar-
winian biology, he really evolves superman from
man on the lines of Hegelian dialectic. That is to
say, the old human species, in awakening to the
consciousness of its degeneracy, overcomes and
supersedes itself, thus calling the new superhuman
species into being. Thus the pessimism of his
youth becomes unexpectedly justified as an ideal
expression of race-suicide preparatory to a better
state of things.

I have said that Nietzsche hated England ; and
it may be thought that this is inconsistent with the
praises he lavished on her in his second or scientific
period. But the revulsion merely repeats in a
much less excusable form his earlier revolt from

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 263

Wagner and Schopenhauer. It belongs to an
unpleasant habit he had of kicking down the ladder
by which he had climbed up. He could not
forgive the English thinkers for what he owed
them ; and the " profound mediocrity of the English
intellect" — represented presumably by Shakespeare,
Newton, Chatham, and Byron — is charged with
having caused a deep depression of the European
intellect as a whole, but more particularly of the
French intellect. This very mediocrity, however,
enables the English to perform important services
for which men of genius are incapacitated by their
splendid disregard of facts. Darwin, Mill, and
Herbert Spencer, being the men to whom he
personally owed most, are particularly mentioned
in this connection as examples of useful dulness.1
Of the three Spencer seems to have had the largest
share in ultimately determining Nietzsche's philo-
sophy, and so he is never mentioned without
some expression of contemptuous disagreement.
English utilitarianism is the foundation of his
ethics ; and therefore it is savagely denounced as
a canting, hypocritical attempt to secure the greatest
happiness of England under pretence of pursuing
the greatest happiness of all. In England itself
the standard of happiness among moral philo-
sophers is comfort, fashion, and a seat in Parlia-
ment.2 Gizicki once congratulated a German critic
for having performed the rare feat of attacking
utilitarianism without forgetting the manners of a
gentleman. This admirable exception could not
have been our aristocratic immoralist.

1 WW., VII., p. 223. » Ibid., p. 184.

264 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—

Throughout his second period Nietzsche, besides
being a utilitarian in the wide sense of judging
actions by their consequences, had also been a
hedonist — that is, he had considered happiness (or
pleasure) as a universally desired and absolutely
desirable thing, although at the same time as a
thing too indefinite to be made a standard for the
unification of human life. The desire of domina-
tion, on the other hand, is mentioned in a note
bearing the date of 1880 as often a symptom of
weakness.1 Within a year we find the first intima-
tion of his final doctrine, that power is the summum
bonum and love of power the universal motive, in
an aphorism setting forth (for the rest without an
attempt to demonstrate it) that, whether we give
pleasure or pain to others, it is solely for the
purpose of satisfying our love of power.2 A little
later still, Zarathustra proclaims power as a new
virtue, a new standard of good and evil.3 It is not
so very new, being borrowed, as usual without
acknowledgment, from an English philosopher,
Hobbes ; and besides that Nietzsche, in his later
writings, especially in the uncompleted Wille zur
Macht) assumes that power is what everyone really
wants and has always wanted. Everyone — with a
single striking exception. " Men do not strive for
happiness — only Englishmen";* though elsewhere
our people are associated, in this contemptible
pursuit, with " shopkeepers, Christians, cows,
women, and other democrats."5 Nevertheless,
"every healthy morality is dominated by an
instinct of life";6 "an action imposed by the vital

' WW., XI., p. 405. a WW., V., p. 50 s(j. 3 WW.,Vl.t p. 112.
« WW., VIII., p. 62. 5 ibid., p. 149. 6 P. 88.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 265

instinct is proved to be right by the pleasure it
gives";1 " everything good is instinctive, and there-
fore easy, necessary, free ";2 " pleasure is a feeling
of power ; to exclude the emotions is to exclude
those conditions which give the feeling of power,
and therefore of pleasure at its highest."3 Herbert
Spencer would not have dissented in principle from
this statement ; but then he would not, like his
critic, have distinguished between happiness and
pleasure, which two other Englishmen, Words-
worth and Ruskin, would have identified with
"vital feelings of delight." Can Nietzsche have
been ignorant that the gospel of health, with its
accompanying condemnation of the sickly and
helpless, had been preached before him in The
Data of Ethics ?

On the other hand, Spencer would have emphati-
cally dissented from such a statement as that
" egoism belongs to the essence of the distinguished
soul ; I mean the immovable belief that other
beings must be naturally subject to a being like us,
and have to sacrifice themselves to it ; a relation-
ship which the distinguished soul accepts as
founded on the primary law of things."4 Nor
would he have allowed that the conquest and
spoliation of the weaker by the stronger was the
very principle of society and of life itself.5 But
he might have fairly challenged the Prussian
philosopher to reconcile these crudities with the
admonition given elsewhere : " Learn betimes to
discard the supposed individual ; to discover the
errors of the ego ; to feel cosmically about the me

1 P. 226. a P. 93. 3 w. z. M., p. 240.

« WW., VII., pp. 251-52. 5 Ibid., pp. 237-38.

266 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—

and thee."1 Or, again, why should Zarathustra
compare unfavourably the vulgar who want to live
gratis with men like himself, who are always
thinking what best thing they can give in exchange
for the life they have received, and who condemn
the wish to enjoy without giving enjoyment in
return ?2

Among his other adventures, Zarathustra falls in
with an imbecile hedonistic moralist, who is
accosting a herd of kine with the object of inducing
them to disclose the secret of their happiness. 3 It
does not seem to have struck the prophet that these
cows had a logic as well as an ethic, or that, if the
pasturing animals were too gentle to toss him on
the horns of a dilemma, a savage bull might have
been invited in for the purpose. If self-interest is
the law of life, with what right can the present
generation be called on to sacrifice themselves for
the evolution of a superior race? If there is a
moral law prescribing self-devotion, how can it
be our duty to create what the highest of our
contemporaries would call a devil?4

If Nietzsche ever contemplated the idea of
evolving a higher animal species than man, he
soon gave it up. His last work, The Anti-Chris-
tian, puts the problem quite clearly, as, not " what
is to succeed man?" but — "what kind of man
ought to be desired and bred as the more valuable,
the more worthy of life, the more certain of a
future?"5 And he proceeds to state, in direct
contradiction to Zarathustra, that the desirable
type has often presented itself in history, but never

1 WW., XII. .p. 74. " WW., VI., pp. 291 sq.

3 Ibid., pp. 38957. < P. 213. 5 WW., VIII., p. 218.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 267

as the result of a conscious effort, while the effect
of prevalent opinions has long been to repress or
extinguish it. Two agencies in particular have
hitherto worked with fatal effect in this direction —
morality and Christianity. He therefore applies
himself with a holy zeal to the destruction of both,
his intellect being indeed much better fitted for the
work of pulling down than for the work of build-
ing up.

The attack on morality, by which is meant the
doctrine of universal benevolence, proceeds on the
lines of the historical method, and rests on the
false assumption that a belief is refuted by showing
how it came to exist. Such a method, were it
generally applied, would ruin every belief without
exception, as all beliefs have a history, and even
the scepticism that displaced them would share
their fate. As it happens, however, the historical
explanation offered of the current distinction
between good and evil in conduct is entirely false.
It is the work of a mere classical philologist, and a
very imperfectly informed one at that. His thesis
is that the valuations of character and action were
originally fixed by the ruling caste in society,
those qualities of health, strength, beauty, courage,
liberality, and truthfulness which were most con-
spicuous in its members being approved of, while
the distinguishing qualities of their serfs were
proportionately despised. In those right-minded
ages to be strong and successful was the great
merit, to be weak and a failure the great vice. As
the subject classes had become enslaved through
their weakness, they set up a rival scale of values
in which pity, the correlative and consolation of

268 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—

weakness, occupied the highest place, while the
virtues of their betters were disparaged, their
rightful claims on the labourers treated as wicked
spoliation, and their favoured position assailed
with vindictive envy.

The aristocratic and chivalrous virtues maintain
their ascendancy during that chronic state of war
by which they are at once originated and preserved.
Prolonged peace, on the other hand, creates a
fatal split in the ruling body, and undermines its
ideals by favouring the development of a priest-
hood, and enabling it to dispute the supremacy of
the warrior caste. For a priestly life, being con-
ducive to physical degeneracy, breeds all the
mental characteristics of a weak race, thus throw-
ing the priests out of sympathy with the warriors,
and making them the natural allies of the servile
herd whose scale of values they adopt and syste-
matise into a code.

It would seem that, according to Nietzsche's
reading of history, which, however, is nowhere
given as a connected whole, the first essay towards
organising a servile or gregarious ethic was made
in Greece by Socrates, himself a man of the
people, and afflicted with the characteristic vices of
his class, one of these being a morbid disposition
to substitute self-conscious reasoning for instinct.
Under his corrupting influence Plato, an aristocrat
of genius but born with the soul of a Semitic
priest, proceeded to work out a theory of values
based on supernatural sanctions, in which the
right of the stronger, vigorously but vainly
defended by those genuine champions of old
Hellenic ideals, the Sophists, is subordinated to

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 269

the interest of the masses ; a pestilent doctrine
which, in company with an equally morbid asceti-
cism, became more or less current in all the later
schools of Greek philosophy.

More, however, was needed than a false philo-
sophy to secure the final victory of servile over
seignoral values. The Jews, a race of slaves and
priests combined, managed to impose their degrad-
ing morality on the civilised world by appealing to
the instincts of the lowest classes in the Roman
Empire under the name of Christianity. This
must not be confounded with the genuine teaching
of Jesus, a religion in which supernaturalism had
no place, and which perished with its author on
Calvary. What carried all before it was Paul's
theology, in which the idyllic domestic morality of
the Jewish Diaspora is artfully combined with a
scheme for giving envious plebeians their revenge
on the rich in another world.

In modern times Christianity has transmitted its
moralin virus to utilitarianism — an essentially
gregarious ethical system, first founded by the
sickly Jewish artisan Spinoza, and further deve-
loped by the plebeian English race, of which
Buckle, with his cheap and noisy eloquence, is a
characteristic type. For, let there be no mistake
about it, what we call " modern ideas " do not
come from the essentially aristocratic French
people, but from the plebeian English.1

As we learn from his letters, Nietzsche was in
early youth a careful student of Theognis ;* and
his theory of the two moralities, servile and

1 W W., VII., pp. 224 and 307. 3 Brief e, I., p. 2.

270 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST—

seignoral, or gregarious and egregious (taking
the second word in its Latin or Italian sense),
seems to have been suggested, in the first instance,
by that aristocratic elegist's bitter complaint of the
change in language brought about by the demo-
cratic revolution in Megara. An improvement in
their condition, he tells us, has turned the ignorant
rustics from bad to good ; while reverses of fortune
have given an evil name to the quondam nobles.
In reference to these passages Welcker, quoted by
Grote, observes that the political, as distinguished
from the ethical, sense of good and bad, fell into
desuetude through the influence of the Socratic
philosophy, which, according to the same authority,
first popularised those terms as ethical qualifica-
tions.1 However this may be, there is no evidence
that the personal revaluation brought a change of
moral values in its train, nor that either then or
afterwards a change in the relative estimate of the
different virtues took place. Least of all does it
appear that either pity or vindictiveness was
a peculiar characteristic of the lower orders.
Theognis is thirsting to drink the blood of his
enemies, in what Nietzsche would call a truly
plebeian spirit ; and he particularly reproaches his
young favourite Cyrnos for not grieving long over
the sufferings of his friends. Indeed, Homer alone
would prove that tenderness and sympathy were
qualities highly valued among the best-born
Greeks ; while the oath taken by every member of
an oligarchic club during the revolutionary period,
"to do the Demos all the harm he could," is

1 Crete's History of Greece, II., pp. 419 sq.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 271

evidence that resentment flourished to the full as
much among the hawks as among the lambs.

It would be more true to say that different classes
have different and contrasted vices than that they
have different and contrasted virtues — or values, if
the latter term be preferred. And we may admit
that insolence and cruelty are more characteristic
of a ruling, meanness and mendacity of a servile,
class, while contending that the permanent public
opinion of both classes makes for the consecration
of courage and gentleness all round. Indeed, the
very word " gentleness " is a historical lesson in
itself, proving that English aristocratic society, at
least, discerned a peculiar connection between
sweet manners and good birth.

As a young professor at Basel Nietzsche fully
accepted Grote's vindication of the Sophists,
although he failed to see that a far better case than
Grote's might be made out for them as ethical
reformers. In his latest phase he peremptorily,
and without reason given, goes back on the old
view, glorifying them as apostles of brute force.1
In this connection also he accepts the Melian
Dialogue — that masterpiece of tragic irony — as an
expression of what Thucydides himself thought
about public morality. There is no direct reference
to Plato's Gorgias — a wise abstinence ; for perhaps
it would have involved him in the necessity of
rinding an answer to the unanswerable Socratic
argument against Callicles, the real author of
Nietzsche's distinction between gregarious and
egregious morality. For, after appealing to natural

1 Cf. WW., X., p. 129, with W. s. M., p. 235.

2-J2 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

law in justification of the claim put forward by the
superior man to subjugate and despoil the inferior,
this cynical aristocrat has to admit that the many,
by banding together, may and do gain the upper
hand so decisively as to impose their standards on
him. Callicles tries to get out of the difficulty by
falling back on qualitative distinctions as consti-
tuting the right to rule ; but this admission re-
admits moral values into the discussion, with the
result that their supremacy over the whole of life
has to be conceded.

Such is also the outcome of Nietzsche's efforts
to get beyond good and evil. His objections to
the received morality can only be accredited by an
appeal to moral considerations of a still higher
order. His polemic against pity for degenerates
derives its whole strength from the argument that
their survival and propagation impairs the life-
enhancing qualities of the race. But if anyone
chooses to say, "What do I care for the race?"
his principles leave him without any answer, beyond
a torrent of unconciliatory abuse.

In so far as popular religion is identified with
popular morality, the attack on Christianity lays
itself open to the same objection. Nor is that all.
What gives such lustre to the whole argument
and raises it as literature to the first rank among
Nietzsche's writings is the moral passion displayed
throughout ; the constant invoking of truth as a
precious thing violated by the Jewish and Christian
priesthoods at every step in the propagation of
their creed.

Whether his charges have or have not been
made out is a question irrelevant to the present

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 273

discussion. What interests us to observe is that
at any rate it did not lie in the mouth of a pro-
fessed immoralist to make them. For they involve
the assumption, to which he is not entitled, that
there is such a thing as moral obligation, and that
part of it is to speak the truth. Nietzsche had
some glimmering of the difficulty ; but he never
worked out a consistent theory of the subject, and
his language when he touches on it is still more
illogical than elsewhere. Even before the days of
Zarathustra some of his reasonings would have
discredited a Conservative speaker opposing Brad-
laugh's claim to be sworn.

Our whole European morality falls to pieces with the
death of God. Now, in disclaiming the will to deceive,
we stand on moral principle. But supposing, as seems
very probable, that all life rests on a basis of deception —
what then ? Would it not be Quixotic, and even worse
to insist on veracity ? Let there be no mistake about it ;
what fires us still, unbelievers and all, is the old Christian
belief, which was also Plato's belief, that God is the
truth — that truth is divine. How, then, if this should
seem every day more incredible, if God himself should
prove to be our oldest lie ?'

At this rate, philosophers, whose chief business
it is to investigate truth, might be expected to
receive the news of their only guarantor's death
with some dismay. On the contrary, they show an
exultation which, in the circumstances, strikes one
as rather indecent. " Our whole heart overflows
with gratitude, wonder, and hopeful expectation."2
Zarathustra is one of this jubilant band ; but, then,
he sees no connection between theism and intel-
lectual honesty ( Redlichkeit ) ; on the contrary, he

1 WW., V., pp. 271-276. 2 Ibid., p. 272.

274 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

describes the latter as the latest born among the
virtues, and hated, as knowledge also is hated, by
those who have God on the brain. "Good," or
what we call "goody," people "never tell the
truth."1 A note dating from the same period
suggests the rather awkward compromise that we
should have no conscience in respect to truth and
error, in order that we may be able again to spend
life in the service of truth and of the intellectual
conscience.2

In the mass of notes collected for what was to
have been his magnum opus, the Wille zur Macht,
an untranslatable title which we may approximately
render by The Will to be Strong, Nietzsche nearly
anticipates Pragmatism. Indeed, it might seem to
be completely anticipated in such sayings as that
"truth is what exalts the human type";3 " perhaps
the categories of reason express nothing more than
a definite advantage for the race or the species :
their utility is their truth";4 "our confidence in
reason and its categories only proves that their
utility for life has been shown by experience, not
that they are ' true' ";5 were they not balanced by
other passages of a distinctly intellectualist type,
such as the assertion that " it is absolute want of
intellectual honesty to estimate a belief by the way
in which it works, not by its truth";6 " intellectual
honesty is the result of delicacy, valour, foresight,
temperance, practised and accumulated through a
long series of generations";7 "[with Christianity]
the question is not whether a thing is true, but how

1 WW., VI., pp. 44 and 293. » WW., XII., p. 63.

» P. 153. 4 P. 274 sg. * Leben, II., p. 775.

6 W. *. M., p. no. i Ibid., p. 245.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 275

it works — which is an absolute want of intellectual
honesty."1

On the whole, it would seem as if this extreme
regard for veracity were only used as a means for
discrediting religion, morality, and the Socratic
philosophy. And their defenders might plausibly
allege that they only used deception — when they
used it — for a good end ; that is to say, for an
augmentation of vital power. " Everything for the
army," as Colonel Henry said. It would have
been more consistent, not to say honest, on the
part of Nietzsche had he attacked the popular creed
simply on the ground that it lowered the vitality of
the species. Even on so narrow a basis the attack
could not have been worked without an appeal to
disinterested motives ; in other words, without an
appeal to morality. For a selfish religionist might
well prefer the gratification of his mystical cravings,
and a priest his ambition, to the health of the race.
But here also our critic has thrown away his whole
case by two most serious admissions. We have
first a frank acknowledgment that "there is nothing
diseased about the gregarious human being as
such ; on the contrary, he is of inestimable value,
but incapable of self-guidance, and therefore in
need of a shepherd, a need perfectly understood by
priests."2 " Petty virtues are needed for petty
people ";3 and when the lower strata of the popula-
tion are decadent "a religion of self-suppression,
patience, and mutual help may be of the highest
value."4 Therefore, we "require that gregarious
morality should be held absolutely sacred."5 And,

1 Leben, II., p. 719. * W. z. M., p. 209. 3 WW; VI., p. 246.
4 Leben, II., p. 734. s 2bid.t p. 809.

276 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

secondly, we find a parallel acknowledgment that
Christianity deserves great praise as " the genuine
religion of the herd."1 "The continued existence
of the Christian ideal is most desirable. My object
in making war on that chlorotic ideal was not to
destroy it, but to put an end to its tyranny, and
to make room for new and robuster ideals."2
" Common people are only endurable when they
are pious."3 They are not likely to remain pious
long where books like The Anti-Christian circulate
freely.

In England we have had a good supply of those
"robuster ideals," for which the German moralist
wishes to find room ; nor, by all accounts, are they
wanting in America ; yet he does not seem to have
looked to either country for his models. His
enormous self-esteem would have suffered by such
a reference. It also affected his conception of the
superman, who, in Nietzsche's last writings, no
longer figures as a new species destined to succeed
and displace the human species, but rather as a
superior race, like the Greeks — with himself, one
may suppose, as the most conspicuous example of
their perfections. At first supermen are thought
of, not as ruling over the inferior race, but as living
apart from them, "like the gods of Epicurus."4
But this view was soon found impracticable, and
abandoned. Throughout the Wille zur Mac/it
nothing is contemplated but a new aristocracy, a
ruling race, whose sole business will, however, not
be to rule, offering splendid examples of beauty,
strength, and intelligence for the delectation of

• WW., XIV., p. 336. * Leben, II., p. 744.

s WW., XII., p. 206. « Ibid., p. 211.

FRIEDR1CH NIETZSCHE 277

themselves and of the lower orders.1 Owing, pre-
sumably, to their wise administration, the labourers
are to live as the middle class live now ; but the
higher caste above them will be distinguished for
its abstinence.2 This elite naturally falls into two
divisions : a small body of supremely intellectual
men performing the highest functions and leading
the most perfect life, and, below them, an executive
of soldiers and judges to relieve them of the rough
work of government ; while men of science and the
majority of artists will find their appropriate place
among the labouring classes.3

It has been mentioned how dependent Nietzsche
was on the English moralists in his positivist
period, and under what studied rudeness his sense
of obligation was afterwards concealed. In his
last or fourth period the debt to Plato is even
more obvious, and his resentment is conveyed in
the same way, only, as befits the occasion, with
extraordinarily virulent abuse. Plato is "a great
Cagliostro," an example of " the higher swindling,"
"a moral fanatic," a "poisoner of heathen inno-
cence," and, worst of all, "tedious."4

It might be asked how a race of born rulers can
be called into existence by suspending all the laws
of morality, whether the duties of government are
likely to be better performed by an aristocracy
permanently emancipated from every social obliga-
tion, and, finally, whether these " dragon warriors
from Cadmean teeth " are likely to keep the peace
with each other longer than their fabled prototypes.

1 W. z. M., p. 414 ; Leben, p. 798.

* WW., XII., p. 214. 3 WW., VIII., pp. 302 sq.

« W. s. M., pp. 234 and 244 ; WW., VIII., p. 168.

378 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

But the Wille zur Macht opens a question of more
practical importance for Nietzsche's philosophy
than these. The theory adumbrated in that
unfinished work seems to be that nature consists
of nothing but energy ; that the natural process
consists in the appropriation of energy by one body
at the expense of another ; that the ascending line
of organic development is determined by a con-
tinual gain, and the descending line by a continual
loss, of energy ; that, in so far as we can use such
expressions as right and wrong, the right morality
consists in preferring the qualities that make for
vital energy, and wrong morality in preferring
those that make for its decay.

So far there is nothing in this philosophy incom-
patible with the assumption that great individuali-
ties are the highest products of nature, and that
their production is the worthiest object of human
endeavour. Of course, it always remains open for
Socrates, Plato, the present reviewer, or any other
wretched decadent, to ask why we should scorn
delights and live laborious days in order to promote
the evolution of some future Caesar Borgia. Sup-
posing, however, that we accept the transvaluation
of all values to that extent, a remorseless logic will
impel us to go further, and make a united Italy,
which was Borgia's own ambition, or a united
Europe, which, according to Nietzsche, was Napo-
leon's ambition, or, finally, a united world, the
object of our activity. I can quite imagine and
sympathise with a valuation that counts human
personality as the supreme thing, that says with
Heracleitus, "one man is worth ten thousand if he
be the best." Only Nietzsche bars himself out

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 279

from that valuation by his repeated assurances that
personality is an illusion.1 And it was by no
freak of paradox that he took up this position. It
was an essential part of his antitheistic polemic.
According to him, the ascription of phenomena to
a personal cause arises from the fallacious gram-
matical abstraction of subject and predicate, noun
and verb. There is really no such break in the
continuous stream of becoming. Nor is theism
the only result of this mischievous error. By a
still more fatal perversion, gregarious and Chris-
tian moralists, in their vindictive hostility to the
rich and powerful, coined the false notion of per-
sonal responsibility, on the strength of which their
oppressors were to be visited with everlasting
punishment.2

If I may borrow an illustration from Schopen-
hauer, Nietzsche is like the magician who sent his
familiar spirit to draw water, but knew no spell
that could stop him, with the result that he and
the whole country were drowned. Our modern
Callicles has reformed himself, discarding the
brutal licentiousness of his prototype, and even
adopting the passwords of Plato's Republic. But
it is all in vain. The terrible Socratic dialectic
works on and on to his utter and overwhelming
confusion. He appeals to Power, and to Power
let him go. He invokes a superman, who will be
found in the modern State ; that State so decried
by Zarathustra as the stronghold of the weak and
defenceless. " By value is to be understood the
conditions under which complex vital structures

1 See, among other passages, W. z. M., p. 369.
* WW., VII., pp. 327-31.

280 THE MORALS OF AN IMMORALIST-

are maintained and exalted."1 So says morality
also ; but above the individual, however gifted, she
places the State, and above the State a universal
society whose object is the greatest good of all its
members ; a good which for purposes of conve-
nience may be variously expressed in terms of
pleasure, of life, of health, or of power, but in
which the good of the parts ultimately coincides
and identifies itself with the good of the whole.

I think something of this had begun to dawn on
the noble spirit, to whom I have tried to be more
just than he was to my teachers, before it went
down under the waves of insanity. For among
his later utterances this passage occurs : "In the
whole process I find living morality, impelling
force. It was an illusion to suppose I had
transcended good and evil. Freethinking itself
was a moral action, as honesty, as valour, as
justice, and as love."2 And this confession might
have been extended with equal truth to his whole
polemic against morality, involving as it did the
re-affirmation of moral values in their full binding
authority at every step in the evolution of the
dialectical process by which they were to be
undone.

1 Leben, p. 790. * WW., XIV., p. 312.

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

To many — perhaps to most — readers it may seem
as if the question " What is Agnosticism ?" admitted
of an obvious and easy answer. They will say that
the term for which an explanation is asked was
created by a master both of language and of thought,
the late Professor Huxley ; that he took pains on
more than one occasion to define its significance,
and that we ought to abide by his ruling.

If there are any such persons, I must demur to
their contention. Words have a life of their own
quite independent of their author's intentions, and
they frequently come to bear a meaning very
remote from that to which they were originally
restricted. This is especially true of party names
and controversial terms. The mere evolution of
opinion is enough to carry them through an ever-
changing series of associations. Many who now
call themselves Protestants hold few beliefs in
common with the confessors of Augsburg ; and,
within a far shorter period of time than that
which separates us from the Reformation, the word
" Opportunism " has come to designate a political
attitude almost precisely the reverse of that adopted
by its first great sponsor, Gambetta.

Thus, even if Professor Huxley had supplied a
definition briefly and satisfactorily indicating the
position of the school of thought to which he
belonged, and if he had steadily held to that

281

282 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

definition through life, the question, " What is now
meant by Agnosticism?" must sooner or later have
come up for reconsideration. And I will proceed
to show, from Huxley's recorded utterances on the
subject, that such a definition is, unfortunately, not
forthcoming.

According to the late Mr. R. H. Hutton, as
quoted in the New English Dictionary (better known
as the Oxford Dictionary), the following definition
of " Agnostic " was suggested in his hearing by
Professor Huxley "at Mr. James Knowles's house

one evening in 1869": "One who holds that

the existence of anything beyond and behind
material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can
be judged) unknowable, and especially that a First
Cause and an unseen world are subjects of which
we know nothing." It was taken, Mr. Hutton
adds, from St. Paul's mention of the altar to " the
Unknown God."

Hutton was not remarkable for the accuracy of
his printed statements ; and one might hesitate to
make Huxley responsible for such slovenly phrase-
ology as is here put into his mouth, had not the
quotation been published during his lifetime, and
suffered to pass uncontradicted as recording in a
monumental work the exact expression of his
opinion. Anyhow, the definition will not hold
water. A leak is sprung by the introduction of
the qualification "material" affixed to "pheno-
mena." No one knew better than Huxley that
there are non-material phenomena also — mental,
spiritual, or whatever we are to call them ; in short,
thought, feeling, and volition. Are we, then, to
conclude that an Agnostic may admit the existence

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM? 283

of something "beyond and behind " these? And,
if so, what are his reasons for drawing a line of
distinction between the two classes of phenomena?
Again, limiting ourselves to material phenomena,
does an Agnostic, as such, necessarily exclude the
atomic theory and the undulatory theory from the
domain of knowledge, or does he count the sup-
posed atoms and ether among phenomena? As to
the altar at Athens, of course anything may suggest
anything else ; but one cannot help noting that
Huxley went a long step further than the Athenians.
They gave practical evidence of their conviction
that the god to whom the altar was dedicated
existed, although of his attributes they were wholly
ignorant. Our Agnostic, on the contrary, does
not know, and holds that there is no possibility
of knowing, whether a First Cause exists or not.
And, what is still more remarkable, Herbert
Spencer, the acknowledged chief of the Agnostic
school, could not, under this definition, claim to be
considered an Agnostic at all. So far from declaring
the existence of anything behind material pheno-
mena to be unknown and unknowable, Spencer
proclaimed, as our supreme certainty, the existence
of "an Unconditioned Reality without beginning
or end," from which all phenomena are derived.1

While Huxley's definition excludes certain
persons calling themselves Agnostics, it comes
perilously near to including others who would
repudiate the name. How are we to class thinkers
who say with Nietzsche that the apparent world is
the real world — there being no other ; or with Mr.

1 First Principles, p. 192.

284 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

F. II. Bradley, that the Absolute has no assets but
appearances? If we identify the existent with the
knowable and the knowable with phenomena, then,
indeed, we neither do nor can know anything behind
phenomena, simply because no such thing exists.

Turn we now from Huxley's reported conversa-
tion to the printed declarations of his later years.
Writing to defend his philosophy against a number
of attacks proceeding from various quarters, he
says : —

Agnosticism is not a creed, but a method, the essence
of which lies in the rigorous application of a single

principle the great principle of Descartes the

fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the
principle may be expressed : In matters of the intellect
follow your reason as far as it will take you without
regard to any other consideration. And negatively : In
matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions
are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.1

It will be seen that, logically, this definition has
not a note in common with that reported by Hutton.
There is here no reference to phenomena, material
or otherwise, or to a First Cause, or to the unknown
and unknowable. The author may well call his
principle one "of great antiquity"; the wonder is
that he should have gone out of his way to invent
for it a new-fangled name — a name, moreover, which
does not by its etymology give the slightest hint
of its meaning. Huxley had quite enough Greek
scholarship to be aware that the word ayvworoc in
Greek philosophy bears the sense of " unknowable "
as well as of "unknown "; and this was just what

1 From an article on " Agnosticism " originally published in the
Nineteenth Century for February, 1889, and reprinted in Essays
on Controverted Questions (London, 1892), p. 362.

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 285

made the name derived from it so felicitous a desig-
nation for the metaphysical theory recently set forth
in the introduction to First Principles, and what
speedily won for it the unanimous acceptance of
the educated classes in England. Assuredly it was
accepted as designating — to reverse its author's claim
— a creed rather than a method, the extreme applica-
tion of a principle rather than the principle itself.

For that method, for that principle, proclaimed
by Huxley in his later days as what Agnosticism
really designated, a name already existed, or
at least there was a name which, with a couple
of explanations, might have been made to fit it
exactly. I mean the word " Rationalism," which
certainly has the disadvantage of connoting a certain
hostility to theology, but a hostility by no means
amounting to that complete rejection which Agnos-
ticism has been supposed to imply. I say " dis-
advantage," not because I am writing as an advo-
cate of theology — whose pretensions I am not now
concerned either to uphold or to impugn — but
because it seems to me that principles, from which
opposite conclusions continue to be drawn with
complete sincerity by thinkers of equal ability,
ought not to be given names committing their
supporters to either side of the controverted issues.
Huxley himself seems to have felt that, in propor-
tion as he widened the meaning of the word
"Agnostic," he raised it to a new eminence above
the disputed dogmas of the hour. " Agnosticism,"
he assures us, " has no quarrel with scientific
theology."1 What, then, becomes of his own

1 Op. dt.,p. 452.

2S6

famous epigram, penned only a few months before :
" If Mr. Harrison, like most people, means by
' religion ' theology, then in my judgment Agnos-
ticism can be said to be a stage in its evolution
only as death may be said to be the final stage in
the evolution of life."1 If the Agnostic has no
quarrel with the scientific theologian, it is only in
the same sense in which we say that the executioner
has no quarrel with his victim.

It need hardly be observed that Huxley's rather
weak attempt to back out of his earlier and far
more characteristic attitude of mortal enmity to
all theology, " scientific " or otherwise, remained
without influence on the common use of the word
originally created to express that attitude. Launched
at first starting in a negative direction, it soon
received a new impulse in the same sense, from a
steadier, and in this instance a more powerful, hand.
In truth, its great success as a party name first
dates from an essay entitled " An Agnostic's
Apology," contributed by Leslie Stephen to the
Fortnightly Review in June, 1876. In that deliver-
ance of conscience there was a note of poignant
experience that riveted attention, and an accent
of sincerity that commanded respect. Here was
evidently one to whom, at a supreme crisis, the
consolations of theology had once more been
offered, and who had angrily flung them aside as
not merely illusory, but as adding a new sting to
the anguish of bereaved affection. For the rest,
Leslie Stephen put the Agnostic case in a nutshell.
There are limits to the human intelligence, and

1 Op, dt.t p. 366.

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 287

theology lies outside those limits. Mansel, in his
Bampton Lectures on The Limits of Religious
Thought, had adopted this position, but had used
it to screen the mysteries of orthodox Christianity
against Rationalistic criticism. The same prin-
ciples were then taken up and pushed to their
logical conclusion by Herbert Spencer, whom
Stephen seems to regard, with justice, as the
founder of modern English Agnosticism, and whose
presentation, I may add, remains the most complete
and systematic form of the doctrine. It must be
observed, however, that with Spencer, as with
Mansel, though not to the same extent, Agnos-
ticism has a positive side, to which Leslie Stephen
does not call attention. The object of his " apology "
was not, in fact, to give an exhaustive view of the
subject, but rather to retort on believers the charge
of giving up the attempt to solve the riddles of
existence.

To say that man's intelligence has limits is not
to say that within those limits it is impotent. To
declare that certain problems are insoluble is not
to deny that other problems have been solved, and
that many more may be attacked with good hope
of success. These are truisms, but apparently
they are truisms that need to be occasionally re-
stated and enforced. The vulgar are not quick to
draw distinctions ; and, hearing that Agnosticism
had something to do with not knowing, they took
it to imply not so much ignorance of the Absolute
as absolute ignorance. Richard Hutton, with his
usual inaccuracy, translated it into "a sort of know-
nothingism "; and Laurence Oliphant makes a very
modern young man, in his novel, Altiora Peto,

288 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM?

say to the heroine : " We neither of us know any-
thing or believe anything ; in other words, we are
both Agnostics." So, also, a very recent writer of
high philosophical pretensions, Dr. Percy Gardner,
in the opening pages of his Exploratio Evangelica,
seems to use " Agnostic " and " Sceptic " as synony-
mous terms. What was said of Huxley's definition
may be repeated in this connection. There is no
need to coin a new word when there is an old word
of the same value in general circulation. But the
popular confusion may be turned to good account.
From one point of view nothing throws a more
vivid light on the meaning of Agnosticism than to
contrast it with Scepticism. The ancient Sceptics
doubted everything, and were at last driven to the
pass of doubting that they doubted. This paradox
helps us to understand the logical difficulty of their
position. The very notion of doubt would be
impossible without the correlative notion of certainty
to serve as a standard of comparison. But the
notion of certainty can be acquired only by the
experience of knowledge. It may be said that our
certainties have often turned out to be illusory ;
but that is only because the standard of knowledge
has been raised : our very disillusionment proves
that we have a standard still. Here is a law which
the Agnostic, unlike the Sceptic, has recognised.
He claims to possess knowledge within the limits
of experience so abundant in quantity and so good
in quality that it furnishes sufficient material for an
exhaustive analysis, by which he succeeds, at least
to his own satisfaction, in determining the nature
and conditions of all knowledge — in framing a
concept of knowledge in general. Briefly stated,

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM? 289

the result is this : The whole content of conscious-
ness resolves itself into groups of phenomena
arranged according to certain laws of resemblance,
difference, co-existence, and succession. These
groups and their component parts severally become
associated with particular signs, generally called
names ; and a group is said to be known when the
order of its components is accurately reproduced
by the order of the signs that denote them.

Agnostics contend that something exists inde-
pendently of phenomena — that is, independently of
our states of consciousness — but a something that
cannot be known. Their arguments may be con-
veniently distributed under three heads. First as
regards the material world. Modern science leads
us to the conception of multitudinous invisible
atoms attracting and repelling one another in
various ways, or, as some would prefer to state the
case, of minute masses moving towards, or away
from, one another. But it seems to be generally
admitted that when we talk of forces and atoms, or
of mass and motion, we are only using convenient
fictions for the purpose of making the phenomena
amenable to our methods of calculation. Even
supposing force and matter, as we conceive them,
to exist independently of our conceptions, we
should not know what they are in themselves, nor
the reason of their behaviour. We cannot get
inside them, nor can our analysis extract anything
from their mutual relations, but sequences and
co-existences, which, for aught we can tell, might
have been of an altogether different description.
Still less, if possible, can we explain the existence,
as a whole, of the material world. It can neither

u

290 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

be conceived as having been there from all eternity,
nor as having had a beginning before which there
was nothing, nor as having been created out of
nothing by an immaterial cause. Finally, our
ignorance on these points altogether precludes
the question for what purpose the world exists —
excludes even the assumption that it has any
purpose whatever.

If material phenomena consist for us in some of
the fleeting shows of consciousness, it is incon-
ceivable, according to the Spencerian Agnostic,
that they should be the mere product of our mental
activity. They come and go in complete inde-
pendence of our volition ; they have an order which
is not that of our thoughts and feelings ; we are
convinced that they stand for a reality which is
older than our consciousness, and which will
survive when we are no more.

Passing from the objective to the subjective
sphere, from material to mental phenomena, the
limitations to knowledge make themselves still
more painfully felt. Experience shows that our
only data, the processes of consciousness, are dis-
continuous. Never was a more unwarrantable
dictum than that "The soul always thinks." /, at
any rate, do not always think ; nor am I interested
in an assumed something that vicariously performs
that office for me in the hours of unconsciousness,
and that, to use Fichte's illustration, is no more
myself than is a piece of lava in the moon. If, then,
we assume an enduring substance as the supporter
of thought and feeling, it must have a possible and
very frequently an actual existence apart from these
manifestations ; that is to say, considered in its

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 291

absolute self-existence, it must be unconscious, and
therefore inconceivable to us. Equally inconceiv-
able is the materialistic theory that thought and
feeling are the products of molecular changes in the
nervous tissue ; and, even were it conceivable, we
should, by accepting it, be thrown back on the
ultimate impossibility of interpreting physical
phenomena in terms of absolute reality. And, as
the essence of mind is unknown, so neither is any
complete explanation of its processes forthcoming.
Our analysis ends with empirical sequences for
which no reason can be given. Equally hopeless
is the attempt to account for the origin of con-
sciousness in time. So far as the inhabitants of
this planet are concerned, we know that conscious-
ness had a beginning ; but we know nothing else.
That it came out of mechanical movements, or that
it was created by another consciousness, or that it
was uncaused, seem to be equally inconceivable
alternatives. Thus, if there is a reality behind
and beyond consciousness, it must be unknowable ;
but for the existence of such a reality we have the
strongest testimony of consciousness itself.

The third argument for Agnosticism is drawn
from considerations of a highly metaphysical
character, counting, I think, for much less at the
present day than in the middle decades of the
last century. We used to be told that the Finite
implied an Infinite, the Relative an Absolute, the
Conditioned an Unconditioned ; that we could not
have a distinct consciousness of the one without
a vague consciousness of the other ; that, while
knowledge involves the antithesis of subject and
object, it also involves their synthesis in a higher

*9* WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

unity. Perhaps these abstractions will not look so
alarming if we approach them from a less dialectical
point of view. What we know we know by think-
ing ; and to think is to condition, to limit, to bring
into relation. The most universal of all relations
is that of subject and object, the knower and the
known. The subject-matter of knowledge is the
whole content of consciousness ; and this, as we
have already seen, comes to be arranged under
various forms which it is the business of the intellect
to recognise, some states of consciousness being
referred to an external world, and the remainder to
our own mind. If by an effort of abstraction we
think away the forms of thought, their content does
not disappear. There remains an indestructible
reality which we cannot conceive (for to conceive
would be to condition and relationise), but of which
we are vaguely conscious — without which, indeed,
the developed consciousness called knowledge
would be impossible. Being without relations,
this pure existence may be spoken of as absolute ;
being without limit, it may be spoken of as infinite ;
being common to object and subject, it may be
said to transcend their distinction. That ultimate
reality, whose presence and pressure we have
already felt before and behind phenomena, now
floods the barriers of the outer and inner sense,
penetrating and filling the phenomenal sphere
itself.

This is the unknown and unknowable that
Agnostics confess — at least, all Agnostics of the
Spencerian persuasion ; and, since Huxley devised
a name that so admirably hit off their doctrine, I
submit that his restriction of it to a method which

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 293

might conceivably lead to quite different results is
not justified by the ordinary usages of language,
or by the exigencies of scientific phraseology.
Indeed, the frank admission, contained in one of
his later essays, that he did " not very much care
to speak of anything as ' unknowable,' "x although
he certainly did so speak at the outset of his philo-
sophical career, seems to show that his meta-
physical attitude had undergone a change that
made the word under discussion no longer the
fittest to express it.

If, as is very possible, some of my readers do not
find the above arguments very convincing, I must
beg them to believe that I am not writing as an
advocate of Agnosticism, and that its professed
adherents might very well be able to put their case
in a stronger manner. Those who wish for a
complete and authoritative view, presented in the
best possible light, will, of course, find it in the
opening chapters of First Principles. The word
" Agnostic " does not there occur ; but Herbert
Spencer adopted it in subsequent publications as a
suitable designation for the school which he repre-
sented. My present purpose, however, is to fix
attention on the results to which the reasonings of
the school have led rather than on the reasonings
themselves. And I now propose to consider those
results in reference to the claims of theology on
belief.

The group of controversial essays in which
Huxley set forth his latest opinions on this question
with so much vigour, but, as I have tried to show,

1 " Agnosticism and Christianity," op. cif., p. 451.

294 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

with so little precision, was called forth by the
angry utterances of some English divines, who
seemed to be irritated and dismayed by the general
acceptance of a party name which could be applied
to their opponents without giving them offence.
Judging with perfect accuracy that Agnosticism
implied the rejection of Christianity, and being
interested in it only to that extent, they declared
that Agnostics were, in plain language, infidels,
and should without ceremony be branded as such.
The demand showed a certain want of urbanity,
and still more a want of discrimination. Even
granting that the rejection of the Christian faith —
or, rather, of all the somewhat discordant creeds
clustered together under that appellation — is a
deplorable error, it has ceased to be regarded as a
crime ; and therefore it should not be confounded
under the same denomination with what is criminal
— the violation of a plighted troth. But, waiving
the question of good manners and the undesir-
ability to a logical understanding of classing
Agnostics with adulterers and fraudulent trustees,
there is, perhaps, something to be said for the pro-
priety of countenancing the distinctions set up by
Freethinkers among themselves. If all Agnostics
are "infidels," all "infidels" are not Agnostics;
and some would abjure communion with that
particular sect as heartily as any Churchman, nor
would they meet with very respectful treatment
from its devotees. Carlyle and Francis Newman,
Emerson and Theodore Parker, perhaps even
James Martineau, certainly Clifford, were all, to
the Anglican mind, "infidels"; yet not one of
them was an Agnostic. Hegel, who was never

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 295

weary of denouncing the current acquiescence in
ignorance of things in themselves, used to pass, I
think with reason, as a formidable enemy of Chris-
tianity ; and the English neo-Hegelians may be
the next foe with whom orthodoxy will have to
reckon. There is, I know, a good deal of coquetry
going on just now between the dialectic philosophy
and the higher Catholicism ;J but something of the
same sort happened at Berlin before the advent of
Strauss and Feuerbach.

As a philosophical system Agnosticism has
much that is unobjectionable, or even acceptable,
to the religious believer. Cardinal Newman, in
defending the reasonableness of transubstantiation,
urged that we do not know what matter is in itself;
and doubtless he would have avowed the same
ignorance about the essence of mind. Of course,
no Christian, and, indeed, no theist, will admit
that the origin of the world or of our own con-
sciousness is unknown ; but if he is candid he will
admit that to adduce the will of a divine Creator as
a sufficient cause for either is merely to push the
difficulty a step further back. That a self-conscious
intelligence, with power to make a world out of
nothing, should have existed from all eternity is
not in itself a proposition of axiomatic evidence,
nor intrinsically more conceivable than its con-
tradictory ; and nothing that is not a self-evident
axiom can be taken as ultimate in philosophy.
Without going into the question of origins, the
incomprehensibility of God has long been a theo-
logical commonplace. Like Huxley, the religious

1 Written in 1900.

296 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

believer may " not much care to talk about the
4 Unknowable ' " (with or without a capital) ; but
he would hardly refuse to admit that the divine
nature, being infinite, can never be fully understood
by a finite intelligence. He may appeal to revela-
tion, either the revelation of his own conscience or
the revelation given by inspired writers, as affording
some certain knowledge of God's will ; but, so far,
his knowledge of divine things amounts to no more
than the knowledge of nature that an Agnostic
professes to derive from the study of material and
mental phenomena. This also may, without much
straining, be called a revelation ; and the truth of
each revelation is relative, to the extent of being
conditioned by the capacity of its recipient. A
Christian may plead that to have the same assurance
of God's existence that a Spencerian Agnostic has
of the existence of an objective world, or of his
fellow-men, or, if it comes to that, of his own
existence, is a sufficiently solid basis for hisTheistic
faith. He may, if he chooses, draw out a further
parallel between the workings of the Power mani-
fested to us through all existence1 and the workings
of God as manifested in the scheme of redemption.
Agnosticism and Christianity do not, then, as
some seem to suppose, form a sharply contrasted
and mutually exclusive couple ; still less are they
alternatives exhausting the possibilities of serious
belief. An Agnostic may become convinced by
reading Hegel that " the universe is penetrable by
thought," and yet have moved to a greater distance
from faith in a personal God ; and a Christian may

1 First Principles, p. 112.

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 297

let fall every article in his creed but that one,
holding it as a truth given by experience and
induction. The one will have ceased to be an
Agnostic, and the other will have ceased to be a
Christian ; but their positions will not have been
exchanged. Indeed, this whole system of alter-
natives is a fiction invented by brow-beating con-
troversialists, and accepted by a public too lazy or
too impatient for the exercise of that private judg-
ment which it professes to prize so dearly.

The truth is that the Agnostic rejects Christianity
on grounds quite distinct from the metaphysical
considerations by which he has become convinced
that things in themselves cannot be known. A
course of logical and ethical analysis has led him
to think that the doctrines held in common by all
the Churches are inconsistent with themselves and
with the morality that they profess to teach. A
course of historical criticism has led him to think
that miracles do not happen ; that there never was
a revelation ; that the advent of Christianity can
be explained, like any other phenomenon in the
evolution of religion, by natural causes. The
whole process is well exhibited in that masterpiece
of mental autobiography, Francis Newman's Phases
of Faith — a work, in my opinion, far superior to
his brother's more celebrated Apologia.

But the modern Agnostic does not find rest,
where the younger Newman found it, in the creed
of ethical Theism. Starting in early youth from a
much more advanced position, and enjoying much
greater liberty of thought than was possible in the
first half of the last century, he attacks the supreme
questions of theology with a more open and a more

298 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM?

active mind. What is of still greater importance,
he finds himself supplied, by the advance of positive
knowledge, with a new set of ideas — above all, with
the idea of evolution.

Much has been written about the relations
between evolution and theology, and the subject
is still far from being exhausted. Only a few
leading points can be touched on here. The
Darwinian theory, so far as it went, was adverse
to natural Theism because it tended to substitute
mechanical for teleological causation. In more
familiar language, it did away with the argument
from design in a field where that argument had
hitherto reigned supreme. At one stroke a single
volume made large libraries obsolete. Even if it
could be shown that natural selection had not the
efficacy attributed to it by Darwin, and still more
by Weismann, the old methods of reasoning would
not recover from the shock they received when it
was first promulgated ; for here was a totally new
explanation of the mechanism by which organisms
are adapted to their environment, and none could
tell how many more such explanations the science
of the future holds in reserve, " one sure if another
fails." Hence the rule, now generally admitted,
that appeals to supernatural intervention do not lie
in the region of physical phenomena.

Evolution is not, however, limited to the region
of physical phenomena. Under the influence of
the new doctrine, mental phenomena also — feeling,
volition, and reason — came to be interpreted as part
of the vast mechanism by which organisms are
adapted to their environment, and as having, like
every other part, grown up gradually in response

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 299

to the demands of life. How, then, could such
obviously relative qualities be legitimately ascribed
to the absolute cause or substance of things? Our
moral nature in particular, which had long been
claimed by religious teachers as a peculiar
revelation of the transcendent realities, became an
adaptation like any other — a social instinct, a racial
heritage, secured by the survival of the fittest.
The spiritual experiences confidently appealed to
by believers could be explained away by the evolu-
tionist as survivals of the hallucinated states known
to occur with far more intensity among primitive
men.

Behind the dynamic law of evolution our Middle
Victorian inquirer found another and a greater law,
more luminous in its evidence, more sweeping in
its applicability, more inflexible in the severity of
its control — the static law of conservation, the prin-
ciple that the quantity of energy in the universe
remains unaltered and unalterable, without increase
or diminution, through all time. This principle
enabled him to arrive by a more summary process
at the results already detailed. Miracles, which
historical criticism had shown to be fictitious, were
fictitious because they were impossible — because
their performance would involve a creation or a
destruction of energy.1 And the same principle
might be applied to the whole range of religious
experiences still maintained by natural Theism,
including the efficacy of prayer and the very

1 In view of the ignorance still prevalent on this subject, I must
mention that to give energy a new direction, not determined by
pre-existing energy, involves either the creation or the destruction
of energy.

300 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

existence of human free-will. Theologians might
call this reasoning in a circle. They might say
that to assume that the law of conservation held
without exception was to assume the very point at
issue, whether supernatural intervention was possible
or not. Herbert Spencer and his disciples would
reply that the conservation of energy, or, as they
preferred to call it, the persistence of force, was,
like the axioms of geometry, a truth known a priori,
and verified by the inconceivableness of its contra-
dictory. Thinkers of a more moderate school
would be content to argue that a principle found
to prevail over the whole field of phenomena
accessible to exact observation and experiment
showed the highest probability of being true
without exception.

Another point remains to be noticed as illus-
trating the latent hostility between Theism and the
law of conservation. I refer to what is known as
the order of nature and its implications. The
subject was a favourite theme with the Rev. Pro-
fessor Baden Powell, famous for his epoch-making
contribution to Essays and Reviews, and, what
now seems forgotten, a fervent evolutionist before
Darwin. This very liberal divine, while frankly
abandoning miracles, insisted on the order of nature,
the unbroken supremacy of law, as the one all-
sufficient proof that the world was ruled by a
personal God. But, according to Herbert Spencer,
order and law simply mean that the quantity of
matter existing always remains the same, that its
properties are constant, and that the variations in
the movements of its particles are mutually com-
pensatory— all consequences of the conservation

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 301

of energy.1 What we call the order of nature is
merely another expression for that ultimate self-
identity of the universe which reason is not needed
to explain, for it first makes reasoning possible to us.
It will be observed that, so far, the case has been
conducted on behalf of our supposed free inquirer,
without any reference to Agnostic principles. His
appeal has not been to the new nescience, but to
the new science. A point has been now reached
where the intervention of Agnosticism can be
explained. Left alone on what Carlyle calls the
shoreless fountain-ocean of force, to what stars
shall we turn for guidance ? The position was
not new. The philosophers who met round Baron
D'Holbach's dinner-table, the English Benthamites,
the German materialists, had reached very similar
conclusions, and had called them " Atheism." The
disciples of Nietzsche would call them so still.
With a little ingenuity they could equally well be
fitted into the creed of Pantheism more or less
openly professed by Goethe and Herder at Weimar,
by Schelling and Hegel at Jena, by Coleridge and
Wordsworth at Alfoxden. But it so happened that
England, in 1860, was under the dominion of the
Kantian criticism ; not that many students read
Kant for themselves, but the chief results of his
philosophy had been presented in what, as com-
pared with the original, might be called a popular
form by Hamilton and Mansel. Now, it is inter-
esting to note that these two writers, both strong
supporters of the received opinions, were particu-
larly earnest opponents of German Pantheism,

1 This argument was pressed against Baden Powell by G. J.
Romanes in his non-theistic days.

302 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

at that time a great bugbear to the orthodox.
Hamilton, for all his boasted learning, was not
very deeply read in German philosophy, and his
acquaintance with Schelling and Hegel, the latter
especially, seems to have been superficial; his
attack is directed chiefly against a flashy combina-
tion of their theories, put together, with more
rhetorical skill than sincerity, by the Parisian
sophist, Victor Cousin. Mansel, on the other
hand, knew a good deal about Hegel, and seems
to have anticipated with singular prescience the
future ascendancy of Hegelianism at Oxford,
although he probably did not foresee that it would
be converted by some professors into a bulwark of
Anglican theology. To him Hegel was the master
of Strauss and Baur, the author of a method for
dissipating dogma into mist ; and he turned for
salvation, as Hamilton had already turned, to Kant,
with whose help Atheism also could be refuted.

To some persons Pantheism and Atheism are
indistinguishable ; to others they stand for the
widest possible contrasts of belief; but it will be
generally admitted that on one important point
they are agreed. Both alike assume that things
in themselves can be known. The philosophy of
Atheism is, as a rule, materialistic or monadistic.
Mass and motion are intelligible conceptions apart
from our consciousness, and from mass and motion
all phenomena are derived. The absolute, in
Diihring's phrase, is under our feet. In the
more modern refinements of the system a certain
amount of sensibility is supposed to accompany
each material particle or centre of force ; and con-
sciousness is explained as resulting from the joint

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 303

action of innumerable monads ; or, by a still nearer
approach to idealism, the elementary sensibilities
are conceived as the only true realities, what we
call matter being a mere objectivation of feeling.
In any case, a plurality of substances is the primary
fact beyond which we need not go.

Pantheism is much less easy to define ; and
perhaps no definition can be framed wide enough
to embrace the various forms under which it has
been professed throughout history and all over the
world. For our present purpose only the most
recent aspects need be taken into account ; and of
these it is enough to say that, starting from a
supreme animating principle, the centre and soul
of things, they work down to the particular modes
of existence, explaining the parts by the whole
rather than, as in the materialistic method, the
whole by the parts. Those who wish to avoid
what they consider confusing theological associa-
tions may call the result spiritualistic monism.
For us the important thing to note is the attempt
here also to render existence into intelligible terms,
to make thought conterminous with things.

Agnosticism regards both attempts, the pluralistic
and the monistic, as alike chimerical. It applies
the Kantian or Hamiltonian criticism to their logic,
and finds it wanting. Not from any lack of moral
courage, but from sheer intellectual honesty, does
the Agnostic refuse to call himself an Atheist or a
Pantheist. In truth, it is against Atheism and
Pantheism, rather than against Theism, that the
point of his philosophy is turned. As has been
already observed, he may have much in common
with the Theist, who generally shares his contempt

304 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

for dogmatic metaphysics. Of course, he has no
mercy on a priori attempts to " construct "a per-
sonal God ; but of these we hear less and less every
day. It is true that the a posteriori or inductive
argument, which leads up from the contemplation
of nature to the recognition of divine intelligence
and will before and beyond nature, fails to convince
him ; but his objections to it are based, as I have
said, on scientific grounds in the widest sense of
the word "scientific," using it so as to include
psychology and historical criticism. At the same
time, the Spencerian Agnostic admits, or rather
contends, that Theism, and, indeed, all forms of
ontology, whether monistic or pluralistic, spiritual-
istic or materialistic, contain a certain measure of
truth. He agrees with them in admitting that
phenomena are not everything — that they are the
index to an absolute reality ; but Kant has taught
him that this reality is beyond the reach of our
knowledge.

If the foregoing analysis is correct, the late
Bishop Fraser was not justified in saying that "the
Agnostic neither denied nor affirmed God," but
"simply put him on one side." If the Bishop
meant by " God " what most of his co-religionists
mean, thenthe Agnostic certainlydenies the existence
of such a being, if only because, like Darwin, he
" does not believe that there ever was a revelation ";
and the Christian God is essentially self-revealing.
If by "God" is meant a Power whence all things
proceed, then the Agnostic no more puts him on
one side than Spinoza did. Of course, it was
open to Bishop Fraser to contend that Spinozism
amounts to a denial of God ; and, if words are to

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 305

retain their ordinary meanings, I am by no means
sure that he would not have been right ; but such
a denial differs widely from the lazily contemptuous
attitude implied by the Bishop's phrase.

After all, the final issue will centre in the question
of personality. Evidently the Agnostic,, refusing
to predicate anything of the absolute reality, cannot
positively say that it is a person ; but can he posi-
tively say that it is not a person ? It seems to me
that he is logically bound to go that far ; for the
notion of personality seems to involve the notion
of a subject and object, related to and conditioning
one another, which excludes the notion of an
absolute. Accordingly, the chiefs of the Agnostic
school, if I am rightly informed, take refuge in the
supposition that there may be something infinitely
higher than personality, and free from its limita-
tions. But I must confess that to me at least such
an hypothesis conveys no meaning whatever.
Inconceivable is not the word for it. The category
of quantity is out of relation to personality. We
may talk about being " intensely self-conscious "
or the reverse ; but that is said only in reference
to our concrete individuality as apparent to others.
Pure self -consciousness admits of no degrees.
When Jean Paul, at five years old, thought to
himself "Ic/i bin ein Ic/i," he had won that to the
perfection of whose reality no experience or imag-
ination or philosophy could add any more than
the centre of a circle can be modified by enlarging
its circumference. My present business, however,
is not criticism, but exposition ; and to that I
return.

To some minds what a philosopher thinks about

x

306 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

human immortality marks his attitude towards
religion even more decisively than what he thinks
about the existence and nature of God. To others,
on the contrary, it is a mere matter of curiosity,
possessing little or no religious value. At any
rate, religious history and the course of recent
speculation have made it abundantly clear that
there is no necessary association between the belief
in a personal God and the belief in a future life.
An eminent religious genius, Leo Tolstoy, holds
the latter doctrine to be incompatible with true
Christianity. A very independent thinker, the
late Edmund Gurney, seems to have rejected God
while keeping immortality ; and there are probably
many who more or less openly hold the same
opinion. Theoretically at least there seems no
reason why a similar latitude should not prevail
among Agnostics. I should say that, in practice,
nearly all who call themselves by that name hold
that consciousness becomes extinct with the destruc-
tion of what our ordinary experience shows to be
its physiological conditions ; but they hold this
conviction as Rationalists rather than as Agnostics.
An Agnostic will no doubt subject the alleged
phenomena of spiritualism to a more severe scrutiny
than the ordinary religious believer, and, even if
he accepts them as genuine, will be more cautious
about making them the basis for wide inferences ;
but, even if he accepts them for what they profess
to be, they must always remain phenomena — that
is, products of a reality the absolute nature of which
is unknown and unknowable. However dazzling
the prospects of futurity opened out to him may
be, there is one assurance from which he remains

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 307

debarred. He cannot say, like a confident young
friend of mine, " I know that the soul is immortal."
Not only can he not say it in this life, but in no
circumstances conceivable to us could he say it.
Supposing his individual consciousness to be pro-
longed for any length of time, the fatal antithesis
of subject and object would still remain, shutting
him out from a real knowledge of things in them-
selves and of the possibilities of a catastrophe that
infinite time may contain.

I have said that the quarrel of the Agnostic is
rather with the Pantheist and the dogmatic Atheist
than with the Christian Theist, whose belief he
rejects on grounds common to all Rationalists.
Still, one quite understands the peculiar animosity
with which Agnosticism is regarded by orthodox
champions, for it occupies a very much stronger,
because less assailable, position than that held by
their ancient opponents. Theological controver-
sialists like to carry the war into the enemy's
country, to lay him prostrate with a tu quoque, or
to explode his magazines with a well-directed sneer.
The Atheist is asked whether he can compose an
epic poem by shaking up a quantity of type in a
box. The Pantheist is taunted with believing that
the table is God, or that he himself is God. The
Agnostic offers no such handle for attack. He
has, to use Huxley's expression, " made a desert
of the unknowable," so that it will not support an
invading army. Asked what explanation, then,
he gives of the origin of things, he calmly replies
that he has none — that the problem is insoluble.
" What ! have you not a theory of the universe?"
said a clerical friend in mild surprise to Professor

3o8 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM?

Tyndall. " I have not even a theory of magnetism,"
was the answer of the great physicist. It must add
to the discomfiture of polemical divines if they bear
in mind that the trick was taught by one of them-
selves. It is almost pathetic to re-read those
wonderful Bampton Lectures of Dean Mansel,
masterly, brilliant, and overwhelming, and then to
remember how, only two years after their delivery,
his positions were outflanked by Herbert Spencer,
his batteries seized, and his artillery turned with
destructive effect on the retreating ranks of
orthodoxy.

The Agnostic, however, gives away this immunity
from attack when, with Spencer, he exchanges a
purely critical for a constructive attitude. It then
appears that, in endeavouring at once to reconcile
and to supersede the various forms of theology, he
has borrowed a principle from each, with the result
of putting together a somewhat heterogeneous and
unstable edifice. The idea of a necessary antithesis
between appearance and reality, of a hidden power
which at once produces phenomena and radically
differs from them, comes from natural Theism, and
repeats the dualism that has always been its reproach
in the eyes of philosophy, which, in Emerson's
phrase, is essentially centripetal ; while the manner
in which phenomena are spoken of as manifesting
the power behind them sounds like a reminiscence
of Christian revelation. When the ultimate reality
figures as an infinite and absolute, or, what comes
to the same thing, a non-relative existence, a sub-
stance for ever extricating itself even in our con-
sciousness from the conditions and limitations of
thought, the debt is still more obvious to Pantheism,

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 309

to the indestructible tradition of Parmenides and
Spinoza. When the unknowable, of which assur-
edly neither unity nor plurality should be predicated,
is habitually spoken of as one, Theism and Pan-
theism have contributed in equal proportions to
that extreme definiteness of statement. Finally,
when in the theory of evolution the teleological
method is altogether superseded by mechanical
causation, we have a procedure running parallel to
the atheistic materialism from which Agnostics are
most sincerely anxious to dissociate their cause.1

There is, then, some truth in the dry remark of
a subtle critic, the late Father Dalgairns, that it
seems we know a good deal about the unknowable.
At any rate, what may be called the positive and
dogmatic Agnosticism of First Principles seems
to contain germs of decomposition inherited from
parent systems which must eventually lead to its
dissolution. But the philosophy of knowledge (or
ignorance) represented by Spencer is older than his
system, and will survive it. He would himself
have been the first to admit that differentiation
must go on ; and an attempt to indicate roughly
the divergent lines along which Agnostic specula-
tion will move in the immediate future may not be
premature.

First of all, we may expect that the conceptual
proofs of an infinite and absolute existence beyond
consciousness will be given back to the exclusive

1 In the profoundly interesting chapter on " The Dynamic
Element in Life," added to the last edition of his Principles
of Biology, Spencer himself insists on the insufficiency of
mechanical causation as applied to the explanation of vital
phenomena ; and some will probably interpret this as a conces-
sion to teleology. Cf. vol. i.,pp. 573-574, of the same edition.

310 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ?

keeping of the Pantheism whence they were
derived. Agnostics will content themselves with
insisting that the phenomena of consciousness
must be produced by causes beyond consciousness,
and therefore unknowable ; but they will drop the
somewhat mystical phrase " the Unknowable," if
only to avoid the appearance of assuming, what
seems highly improbable, that the endless varieties
of sensible existence proceed from a single self-
identical Power ; and they will abandon the
chimerical idea that the recognition of such in-
definite and indefinable forces can be made the
basis of a final religion, or has anything to do
with religion at all, seeing that religion is nothing
if not the revelation of a supersensual world. Such
a course would involve no new departure; it would
be merely a return to the principles of Auguste
Comte, of Mill's Logic, and of Lewes's History of
Philosophy.

Others, again, may plausibly maintain that to
postulate causes of phenomena which certainly
exist, and as certainly cannot be known, is a some-
what self-contradictory proceeding, savouring of
the old metaphysics, and that a true Agnostic will
decline to commit himself one way or the other.
He will observe that our notion of causation,
whether derived from the sense of muscular effort
or from the observation of invariable sequences
among phenomena, is essentially subjective, and
cannot legitimately receive a transcendental appli-
cation. When asked how phenomena are to be
explained without assuming an external cause, he
will answer : " I don't know. Perhaps phenomena
as a whole are uncaused, or self-caused, or caused

WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM ? 311

by something in the future. If I am talking non-
sense, it is your fault in asking nonsensical questions
about things to which our categories do not apply.
Keep your catechism for the Sunday school."

Finally, there will be, or rather there are even
now, a few patient and temperate inquirers who,
convinced of their own ignorance, convinced also
that in no school, past or present, is the enlighten-
ment they desiderate to be found, will yet refuse to
restrict the future development of thought. In their
opinion, the possibilities of knowledge are them-
selves among the things that cannot now be known.
With Taine, they see the limits of their own mind,
but not the limits of the human mind. With
Huxley, they do " not much care to speak about
anything as 'unknowable." Yet none better
deserve the name of "Agnostics," if Agnosticism
implies the irrevocable condemnation of what has
been proved false, coupled with the resolute refusal
to set up a still more fragile image in its place.
Theirs is not the facile philosophy which, shamed
out of its old via-mediaism, instead of saying that
truth lies between the two extremes, pronounces
with a still more oracular air the dictum that con-
tradictories are equally true. They hold that to be
always turning back is the worst possible way to
reach the goal, and that rubbish-heaps are the
weakest possible foundations for a new building.

I have no great faith in abstract definitions.
Experience shows that the best of them are open
to exception, and that they have hampered pure
speculation with the difficulties of legal draughts-
manship, without the excuse of those practical
necessities by which lawyers are hemmed in. But,

3i2 WHAT IS AGNOSTICISM?

for the comfort and relief of those persons who read
only the beginning and end of an essay, I conclude
with a summary, as short and as exact as I can
make it, of the results to which the foregoing
exposition has led.

Agnosticism is the philosophy of those who hold
that knowledge is acquired only by reasoning on
the facts of experience ; that among these facts
supernatural events have no place ; that facts, if
any, lying beyond experience are inconceivable ;
and that no theory, theological or otherwise, pro-
fessing to give an account of such facts has any
legitimate claim on our belief.

INDEX

ABDUL HAMID, 32

Abelard, Peter, on Gentile
virtue, 2 sq.

Abolitionism derived from Greek
thought, 22

Achilles, 30

Acts of the Apostles, 147

^Eschylus, 222, quoted, 24, 258

Agiatis, wife of Agis and
Cleomenes, 75, 76

Agis, king of Sparta, 73 sg.

Agnosticism as defined by Hux-
ley, 282 ; criticism of his defi-
nition, 282 sqq.; taken up by
Leslie Stephen, 286 ; distin-
guished from scepticism, 288;
arguments for, 289 syy.; how
related to theology, 293 sqq. ;
not a necessary alternative to
Christianity, 296 sq. ; distin-
guished from atheism and
pantheism, 303517.; future of,
3095^. ; provisionally defined,
312

Alcibiades, 260

Alexander the Great, 31

Amos, 21 ; 85 ; 89 ; 93 ; 96 ; 104 ;
112

An Agnostic's Apology, 286

Anarchists, compared by Renan
with the Hebrew prophets,
89 sq.

Anavim, Renan on the, 96

Anaxagoras, 47

Anaximander, 46

Anti-Christian, Nietzsche's,
266 sqq.

Antigonus Doson, 76

Apollo Belvedere, the, 70

Aratus, 71, 72, 76

Argileonis, 72

Argument from design, 298

Aristeides, 24, 26

Aristophanes, 50, 105

Aristotle, 23; 29; 55 sq.; 105;
condemns usury, 114; on in-
duction, 220 ; 250

Arnold, Matthew, on Hellenism
and Hebraism, 2 ; on the
place of conduct in life, 14 ;
his reference to Phryne, 15;
on sweet reasonableness, 23 ;
38 ; against routine methods,
181

Arnold, Dr. Thomas, quoted, 33

Athens, direction given to philo-
sophy at, 229

Augustine, St., miracles re-
ported by, 143

BACON, FRANTCIS, 250

Bacon, Roger, on pagan and
Christian morals, 3 sq.

Bain, Alexander, his theory of
voluntary action, 180

Balfour, Mr. Arthur, 129

Barbarians and Hellenes, eva-
nescent character of the dis-
tinction between, 35

Baur, F. C., 145,302

Beloch, Prof. Julius, on the
slave population of Attica,
22 ; on the growth of human-
ity among the Greeks, 36 ; on
the alleged degeneracy of
the Greeks, 57 ; 70, note

Bentham, Jeremy, 28, 250

Bradley, Mr. F. H., quoted, 284

Brasidas, 72

Brown, Dr. Thomas, 210

Browning's Caliban on Setebos,

165

Brunschvicg, M. Leon, his
edition of Pascal's Pensjes,
152 ; on the meaning of

s'ahetir, 158

313

3'4

INDEX

Brunette Latini, 7

Buckle, H. T., on the distinc-
tion between history and bio- ;
graphy, 177 ; prefers liberty
to knowledge, 181 sq. ; carries
business traditions into philo-
sophy, 182; prejudiced against
State interference, 183; his at-
titude the reverse of Comte's,
183; not a materialist, 184;
accepts the basis of evolution,
184, but regards Nature as a
hostile power, 185 sq. ; treats
universal history as a collec-
tion of experiments, 186 ;
biassed by patriotism, 187,
and by the love of simplifica-
tion, 187 ; depreciates the
moral element in civilisation,
187 sqq. ; on poetry and
science, 190 ; applies econo-
mic laws to history, 191 ; but
neglects the analogies of
Exchange, 192, and misses
the meaning of the Renais-
sance, 193 ; on the decline of
the English intellect in the
eighteenth century, 193 sq. ;
on Spanish civilisation, 195 ;
on the protective spirit, 196 ;
sets up a false antithesis be-
tween the people and their
rulers, 197, and entertains
confused ideas about the
nature of protection in
general, 198 say. ; fallacy of
his criticisms on Louis XIV.,
200 sqq. , whose personal in-
fluence he exaggerates, 202 ;
on the protective spirit in
theology, 203$^.; a disciple |
of Mill rather than of Comte,
205 ; misinterprets the nature
of induction and deduction,
206, 208 sqq. ; uncritical adop-
tion of the popular metaphy-
sics, 206 sqq. ; confuses psy-
chology with logic, 211 ; on
Hume and Adam Smith, 212
sqq. ; on the philosophies of
England and France, 2\6sqq. ;
on the accumulation and diffu-

sion of knowledge, 218 sqq.
his popularity in Germany,
222, 233 ; general summary of
his intellectual character, 226
sq., 269

Burckhardt, Jacob, on the
Greeks, 29

Burns, Robert, secular spirit of
his poetry, 223 sq.

Butler, Bishop, on probability as
an aid to faith, 167 sq.

Byron, justification of his hos-
tility to the Romanticists, 9 ;
263

CESAR BORGIA, 259 sq.

Caesar, Julius, 260

Caird, Prof. Ed., quoted, 72

Callicratidas, 30

Canning, George, a philhellene,9

Carlyle, Thomas, 71 ; to some
extent an advocate of liberty,
181 ; 294, quoted, 301

Carneades, 50

Cassels, Walter, 148

Charles, II., conversion of, 169

Chatham, 263

Cheyne, Prof. T. K., on the
dial of Isaiah, 141

Chremonidean War, 70

Christianity, early, and social-
ism, in

Christology of the Old Testa-
ment, 141

Cleomenes, King of Sparta, 75
sq.

Clifford, Prof. W. K., 294

Clough, A. H., quoted, 107

Coleridge, S. T., 253; 301

Comte, Auguste, how he dif-
fered from Buckle, 183 ; Nietz-
sche on, 245, 310

Conscience first recognised and
named by the Greeks, 25

Conservation of energy and
theism, 299 sq.

Conversions to Rome under
Charles I., 169

Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi,

79

Cousin, Victor, quoted, 159 sq. ;

302

INDEX

Cratesicleia, 75
Curtius, Ernst, quoted, 61 sq.
" Cutting a covenant," 114
Cuvier, 130

DALGAIRNS, FATHER, 309

Daniel, Book of, quoted, 69,
136 ; prophecies of, 145

Dante on the moral superiority
of the ancients, 4 ; his attitude
towards Brunette Latini, 7

Darmesteter, Prof. James, on
the prophets of Israel, 20, 84
sq. ; overestimates their value
for modern needs, 116

Darwin, Charles, projects the
experimental method into
nature, 180; carries economic
law into zoology, 191 ; his
influence on German thought,

233 ; 255 ; 263 ; 298

Davidson, Samuel, 142

Definition, 311

Demetrius Poliorcetes, 69

Democracy, socialistic tenden-
cies of, 64

Demonicus the Cynic, 33

Demophanes, 71

Descartes, 167 ; 250

Deuteronomy, Renan on, 90 ;
compiled under prophetic
influences, 108 ; assumes the
justice of private property,
109

D'Holbach, Baron, 301

Diderot, 52

Diogenes the Cynic, 66

Dion, Plato's disciple, 31 ; 60
sqq.

Dionysius the Younger, 62

Droysen, J. G., his Geschichte
des Hellenismus, 43; 90

Diihring, Eugen, 302

ECCLESIASTES, Book of, 135

Ecdemus, 71
Egyptian inhumanity, 32
Ellicott, Bishop, 128
Emerson, R. W., 294 ; quoted,

114, 328

Empedocles, 46
Endowment of research, 201

English scepticism and the
deductive method, 219

English thought in the Early
and Middle Victorian periods
characterised, lyS-syy.

Epameinondas, 30 sq. ; 60 ; 73

Ephorus the historian, 63 sy.

Epictetus, 27; 249

Epicureans, 66

Epicurus, 249

Equality of the sexes at Athens,

32

Equity defined by Aristotle, 23
Eratosthenes the geographer,

35

Erinyes, the, 46

Essenism, influence of, on
Christianity, 1 1 1

Esther, Book of, 33

Euripides quoted, 20, 22 ; reli-
gious conflict in his Hippo-
fytits, 109 ; 222

Evolutionism, bearing of, on
theism, 298

Ewald, H., 142

Ezekiel, 93 ; 96 ; reference to
Daniel in, 136, note

Ezra, 20

FiCHTE, J. G., 228, 230 sq. ; 290
Forster- Nietzsche, Madame,

259
Fourth Gospel, question of,

145 sqq.
Fraser, Bishop, on Agnosticism,

304
Freeman's History of Federal

Government, 43
French intellect, deductive

character of, 217 sq.
Friedlander, L., quoted, 34

GALLIC invasion of Greece, 69
Gardner, Dr. Percy, 288
Gaume, the Abbe\ opposed to

classical studies, 10
George Eliot, 234 sq.
Germany, decay of superstition
in, 222 sq.; has not con-
tributed much to ethical
thought, 228 ; paradoxical
character of philosophy in, 230

3i6

IN7DEX

Gladiatorial games, Greek pro-
test against, 33

Gladstone, W. E., 129

God bound to keep his promises
according to Pascal, 163

Goethe, 301 ; quoted, 149

Gorgias the Sophist, 50, 54

Gorgias, the, of Plato, 271 sq.

Gorge, 72

Gracchi, the, 77

Greek history after Alexander,
a neglected study, 41 sqq.

Greek ideas, stimulating effect
of, on conquered nations, 44

Green, T. H., quoted, 125

Grote, George, 291

Crete's History of Greece, 43 ;
a defence of liberty, 180 sq.

Gurney, Ed., 306

Gylippus, 30

HAMILTON, SIR W., 301, 302
Hardy, Mr. Thomas, quoted, 151
Harrison, Mr. Frederic, 286
Harvey, 216
Havet, Ernest, on the meaning

of Pascal's wager, 158
Hegel, G. W. F., 230; 233; 261

sq. ; 294 sq.; 301 ; quoted, 196
Helen, 25 sq.
Henry of Navarre's reason for

abjuring Protestantism, 169
Heracleitus, 46 ; 54
Herder, 301
Herodotus, 22 ; story from, 24 ;

222

Hesiod, 103
Hexateuch, the, as an index to

Jewish ideals, 32
Higher Criticism, the, attitude

of theology towards, 127 sqq. ;

meaning of, 134 ; applicable

to all ancient literature, 134 ;

practised by every believer,

134 ; illustrations of its use,

l&sqq.
Hippias the Sophist, 49 sq. ; 63,

66; quoted, 35
Historical method, the, 267
Hobbes, 216 ; 264
Hodgson, Mr. Shadworth,

quoted, 107

Holm, Adolf, his Griechische

Geschichte, 43
Homer, 270
Hosea, 86 ; his denunciation of

Jehu, 94 sy.

Humanity of the Greeks, 30
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 253
Hume David, 210; Buckle's

account of, 212 sg. ; his atti-

tude towards theology, 224,

230
Hutcheson, Francis, indebted

to Shaftesbury and Butler,

211
Huth, A. H., his Life of Buckle,

178
Hutton, R. H., 51, note ; against

Mansel, 174; on Agnosticism,

282
Huxley, Prof. T. H., on the

Greeks, 10 ; on natural rights,

28, 54 ; creates and defines

the word "agnosticism," 281

sqq. ; later views, 284, 287,

292 sq., 295, 309,311

IMMORTALITY, 306 sq.

" Infidelity " not identical with
agnosticism, 294

Intellectual interdependence of
nations, 194 sy.

Isaiah, 21, 93 ; his opposition to
Shebna justified, 95, 96 ;
soundness of his political
counsels, 118 sg. ; prophecies
of, and the higher criticism,

137

Isocrates,2s; 26; 27; 31; 35; 59;
on the meaning of Hellenism,

JAMES II., 164

Jeremiah on the modern drama
and novel, 84 sg. ; part as-
cribed to him by Renan, 90
£^.,93; his condemnation of
Jehoiakim justified, 97 sg.;
not a Jesuit, 106 sg. ; connec-
tion of, with Deuteronomy,
109 ; did not attack private
property, 113 ; on the sanctity
of contracts, 114; a patriotic

INDEX

citizen, 120; advised surren-
der of Jerusalem, 121 ; his
policy not explained by
modern analogies, 122 sg.;
develops Isaiah's idea of the
Remnant, 123

Jerusalem, alleged prediction of
its fall, 144

Jesus, oldest account of, 147

Jevons, Prof. Stanley, on the
character of the experimen-
talist, 180; quoted, 225

Job, Book of, 88 ; 134 sq.

John of Salisbury on the morals
of the twelfth century, 3

Journalists, modern, charac-
terised, 94

Jowett, Benjamin, 154

Juvalta, Prof., 254

KANT, IMMANUEL, 129, 228, 230,

231, 302
Keble, John, 167 ; on the method

of probability, 191 sqq.

LACHELIER on Pascal's wager,

159

Lady, the, or the tiger? 166

Laplace, 129

Lazarus, raising of, 144

Leo XIII., 128

Leibniz, 231

Leonidas, 72

Levitical legislation and private
property, 109 sq.

Locke, John, 250

Louis XIV. ;s influence exag-
gerated by Buckle, 202

Luther, opposes Aristotle, 8 ;
250

Lycophron the Sophist, 63

Lycurgus the legislator a myth,

73

Lydiades, 72
Lyell, Sir Charles, 130
Lysander, 58
Lysis the Pythagorean, 60

MACAULAY, quoted, 33 ; his
History of England a defence
of liberty, 180 sq.

Machiavelli, 260

McTaggart, Dr., 151, note
Mahaffy, Prof., his Greek Life
and Thought, 43 ; quoted, 60
Maistre, Joseph de, quoted,

54

Mansel, Dean, denies the applic-
ability of our moral distinc-
tions to God, 173 ; on The
Limits of Religious Thought,
287, 301, 302, 308

Marcus Aurelius, 36

Mark, St., Gospel of, 147

Martineau, James, against
Mansel, 174 ; 294

Maurice, F. D., quoted, 109,
no ; against Mansel, 174

Mediaeval writers on the mor-
ality of their own times, 2 sqq.

Meinong, Prof., 232

Melian Dialogue, the, 271

Melissus of Samos, 46

Menander, quoted, 65

MeVe, the Chevalier de, 160

Michelet on Gargantua, 259

Middleton's Free Inquiry, 270

Mill, James, 210

Milton's Lycidas, quoted, 170

Miracles in Daniel, 136 ; in the
Hexateuch, 139; many stories
of, discredited by the higher
criticism, 139 sqq.

Mitford wrote Greek history in
an anti-Jacobin spirit, 10

Monogamy a Greek institution,
26 sq.

Montaigne, 162 ; 167

Montesquieu, 250

" Moralin," 230

Morality necessary to intellec-
tual progress, 190

Musset, Alfred de, quoted, 54

NAPOLEON, 254, 256

Natural selection and the trans-
mission of acquired qualities,
130 sq.

Nature, idea of, 48 sq.

Neal's History of the Puritans,
169

Nebuchadrezzar, 99 ; character
of, 1 19

Nebular hypothesis, 129

INDEX

New English Dictionary, quoted,
282

Newman, Cardinal, 167 ; adopts
Butler's doctrine of probabi-
lity, 191

Newman, F. W., 294 ; his
Phases of Faith, 297

Newton, Isaac, 216; 263

Nicias, 47

Nietzsche, Friedrich, an ethical
g-enius, 229 ; parentage and
education, 234 ; theory of
tragedy, 236 ; friendship with
Wagner, 236 ; never a pessi-
mist, 239; military experience,
240 ; on Socrates, 240 ; breach
with Wagner, 241 ; openly
anti-religious attitude of, 242 ;
distrust of genius and grow-
ing preference for pure know-
ledge, 242 sq. ; anti-German
feeling, 244 ; enthusiasm for
England, 244 sq. ; in praise of
Auguste Comte, 245 ; philo-
sophical volte-face, 246 ; at-
tacks morality under cover of
moral motives, 246 sqq. ; ad-
vocates utility without altru-
ism, 249; a hedonist, 251 sq.;
proposes individuality as an
end of action, 253 ; against
socialism, 254 ; on Napoleon,
254 ; interested in evolution,
255 ; doctrine of the super-
man, 255 sqq. ; hostile to the
modern State, 259 ; self-con-
tradiction involved in his
ideals, 260 sq. ; confuses Dar-
winian with Hegelian evolu-
tion, 261 sq. ; inveighs against
English writers, 263 ; substi-
tutes power for pleasure as
an end of action, 264; borrows
the gospel of health from
Herbert Spencer, 265 ; new
view of the superman, 266 ;
the Anti-Christian, 266 sqq.;
inconsistency of his attacks
on morality and Christianity,
272 sq. ; plans an ideal State,
276 sqq.; on the illusoriness of
personality, 279 sq. ; his rela-

tion to Agnosticism, 283 ; 301

Novelists, modern English, on

the morality of the ancients, i

OLIPHANT, LAURENCE, quoted,
287 sq.

PARKER, THEODORE, 294

Parmenides, 54 ; 309

Pascal, Blaise, an apologist of
Christianity, 152 ; meaning
of his wager, 153 ; logically
an agnostic, 153 ; looseness
of his notions about betting,
!55 » a gentleman, 160; a
moral sceptic, 162 ; on the
morality of God, 163, 164 sq.

Pater, Walter, on Pascal, 160

Paul, St., 25; Hellenistic char-
acter of his teaching, 38 ; not
a socialist, 1 1 1 ; does not
refer to the Virgin-birth, 144 ;
on the gift of tongues, 147 ;
269

Pergamene reliefs, 70

Pericles, 24 ; 47

Personality, 305

Philip of Macedon, 31 ; 69

Philosophy, humanising ten-
dency of, 58

Phocion, 58

Phocylides on justice, 26

Phoenicians, inhumanity of, 32

Plato, 26, 27 ; 31, 32 ; 46; his
Protagoras, 49; 55 sq., 62, 63,
65, 66 ; on communism, 105 ;
143 ; on the reasoning powers
of mathematicians, 154; refer-
ence to his Parmenides, 154 ;
268 ; 277, 278, 279 ; influenced
by Athenian religion, 229 ;
quoted, 25, 50, 51

Plotinus, 28

Plutarch, 35 ; 47 ; 48 ; 75

Pohlmann, R., quoted, 64

Popular intelligence and free-
thought, 219

Porphyry's criticism on Daniel,
136

Positivists, English, advocate
the liberation of the spiritual
power, 181

INDEX

Pragmatism, Nietzsche on, 274

Priestly code, 20

Prodicus the Sophist, 28; 50 sq. ;
66

Prophets, Hebrew, 20 ; Renan's
treatment of, 83 sqq. ; modern
misinterpretations of, 90 ; did
not interfere with private
property, 113; were good
patriots, 118 sqq. ; general
character of, 125

Protagoras, 50 ; 52 sqq.

Protective spirit revived in
modern England, 196 sq.

Ptolemy Keraunos, 69

Pyat, Fe"lix, 120

Pyrrhus, 70

Pythagorean school, 46

RATIONALISM confounded with
agnosticism by Huxley, 285

Ravachol, 91

Religion of Humanity, danger
of, 47

Reuss, Ed., 142

Renan, Ernest, 20 ; merits and
defects of his History of
Israel, 80 sqq. ; on St. Paul,
85 ; derives Socialism from
the Hebrew prophets, Sgsqq.;
unjust to the Greeks, 105 ;
misrepresents Jeremiah, 105 ;
sympathises with socialism,
112 sg. ; defends certain
abuses, 116 ; on later Judaean
politics, 1 18 sqq.; disparages
post-exilian Hebre%v litera- j
ture, 124; a conservative I
critic, 148 ; his influence on j
German thought, 233

Rochefort, Henri, 91

Romanes, G. J., 129 ; 301, note

Romans, the, inhumanity of,

33

Rousseau, J. J., 52 ; 63 ; 72
Ruskin, John, advocates indi-
vidual initiative, 185, 265

SALMON, Dr., 128; on the

higher criticism, 143
Scepticism distinguished from

agnosticism, 288

Schelling, 231 ; 262 ; 301

Schoolmen, their knowledge of
classical literature, 5

Schopenhauer, 228 ; 231; Nietz-
sche's first master, 232 sq. ;
239 ; 245, 246 ; 263 ; 279

Science, physical, in relation to
the supernatural, 132

Scotland, progress of enlighten-
ment in, 223 sq.

Scott, Sir Walter, 223 sq.

Scythians, the, Greek idealisa-
tion of, 63

Sebon, Raymond, 167

Seneca, 36

Shakespeare, 263

Shorthouse, J. H., quoted, i

Slavery, Athenian, did not ex-
clude free labour, 22

Smith, Adam, 210 ; Buckle's
account of, 213 sqq. ; his
Theory of Moral Sentiments,

214 sq. ; Wealth of Nations,

215 sq.

Smith, Prof. Goldwin, against
Mansel, 174

Smith, Prof. Robertson, quoted,
80

Socialism, pedigree of, 78 ; a
Greek creation, 100

Socrates, 55 sq.; 143; 239; 268;
278

Solon, 64 ; ordinances of, 104

Sophists, the, 55 ; 268

Sophocles, 24

Sparta, later history of, 72 sqq.

Spencer, Herbert, an anti-
Socialist, 112; his contro-
versy with Weismann, 1 30 sq. ;
form of Agnosticism professed
b}'» 153; a philosopher of
freedom and individuality,
179; his philosophy a general-
isation of the current political
situation, 191 ; his protest
against State - interference,
1975 253. 254. 255; 263;
acknowledged chief of the
Agnostic school, 283; 287; 293 ;

3°9

Sphaerus, 75
Spinoza, 269 ; 304 ; 308

320

INDEX

Stephen, Sir Leslie, his account I

of Agnosticism, 286
Stillman, W. J., quoted, 29
Stoics and Stoicism, 66 sq., 70 '
Strauss, D. F., 148; 233; 302
Sully-Prudhomme on Pascal, j
157 ; on the meaning of the
wager, 158 sq.

Supernatural predictions dis-
credited by the higher criti-
cism, 141

TAINE, H., quoted, 311
Taxation as an instrument of

oppression, 86
Telemachus, the Greek monk,

and the gladiatorial games,

34
Thales as a practical politician,

45 sq.

Theognis, 269 sq.
Thirlwall's History of Greece, 43
Thucydides, 49 ; 53 ; 143 ; 271
Timoleon, 61
Tolstoy, Leo, 306
Tyndall, Prof. John, 191; 308

VERACITY of God only guaran-
teed by his moral perfection,
167

WACE, DEAN, 129

Wagner, Richard, 241; 255; 263

Walpole, Horace, predicts the
Catholic revival, 170

Ward, W. G., opposed to
classical studies, 10

Wealth not necessarily asso-
ciated with wickedness in the
Hebrew Scriptures, 88

Weismann, Prof. Aug., his con-
troversy with Spencer, 130 sq.

Welcker, 270

Wilamowitz, 237

Wilberforce, William, identifies
Bonaparte with the little horn
in Daniel, 91

Wille zur Macht, Nietzsche's,
quoted, 274 sqq.

Wordsworth, William, 265 ; 301

XENOPHON, 52, 222 ; his Memo-
rabilia, 143

Zarathustra, Nietzsche's, 256,
257, quoted, 264, 266, 273

Zedekiah's faithlessness de-
nounced by Jeremiah, 99

Zeller, Ed., on the history of
Greek philosophy, 40 ; on
Essene communism, lit

Zeno of Elea, 46

Zeno the Stoic, 25 ; 67, 68, 69 ; 71

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