and sentiments.

The self-styled truth that fails to do this is a fragment which men have mistaken for the whole-a fragment, moreover, which cannot even supply its own foundation. Such a system arrogates to itself unjustly the august name of truth, for truth cannot land us in an open contradiction between equally fundamental constituents of our nature. But if this is so, the appeal of the volume is not from truth to authority but from a partial to a fuller truth, from man conceived as mere abstract intellect to human nature as a whole.

In his method, as I have said, Mr Balfour resembles Kant, and, like Kant, he passes from the intellectual to the ethical domain. But, in his conclusions, he approaches more nearly the general position of Hegel. In the metaphysical application of his thought, he enforces the dependence of the subjective reason of the individual on the objective reason of the historic process, and recognises a cosmic or Absolute Reason as the ground of the whole development. What dis

tinguishes all three alike is (in one way of putting it) the unwavering humanism of their point of view, as opposed to the naturalism of those who would crush the spirit of man by thrusting upon it the immensities of physical nature, of infinite space and endless time.

Mr Balfour, in some searching pages, has exposed the fallacy of such a mode of argument: material grandeur and moral excellences, as he well says, are incommensurable quantities. And in the age-long debate which has divided thinkers since the time of Democritus and Plato, this has been the essential import of all the great idealistic systems — πάντων χρημάτων μéтρоv äveрwπOS. This thesis, first formulated by μέτρον ἄνθρωπος. scepticism, is in point of fact, when properly interpreted, profoundly true. Our own nature is, from the very circumstances of the case, the only measuringrod which we can apply to the universe. "A harmony of some sort between our inner selves and the universe of which we form a part is a tacit postulate," as Mr Balfour says, "of every belief we entertain about phenomena." Our intellect is, after all, as much ours as any other part of our being, and in accepting the account of science as true, the Naturalist is involuntarily postulating harmony, to that extent, between himself and the universe. But why should this harmony be limited to the intellectual activities of sense-perception? It is impossible to show that this limitation is other than arbitrary, and that we have not as good a right to use as our touchstone of reality those inspirations of goodness which are the spur of

all our endeavour, and those visions of beauty and of harmonious truth which are a master-light of all our seeing. Man must be anthropomorphic. What we ask is simply that his anthropomorphism shall be deliberate, consistent, and critical, instead of being unconscious, partial, and arbitrary.

But if, in these latter remarks, I have emphasised the affinity of Mr Balfour's thought to these systems of the larger Reason of which Hegel's is the most convenient example, the affinity is obviously not to be understood in any narrow or rigid sense. His whole intellectual temper is different; some might say it is more sceptical, others might say it is more human, by which I mean more cognisant of the limitations of humanity. There is one important Hegelian doctrine at least with which Mr Balfour is strenuously at one-the doctrine of "degrees of truth,"-the insight that all truth is a matter of approximation, that no error is wholly false and no finite truth is wholly true. This doctrine, recently re-expounded by Mr Bradley with so much force, is an integral part of Hegelian thought, but a part strangely forgotten in the claim of the system to represent absolute truth, to be indeed the insight of the Absolute Being into his own essence and history. The temper of Mr Balfour's book is

well exhibited by contrast in a characteristic passage, with which this long review may fitly close:

And if, both

I like to think of the human race, from whatever stock its members may have sprung, in whatever age they may be born, whatever creed they may profess, together in the presence of the One Reality, engaged not wholly in vain, in spelling out some fragments of its message. All share its being; to none are its oracles wholly dumb. in the natural world and in the spiritual, the advancement we have made on our forefathers be so great that our interpretation seems indefinitely removed from that which primitive man could alone apprehend, and wherewith he had to be content, it may be, indeed I think it is, the case that our approximate guesses are closer to his than they are to their common Object, and that, far as we seem to have travelled, yet, measured on the celestial scale, our intellectual progress is scarcely to be discerned, so minute is the parallax of Infinite Truth.

NOTE A.

THE USE OF THE TERM "NATURALISM."

ONE of the results of Mr Balfour's

Foundations of

Belief' has been to bring to light some serious, and even remarkable, divergences of view as to the meaning and precise application of current philosophical terms. This was particularly the case in regard to the term Naturalism, which is so prominent in Mr Balfour's argument. Much of the criticism of the book took, in fact, the form of an indignant repudiation of the author's use of names. It may perhaps, therefore, contribute to the fixing of philosophical usage in this case, and in the case of some other terms frequently conjoined with it, if, starting from Mr Balfour's definitions, we examine his usage in the light of some of the chief objections taken to it.

In his introductory chapter, Mr Balfour thus indi

T