harmonising human ideals with the course of the universe. The Religion of Humanity rightly finds in man alone any qualities which call for adoration or worship; but it inconsistently supposes man to develop these qualities in a fundamentally non-ethical cosmos, and so fails to furnish a solution that can be accounted either metaphysically satisfying or ethically supporting. But we must bear in mind, I repeat, the principle of the unity of the world. The attitude of the Agnostic and the Positivist is due to the separation which they unconsciously insist on keeping up between nature and man. The temptation to do so is intelligible, for we have found that nature, taken in philosophical language as a thing in itself nature conceived as an independent system of causes-cannot explain the ethical life of man, and we rightly refuse to blur and distort the characteristic features of moral experience by submerging it in the merely natural. We easily, therefore, continue to think of the system of natural causes as a world going its own way, existing quite independently of the ethical beings who draw their breath within it. Man with his ideal standards and his infinite aspirations appears consequently upon the scene as an alien without rights in a world that knows him not. His life is an unex

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plained intrusion in a world organised on other principles, and no way adapted as a habitation for so disturbing and pretentious a guest. And the consequence is that he dashes his spirit against the steep crags of necessity, finds his ideals thwarted, his aspirations mocked, his tenderest affections turned to instruments of agony, and is driven, if not into passionate revolt or nerveless despair, then at best into stoical resolve. Some such mood as this appears also in much of Matthew Arnold's poetry, and is to my mind the explanation of its insistent note of sadness.

"No, we are strangers here, the world is from of old,
To tunes we did not call, our being must keep chime."

It is powerfully expressed in the famous monologue or chant in "Empedocles on Etna," with its deliberate renunciation of what the poet deems man's "boundless hopes" and "intemperate prayers." It inspires the fine lines to Fausta on "Resignation," and reappears more incidentally in all his verse. But calm, as he himself reminds us, is not life's crown, though calm is well; and the poet's "calm lucidity of soul" covers in this case the baffled retreat of the thinker. have, in truth, no right to suppose an independent non-spiritual world on which human experience is in

We

congruously superinduced. If we are really in earnest, at once with the unity of the world and with the necessity of an intrinsically worthy end by reference to which existence may be explained, we must take our courage in both hands and carry our convictions to their legitimate conclusion. We must conclude that the end which we recognise as alone worthy of attainment is also the end of existence as such-the open secret of the universe. No man writes more pessimistically than Kant of man's relation to the course of nature, so long as man is regarded merely as a sentient creature, susceptible to pleasure and pain. But man, as the subject of duty, and the heir of immortal hopes, is restored by Kant to that central position in the universe from which, as a merely physical being, Copernicus had degraded him.

To a certain extent this conclusion must remain a conviction rather than a demonstration, for we cannot emerge altogether from the obscurities of our middle state, and there is much that may rightly disquiet and perplex our minds. But if it is in the needs of the moral life that we find our deepest principle of explanation, then it may be argued with some reason that this belongs to the nature of the case; for a scientific demonstration would not serve the purposes

of that life. The truly good man must choose goodness on its own account; he must be ready to serve God for naught, without being invaded by M. Renan's doubts. As it has been finely put, he must possess "that rude old Norse nobility of soul, which saw virtue and vice alike go unrewarded, and was yet not shaken in its faith." This old Norse nobility speaks to us again, in accents of the nineteenth century, in Professor Huxley's lecture. But because such is the temper of true virtue, it by no means follows that such virtue will not be rewarded with "the wages of going on, and not to die."

1

1 R. L. Stevenson, Preface to 'Familiar Studies of Men and Books.'

с

THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE

PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES.1

You

will not find it wonderful if my feelings are deeply stirred in appearing before you to-day for the first time in my new capacity. There is no honour

1 An Inaugural Lecture on assuming the duties of the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh, October 26, 1891.

The Lecture is printed exactly as it was delivered, and the nature of the occasion will perhaps be held to excuse the personal references with which it opens. The general survey of the philosophical field which it undertakes, and the philosophical point of view indicated in the concluding pages, seem to give it a useful place in the present volume. But to prevent misconception, it may be well to append here the Prefatory Note which accompanied it on its original appearance : "The title of this Lecture may seem to promise too much. The Lecture does not profess to deal with the circle of the philosophical sciences, but only with the subjects traditionally associated with a Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in Scotland. Moreover, as the occasion demanded, it is addressed not so much to the expert as to the large general public interested in philosophy."